"Predicate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... We may predicate from this that Mr Palliser's chance of being able to shipwreck himself upon that rock was but small, and that he would, in spite of himself, be saved from his uncle's anger. Lord Dumbello took the letter and ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... Heroism," and as she sought among the dusky annals of the past for instances in confirmation of her predicate, that female intellect was capable of the most exalted attainments, and that the elements of her character would enable woman to cope successfully with difficulties of every class, her voice grew clear, firm, and deep. Quitting the fertile fields of history, she painted the trials ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... composition—the workmanship apart from the native grandeur of the materials—the majestic style of the artistic treatment as distinguished from the original creative power—which Dryden, the translator of the Roman poet, familiar therefore with his weakness and with his strength, meant in this place to predicate as ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Liberty is the entire absence of all limitation, and to have no limitation in Being is to be co-extensive with All-Being. We are all grammarians enough to know that the use of a predicate is to lead the mind to contemplate the subject as represented by that predicate; in other words, it limits our conception for the time being to that particular aspect of the subject. Hence every ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... is unknowable because since it is essentially the knowing subject it can be known only by itself: it can never become the object of knowledge and language is inadequate to describe it. All that can be said of it is neti, neti, that is no, no: it is not anything which we try to predicate of it. But he who knows that the individual soul is the Atman, becomes Atman; being it, he knows it and knows all the world: he perceives that in all the world there is no plurality. Here the later doctrine of Maya ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... or settled" is a predicate common to natural and supernatural, not the differentia of either. And here let me remark that the expression, "Laws of Nature," is a modern technical expression which the Catholic philosopher would require, probably, to have defined before employing it. "Natura," in ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... other words, by their politico-economical situation. It is especially in the higher stages of civilization, that one bankrupt may easily drag numberless others down with him; and where the laws are bad or powerless, not even the wealthiest man can predicate his own solvency for any length of time in advance. One of the most important conditions of credit is the certainty that, if the debtor's good will to meet his obligations should fail, it shall be supplied by the compulsory ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... as marking the highest point of a climax, the predicate is read with "religion," and with it alone. When so great a thing as religion is said to be at stake, everything else is dropped out of sight, or is held to be included. But write the three names as if they were of equal importance; the ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... nom. agreeing with subj., ยง 71; without the art. because the predicate; emphatic ...
— Greek in a Nutshell • James Strong
... of language. Admitting that language is a sign, are we to take that as signifying a spiritual necessity (phusis) or as a psychological convention (nomos)? Aristotle made a valuable contribution to this difficult question, when he spoke of a kind of proposition other than those which predicate truth or falsehood, that is, logic. With him euchae is the term proper to designate desires and aspirations, which are the vehicle of poetry and of oratory. (It must be remembered that for Aristotle words, like ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... of daylight and been compelled to dispel the darkness by means of fires; but such instances were rare and of short duration. Statements are sometimes made that specimens, usually flint implements, have been found far, possibly several hundred yards, within the cavern. Such objects do not predicate habitation at that distance; primitive explorers may have lost them. It has been pointed out, too, by Mr. De Lancey Gill, that a wounded animal, taking refuge in a cave and instinctively seeking its dark recesses, may carry in an arrow or spear ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... the Bible and Burn's Justice are unknown, where a prank which on this earth would be rewarded with the pillory is merely matter for a peal of elvish laughter. A real Horner, a real Careless, would, it is admitted, be exceedingly bad men. But to predicate morality or immorality of the Horner of Wycherley and the Careless of Congreve is as absurd as it would be to arraign a sleeper for his dreams. "They belong to the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point, Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a predicate and six ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... The fact that a particular predicate is applicable to one thing and less properly to another, does not prevent this latter from being simply better than the former: thus the knowledge of the blessed is more excellent than the knowledge ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of Jerusalem, nor propagated on the miracles on which the gospels have founded it. Here, sir, have I not an occasion of some little complaint? If you really thought that the gospels were, none of them, written in the life time of the apostles, and considered it safe to predicate an argument on this ground, why should you withhold the proof of this fact? Why did you not inform me of the authority by which your argument is supported in your own mind? And furthermore, why do you try to get away from the argument as stated in its first form, ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate, In honest simple verse, this song to you. And if in flattering strains I do not predicate, 'Tis that I still retain my "buff and blue"; My politics as yet are all to educate: Apostasy's so fashionable, too, To keep one creed's a task grown quite Herculean: Is it not so, my ...
— English Satires • Various
... PRINCIPLES—Subject and Predicate, Inflection, Number, Nominative Subject, Possessive Genitive, Agreement of Verb, Direct ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... and Radiates lowest, how do the Articulates and Mollusks stand to these and to each other? To me it seems, that, while both are decidedly superior to the Radiates and inferior to the Vertebrates, we cannot predicate absolute superiority or inferiority of organization of either of these groups as compared with each other; they stand on one structural level, though with different tendencies,—the body in Mollusks having always a soft, massive, concentrated character, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... nervous, decidedly alert, and somewhat self-congratulatory that I was not more scared. No man can predicate how efficient he is going to be in the presence of really dangerous game. Only the actual trial will show. This is not a question of courage at all, but of purely involuntary reaction of the nerves. Very few men ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... and knowledge to God does not involve plurality in his essence. The distinction of three attributes is due to our limited mind and inadequate powers of expression. In reality the essence of which we predicate these attributes is one and simple. This solution did not seem thoroughgoing enough to Saadia's successors, and every one of the Jewish philosophers tried his hand at the problem. All agreed that the attributes ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... right to claim from us the particular mood called seriousness,—which means the willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be in se, it is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be our rule of life. There can be no greater incongruity than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is unknowable, and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... is an adjective of Jagat. See Sreedhara. Both Mr. Davies and Telang seem to take it as a predicate in contra-distinction to Ekastham. This is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... you ready?" asked Winnie, stretching her lazy little form and rising reluctantly from the cosy corner; "now for a long, long lecture on subject and predicate, ugh! How I do hate lessons, to be sure;" and Miss Blake, parting the tapestried curtains, stepped along the hall with a ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... denotes false sensations such as have only a slight degree of resemblance to the true, by the three succeeding stages the resemblance is made complete. The word probabilia is a sort of tertiary predicate after efficere ("to manufacture so as to be probable"). It must not be repeated after the second efficere, or the whole sense will be inverted and this section placed out of harmony with 50. Plane proxime: ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... composition and the properties of a soil, and with each advancement in the accuracy and minuteness of our analysis the difficulties have been rather increased than diminished. Although it is occasionally possible to predicate from its composition that a particular soil will be incapable of supporting vegetation, it not unfrequently happens that a fruitful and a barren soil are so similar that it is impossible to distinguish them from one another, and cases even occur in which the barren appears ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... has been reached, but he has been reached by thinking away from him everything concrete. All predicates are unsuitable to him, as any predicate implies a limitation; he can only be described in negatives, or in questionable metaphors. He is meant to satisfy the religious craving for a being quite free from any imperfection and entirely supreme—and it is ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... causes of insanity, and have scarcely done more than recognize the possibility of molecular disease of the brain. Hereafter science will, probably, succeed in unveiling the obscure facts of molecular brain pathology, and enable the medical psychologist to predicate disease of recognized classes of brain elements from the special phenomena of mind disturbance. This is the line of inquiry, and the result, to which the progress already made distinctly tends. For the present, the inferences we can surely draw from known facts are very ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... of truth, and convicted Haeckel of "ignorance" and "dishonesty;" while the philosopher Paulsen made short work of the "Weltraetsel" from his own standpoint, ("if a book could drip with superficiality, I should predicate that of the 19th chapter"). Harnack also condemned the theological section in the "Christliche Welt," and Troeltsch, Hoenigswald, and Hohlfeld took Haeckel severely to task on philosophic grounds. The naturalists have thus ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... no man predicate That aught the name of gentleman should have Even in a king's estate Except the heart there ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... they have to do with characters and places which are tied to the present by stronger cords than those of the divine age. What the events really were which are involved in the myths of the preceding chapter it is impossible to predicate. That the celestial invasion of the island of Kyushu means the coming thither of a chief and his followers from the continent by way of Korea seems most reasonable. The inter-mixture of Izumo with these ...
— Japan • David Murray
... 179 of the maxims of the first edition, 1665, it is omitted from the 2nd and 3rd, and reappears for the first time in the 4th edition, in 1675, as at present, at the head of the Reflections.—Aime Martin. Its best answer is arrived at by reversing the predicate and the subject, and you at once form a contradictory maxim equally true, our vices are most frequently ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... Genesis. Somewhere in my most desultory reading I have seen it stated that in some of those early Targums was the declaration, that 'God originally created men red, white and black.' Mr. Hammond is charitable enough to say that I must have smoked an extra cigar, and dreamed the predicate I am so anxious to authenticate. Will you oblige me ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... are learned, and therefore I will not conclude an absolute contradiction in the terms of nobleman and scholar; but as the world goes now, 'tis very hard to predicate one upon the other; and 'tis yet more difficult to prove, that a nobleman can be a friend to poetry. Were it not for two or three instances in Whitehall, and in the town, the poets of this age would find so little encouragement for their labours, and so few understanders, that they might ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... unorganized myriads that one can cover by the phrase "mechanics and engineers," if one uses it in its widest possible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describe such a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universally applicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced, oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough, until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his additions ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... be defined as the process of raising the level of appreciation. This definition will stand the ultimate test. Here is bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation as a goal in every rational system of education. Appreciation has been defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Somehow I could not predicate these simple joys of the people I have been talking of, for the very reason, that they were themselves so simple. It was our sophistication which enabled us to taste pleasures which would have been insipidities to them. Their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "Perfect sanity would be impossible to predicate of any individual; doubtless there are perfectly sane persons, that is, sane at times, but to find them would be like finding the traditional needle. I suppose our good friend Willis would rank higher than the average, after ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... whole delusion of the Anti-Trinitarians arises out of this, that they apply the property of imaginable matter—in which A. is, that is, can only be imagined, by exclusion of B. as the universal predicate ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and, placing a finger on a point, she would say: "Here is General ——'s detachment; here is the rebel army; such and such are the fortifications and surrounding circumstances; and she would then begin thoughtfully to predicate the result ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... melodic Motive, equivalent to the smallest group of words (a subject with its article and adjective, for example); and two or three motives make a Phrase, equivalent to the complete, though comparatively brief, sentence (subject, predicate, and object). This definition, amply illustrated in the following examples, serves also to point out the significant resemblance between the structure of language and of music. The principal melody is, as it were, the voice ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... reverential parenthesis "(never Shakspere, by-the-bye)—and at others my heart aches and I cry real, bitter, warm tears as earnestly as if I was in earnest." Reading which last sentence, one might very safely predicate that in the one instance, where she could turn her words into burlesque, she would be certain to act but indifferently, whereas in the other, with the hot, scalding tears running down her face, she could not by necessity do otherwise ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... The object of hope is not the possible as differentiating the true, for thus the possible ensues from the relation of a predicate to a subject. The object of hope is the possible as compared to a power. For such is the division of the possible given in Metaph. v, 12, i.e. into the two kinds ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... pieces of parchment. They were then to be placed on a frame so constructed that by turning a handle they might revolve freely, and form endless combinations. One term would stand for a subject, and another for a predicate. The student was then diligently to inspect the different combinations that fortuitously arose, and exercising the subtlety of his faculties to select such as he should find best calculated for his purposes. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... is, to distinguish between the mental process of predication, and observation, induction or testimony. Predication is the attribution of a quality or action to a subject, by adding to it a predicate. In the sentence, "the man is wise," "the man" is the subject; "is wise" is the predicate. This may be simply an interplay of thoughts, without the presence of the object thought of; or the things thought of may be imaginary or unreal; while observation, ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... predicate. In Old English, the Normal order is found chiefly in independent clauses. The predicate is followed by its modifiers: S hwl bi micle l:ssa onne re hwalas, That whale is much smaller than other whales; Ond h geseah tw scipu, And ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... seemed to be shifted from Mrs. Ormond to her convert, whom he followed with his tolerant eyes. "Nothing in all this sort of inquiry is so impossible to predicate as the effect of any given instance upon a given mind. It would be ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... points out that some of these verses need not mean actual transformation, but mere likeness, through "a primitive formation of predicate without the aid of a particle corresponding to such a word as 'like.'"[1214] Enough, however, remains to show the claim of the magician. Taliesin, in many poems, makes similar claims, and says, "I have been in ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... developments of the worlds of nature and of mind, show a multiplicity of forms and an infinite variety of existences. But whatever may be their difference of degree, of force, of content, these things have no true independence; their being is consequent, and, so to speak, contingent. When we predicate being of particular things, it is not of Being which is absolute that we speak—Being of and from itself; that is, God—but a borrowed being, a semblance ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... to say—though I did then believe it—that the First Councillor of the Mormon Church was prepared to have the doctrine of plural marriage abandoned in order to have the people saved. It is impossible to predicate the thoughts of a man so diplomatic, so astute, and at the same time so deeply religious and so credulous of all the miracles of faith. He did believe in Divine guidance. He was sincere in his submission ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... faces astounding prejudice. That which may be assumed as true of white men must be proven beyond peradventure if it relates to Negroes. One who writes of the development of the Negro race must continually insist that he is writing of a normal human stock, and that whatever it is fair to predicate of the mass of human beings may be predicated of the Negro. It is the silent refusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, the answer to the apparently simple question "What is a ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... vision is compelled by the very nature of its organ of research to choose, in this dilemma, the latter rather than the former. And the universe which it thus dares to predicate is at least a universe that lends itself, as so many "scientific" universes do not, to that synthetic activity of the imaginative reason which in the long run alone satisfies the soul. And such a universe satisfies the soul, as these others cannot, because it reflects, in its objective spectacle ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... be sweet intellectualism outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate rationally. Nothing 'between' things can connect them, for 'between' is just that third thing, 'between,' and would need itself to be connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens, and so ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the lunar atmosphere, it may be said, in a word, that even those who advocate the existence of vegetation and of clouds of dust or ice crystals on the moon do not predicate any greater amount, or greater density, of atmosphere than do those who consider the moon to be wholly dead and inert. Professor Pickering himself showed, from his observations, that the horizontal refraction of the ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... digress. How do the poets do it? (I do not mean where do they get their power, as I was asking just now of Shakespeare, but how do the words, simple or complex, produce that effect?) Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any qualification at all: often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object. There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... schoolbook, and thought necessary as a part of polite education; and as they have read little or nothing since, it is only reasonable that they should stick to their colours. Indeed, the French satirist's boast that he could predicate the views of any man with regard to both worlds, if he were only supplied with the simple data of his age and his income, is quite true in the general with regard to literary taste. Given the age of the ordinary individual—that is to say of the gentleman ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... import of it seems to be this—That no system of government can long exist among men, unless it is substantially, and in the majority of cases, founded in reason and justice, and sanctioned by experienced utility for the people among whom it exists; and therefore, that we may predicate with perfect certainty of any institution which has been generally extended and long established, that it has been upon the whole beneficial, and should be modified or altered with a very cautious hand. That ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Nous, the Intellectual Teacher has vanished further and further off; further off still some dim vision of a supreme Goodness. Infinite spaces above that looms through the mist of the abyss a Primaeval One. But even that has a predicate, for it is one; it is not pure essence. Must there not be something beyond that again, which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute? What an abyss! How shall the human mind find anything whereon to rest, in the vast nowhere between it and the object of ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Of anyone else it would have been said that she must be finding the afternoon rather dreary in the quaint halls not of her forefathers: but of Miss Power it was unsafe to predicate so surely. She walked from room to room in a black velvet dress which gave decision to her outline without depriving it of softness. She occasionally clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of a window; but she more ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... verb "to be." By incorporating yalu with this expression, it makes it more emphatic, as, Yalu murrung nginyadhu, "Really I am well." Any adjective describing a human attribute may be taken as a predicate, as, good, bad, strong, sleepy, and employed with the modifications ...
— The Wiradyuri and Other Languages of New South Wales • Robert Hamilton Mathews
... of a subject and predicate with their modifiers and forming a part of a sentence: ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... have this sentence, "To them that are sanctified by God the Father." The word "sanctified" is here used as a predicate adjective, and describes the people addressed. It would not alter the meaning of the text were we to translate it thus: "To them that are made holy by God the Father." The word holy is here used ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... researches, and translated by the energy of science from forgotten and buried ages. The deductions to be drawn from it, I leave to those who have a taste for the speculative, neither believing in, nor quarrelling with the theory which they may predicate upon it." ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... which the human mind tends, in which it is absorbed or even annihilated. Awful as such a mysticism may appear, yet it leaves still something that exists, it acknowledges a feeling of dependence in man. It knows of a first cause, though it may have nothing to predicate of it except that it is [Greek: to kinoun akineton]. A return is possible from that desert. The first cause may be called to life again. It may take the names of Creator, Preserver, Ruler; and when the simplicity and helplessness of the child ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... so that people really thought I was getting older and older; at last I acquired the reputation of a prophet, and was held in veneration by a great many religious people. Of course I could not prophesy, but as I had such a vast deal of experience I was able to predicate intelligently something about the future from my knowledge of the past. I became famed as a wonderful seer, and there were a great many curious ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... especially after than or as; b Nominative who and whoever; c Predicate nominative; d Objective; e Objective with infinitive; f Possessive; g Possessive with gerund; h Possession by inanimate objects; i Agreement of pronouns 51. Number: a Each, every one, etc.; b Those kind, etc.; c Collective nouns; d ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... Nobody can predicate as to her object or fancy; she may have done the deed in the very abstraction of deep sadness. She may have been moaning from the bottom of her heart, 'How unhappy am I!' But the impression produced on Knight was ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... all our knowledge of things must be. There, for example, are all the truths of mathematics. When we enunciate a truth regarding the relations of the lines and angles of a triangle, we are not merely unfolding in the predicate of our proposition what was implicitly contained in the subject. There are propositions that do no more than this; they are analytical, i.e. they merely analyze the subject. Thus, when we say: Man is a rational animal, we ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, A good ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... given what Aristotle calls 'a form,' others had ascribed a material nature only. The tendency of their philosophy was to deny to Being all predicates. The Megarians, who succeeded them, like the Cynics, affirmed that no predicate could be asserted of any subject; they also converted the idea of Being into an abstraction of Good, perhaps with the view of preserving a sort of neutrality or indifference between the mind and things. As if they had said, in the language of modern philosophy: 'Being is not only neither finite ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, the possessor of that complete culture, does not "weep" over the failure of "a theory of the quantification of the predicate," nor "shriek" over the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mental attitude, in the criticism of by-past stages of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... place he asks, What are the antecedents of fetich-worship? He appears to conceive himself to be arguing with persons (p. 127) who 'have taken for granted that every human being was miraculously endowed with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich, call it power, spirit, or god.' If there are reasoners so feeble, they must be left to the punishment inflicted by Mr. Muller. On the other hand, students who regard the growth of the idea of power, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... (2) As a predicate noun, completing a verb, and referring to or explaining the subject: "A bent twig makes ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... sun is called "the candle of God." A book just bought is "my late literary acquisition." Facts such as "I returned to Llangollen by nearly the same way by which I had come," abound. Sentences straight from his note book, lacking either in subject or predicate, occur here and there. At times a clause with no sort of value is admitted, as when, forgetting the name of Kilvey Hill, he says that Swansea town and harbour "are overhung on the side of the east by a lofty green mountain with a Welsh name, no doubt exceedingly ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... there can be no sound without an ear to appreciate it, so there be can no matter without an existing ego, in some state of consciousness in the universe, to apprehend it—to ascribe to it attributes.[2] On what, therefore, are we to predicate the existence of either matter or motion, except it be these intuitions of consciousness whose validity, so far as we have any knowledge whatever on the subject, rests exclusively on that "breath of life," which was breathed into man when he became a living soul? But if our intuitions are not ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... little in question that this degree of mental development had been attained long before the opening of our historical period. The primeval man, then, whose scientific knowledge we are attempting to predicate, had become, through his conception of fishes, birds, and hairy animals as separate classes, a scientific zoologist of relatively ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... in Mark and the Clementines a predicate, in Matthew the subject. In the introduction to the Eschatological discourse the Clementines approach more nearly to St. Mark than to any other Gospel: [Greek: Horate] ([Greek: blepeis], Mark) [Greek: tas] ([Greek: megalas], ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... understanding could not frame an idea involving a spiritual element such as animism undoubtedly presents. Apropos of the dream birth of the soul, all terrestrial mammals dream, and in some of them, notably the dog and monkey, an observer can almost predicate the subject of their dreams by watching their actions while they are under dream influence; yet no animal save man, as far as we know, has ever evolved any idea of ghost or soul.[B] It may be said, on the other hand, that since animals show, unmistakably, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... doctrine, that there is not, and cannot be any such thing as sin. If man be not a free agent—if he be incapable of acting otherwise than as predetermined by Jehovah—he is incapable of either virtue or vice. It would be as reasonable to predicate virtue or vice of the flux and reflux of the tides, or the circulation of the blood, as of man or angel under ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... consciousness is only possible under the antithesis of a subject and an object known only in correlation, and mutually limiting each other"[318] Thought necessarily supposes conditions; "to think is simply to condition," that is, to predicate limits; and as the infinite is the unlimited, it can not be thought. The very attempt to think the infinite renders it finite; therefore there can be no infinite in thought, and, consequently, the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... at the very beginning. As the reader will perhaps see, from the tenor of my discourse, I would find it difficult to say whether I should give them a good name or a bad—to speak more scientifically, and of course more clearly, whether I should characterise them by a predicate eulogistic, or a predicate dyslogistic. On the whole, I am content with my first idea, and continue to stick to the title of "The Book-Hunter," with all the more assurance that it has been tolerated, and even liked, by readers of the kind I am ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or laughter, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... if it is ever passing out below, predicate about it; first, that it is that; next, that it has this or that quality; or must it not be that, even as we speak, it should straightway become some other thing, and go out under on its way, and be no longer as it is? Now, how could that which is never in the same state be a ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... no more possible to predicate the conduct of an Indian than that of a woman. In Detroit lived Wasson, one of the warriors of the dreaded Pontiac, who had felt some tender movings of the spirit toward a girl of his tribe. The keeper of the old red mill that stood at the foot of Twenty-fourth Street adopted ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... are a series of pictures or tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth. In his essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration of the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another. His picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets: "dark simmering ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... or Base. "I predicate my argument on universal experience." What is predicated of something is affirmed as an attribute of it, as omnipotence is ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... watch one's verbs carefully, too, to see that they agree in number with their subjects. One is sometimes tempted to make the verb agree with the predicate, ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... all his variants from Builth to Ballyhoo, His mental processes are plain—one knows what he will do, And can logically predicate his finish by his start; But the English—ah, the English—they are quite a ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... fine talking is this?" retorted the Spaniard. "There is little chance of the triumph you predicate for your countryman. Trust me, we shall have to greet his departure from the debate with many hisses and few cheers; and if we could penetrate through the plates of yon iron door, and gaze into the court it conceals from our view, we should find that the loftiness ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with forms only, "formal logic," or because it deals with names and not things, "the logic of names." It dates its rise as an independent science from the discovery of what is known as "the quantification of the predicate," claimed by Sir William Hamilton. Of writers upon it may be mentioned Professor De Morgan, W. Stanley Jevons, and especially Professor George Boole of Belfast. The latter, one of the subtlest ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... which she had spoken, and never had it looked more lovely. The father considered it for a moment, less with admiration than with curiosity: this daughter of his was an unknown quantity: he never could predicate what she would do or say. Certainly she surprised him once more when she lifted her ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... is not easy to lay down very definite rules as to what is allowable and what not. It is best not to deviate from the usual order of words unless one can find a precedent in one of the Dramas. Some inversions, however, are quite allowable. Thus one may put the complement of a predicate, e.g. an infinitive, an accusative, or a participle, at the beginning ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... of our experience, which rise up in unanimous and spontaneous testimony against the monstrous fiction that we are either nothing or God. The fallacy upon which this fiction rests is not a {27} very subtle one. When we speak of God's indwelling in man, we predicate that community of nature which the writer of Gen. ii expresses by saying that God created man in His own image; we predicate, i.e., what we already called homogeneity—likeness of substance—and not identity, which is a very different thing. We do not commit ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... pronouncement; solemn averment, solemn avowal, solemn declaration. remark, observation; position &c. (proposition) 514, saying, dictum, sentence, ipse dixit[Lat]. emphasis; weight; dogmatism &c. (certainty) 474; dogmatics &c 887. V. assert; make an assertion &c n.; have one's say; say, affirm, predicate, declare, state; protest, profess. put forth, put forward; advance, allege, propose, propound, enunciate, broach, set forth, hold out, maintain, contend, pronounce, pretend. depose, depone, aver, avow, avouch, asseverate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... hierarchical episcopacy of the church. Hence from the year 313 he placed himself in close connection with the bishops, made peace and harmony his first object in the Donatist and Arian controversies, and gave the predicate 'catholic' to the church in all official documents. And as his predecessors were supreme pontiffs of the heathen religion of the empire, so he desired to be looked upon as a sort of bishop, as universal bishop of the eternal affairs of the church. All this by no means from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the student be familiar with Philo, who was an eminent Platonic Jewish philosopher and a celebrated writer, flourishing previous to the composition of the fourth Gospel, in which, indeed, there is scarcely a single superhuman predicate of Christ which may not be paralleled with striking closeness from his extant works. In all these fields are found, in imperfect proportions and fragments, the materials which are developed in John's belief of the Logos become flesh. To present all ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... ceased, "to have the honour of being wracked (for so the steward, in conformity with the Doric of the forecastle, pronounced the word,) in such company. I should deem it a disgrace to be cast away in some society I could name, although I will predicate, as we say in America, nothing on their absence. As to what inwolves the stores, it surgested itself to me that the ladies would like delicate diet, and I intermated as much to Mrs. Sidley and t'other ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... importance of truths. 58 Sec. 2. Misapplication of the aphorism: "General truths are more important than particular ones." 58 Sec. 3. Falseness of this maxim, taken without explanation. 59 Sec. 4. Generality important in the subject, particularity in the predicate. 59 Sec. 5. The importance of truths of species is not owing to their generality. 60 Sec. 6. All truths valuable as they are characteristic. 61 Sec. 7. Otherwise truths of species are valuable, because beautiful. 61 Sec. 8. And many truths, valuable if separate, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... expression of their ideas, and now they were beginning to ask themselves whether the expression might not be distinguished from the idea? They were also seeking to distinguish the parts of speech and to enquire into the relation of subject and predicate. Grammar and logic were moving about somewhere in the depths of the human soul, but they were not yet awakened into consciousness and had not found names for themselves, or terms by which they might be expressed. Of these beginnings of the study of language we know little, and there ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... the feminine mind; more than I have, if you will excuse my frankness, in their power of dealing with a practical situation. Woman to interpret events, men to foresee contingencies. Woman to indicate, man to predicate—perhaps I mean predict! No matter; the thought, I think, is clear. Well, then, that is settled! I claim Howard for luncheon—a very simple affair—and for a walk; and by five o'clock we shall have settled this important ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... any grudging incapacity to appreciate new authors, but from a strong feeling that we are to guard the graves of the dead from encroachment, and their fames from vulgarization, that the "Atlantic" has been and will be sparing in its use of the word genius. One may safely predicate power, nicety of thought and language, a clear eye for scenery and character, and grace of poetic conception of a book, without being willing to say that it gives proof of genius. For genius is the shaping faculty, the power of using material in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... represents a regularizing of the natural undulations in the stress of speech, so there is also a more deep-lying rhythm, which arises through a simplification and regularizing of the movement of thought-pulsations. The fundamental rhythm consists in an alternation of subject-group and predicate-group. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... existence, hath existence; or, who hath a soul, hath a soul. What is this more than trifling with words? It is but like a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand to the other: and had he but words, might no doubt have said, 'Oyster in right hand is subject, and oyster in left hand is predicate:' and so might have made a self-evident proposition of oyster, i.e. oyster is oyster; and yet, with all this, not have been one whit the wiser or more knowing: and that way of handling the matter would much at one have satisfied the ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... universe? Apart sits his great father—Priam, the first of existences, father of many sons, the Absolute Reason; unseen, tremendous, immovable, in distant glory; yet himself amenable to that abysmal unity which Homer calls Fate, the source of all which is, yet in Itself Nothing, without predicate, unnameable. ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... against Douglas. 'I thought,' said he, 'their contest had been over long ago.' I answered, 'The contest concerning Douglas's filiation was over long ago; but the contest now is, who shall have the estate.' Then, assuming the air of 'an antient sage philosopher', I proceeded thus: 'Were I to PREDICATE concerning him, I should say, the contest formerly was, What IS he? The contest now is, What HAS he?' 'Right,' replied Mr Harris, smiling, 'you have done with QUALITY, and ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... identified with India and the Vedanta, the most widely accepted of the six systems of Indian philosophy, and the [A]rya Sam[a]j is nothing if not patriotic. It is above all pro-Indian and pro-Vedic. Their direct repudiation of pantheism may not be apparent to Western minds. [A]ryas predicate three eternal entities, God, the Soul, and Matter,[77] and this declaration of the reality of the soul and of matter is a direct denial of the pantheistic conception, its very antithesis. One pantheistic formula is: "Brahma is reality, the world unreality" (Brahma satyam, jagan mithy[a]). ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... fairly attributable to anything that may be reasonably considered as an outgrowth of the order, but come despite its constant teachings and warnings. Bad work they of course make, and so at times and to a limited extent bring the fraternity under the ban of popular displeasure, but shall the world predicate unfavorable judgment upon a few and unfair tests? If so, and the principle logically becomes general, pray who shall be appointed administrator of the effects of other social and moral organizations, and even of the church itself? ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... the States in which it is most broadly apparent. The deterioration of a single generation left to run wild may influence for the worse, during whole centuries, the character of a people; and who can predicate what these colonies of the southern hemisphere are yet to become? They may be great nations, influencing for good or evil the destinies of the species in ages of the world when Britain shall have sunk into ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... by sense, but they are names, and cannot be defined. When we assign to them some predicate, they first begin to have a meaning (onomaton sumploke logou ousia). This seems equivalent to saying, that the individuals of sense become the subject of knowledge when they are regarded as they are in nature in relation ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... the point, nor be dealing in poetical fancies, if we should predicate upon the introduction of the English lark into American society a supplementary influence much needed to unify and nationalise the heterogeneous elements of our population. Men, women, and children, speaking ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... Mr. Beam, he is older than I am, but he is young enough. Upon the probable duration of his life one might predicate forty years of mental activity, and from what I have seen of him he appears to have a good intellect. They talk about an aqueduct and waterworks he is about to construct. That indicates the study of geology, and engineering ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... is predicated accidentally, predicates, not substance, but quantity, or quality, or some other mode of being. If therefore the human nature accrues accidentally, when we say Christ is man, we do not predicate substance, but quality or quantity, or some other mode of being, which is contrary to the Decretal of Pope Alexander III, who says (Conc. Later. iii): "Since Christ is perfect God and perfect man, what foolhardiness have some to dare to affirm that Christ ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... quickly. Whether this meant that she was agreeably surprised to see me again, or whether it showed that she resented my turning up again so soon after she thought she was finally rid of me, I did not know. It does not do to predicate too much upon ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton |
