"Dialectic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Roman constitution. This is a great error. Speeches, when delivered in the midst of a popular tumult, must be pithy in order to be effective: nor was Appius such an ass as to have lost the opportunity afforded him by this dialectic display, of effectually securing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... correspondence with astronomers in Europe. This circumstance gave us real pleasure on their account,—for science, in all its degrees, is a positive good, and a mental tonic of the first importance. Earnestly did we, in thought, commend it to those wearied minds which have undergone the dialectic dislocations, the denaturalizations of truth and of thought, which enable rational men to become first Catholics and then Jesuits. For let there be no illusions about strength of mind, and so on,—this is effected by means of a vast machinery. As, in the old story, the calves were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... In Socratic philosophy the Dialectic Method occupies a lofty position. By this method he was enabled to penetrate deeply into human nature and unfold all phases of man's experience. Aristotle characterizes this method as the induction of reasoning and the definition of general concepts. Gomperz, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... diplomatic contempt for the Senate which his colleagues, if they felt it, were obliged to conceal. He performed his duties with conscientious precision. He never missed an opportunity to thrust the sharp point of his dialectic rapier through the joints of the clumsy and hide-bound senatorial self-esteem. He delighted in skilfully exposing to Madeleine's eyes some new side of Ratcliffe's ignorance. His conversation at such times ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... 'Carriage Entrance' was posted above the main arch, on what the writer pleases to call 'coarse, unclassic boards.' The benches of the 'Speculative' then, as now, were red; but all other Societies (the 'Dialectic' is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some rooms of which it is pointedly said that 'nothing else could conveniently be made of them.' However horrible these dungeons may have been, it is certain that they were ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which the heart is apt to starve, or a luxury without which it grows parsimonious. Men who are isolated from society by distance, feel these wants by an instinct, and are grateful for an opportunity to relieve them. In Meriwether the sentiment goes beyond this. It has, besides, something dialectic in it. His house is open to everybody, as freely almost as an inn. But to see him when he has had the good fortune to pick up an intelligent, educated gentleman, and particularly one who listens well!—a respectable, assentatious ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... wealthy father, Democritus devoted the whole of his inherited fortune to the culture of his mind. He travelled everywhere; visited Athens when Socrates and Plato were there, but quitted the city without making himself known. Indeed, the dialectic strife in which Socrates so much delighted, had no charm for Democritus, who held that 'the man who readily contradicts, and uses many words, is unfit to learn anything truly right.' He is said to have ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754) warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in the spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities of literary dialectic.[245] ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... natural rights, and by means of much subtle dissection and argument found that there were no natural rights; law was the only basis of privilege. It is quite easy to be convinced by the author's delightful dialectic, but the conviction is apt to vanish suddenly in the presence of a ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Affairs, and go to the Lords in a blaze of glory," said McEwart. "But he's impossible!—as leader in the Commons. The party wants grit—not dialectic." ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I note this deficiency, that there hath not been, to my understanding, sufficiently inquired and handled the true limits and use of reason in spiritual things, as a kind of divine dialectic: which for that it is not done, it seemeth to me a thing usual, by pretext of true conceiving that which is revealed, to search and mine into that which is not revealed; and by pretext of enucleating inferences and contradictories, to examine that which is positive. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... fixity of species? Surely it is clear that it is only in the rarest cases that false or inadequate ideas on such subjects have any tendency to shorten life or weaken health. Bishop Wilberforce was killed by a fall from his horse, not by the triumphant dialectic of Professor Huxley. Sir Richard Owen lived to a patriarchal old age, and did not disappear from the face of the earth because he still clung to an idea which the best intellect of his time had relinquished. There is nothing in the doctrine of the fixity of species—if you hold it—which ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... just as soon as the tremendous spring rush in local literature eases up a little. The recent opening up of the Straits of Mackinaw, and the prospect of a new railroad-line into the very heart of the dialectic region of Indiana, have given Chicago literature so vast an impetus, that we find our review-table groaning under the weight of oovrays that demand our scholarly consideration. Mdlle. Prud'homme must understand ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... logical induction, is indeed so rare, we cannot be surprised at the injustice which the genius of Burke has had to endure in this respect. And yet, in the nature of our faculties themselves, there exists no necessity why a vivid power to conceive ideas, should NOT be combined with a dialectic skill in expressing them. Degerando, an admirable French writer, in one of his Treatises, has some profound observations on this subject; and does not hesitate to define poetry itself as a species ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... might and did come across him in waves. He remembered, he regretted; he pursued a dialectic with various convenient divisions of himself. But all that would be lost for long times in the general miraculous variety of things! On the whole, going through Spain in the autumn weather, even with poverty making mouths alongside, was not a sorry business! Zest lived in pitting vigor ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... since introduced from Scotland—and consequently I was allowed no opportunity to draw the attention of the jury to the total want of any direct evidence of the prisoner's guilt. Harvey himself tried to point out the unlikelihood of his being guilty; but he was not a man gifted with dialectic qualities, and his harangue fell pointless on the understandings of the twelve common-place individuals who sat in the jury-box. The judge finally proceeded to sum the evidence, and this he did ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... Cannot we get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement, some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies? ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Jerome [*Comment. in Ep. ad Ephes. iv, 17] says: "Is it not evident that a man who day and night wrestles with the dialectic art, the student of natural science whose gaze pierces the heavens, walks in vanity of understanding and darkness of mind?" Now vanity of understanding and darkness of mind are sinful. Therefore curiosity about intellective sciences may ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the rival systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers. But every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach and deploying greater range of things in space. In ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... art: | within a system, methodically | organized for the exhibiting of | knowledge, any statement must be | taken in its full extension, it must | join things which are necessarily | related and it must be equivalent to | a definition. But these rules for | syllogistic or dialectic art in | Aristotle or Ramus become rules for | inductive invention in Bacon: and | their meaning is quite different. | With the rule of certainty and | liberty, Bacon aims at directiy | opposing the old logic, infected by | syllogistic or rhetoric ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... are annotations, explaining any difficulties therein; while no less than five or six indexes adorn each volume: the first an alphabetical list of Saints discussed; the second chronological; the third historical; the fourth topographical; the fifth an onomasticon, or glossary; the sixth moral or dialectic, suggesting ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... —Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (absit nomen!), Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know. But neither ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... place 'on the greatest stream.' The Schuylkill was Ganshow-hanne, 'noisy stream;' the Lackawanna, Lechau-hanne, 'forked stream' or 'stream that forks:'[17] with affix, Lechauhannak or Lechauwahannak, 'at the river-fork,'—for which Hendrick Aupamut, a Muhhekan, wrote (with dialectic exchange of n for Delaware l) 'Naukhuwwhnauk,' 'The Forks' of the Miami.[18] The same name is found in New England, disguised as Newichawanock, Nuchawanack, &c., as near Berwick, Me., 'at the fork' or confluence of Cocheco and Salmon Fall rivers,—the 'Neghechewanck' ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... of those who was held of the greatest casuists (di quelli che de' maggior cassesi era tenuto). This is another very obscure passage. The meaning of the word cassesi is unknown and we can only guess it to be a dialectic (probably Venetian) corruption of the word casisti (casuists). The Giunta edition separates the word thus, casse si, making si a mere corroborative prefix to era, but I do not see how the alteration helps us, the word casse (chests, boxes) being ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that 'it hath not pleased the Lord to give his people salvation in dialectic,' has a profound meaning far beyond its application to theology. It is deeply true that our ruling convictions are less the product of ratiocination than of sympathy, imagination, usage, tradition. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... notoriously false. Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though unlucky in that it makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his argument, mercifully blinds him to the absurdity of his conclusions while leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic. People who set out from the hypothesis that Sir Edwin Landseer was the finest painter that ever lived will feel no uneasiness about an aesthetic which proves that Giotto was the worst. So, my friend, when he arrives very logically ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Like the horse changing his master loses all gracefulness, as he forgets his many words of guidance! as a king without a kingdom, such is the world without a Buddha! as a disciple with no power of dialectic left, or like a physician without wisdom, as men whose king has lost the marks of royalty, so, Buddha dead, the world has lost its glory! the gentle horses left without a charioteer, the boat without a pilot left! The three divisions of an army left without a general! the merchantman ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... subject, and broods patiently over its living elements and relations, before it assumes to take them as materials for argumentation. This broad grasp of premises, which implies a penetrating and interpretative as well as dialectic mind, is the distinguishing difference between a great reasoner and an able logician. In regard to the form of the work, we can see no reason why its essays should be thrown into the shape of letters. The epistolary spirit vanishes almost as soon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... not pass current very generally, yet they are taken here and there by a few disciples, and throw some standard money out of the market. The want of consideration evinced in these novel vocabularies is remarkable. Whewell, whose scientific position and dialectic turn of mind may fairly qualify him to be a word-maker, seems peculiarly deficient in ear. Take, as an instance, "idiopts," an uncomfortable word, barely necessary, as the persons to whom it applies are comparatively ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... they assert as incontrovertible being the fact that we know nothing. Thus instead of proposing as the highest activity of man a life of speculative thought, they came to consider inactivity and impassibility [13] the chief attainable good. Their method of proof was a dialectic which strove to show the inconsistency or uncertainty of their opponent's positions, but which did not and could not arrive at any constructive result. Philosophy (to use an ancient phrase) had fallen from the sphere of knowledge ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... particular harm. That country has always been divided into two classes, one of which believes nothing and the other everything, the latter numerically preponderant, but the former exceeding in erudition and dialectic—a condition of things quite certain to continue and on which a few essays more or less in destructive criticism can ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... lower of the stages symbolic of the higher. Indeed to introduce the concept of symbolism at all into such a context is to court inextricable confusion. Let symbolism be one thing, and let organic (or dialectic) connection be another—then we know where we are when we claim for natural objects that they have a being and a meaning in their own right, and that they are akin to the soul of man. Emerson had a firm grasp of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... stumbling-block in the doctrine that there may be laws through whose action inspiration is the enlightenment of mind as it exists in man, by mind as it underlies the motions which make up matter. The truth thus reached is not the formulae of the Calculus, nor the verbiage of the Dialectic, still less the events of history, but that which gives what validity they have to all of these, and moreover imparts to the will and the conscience their ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... as the author of sensationalism any more than of idealism. His system is based upon experience, but with him experience includes reflection as well as sense. His analysis and construction of ideas has no foundation in fact; it is only the dialectic of the mind 'talking to herself.' The philosophy of Berkeley is but the transposition of two words. For objects of sense he would substitute sensations. He imagines himself to have changed the relation of the human mind towards God and nature; they remain the same as before, though he ...
— Meno • Plato
... dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping at its image in the water? If we knew any more real kind of union aliunde, we might be entitled to brand all our empirical unions as a sham. But unions by continuous ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... religion; "Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto" were holy writ enshrining the dogmata of Marxism-Leninism, and the conflict with the West was a jehad, a holy war in which God, in His manifestation as Dialectic Materialism, would naturally win out ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... do you mean to say that the conversation of two gentlemen upon delicate professional—and—er—domestic affairs—is to be broken upon by the blank profanity of low-bred hounds over their picayune gambling! Take them my kyard, sir," choked the Colonel, who was always Southern and dialectic in his excited as in his softest moments, "and tell them that Colonel Starbottle will ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... preaching the gospel of the Son of God!" The shamefast silence and confusion which ensued was of ill omen for the success of an undertaking so unwelcome to the growing liberalism of the time. The zeal of the persecuted Baptists was presently reinforced by the learning and the dialectic skill of the Presbyterian ministers. Unlike the Puritans of New England, the Presbyterians were in favour of the total separation of church from state. It was one of their cardinal principles that the civil magistrate had no right to interfere in any way with matters of religion. By taking this ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... assaults it so changed its character as to become a thing totally different from the theory proposed by Volta. The more persistently it was defended, however, the more clearly did it show itself to be a congeries of devices, bearing the stamp of dialectic skill rather ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... dialectic varieties in the Mythology of the Esquimaux as of the Greeks and Hindus, and, with a change of gender between Sun and Moon, the same story occurs among other tribes in ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... the most part. Still differentiation would be largely at work. Without frequent intercourse, frequent interchange of women as the great factor in that intercourse, the tribes and bands of mankind would still go on separating, would develop dialectic and customary, if not physical and moral differences. It was no longer a case of pools perhaps, but they were still in lakes. There were as yet no open seas of mankind. With advancing civilization, with iron weapons and war discipline, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... be admitted that Reason cannot give any answer. Socrates, when his reasoning comes to an end, often permits himself to tell a story. "My dialectic," he seems to say, "is of no further use; but here is a tale for you," and as he goes on with it we can see his satyr eyes gleam with an intensity which shows that he did not consider he was inventing a mere fable. That was the way in which he taught theology. Perhaps ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... the dialectic and jesting turn of the conversation; along that path could rise no speech worth the while. "Don't make a joke of things!" he exclaimed. "This is a ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... private ambitions, was yet one between differing ideals of justice and welfare; one of those issues which, touching the emotional springs of conduct, are never composed by an appeal to reason, which formal argument the most correct, or the most skilled dialectic, serve only to render more irreconcilable. "In Britain," said Bernard in 1765, "the American governments are considered as corporations empowered to make by-laws, existing only during the pleasure of Parliament. In America they ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Antisthenes is commonly attributed, on the authority of Aristotle, the denial of predication, while the Megarians are said to have been Nominalists, asserting the One Good under many names to be the true Being of Zeno and the Eleatics, and, like Zeno, employing their negative dialectic in the refutation of opponents. But the later Megarians also denied predication; and this tenet, which is attributed to all of them by Simplicius, is certainly in accordance with their over-refining philosophy. The 'tyros young and old,' of whom Plato speaks, ...
— Sophist • Plato
... betray the theology of the Pharisaic schools, were forced from the Apostle by Christian opponents, who would only grant a place to the message of the crucified Christ beside the [Greek: dikaiosune ex ergon]. Both as an exegete and as a typologist he appears as a disciple of the Pharisees. But his dialectic about law, circumcision and sacrifice, does not form the kernel of his religious mode of thought, though, on the other hand, it was unquestionably his very Pharisaism which qualified him for becoming what he was. Pharisaism embraced nearly ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... of necessity, gentlemen," finally said the High Bailiff, "in my advice it is written that our necessity is too fine for dialectic. Our present need is to kill the common enemy. Here is a gentleman who asks for no other pleasure. Let ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... and allwise. It agrees with Kapila in making all souls eternal, and distinct from body. Its evil to be overcome is the same, namely, transmigration; and its method of release is the same, namely Buddhi, or knowledge. It is a more dialectic system than the others, and is rather of the nature of a logic ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... [1] has much in common with their theosophical Deity, and that by a dexterous manipulation of infallible texts and articles of religion, a modus vivendi may be arranged between the two. This is the kind of dialectic that goes on at every Church Congress—men who know in their hearts that the "inspired" anthropology of the Bible is contradicted, fully, flatly, irreconcilably, by the undeniable facts discovered by science, continue to mystify themselves and their hearers alike ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... distinguishes him from his contemporaries. Learning may be acquired; the habit of reasoning may be induced by constant dialectic contest; but eloquence is far more than these the gift of nature. Lord Brougham's eloquence savors of the peculiar constitution of his mind. It is eminently adapted for educated men. He was never intended for a demagogue; ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... French dialectic form, avalance, descent), a mass of snow and ice mingled with earth and stones, which rushes down a mountain side, carrying everything before it, and producing a strong wind which uproots trees on each side of its course. Where the supply of snow exceeds the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Mr. Stokowski's dialectic vagaries are among the mysteries in which, for his own good reasons, he has chosen to wrap himself. Another one concerns his name and origin. Is he really Leopold Antoni Stanislaw Stokowski? Was his father ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... logic we isolate the understanding, concentrating our consideration on that element of thought which has its source simply in the understanding. But transcendental logic must be divided into transcendental analytic and transcendental dialectic. The former is a logic of truth, and is intended to furnish a canon of criticism. When logic is used to judge not analytically, but to judge synthetically of objects in general, it is called transcendental dialectic, which serves as a protection ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... lorded not, nor rose the hectic Up to the cheek of youth; But reigned throughout their dialectic ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... lines only, is Mr. Dunbar by far greater than all others. Out of those lines he is still the first poet, Whitman not excepted, but he is first with nothing like the difference in real merit and the fame he has above all others. But in passing from him, here is Dunbar at his best, dialectic and otherwise: ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... achieve that, though much of the light it gave me still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind and the bare star-light were ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... third-classmen to be absent from camp till the practice is over. Sometimes a special permit is necessary. It might be well to say here, ere I forget it, that Wednesday evening is devoted to prayer, prayer-meeting being held in the Dialectic Hall. All cadets are allowed to attend by reporting their departure and return. The meeting is under the sole management of the cadets, although they are by no means the sole participants. Other privileges, more ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... quarrel after the German fashion, to disengage himself from a wit that presses too hard upon him: and a last man sees nothing into the reason of the thing, but draws a line of circumvallation about you of dialectic clauses, and the formulas of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... unless he had grappled with this Play of the Negative, which had some marvelous fascination for the Greek mind. It is the leaven working in the Sophists with their subtle rhetoric, in Socrates with his negating elenchus, in Plato with his confounding dialectic. Homer, as the prophet of his people, foreshadowing all forms of Greek spirit and of Greek literature, bring to light repeatedly this Play of ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... palaces; the "alu" was a bull-like demon of tempest, and there were also many composite, distorted, or formless monsters which were vaguely termed "seizers" or "overthrowers", the Semitic "labashu" and "ach-chazu", the Sumerian "dimmea" and "dimme-kur". A dialectic form of "gallu" or devil was "mulla". Professor Pinches thinks it not improbable that "mulla" may be connected with the word "mula", meaning "star", and suggests that it referred to a "will-o'-the-wisp".[83] In these islands, according to an ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Crusades, the foundation of the Spanish kingdoms, and the creation of the Latin Empire at Constantinople. In the princely fiefs of the French Crown, and above all in Normandy, they seized on men's minds. Chivalrous life and hierarchic institutions, dialectic and poetry, continual war at home and ceaseless aspirations abroad, were here fused into a ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... and to inspire the eloquence of orators. That a set of people on the other side was professing to do the same things, with totally different and utterly wrong notions of the results to be obtained, afforded the whet of antagonism, and let in dialectic and partisanship as a seasoning to relieve the high severity of the main topic. Quisante's personal relations with the Church had never been intimate; he was perhaps the better able to lay hold of its romantic and picturesque aspect. The Dean, ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... Metaphysics has nothing in common with a generalization of facts. It might, however, be defined as "integral experience." Nevertheless Intuition, once attained, must find a mode of expression in well-defined concepts, for in itself it is incommunicable. Dialectic is necessary to put Intuition to the proof, necessary also in order that Intuition should break itself up into concepts and so be propagated to others. But when we use language and concepts to communicate it, we tend to make these ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... that reproduction of similar denouements and crucial occurrences which is almost necessary in a time when men write many novels. In almost all there is a want of central interest in the characters that should be central; in some an exaggeration of dialect; or of quaint non-dialectic but also non-catholic locutions on the author's part. One rather hates oneself for finding such faults—no one of which is absolutely fatal—in a mass of work which has given, and continues to give, so much pleasure: but the facts remain. One would not have the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... and some legal training, these schools included a further linguistic and literary training, some mathematical and scientific knowledge, and even some philosophy. The famous "Seven Liberal Arts" of the Middle Ages—Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic; Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy—all seem to have been included in the instruction of these schools. [23] The great studies, though, were the first three and some Law, Music being studied largely to ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... any conception of their individual peculiarities or to classify the varieties of dialect themselves with certainty and precision, while others, like the Sabine, have, with the exception of a few traces preserved as dialectic peculiarities in provincial Latin, completely disappeared. A conjoint view, however, of the facts of language and of history leaves no doubt that all these dialects belonged to the Umbro-Samnite branch of the great Italian stock, and that this branch, although ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... views concerning the limits of human reason. But all the contradictions and conflicts of thought prove to Hegel the sovereignty of reason. The conflicts of reason are its own necessary processes and expressions. Its dialectic instability is instability that is peculiar to all reality. Both thought and reality manifest one nature and one process. Hence reason with its "dynamic" categories can comprehend the "fluent" reality, because it is flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone. Hegel's bold and oft quoted words "What ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... or coarse, stridulent, and, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, "broad" forms of utterance, are not dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them; and all phrases developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as the speakers are men of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... attitude, as revealed in a recent publication at Corinth. Much had been expected of him, but not enough; starting straight off with the first sentence of the preface, he subjects his readers to a dialectic catechism, his thesis being the highly philosophic one, that no one but a philosopher should write history. Very shortly there follows a second logical process, itself followed by a third; in fact the whole preface is one mass of dialectic ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... demons. Devil. dialectic. difference. Diogenes Laertius. Dionysius. divine nature, eternal, substance. divinity of Christ, see Christ, diuisio. Dorset, ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... took up the volume. 'Ha! Justin Walsh. I know him. A wonderful book! Admirable dialectic! ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... lived with Plotinus the latter attained four times to ecstatic union with "the One." Plotinus combined, in unusual measure, the intellect of the metaphysician with the temperament of the great psychic, so that he was able to analyse with the most precise dialectic, experiences which in most cases paralyse the tongue and blind the discursive reason. His sixth Ennead, "On the Good or the One," is one of the great philosophic treatises of the world, and it sums up in matchless words the whole mystic position and experience. ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... of being inflamed by wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of any sort. As to "Philip," something that he saw in me helped to suggest the character—that was all. There is much in Philip that is Clough himself, and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly was never in me. A great yearning for possessing one's soul in freedom—for trampling on ceremony and palaver, for trying experiments in equality, being common to me and Philip, sent me out to New Zealand; ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... system thus originating with Xenophanes is to be attributed the dialectic phase henceforward so prominently exhibited by Greek philosophy. It abandoned, for the most part, the pursuits which had occupied the Ionians—the investigation of visible nature, the phenomena of material things, and the laws presiding over them; conceiving such to be merely deceptive, and attaching ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... The dialectic skill of the fathers was easily equal to explaining away this contradiction; but the old current of thought, strengthened by both these legends, arrested their attention, and, passing through the minds of a succession of the greatest men of the Church, influenced theological ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... faith of that time, and set aside in thought the materializing and exaggeration of the hagiology and Mariolatry produced by later centuries, rendering the reaction of the Reformation unavoidable—if now in our age, turned exclusively to logical ideas and a negative dialectic, we live again by thought in those ages of feeling and poetry—if we acknowledge all these things to be something more than harmless play of words and fancy, and as the true lifelike contents of the period, then we can properly appreciate this legendary poetry as a necessary link ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... daughter, I have shut their ears to the imaginary harpings and speech of the angels; and I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the light star and out of the amorous star, you have been my spear-man and my catapult! Oh! my swift horsemen! Oh! my keen darting arguments, it is because of you that I have overthrown the hosts of ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... of language. Individual and dialectic variations. Time variation or "drift." How dialects arise. Linguistic stocks. Direction or "slope" of linguistic drift. Tendencies illustrated in an English sentence. Hesitations of usage as symptomatic of the direction ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... (Dialectic Variants, Chapter III) according to locality. In Tennyson, for Denison, son of Denis, we have the opposite change. The forms assumed by Theobald are very numerous (Chapter I). Besides Dibble we have the shorter Dibb. Other variants are Dyball, Dipple, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... reasons best known to himself for cultivating Pope's favor, besides considerable practice during his youth in a special pleader's office, took the desperate case in hand. He caulked the chasms with philosophic oakum, he 'payed' them with dialectic pitch, he sheathed them with copper and brass by means of audacious dogmatism and insolent quibbles, until the enemy seemed to have been silenced, and the vessel righted so far as to float. The result, however, as a permanent result, was this—that the demurs which had once been raised (however ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... perdition, to the soul of man. This was achieved with the aid of a naive metaphysic, created by the Greek genius and externalised by the crude intellect of barbarians; this metaphysic drew its whole content from a unique revelation, and the essential was frequently hidden by dialectic and speculation. One may safely say that the first millenary strove, if not exactly to set aside the original principle of Christianity, yet to bind it by dogma in such a way that it often became completely obscured. A long training was necessary before the immature nations of barbarians were ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... king had sent through the sacred person of his herald. But Justice to her was a goddess, 'housemate of the nether gods'—and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applauded the Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turned the ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... Professor Jones quoted, 52. Absolutist refutations of Pluralism, 54. Criticism of Lotze's proof of Monism by the analysis of what interaction involves, 55. Vicious intellectualism defined, 60. Royce's alternative: either the complete disunion or the absolute union of things, 61. Bradley's dialectic difficulties with relations, 69. Inefficiency of the Absolute as a rationalizing remedy, 71. Tendency of Rationalists to fly to extremes, 74. The question of 'external' relations, 79. Transition ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... really have no structure. To what, then, shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... under the image of geometrical lines, exhibits the various relations of the intelligible to the sensible world; especially his lofty aspirations with regard to "that second segment of the intelligible world, which reason of itself grasps by the power of dialectic, employing hypotheses, not as principles, but as veritable hypotheses, that is to say, as steps and starting-points, in order that it may ascend as far as the unconditioned ([Greek: mechri tou anypothetou]), ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... termed by Latin writers silvatious, by the Normans forestier. The Anglo-Saxon robber or highwayman is called a woodrover wealdgenga, and the Norse word for outlaw is exactly equivalent.[11] It has often been suggested that Robin Hood is a corruption, or dialectic form, of Robin of the Wood; and when we remember that wood is pronounced hood in some parts of England,[12] (as whoop is pronounced hoop everywhere,) and that the outlaw bears in so many languages a name descriptive of his habitation, this notion will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... theologian and scholastic philosopher of French birth, renowned for his dialectic ability, his learning, his passion for Heloise, and his misfortunes; made conceivability the test of credibility, and was a great ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she had at least enjoyed the dialectic conflicts in which she had held her own so well. But the matter was more serious now. 'What have you to do with my marriage?' she demanded. Knox in answer hinted that she had herself invited him to give her private advice; but what he had said was in the pulpit, where he had to speak ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... talk in private. He talked incessantly, before, at, and after dinner, and he did enormous harm. He was horribly clever, too, and usually got the best of an argument, so that various eminent private Liberals had their tempers ruined by his dialectic. In his rich and unabashed accent—he had long discarded his Edinburgh-English—he dissected their arguments and ridiculed their character. He had once been famous for his soapy manners: now he was as rough as ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... physics in the other dialogues of Plato, and he himself regards the consideration of them as a rational pastime only. He is beginning to feel the need of further divisions of knowledge; and is becoming aware that besides dialectic, mathematics, and the arts, there is another field which has been hitherto unexplored by him. But he has not as yet defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between medicine and mathematics, ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... and devotes several pages to the customary jargon of astrologers; and, under the heading "De animi qualitatibus," says: "There was something portentous about this boy. He had learnt, as I heard, seven languages, and certainly he knew thoroughly his own, French, and Latin. He was skilled in Dialectic, and eager to be instructed in all subjects. When I met him, he was in his fifteenth year, and he asked me (speaking Latin no less perfectly and fluently than myself), 'What is contained in those rare books of yours, De rerum varietate?' for I had dedicated these manuscripts to ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.' But the dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me. Such metaphysical ideas as 'laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works' and 'crucifying the Son of God afresh' were not successfully brought down to the level ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... and manner must have some compelling charm in them: the dialectic debate is not pursued, but by a word and look the archic ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... exclaim, if any man attempts to fling dust in my eyes by false syllogism, or any mode of dialectic sophism. And in relation to this particular subject of value, I flatter myself that in a paper expressly applied to the exposure of Mr. Malthus's blunders in his Political Economy, I have made it impossible ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... comparisons and illustrations from outward things are almost invariably drawn from actual eyesight. As to the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt that he went through the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary university course. To these he afterward added painting (or at least drawing,—designavo un angelo sopra certe tavolette),[16] theology, and medicine. He is said to have been ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... been fixed in Sanskrit as a verbal, but only as a nominal base, is no real objection either. The same thing has happened over and over again, and has been remarked as the necessary result of the dialectic growth of language by so ancient a scholar as Yaska. ('Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft, vol. viii. p. 373 seq.) That scandere in Latin, in the sense of scanning is a late word, does ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... raise?" No, they could not agree, as Franklin was bound to admit, knowing the fact better than most men. And if no adequate answer was forthcoming from Franklin, a man so ready in expedients and so practiced in the subtleties of dialectic, it is no great wonder that Grenville thought the agents now fully convinced by his reasoning, which after all was only an impersonal formulation of the inexorable logic ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... nothing more paradoxical than the female mind; it is difficult to convince a woman of anything; they have to be led into convincing themselves. The order of the proofs by which they demolish their prejudices is most original; to learn their dialectic it is necessary to overthrow in your own mind every scholastic rule of logic. For ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... furnished the dialectic and the mould for the characteristic Christian teaching, the doctrine of the Trinity preserved religious values. By Jesus the disciples had been led to God, and he was the central fact of faith. After the resurrection he was the object ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... an anti-hegelian Aesthetic, of a Logic where Hegel is only half accepted, and of a Philosophy of the Practical, which contains hardly a trace of Hegel. I give an instance. If the great conquest of Hegel be the dialectic of opposites, his great mistake lies in the confusion of opposites with things which are distinct but not opposite. If, says Croce, we take as an example the application of the Hegelian triad that formulates becoming (affirmation, negation and synthesis), ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... even the shamans themselves are now unable to explain. These archaic forms, like the old words used by our poets, lend a peculiar beauty which can hardly be rendered in a translation. They frequently throw light on the dialectic evolution of the language, as many words found now only in the nearly extinct Lower Cherokee dialect occur in formulas which in other respects are written in the Middle or Upper dialect. The R sound, the chief distinguishing characteristic of the old Lower ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... school of his own, outside the walls. "I attached myself to the Palatine Peripatician who then presided on the hill of Sainte-Genevieve, the doctor illustrious, admired by all. There, at his feet, I received the first elements of the dialectic art, and according to the measure of my poor understanding I received with all the avidity of my soul everything that came from ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... their changes Our fathers may have slain a son or two, Discouraging a further dialectic Regarding what was new; And after their unstudied admonition Occasional contrition For their old-fashioned ways May have reduced their doubts, and in ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... With his wonted dialectic skill Douglas sought to establish his case. The existing laws made no provision for collecting the revenue on shipboard. It was admitted on all sides that collection at the port of entry in South Carolina was impossible. The President had no legal right to blockade the port of Charleston. He could ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... apologist he laboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the effort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The Baraitha of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third text must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that distorted dialectic known as Pilpul. The only true "Conciliador" is history, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizing rationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere—or rather everywhere. The same method that softened the Oriental amorousness of "The Song of Solomon" into an allegory of God's love for ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... painted, on the trunk and branches of which were the figures and names of the seven liberal arts. At the foot sat Grammar—the basis of all learning—holding on her hand a lengthy rod (ominous for the tender student). On the right Rhetoric stretched forth her hand. On the left was Dialectic. Philosophy sat on the summit; the rest being disposed according to their relative importance. The whole was explained in the Carmina de septem artibus, in which the bishop, who was one of the ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as is also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed with the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into rich earth, and I think it will go on ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and hard reading, nothing of all this matters a jot in comparison with the association of youth with youth and the communion of quick and eager spirits. I have lived my life with clever people, men and women who thought themselves masters of dialectic, but I can say truthfully that I have never heard such good talk as in my own rooms and in the rooms of my contemporaries at Oxford. There, and there only, have I seen practised what Dr. Johnson believed to be an essential to good talk, the ability to stretch one's ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... a student in Dante's time embraced the seven liberal arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, namely Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astrology. The higher education comprised also Physics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, and Theology. Of the cultural effect of the old education, Professor Huxley spoke in the highest praise on the occasion of his inaugural ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear the greatest 'marks of design'—justice more than the external frame-work of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science of dialectic or the organisation of ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and all existence. It is in ...
— The Republic • Plato
... remarked to Marion afterwards, it was a hard team to drive, for the table was too small to permit anything like private conversation at either end, and to enter upon general topics was to start Clarke and Weissmann into dialectic clamor. "I trusted in the food," she answered to Marion's query. "It was a good dinner and kept even the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... before, the Emperor had visited the Museum and had carried on learned discussions with the most prominent of the sages and professors there, in the presence of their assembled disciples. At last a formal disputation had arisen, and the dialectic keenness and precision with which Hadrian, in the purest Attic Greek, had succeeded in driving his opponents into a corner had excited the greatest admiration. The Sovereign had quitted the famous institution with a promise to reopen the contest at an early date. The philosophers, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... for his former merits, and for his numerous admirers. There is no common thread, no common action which would have tied together all the parts of the novel; all of it is in some way just separate rhapsodies. . . . This novel is didactic, a real learned treatise written in dialectic form, and each character as he appears serves as an expression and representative of a certain opinion and direction. . . . All the attention of the author is turned on the principal hero and the other acting characters, however, not on their personality, not on the emotions of their souls, their ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Love and sympathy for man as man, could alone give this knowledge and furnish this magic key to hearts in wilds unknown. No human system of mental training could ever do it. In this connection I smile somewhat at Dr. Leitner's profound German dialectic in the discussion on the paper read by McNair over the preliminary preparation in language and terms required by an explorer to do his work effectively. Where man is equipped by that instinctive faculty of accommodating himself to the men ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... till his intellect is in a tangle. He fails to see that a man of intellectual agility might frame a theory and argue it out ably, and then suddenly turn over and with equal dexterity argue the other side. Do we not have set debates with speakers appointed on each side? That is dialectic—a trick of the mind. But philosophy is the wine of the spirit. The capacity then to argue the point is not the justification of a philosophy. That justification must be found in the virtue of the philosophy that gives its believer vision and grasp of life ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... one single continuity the different periods of the preceding dialectic. Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of them reality by themselves; but all the same they are part of reality. And absolute reality would be the whole of these degrees and moments, and many others as well, no doubt. Or rather, to secure absolute ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... speech. The subject is Dialectic Efficiency—without quotation-marks, be it noted. The way of it is this: I have been reading, or, rather, trying to read the masterly book by Doctor Fletcher Durell, whose title is "Fundamental Sources of Efficiency." This is one of the most recondite books ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... himself, was obliged to plead guilty to his inconsistencies, with an admission that he could make no satisfactory answer to the original inquiry which had at first appeared so easy." Thus, by this system of cross-examination, he showed the intimate connection between the dialectic method and the logical distribution of particulars into species and genera. The discussion first turns upon the meaning of some generic term; the queries bring the answers into collision with various particulars ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... tongue current all over the island, called by the Spaniards la lengua universal and la lengua cortesana. This is distinctly said by all the historians to have been but very slightly different from that of Cuba, a mere dialectic variation in accent being observed.[15] Many fragments of this tongue are preserved in the narratives of the early explorers, and it has been the theme for some strange and wild theorizing among would-be philologists. Rafinesque christened it the "Taino" language, ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... of three philosophical schools: the Dialectic, the Atomic, and the Vedanta. The Dialectic school considers the principles of knowledge as entirely distinct from nature; it admits the existence of universal ideas in the human mind; it establishes the syllogistic ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... among the apostles of the idea of Progress. It never secured any hold upon his mind. But he had grown up in the same intellectual climate in which that idea was produced; he had been nurtured both on the dissolving, dialectic of Bayle, and on the Cartesian enunciation of natural law. And his work contributed to the service, not of the doctrine of the past, but of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... being merely incidental. No more distinctively English treatise on political economy was ever written, not even "The Wealth of Nations." Even the method and style of the book are, contrary to general opinion, much more distinctly English than German. I do not forget his Hegelian dialectic with its un-English subtleties, but against that must be placed the directness, vigor, and pointedness of style, and the cogent reasoning, with its wealth of concrete illustrations, which are as characteristically ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... pour a flood of light upon Lassalle's own powerful personality. In the Philosophy of Heraclitus he grappled with the most formidable philosophical problems and showed himself a master of the Hegelian dialectic. In the System of the Acquired Rights he attacked the very foundations of the current theories of law and justice with the same concentration of energy and purpose as had been displayed in the more practical problems of law and justice involved in the case of the Countess von Hatzfeld. But ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... uneducated whites at the beginning of my labors as an exhorter, but after hard study and training I improved myself greatly in this respect, and gained the reputation of being as correct in my pronunciation of English words as the majority of the white preachers. I am not yet entirely free from dialectic pronunciation, and never expect to be; but I find that this very defect, if so it may be called, adds force to my sermons, and gives them a distinctness not otherwise attainable. Therefore I make use of my very faults ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... power over nature: thus it was that mathematics were most shamefully neglected; in physics the absurd doctrines of the Peripatetics predominated; and the name of philosophy was given to a puerile and complicated dialectic which had neither the merit of ingenious classification, nor that subtlety of argument which ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... of his well-known love of argument occurred on this trip. In Mr. Edkins he found a foeman in all respects worthy of his dialectic steel. Chinese mules will only travel in single file, even where the roads are wide enough to allow of their travelling abreast, and as Gilmour's went in front of that ridden by Mr. Edkins, he used to ride with his face to the tail of his beast, and thus the more readily and continuously conduct ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour |
