"A priori" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought given to the philosophical study of the relation of Christ and God. It fills the library of the Early Church, and practically all the early controversies turn upon it. The weak spot in all this was the use of the "a priori" method. Men started with preconceptions about God—not unnaturally, for we all have some theories about God, which we are apt to regard as knowledge. But knowledge is a difficult thing to reach in any sphere of study; and men assumed too quickly ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... of the "Eclipse." he implies, without absolutely asserting, that I hold the Bible to be an impertinence. He repeats this in p. 85 of the "Defence." Such is his mode. I wrote: "Without a priori belief, the Bible is an impertinence," but I say, man has this a priori belief, on which account the Bible is not an impertinence. My last sentence in the very passage before us, expressly asserts the value of (good) external teaching. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... charity and the lives of the poor: consider all this, and then say what it means to society that such a power must be, in every new issue that arises, on the side of reaction and falsehood. "So it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be," runs the church's formula; and this per se and a priori, of necessity and in the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... has originated since man domesticated the species. In the case of multiple origins part of the difference was produced under natural conditions. I should INFINITELY prefer the theory of single origin in all cases, if facts would permit its reception. But there seems to me some a priori improbability (seeing how fond savages are of taming animals), that throughout all times, and throughout all the world, that man should have domesticated one single species alone, of the widely distributed genus Canis. Besides this, the close resemblance of at least three kinds of American ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... he would include it entirely under the law of Economy; at any rate he treats of it solely in reference to intelligibility, and not at all in its scarcely less important relation to harmony. We have A PRIORI reasons," he says, "for believing that in every sentence there is one order of words more effective than any other, and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... pronouncement—constat. 'You see, my friend,' writes Goldsmith's Citizen of the World ,'there is nothing so ridiculous that it has not at some time been said by some philosopher.' But for the first part, while a priori Mr. Ireland ought to be right—since Hazlitt, as we have seen, came to literary criticism by the road of philosophical writing—I confess to finding very little ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt |
