"Deductive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... only trying to make you admit the tendency of facts discovered by yourself. There is a period in all criminal investigation when deductive reasoning ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... presuppositions, evidence that is supplemented by an act of imagination, or by the grace of faith, shall we say? At any rate, the fact is, that the genius of the great reasoner, of this great master of the abstract and deductive sciences, turned theologian, carrying the methods of thought there formed into the things of faith, was after all of the imaginative order. Now hear what he says of imagination: Cette faculte trompeuse, qui semble nous etre donnee expres pour nous induire ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to hear him, and went on with hardly a moment's interruption. 'I am a student,' he said, 'of the deductive method of reasoning, and I begin with the a priori assumption that E. W. Smith could not die. I should hold the same belief even if I believed in Purgatory.' (Dunbar pronounced the word with an ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... think what they did with those cold ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... if I were a "transformist." All this is a chain of highly logical deductions, and it hangs together with a certain air of reality, such as we like to look for in a host of "transformist" arguments which are put forward as irrefutable. Well, I make a present of my deductive theory to whosoever desires it, and without the least regret; I do not believe a single word of it, and I confess my profound ignorance of the origin of the twofold ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... point of view by no means embraces the whole of the actual process ; for it slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science. As soon as a science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... less acute is the remark which the late excellent Hugh James Rose has somewhere left on record, concerning the chapter wherein the preceding remark occurs,—That the world would not easily forgive Dr. Whewell for those two chapters on "Inductive" and "Deductive Habits." ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... in the shape of a cloud, the pitch of a thrush's note, the nuance of a sea-shell you would find, had you only insight enough, inductive and deductive cunning enough, not only a meaning, but, I am convinced, a quite endless significance. Undoubtedly, in a human document of this kind, there is a meaning; and I may say at once that this meaning is entirely transparent to ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Lucretius' companion. This habit was apparently a composite product. The ingredients are the capacity for wonder that we find in some great poets like Wordsworth and Plato, a genius for noting details, bred in him as in Lucretius by long occupation with deductive methods of philosophy,—scientific pursuits have thus enriched modern poetry also—and a sure aesthetic sense. This power of observation has been overlooked by many of Vergil's commentators. Conington, for example, has frequently done the poet an injustice by assuming that Vergil ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... human minds turned to the consideration of the Christian facts. But it makes all the difference which end you start from, the facts or the theory: whether your method is a posteriori or a priori; inductive or deductive; scientific or obscurantist. And Christianity follows the scientific method of starting with the facts. In this lies the justification of its claim to be a religion at once universal and life-giving. It is universal because facts are the common property of all, although the ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. It is based upon the broadest induction, and it is verified by the most constant, regular, and universal of deductive processes. But we must recollect that any human belief, however broad its basis, however defensible it may seem, is, after all, only a probable belief, and that our widest and safest generalizations are simply statements ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... interested in 'ideas' than Schiller, but he had not the same fondness for abstract reasoning from mental premises. His starting-point was always the external fact, and he regarded ideas as possessing a sort of objective reality. His homage was paid to nature and the five senses; Schiller's to the deductive reason. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... "Homogeneity-Heterogeneity," "Unknowable," "Ghost Theory," "Presentative-Representative"), which don't seem, somehow, as helpful as their inventor assumes. And 'tis certain he took tosses into many of the pits of his dangerous deductive method. I don't present this as Mr. ELLIOT'S view. He is respectful-critical, and makes perhaps the best case for his old master's claim to greatness out of the assumption that SPENCER himself, stark enemy to authority and dogmatism, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... hypothetical in so far as the laws it lays down are only approximately true, i.e. are only valid in the absence of counteracting agencies. From this view of the nature of the science, it follows at once that the method to be pursued must be that called by Mill the physical or concrete deductive, which starts from certain known causes, investigates their consequences and verifies or tests the result by comparison with facts of experience. It may, perhaps, be thought that Cairnes gives too little attention to the effects of the organism of society on economic facts, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the case of nearly all deductive reasoning the handwriting expert becomes sensitive to slight suggestions. If called upon, as he sometimes is, to explain to others how and why one of these slight and almost imperceptible signs fit ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... education was classical. In the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation a revival of interest in the classics produced a reaction against mediaevalism, and in time fastened a curriculum upon the universities that was composed mainly of the ancient languages, mathematics, and a deductive philosophy and theology. In the nineteenth century there began a criticism of the classical curriculum. It was declared that such a course of study was narrow and antiquated, that new subjects, such as history, the modern languages, and the sciences were better worth attention, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... made during objective life, the conception of things which he held at the time he passed over, for this constituted his idea of Truth. Now he cannot add to these inductions, for he has parted with his instrument for inductive reasoning, and therefore his deductive reasoning in the purely subjective state which he has now entered is necessarily limited to the consequences which may be deducted from the premises which he has ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... slope of the hill. The wind up there blew him a welcome, and the sting and taste of dust were sweet. His steps was swift. And then again he loitered, with keen, roving glance studying the lay of the ground. Neale's was the deductive method of arriving at conclusions. Today he was inspired. And at length there blazed suddenly his ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... "young god" is an invention of Brinton. The purely inductive and descriptive study of the manuscripts does not prove the existence of such a personage, and we must decline to admit him as the result of deductive reasoning. In this so-called "young god", we miss, first of all, a characteristic mark, a distinct peculiarity such as belongs to all the figures of gods in the manuscripts without exception and by which he could be recognized. Except his so-called ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... enacted by him, was mostly neglected, although it ought to be—nay, would and must more and more become—our most important subject, as forming the only real basis of all our higher culture. History was undoubtedly a deductive science, but it could be verified and put to the best uses by the purely inductive study of facts. Any change, whether progressive or retrospective, in the social, political, or religious condition of men, would be a fact. The acting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... Kennedy's reasoning seemed to be leading into a maze of considerations beyond me. How could the deductive method produce results in a ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... room with a very clear conviction that scientific investigation is not, as many people seem to suppose, some kind of modern black art. I say that you might easily gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the "Baconian philosophy." I do protest that, of the vast number of cants in this world, there are none, to my mind, so contemptible as the pseudoscientific cant which is ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... methods that work best. Sometimes these are not always to be identified with the methods that theoretical pedagogy had worked out from a priori bases. For example, the type of lesson which I call the "deductive development" lesson[7] is one that is not included in the older discussions of method; yet it accurately describes one of the methods employed by a very successful teacher whose ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a less degree by Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded by the stratified rocks. I said: "This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things which are to the things which were—this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geological speculation which it might otherwise have held" (Lay ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... proceeded inductively, in conformity with established usage; but it seems to us that much may be done in this and other departments of biologic inquiry by pursuing the deductive method. The generalizations at present constituting the science of physiology, both general and special, have been reached a posteriori; but certain fundamental data have now been discovered, starting from which we may reason our ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of murder and so on, but at other times you're simply playing to blind, dumb luck, only your vanity is so enormous that you won't admit it. You want everybody to believe that you dope out all your problems with that wonderful deductive reasoning power that you get from injecting 'coke' into your arm, and sitting still with a pipe in your mouth! 'Intuition,' my eye! You might be able to tell that to Barney Letstrayed, but you can't tell ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... that. I know the Tenant came up to me, very respectfully, and said, 'I hope you don't think, sir, that I was presumptuous in trying to display my humble deductive ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... Heldon Foyle the danger of jumping to conclusions. Inferences, however clever, however sound they may seem when they are drawn, are apt to lead one astray. The detective who habitually used the deductive method would spend a great deal of his time exploring blind alleys. Yet Foyle, with the unostentatious Maxwell at his right hand, hurried in the direction of Berkeley Square with a hope that his theory might not ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... symptoms (hoarseness, croupiness, etcetera) may be due to digital or instrumental efforts at the removal of a foreign body that never was present. 9. Laryngeal symptoms may be due to acute or chronic laryngitis, diphtheria, pertussis, infective laryngotracheitis, and many other diseases. 10. Deductive decisions are dangerous. 11. If the roentgenray is negative, laryngoscopy (direct in children, indirect in adults) without anesthesia, general or local, is the only way to make a laryngeal diagnosis. 12. Before doing a diagnostic laryngoscopy, preparation should be made for taking ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... necessary to make him extend his present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the late war shall convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his taste for golf and cigars if the race is to be saved. This is not fantastic speculation: it is deductive biology, if there is such a science as biology. Here, then, is a stone that we have left unturned, and that may be worth turning. To make the suggestion more entertaining than it would be to most people in the form of a biological treatise, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... to use an 'inductive' instead of the deductive method of the Jacobins; but reaches the same practical conclusions from the other end. The process is instructive. He objected to the existing inequalities, not as inequalities simply, but as mischievous ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... he was even reduced to pinching himself, sometimes, in order to keep awake, just as the learned and ingenious Baron had got his pyramid of inference ready to balance on its rather slender apex of fact. Archaeology was new to Hilbrough, and deductive profits so large from inductive investments so small always seemed to the financier ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the unification of algebra, and its separation from other branches of mathematics, have usually been accompanied by an attempt to base it, as a deductive science, on certain fundamental laws or general rules; and this has tended to increase its difficulty. In reality, the variety of algebra corresponds to the variety of phenomena. Neither mathematics itself, nor any branch or set of branches ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... hours, though Dr. Angus sent two every week. Louis began to lecture her on medicine; he really knew extraordinarily well what he had learnt: he was an excellent teacher of facts, but he had not one iota of deductive thought in his teaching and, like Andrew Lashcairn, was remarkably impatient if she did not understand or, understanding, ventured to express an opinion of her own about anything. They had many glamorous nights on the roof, nights that recalled the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... While the deductive, axiomatic or intuitive, scholastic or introspective methods of inquiry prevailed in the intellectual world, systems of philosophy, psychology and theology were built up according to the peculiar subjective nature of their author, and held the field until some ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... the adaptive: 3rd, that, consequently, natural selection is the only possible cause of modification, whether adaptive or non-adaptive. Here again, therefore, we must observe that none of these sweeping generalizations can possibly be justified by deductive reasoning from the theory of natural selection itself. Any attempt at such deductive reasoning must necessarily end in circular reasoning, as I shall likewise show in the second volume, where this whole "question of utility" will be thoroughly ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza are all agreed: true knowledge is the work of reason, of pure intellection. Plato is the great exponent of dialectic, or the reciprocal affinities and necessities of ideas. Aristotle is the founder of deductive logic. Spinoza proposes to consider even "human actions and desires" as though he were "concerned with lines, planes, and solids." Empirical data may be the occasion, but cannot be the ground of the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... whether in man or beast; but one does find some little in the beginnings of, and throughout the development of, every habit, at the commencement of which, and on every successive improvement in which, deductive and inductive methods are, as it were, fused. Thus the effect, where we can best watch its causes, seems mainly produced by a desire for a definite object—in some cases a serious and sensible desire, in others an idle one, in others, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... each clew quickly yet painstakingly until he had a foundation of fact upon which to operate. His theory was that the simplest way is always the best way and so he never befogged the main issue with any elaborate system of deductive reasoning based on guesswork. Burton never guessed. He assumed that it was his business to KNOW, nor was he on any case long before he did know. He was employed now to find Abigail Prim. Each of the several crimes committed the previous night might or might not prove a clew to her ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a truth by showing that it comes within an established and recognized principle. This process is known as deductive reasoning. The principle on which deductive reasoning depends is the self-evident truth that "whatever is true of the whole is true of the parts." Starting from the general truth that all men are mortal, we may conclude that A, B, and C ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... too reasonable and too little reasonable; too precise and scientific and too vague; too rigorously logical on the one hand and too abundantly passionate on the other. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than the deductive method worked by passion. When applied to the delicate and complex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... Popularly, no doubt, it is permissible to speak of the soil as a "producer," just as we may talk of the daily movement of the sun. But, as I have elsewhere remarked, propositions which are to bear any deductive strain that may be put upon them must run the risk of [157] seeming pedantic, rather than that of being inaccurate. And the statement that land, in the sense of cultivable soil, is a producer, or even one of the essentials of economic production, is anything ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... my dear Major, as far as information goes. If I did not use these arguments before, it was because it seemed to me an impertinence to offer what, after all, are no more than the conclusions of my own constructive and deductive reasoning to one so well versed in ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... truest in human thought. Like most Jewish philosophers he is synthetic rather than analytic, believing in intuition and distrusting the discursive reason, careless of physical science and soaring into religious metaphysics. Again, like most Jewish philosophers, he is deductive, starting with a synthesis of all in the Divine Unity, and making no fresh inductions from phenomena. It has been said that, though Philo was a philosopher and a Jew, yet Saadia was the first Jewish philosopher. But Philo's philosophical ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of search was definitely assured. Lacking imagination and the subtler senses of criminology, Captain Cronin had built up a reputation for success and honesty in every assignment by bravery, persistence, and as in this case, the ability to cover his own deductive weakness by employing the brains ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... deductive by the mere progress of experiment. The mere connecting together of a few detached generalisations, or even the discovery of a great generalisation working only in a limited sphere, as, e.g. the doctrine of chemical equivalents, does not make a science deductive as a whole; but ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... elsewhere, went down to the foundations of scientific certainty, but, in his 'Principes de Philosophie,' indicated where the goal of physical science really lay. However, Descartes was an eminent mathematician, and it would seem that the bent of his mind led him to overestimate the value of deductive reasoning from general principles, as much as Bacon had underestimated it. The progress of physical science has been effected neither by Baconians nor by Cartesians, as such, but by men like Galileo and Harvey, Boyle and Newton, who would have done their work ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... that fish, like all other natural objects, were studied by the ancients only to pet or to eat. All their views of Nature were essentially selfish; none were disinterested, reverential, deductive, or scientific. Nature ministered only to their appetites, in her various kinds of food,—to their service, in her beasts of burden,—or to their childish or ferocious amusement, with talking birds, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... his eternal forms in sensible things as their meaning, made science possible and necessary. Not only is he the father of scientific method, inductive and deductive, but his actual contributions to science place him in the front rank of scientists. His Zooelogy, Psychology, Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics, are still highly esteemed and extensively studied. At the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... human sleuth all right, all right! It's a home-run every time when you get your deductive theories unlimbered. Yes, George; the stage it is. I'm an actorine—one of the pony ballet in The Island of Girls at the ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... lead the pupil, to the higher, wider generalizations of thought, which belong to the domain of pure reason. In the work of classification, by detecting differences, a knowledge of the inductive process is gained. Similarly, by detecting likenesses, a knowledge of deductive reasoning ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... same, their deductive powers were far from perfect. They saw in Jan a leader who could not hide the soreness and stiffness caused by his many wounds. They, for their part, were feeling rather like indiscreet workmen after a public holiday that has been too recklessly enjoyed. ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... a vast number of properties of objects, and his inductions will not be completed, I fear, for ages to come; but when they are, his science will be as deductive and as exact as the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... that one moiety of the German biologists were orthodox at any price, and the other moiety as distinctly heterodox. The latter were evolutionists, a priori, already, and they must have felt the disgust natural to deductive philosophers at being offered an inductive and experimental foundation for a conviction which they had reached by a shorter cut. It is undoubtedly trying to learn that, though your conclusions may be all right, your ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of God, is as distinct from scholasticism as empiricism is from rationalism, or "tough-minded" philosophy (to use JAMES' happy phrase) is from "tender-minded". But no philosophy can be absolutely and purely deductive. It must start from certain empirically determined facts. A man might be an extreme empiricist in religion (i.e. a mystic), and yet might attempt to deduce all other forms of knowledge from the results of his religious experiences, never caring to gather experience in any other ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... "Nowhere for deductive certainty. Nor, if the things themselves are not worth remembering, or worthy of influencing us, is there any good in enquiring concerning them? Shall I mind a thing that is not worth minding, because it came to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... narrow and deductive manner of the Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your own basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... researches, and created a new era in the history of Italian philosophy. His numerous works embrace all philosophical knowledge in its unity and universality, founded on a new basis, and developed with deep, broad, and original views. His philosophy, both inductive and deductive, rests on experimental method, reaches the highest problems of ideology and ontology, and infuses new life into all departments of science. This philosophical progress was greatly aided by Gioberti (1801-1851), whose ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... arrive at as is the mathematician in arriving at the solution of his problem. In science, the only way of getting rid of the complications with which a subject of this kind is environed, is to work in this deductive method. What will be the result, then? I will suppose that every plant requires one square foot of ground to live upon; and the result will be that, in the course of nine years, the plant will have occupied every single available spot in the whole globe! I have chalked upon the blackboard ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley |
