"Empirically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... judgments. Even where one is accurate in his observations, the conclusions naturally drawn are often wrong. For example, a child that has seen none but red squirrels would naturally think all squirrels red, and include the quality red in his general notion. Most of our empirically derived general notions are spotted with such defects. What relation have these facts to induction? We claim that general notions should be experimentally formed; that is, by a gradual collection ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... be analyzed into a primitive element of consciousness, something which can be defined only as analogous to a nervous shock. These perceptions have now become innate in the individual. They may be called—as Kant called space and time—forms of intuition; but they have been acquired empirically by the race, through the persistence of the corresponding phenomena in the environment, and from the accumulated experiences of each individual being transmitted in the form of modified structure to his descendants. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... regarding them probably as some new and inevitable fatal caprice of nature. And, indeed, all this diplomacy notwithstanding, in the desperate confusion that may follow one of these hazardous expedients, it is on the admirable good sense of the bee that man always, and almost empirically, relies; on the inexhaustible treasure of their marvellous laws and customs, on their love of peace and order, their devotion to the public weal, and fidelity to the future; on the adroit strength, the earnest ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... as in a very few others of the greatest cases, cannot be elicited from particular works. Just as Hamlet will give you no idea of the probable treatment of As You Like It, so Eugenie Grandet contains no key to La Cousine Bette. Even the groups into which he himself rather empirically, if not quite arbitrarily, separated the Comedie, though they lend themselves a little more to specification, do not yield very much to the classifier. The Comedie, once more, is a world—a world open to the reader, "all before him." Chronological order ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury |
