"A priori" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... persons who are given to the making of sonnets, Norman Douglas wrote: "I have a sneaking fondness for some of the worst of these bards.... And it is by no means a despicable class of folks who perpetrate such stuff; the third rate sonneteer, a priori, is a gentleman, and this is more than can be said of some of our crude fiction writers who have never yielded themselves to the chastening discipline of verse composition, nor warmed their hearts, for a single instant, at the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... not the designation of an 'hypnotical subject' become almost a social position? To be fed, to be paid, admired, exhibited in public, run after, and all the rest of it—all this is enough to make the most impartial looker-on skeptical. But is it enough to enable us to produce an a priori negation? Certainly not; but it is sufficient to justify legitimate doubt. And when we come to moral phenomena, where we have to put faith in the subject, the difficulty becomes still greater. Supposing suggestion and hallucination to be granted, can they be demonstrated? Can we by ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... to be good evidence of the great antiquity of the legends recorded by Hesiod. In the first place, arguing merely a priori, it is extremely improbable that in the brief interval between the date of the comparatively pure and noble mythology of the Iliad and the much ruder Theogony of Hesiod men INVENTED stories like the mutilation of Uranus, and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal. It cannot be denied that phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism have been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs—to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... vegetation; the incorrectness of this view is illustrated by the comparison of the fauna of South Africa and South America, and the vegetation of the two continents. The interest of the discussion is that it shows clearly our a priori ignorance of the conditions of life ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... to do with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any previous century, would have led him into the Church; he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a violence as great as ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... ever tell? Experience? I was still, I felt, as ignorant of life as a new-born infant; experience has taught me nothing; what I needed was some definite, a priori principle, some deep conception of the meaning of existence, in the light of which problems of this kind would solve themselves ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses. You will understand by the title that they are written in an imaginary character. I don't doubt they will fit some family-man well enough. I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on a priori grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody. There is no loftier illustration of faith than this. It believes that a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and nurtured it; that its mysterious ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... acted on. The very delicate half tints do not, generally, stand a temperature higher than 35 deg. C. (95 deg. Fahr.), and, therefore, as the degree of insolubility of the various parts cannot be ascertained, a priori, it is advisable during the development to increase gradually the temperature of the water from this degree, and not to exceed 45 deg. C. (113 deg. Fahr.), in order to obtain the most perfect result from a negative of good intensity. Indeed, ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... Catulle Mendes's two letters. M. Mendes goes pretty far in declaring a priori that "Pagliacci" is an imitation of his "Femme de Tabarin." I had not known this book, and only know it now through the accounts given in the daily papers. You will remember that at the time of the first performance of "Pagliacci" at Milan in 1892 several critics accused ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... stating the simplest axioms from which they started. For the propositions of which necessary truth is composed are so linked together that, given one, the rest can always follow. But necessary truth, which is arrived at 'a priori,' that is, by the mind's own working, is quite as real as contingent truth, which is arrived at 'a posteriori,' or by the teachings of experience, in other words, through our own senses or those ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... elementary number systems of the peoples with whom they were trading, but they would not have put this knowledge in permanent written form; (3) wandering scholars would have known many and strange things about the peoples they met, but they too were not, as a class, writers; (4) there is every reason a priori for believing that the [.g]ob[a]r numerals would have been known to merchants, and probably to some of the wandering scholars, long before the Arabs conquered northern Africa; (5) the wonder is not that the Hindu-Arabic numerals were known about 1000 A.D., and that they were the ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... ingenious doctrine is needless, since the doctrine itself is but the developed structure of a speculative conception with no valid basis of observed fact. It is a sheer hypothesis, spun out of the self fed bowels of a priori assumption and metaphysic fancy. It solves the problems only by changes of their form, leaving the mysteries as numerous and deep as before. It is a beautiful and sublime piece of latent poetry, the evolution and architecture of which well display the wonderful genius ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... friends, you add "my school." But I am ruining my temperament in trying not to have a school! A priori, I spurn them, every one. The people whom I see often and whom you designate cultivate all that I scorn and are indifferently disturbed about what torments me. I regard as very secondary, technical detail, local ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... law of Sequence, but I infer that 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 which they may be most readily put together. As in a narrative, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... endless 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; ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... including that of the United States, and not excluding the Papacy, includes chapters of aggression. But the point involved, namely, the charge of England's aggression in the present instance, is clearly an a priori one, based on a presupposition of monopoly which lacks material support. No evidence is presented to justify the statement, nor do the facts seem to ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... most sympathetic smile, for he understood her as his own thought, "you do not feel quite sure yet! What a priori reason do you see why I should not be able to write verses? There is no rule as to where poetry grows: one place is as good as ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... denationalization of others, such as the Bruttians and the inhabitants of the Sabine territory, are historically attested. Setting aside both these classes, there remain a number of stocks whose wanderings can no longer be traced by means of historical testimony, but only by a priori inference, and whose nationality cannot be shown to have undergone any radical change from external causes. To establish the national individuality of these is the first aim of our inquiry. In such an inquiry, had we nothing to fall back upon but ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the augurs, who would obviously need it in order to perform the same ceremony for others—as a bishop needs consecration for the same reason. As regards the pontifices, Dionysius (ii. 73. 3) clearly thought it was needed for them, and we might a priori assume that one who might become a pontifex maximus would need it; but Wissowa discounts Dionysius' opinion, and I am unwilling to differ from him on a point of the ius divinum, of which he is our best exponent. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... in his first estimate of the child's character could not conceive that she had ever possessed a doll. But the master, like many other professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori than a priori reasoning. Mliss had a doll, but then it was emphatically Mliss's doll—a smaller copy of herself. Its unhappy existence had been a secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morpher. It had been the old-time companion of Mliss's wanderings, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... gone beyond his source, as in creating the sleep walking scene without a model for it, so he might just as well have given characters to Lady Macbeth of which the source said nothing. Certainly that would be a priori conceivable. Only that must appear clearly from the text of the tragedy. Yet what does this say? Carefully as I have read its lines, I have not been able to find a single, actual uninterpolated word of love from Lady Macbeth. That is of double ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... care to resume the question with one who so circumspectly refused to take a metaphysical or a priori ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the Scotch school, without considering at all the inequality of skill or labor, posits a priori the equality of the means of labor, abandoning thereafter to each laborer the care of his own person, after the eternal axiom: WHOSO DOES ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... mode of reasoning which will not do in natural history, which will not do in natural religion, which cannot therefore be applied with safety to revelation. It may have same foundation in certain speculative a priori ideas of the divine attributes, but it has none in experience or in analogy. The general character of the works of nature is, on the one hand, goodness both in design and effect; and, on the other hand, a liability to difficulty and ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... conclusions of any value for practice can be arrived at by direct experience. All true political science is, in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced from the tendencies of things, tendencies known either through our general experience of human nature, or as the result of an analysis of the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.—MILL, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... moral, and, in certain versions, creative Beings as Baiame, criticism has taken various lines. There is the high a priori line that savage minds are incapable of originating the notion of a moral Maker. I have already said that the notion, in an early form, seems to be well within the range of any minds deserving to be called human. Next, the ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... apparently real universe and able to remain, as invisible observers, outside all the phenomena of time and space. As the ultimate invisible spectator of the whole panorama, or, in the logical phrase, as the "a priori unity of apperception" our consciousness cannot be visualized ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... religieuse, la meme interdiction; que leurs institutions, leurs ceremonies sont semblables; que leurs croyances sont foncierement identiques; qu'ils ont le meme culte, les memes coutumes, les memes usages principaux; qu'ils ont enfin les memes moeurs et les memes traditions. Tout semble donc, a priori, annoncer que, quelque soit leur eloignement les uns des autres, les Polynesiens ont tire d'une meme source cette communaute d'idees et de langage; qu'ils ne sont, par consequent, que les tribus disperses d'une meme nation, et que ces tribus ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... concerned, or the public space which contains the common sense things and objects and their qualities which make up the every day world, or the private space of sensible perception. When Bergson speaks of "space," however, he does not mean either pure or public or private space, he means an a priori form imposed by intellectual activity upon its object. This resembles Kant's use of the word, but Bergson's "space" is not, like Kant's, the a priori form of sense acquaintance, but of thought, in other words ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen |
