"Postulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his own dreams: it is an inexpensive and gentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me: Fortunatus's purse jingles in his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubs the lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask with what authority I can thus postulate the home-made dreams of any lier in bed but myself, the answer is easy. It is common knowledge that the half-awake minds of men thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may be reasonably deduced from observation of individuals. The ego ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... two trains by which He might arrive—one at 4.15, which would get him to Ardingly for tea, the other at 6.45. She was quite determined to see him, but more inflexible than that resolve was the Euclidean postulate that no one in Tilling should think that she had taken any deliberate step to do so. For the present she had disarmed suspicion by the blankness of her indifference as to what might happen on Saturday or Sunday; but she herself strongly suspected that everybody else, in spite of the public attitude ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... his pupils and ask him for anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit hari-kari. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, capacious ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... more pain, where there shall be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun. It might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first postulate of Euclid's elements holds good universally, 'that a straight line may be drawn from any one ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... war. art of reasoning, logic. process of reasoning, train of reasoning, chain of reasoning; deduction, induction, abduction; synthesis, analysis. argument; case, plaidoyer^, opening; lemma, proposition, terms, premises, postulate, data, starting point, principle; inference &c (judgment) 480. prosyllogism^, syllogism; enthymeme^, sorites^, dilemma, perilepsis^, a priori reasoning, reductio ad absurdum, horns of a dilemma, argumentum ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... causation, cannot admit that miracles or the supernatural in the old sense, as external and arbitrary interference with the natural order, can play or ever have played any part in this universe. Yet science has to postulate a First Cause when it knows, or metaphysics knows for it, that with the Infinite there can be no first and no last, no beginning and no ending, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... question between any two human beings is—Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill me? I do not agree that any organised society has ever subsisted upon either of those principles, or that brutality is always present as a fundamental postulate in the ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... certain acts, this second system postpones the result to an after-life. There is in nature a system of reward and punishment which everyone must have observed because it is part of the universal sequence of cause and effect; but these two phases of religion carry the idea still farther; they postulate rewards and punishments of a supernatural character, over and above those which naturally occur. It is important to note that in neither of these systems is God essentially involved. They are in reality independent ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... recall Dr. Hodge's truthful remark that Darwin "is simply a naturalist," and that "his work on the origin of species does not purport to be philosophical." In physical and physiological treatises, the most religious men rarely think it necessary to postulate the First Cause, nor are they misjudged by the omission. But surely Mr. Darwin does show the disposition which our author denies him, not only by implication in many instances, but most explicitly where one would ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... with this postulate, and was curious to hear the Magian's reply; but he could not follow his argument till he ended by saying, rather more emphatically: "You, even, do not deny the physical connection of things; but I know the power that causes it. It is the magical sympathy which displays ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... also take note of the nature of the services which the given society requires of its adult members. These services vary in character, and there can be no one kind of education which equally fits the individual to perform efficiently any and every service. To postulate this would be to affirm that there is a kind of experience useful for the realisation indifferently of any and every purpose of adult life, and to affirm that a system of knowledge acquired and organised for the attainment ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... Principle of Relativity 19. The Gravitational Field 20. The Equality of Inertial and Gravitational Mass as an Argument for the General Postulate of Relativity 21. In What Respects are the Foundations of Classical Mechanics and of the Special Theory of Relativity Unsatisfactory? 22. A Few Inferences from the General Principle of Relativity 23. Behaviour of Clocks and Measuring-Rods on a Rotating ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... The wedge would go in even. It should have spread the rails equally. That's the probable thing. But instead it did the improbable thing; it spread one. I hold the improbable thing always in question. Human knowledge is built up on that postulate. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... motives), which have now disappeared, but were formerly observed by the authors of the documents, resembled the realities of his own day which he has himself seen and which he retains in his memory. This is the postulate of all the documentary sciences. If former humanity did not resemble the humanity of to-day, documents would be unintelligible. Starting from this assumed resemblance, the historian forms a mental representation of the bygone facts of history similar ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... down as a postulate of the Christian's belief that Hinduism is of the devil; and that, coming from below, it must be shunned as a study and denounced root and branch as a thing purely satanic. This theory has entirely given way to a more rational belief. The question whether the truths of Hinduism, with those of other ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... indeed, show us that the apparent continuity of material things is spurious, that all material things consist of discrete particles, and are hence measurable in numerical terms. But modern science is also obliged to postulate an ether behind these atoms, an ether which is wholly continuous, and hence transcends the domain of number.(1) It is true that, in quite recent times, a certain school of thought has argued that the ether is also atomic in constitution—that all things, indeed, have a ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... the mythological form, or, if you will, the symbolical representation, of a profound idea necessary as the 'prae-suppositum' of the Christian scheme, or a postulate of reason, indispensable, if we would render the existence of a world of finites compatible with the assumption of a super-mundane God, not one with the world. In short, this idea is the condition under which alone the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... acceptance of the Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the 'concrete thing.' This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... am still but man, though man blessed with so much profundity, fecundity, and redundity of thought and expression, and therefore a facile scribe or speaker, able to create, relate, formulate or postulate any truth, axiomatic, sophistry subtle, or, in ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... arising from the imperfect correspondence of fact with thought and language, we shall often have to put up with it. Candour and humility having been satisfied by the above acknowledgment of the subtlety of Nature, we may henceforward proceed upon the postulate—that it is possible to use contradictory terms such as cannot both be predicated of the same subject in the same relation, though one of them may be; that, for example, it may be truly said of a man for some years ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... reconstructed on the new basis. The object of Jesus was to reconstruct the kingdom of heaven in Israel, and he was crucified. All Israel had the same object in view, and stood at the brink of dissolution. If the basis and principles of the kingdom of heaven became the postulate of society at large, Jesus is resurrected in the world, and Israel is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... descendant. But this scientific assurance of self in the past is uttered in no materialistic sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven matter incomprehensible; and it confesses the mystery of mind insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of sensation. Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by millions of years, have undoubtedly been built up all the emotions and faculties of man. Here Science, in accord with Buddhism, avows the Ego composite, and, like Buddhism, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... in the following brief precept: "Interpret the Scripture like any other book." (p. 377.) To this favourite tune, (although he plays many intricate variations on it,) he invariably reverts in the end[145]. On this preliminary postulate therefore, which, at first sight, to a candid mind, seems fair enough, I proceed to ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... see any application in this homily," said the Easy Chair, "or only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that Christmas is a beneficent and consolatory factor ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the human individuality can exist in a discarnate state, and that it reincarnates into the body of an infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous reincarnations that discarnate existence and reincarnation were proven to be facts. So they picture ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... far as possible, endeavours to conceive those things which increase or help the body's power of activity (III. xii.); in other words (III. xii. note), those things which it loves. But conception is helped by those things which postulate the existence of a thing, and contrariwise is hindered by those which exclude the existence of a thing (II. xvii.); therefore the images of things, which postulate the existence of an object of love, help the mind's endeavour to conceive the object of love, ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... the good old times, While yet the Master-singers filled The noisy workshop and the guild With various melodies and rhymes, That here in Hagenau there dwelt A cobbler,—one who loved debate, And, arguing from a postulate, Would say what others only felt; A man of forecast and of thrift, And of a shrewd and careful mind In this world's business, but inclined Somewhat to let the next ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to point his sentence and prove his first postulate, Mr. King is obliged not only to dispose of Washington, but to introduce Columbus, who never was imagined in the wildest fantasy to be an American, and to omit Franklin. The omission of itself is ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... and monsters, or in an impersonal form as a sort of pervading taint or corruption of the air. This is the view of Dr. Edward Westermarck and apparently of Professor Eugen Mogk. It may be called the purificatory theory. Obviously the two theories postulate two very different conceptions of the fire which plays the principal part in the rites. On the one view, the fire, like sunshine in our latitude, is a genial creative power which fosters the growth ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in reference to the statement in the Bishop of Peterborough's Paper, of the moral indifference of certain courses of conduct on the postulate of the existence only of a Mechanical base of Morals, it was observed by Dr. Adam Clarke that, even on such mechanical basis, the word "moral" might still be applied specially to any course of action which tended to the development of the human race. Whereupon I ventured myself to inquire, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... ideals and by more beautiful circumstance. He even introduced a contemporary critic of Utopian conditions in the shape of the talkative person, "a conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way a most consummate ass." But once we begin to postulate our Utopian villains, the reader's thought is distracted from the contemplation of the heroic which is the cement that binds every stone in the visionary city. In order to change conditions it is necessary to change much in the present cast of human nature. ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... very different aspects in different parts of the world, apparently in accordance with the climate and other purely material circumstances. To those circumstances it is scarcely necessary to add manner of life, for that itself arises from them. The doctrine of unity demands as its essential postulate an admission of the paramount control of physical agents over the human aspect and organization, else how could it be that, proceeding from the same stock, all shades of complexion in the skin, and variety in ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... vows (which is a serious matter), and if I neglected to contemplate the heavens (for which neglect I will confess to no one, not even to a postulate sub-deacon; it is no sin; it is a healthy omission), if (I say) I did this, I did what peasants do. And what is more, by drinking wine and eating pig we proved ourselves no Mohammedans; and on such as he is sure of, St Peter looks with ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... metaphysicians postulate a fifth state of life, the divine, placing it above the rest ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... They were observing rites which it was not seemly that the World should watch. Hitherto they had toiled in a harbour at which the World did not touch. Knowing naught else, they had come to take their privacy for granted. Now suddenly this precious postulate had been withdrawn. Since wellnigh the whole of the estate was edged by road, the erection of the fence at once cost them seclusion and showed them how ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the whole it explains much. This has been a favourite notion with me, almost since I wrote on erratic boulders of the south. It harmonises with the modification of species; and without admitting this awful postulate, the Glacial epoch in the south and tropics does not work in well. About Atlantis, I doubt whether the Canary Islands are as much more related to the continent as they ought to be, if formerly ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... formerly prevailed, these have now become discredited with every one. We do not censure this way of proceeding, but we prefer the manner of Sir W. Hamilton. He always keeps before us divergence and discrepancy of view as the normal condition of reasoned truth or philosophy; the characteristic postulate of which is, that every affirmative and every negative shall have its appropriate reasons clearly and ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... about the gaps in the evolution of life, viz. between the inorganic and organic, between vegetable and animal, and between animal and man, I asked, 'Why postulate a beginning at all? We are satisfied with illimitability at one end, why not at the other?' 'For the simple reason,' he said, 'that the mind cannot comprehend anything that ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the indicators points in the same direction. The City was not—could not have been—self-supporting. There is no source of organic material on the planet great enough to support such a city; therefore, foodstuffs must have been imported. On the other hand, it is necessary to postulate some reason for establishing a city on an otherwise barren planet and populating it with an estimated six ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... "I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect," and this other, "I foresee that other objects which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects"? This postulate, that the future will be like the past, and that like causes will have like effects, rests on a purely psychological basis. In virtue of the laws of association the sight of an object or event vividly recalls the image ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... undoubted, even in manners and morals, which are both at root only motor habits. Indeed consciousness itself is largely and perhaps wholly corrective in its very essence and origin. Thus life is adjusted to new environments; and if the Platonic postulate be correct, that untaught virtues that come by nature and instinct are no virtues, but must be made products of reflection and reason, the sphere and need of this principle is great indeed. But this implies a distrust of physical human nature ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... through the depressed centres of cyclones in this atmosphere of metallic gases, might possibly be the cause; but this, though defensible as a "true cause," appeared on further consideration to be an inadequate cause. Keeping the question in mind, however, and still taking as a postulate the conclusion of Sir John Herschel, that the spots are in some way produced by cyclones, I was led, in the course of the year following the publication of the essay, to an hypothesis which seemed more ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... sentiments of the French people, or to offend any principle of public law. It is difficult to question these two postulates, at least in the abstract. Only when we come to the application is there opportunity for difference. The third postulate, demanded alike by justice and humanity, is the establishment of some rule or precedent by which the recurrence of such a barbarous duel shall be prevented. It will not be enough to obtain a guaranty for Germany; there must be ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... of party. The outcome was a resolution in the House of Commons, proposed by Mr. John Redmond, and seconded by Mr. Lecky. The rejoinder of the Government to the demands made was to the effect that the postulate of the Commissioners that Ireland and Great Britain must, for the purposes of the inquiry, be considered as separate entities stultified ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... of you in the habit of supposing that temporal prosperity is owing either to worldly chance or to worldly prudence; and is never granted in any visible relation to states of religious temper. Put that treacherous doubt away from you, with disdain; take for basis of reasoning the noble postulate, that the elements of Christian faith are sound,—instead of the base one, that they are deceptive; reread the great story of the world in that light, and see what a vividly real, yet miraculous tenor, it ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... resolved to oppose its growth. The voice of James Otis the younger, a ripe scholar of six-and-thirty, and then the Advocate General of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, first denounced the scheme and declared the great political postulate which became the basis of all subsequent resistance to kingly domination, that "TAXATION, WITHOUT REPRESENTATION, IS TYRANNY." Like the deep and startling tones of an alarm-bell, echoing from hill to hill, his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... insurmountable without some key. But having once proved the existence of such examples as the clan Coneely and the Ossory wolves, this difficulty, though still great, is very much lessened. Our method would be as follows. We first of all postulate that totem peoples did actually exist in ancient Britain, or whence such extraordinary survivals? We next examine and classify the beliefs and customs which are incidental to totemism in savage society, and having set these ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... other than psychology the datum is primarily a perception, in which only the sensational core is ultimately and theoretically a datum, though some such accretions as turn the sensation into a perception are practically unavoidable. But if we postulate an ideal observer, he will be able to isolate the sensation, and treat this alone as datum. There is, therefore, an important sense in which we may say that, if we analyse as much as we ought, our data, outside psychology, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... opportunity to right the wrongs of the present, and all end well in the best of future worlds. This explanation would have set doubts at rest and settled the question for at least two thousand years; and it seemed such a necessary postulate to the fathers of the Church, who viewed the matter in the light of Christian revelation, that they actually put into Job's mouth the words which he would have uttered had he lived in their own days and been a member of the true fold. And they effected this with a pious recklessness ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the eighty members to have? Ireland is to be represented here fully; that is my first postulate. My second postulate is that Ireland is to be invested with separate powers, subject, no doubt, to imperial authority. Ireland is to be endowed with separate powers over Irish affairs. Then the question before us is: Is she or is she not to vote so strongly upon ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... like a monotony of fine weather. (The order of composition, in these things, I may mention, was reversed by the order of publication; the earlier written of the two books having appeared as the later.) Even under the weight of my hero's years I could feel my postulate firm; even under the strain of the difference between those of Madame de Vionnet and those of Chad Newsome, a difference liable to be denounced as shocking, I could still feel it serene. Nothing resisted, nothing betrayed, I seem ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... supposition is entirely valid. All we know of mankind justifies the statement that, as regards all the qualities and motives with which the primal sympathies deal, men are remarkably alike. Their loves, hates, fears, and sorrows are alike in their essentials; so that the postulate of sympathy that the other man is essentially like one's self is no idle fancy but an established truth. It not only embodies the judgment of all men in thought and action but has its warrant from all the science we can ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... that the ethical perspective should be still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things should be banished by the persecutions of the bullying mate. It is easy to postulate a storm-driven world when the personal horizon is dark and lowering; easy, also, to justify the past by the present. From theorizing never so resolutely upon the rights of man in the abstract to robbing a bank is a broad step, and given an opportunity ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... In as far as variations are summated in successive generations, so as eventually to give rise to new structures, organs, mechanisms, &c., natural selection is theoretically competent to explain the facts, without our having to postulate the operation of unknown causes producing variations in determinate lines,—or not further than is stated in paragraphs ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... be for others and ourselves. But there is no royal road among this complicated business. Hegel the German got the best word of all philosophy with his antinomies: the contrary of everything is its postulate. That is, of course, grossly expressed, but gives a hint of the idea, which contains a great deal of the mysteries of religion, and a vast amount of the practical wisdom of life. For your part, there is no doubt as to your duty - to take things easy and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... innovations, because they were hard of heart and dull of comprehension. This hypothesis is hardly in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for the fourth gospel—a theosophic romance of the first order—it could have been written by none but ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the original postulate of my plan. Other travellers have gone, relying on the abundant Caribou, yet saw none, so starved. I relied on no Caribou, I took plenty of groceries, and because I was independent, the Caribou walked into camp ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... in which I had espied the rough monks' habits, and pulling one out I held it for her to don. She sat there now, in that garment of coarse black cloth, the cowl flung back upon her shoulder, the fairest postulate that ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... He writes:[1] "The postulate with which metaphysical reasoning sets out is that we are primarily conscious only of our sensations—that we certainly know we have these, and that if there be anything beyond these serving as cause for them, it can be known ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... surprisingly many, but the changes taking place within our own souls are deeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation of the sociological tenets of the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... also their individual developments to the first differentiation of the simplest cell, they followed out the unity of the plan of the organic kingdoms—which hitherto had been maintained only ideally and proclaimed as a philosophic postulate—farther and deeper into the sphere of empiric reality. We must mention, moreover, the great palaeontological discoveries which, from the first foraminifera of the Cambrian formations up to the historical period of man, showed a great progressive scale in the appearance of the organisms ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... hard-pushed for originality ere long, may thank us for a new sensation. The French continue to find Shakspeare exaggerated, because he treated English just as our folk do when they speak of "a steep price," or say that they "freeze to" a thing. The first postulate of an original literature is, that a people use their language as if they owned it. Even Burns contrived to write very poor English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Horace Mann, in one of his Addresses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... material cause as well. The world springs from Brahman by way of modification (pari/n/ama; Sutra 26).—Ramanuja views this adhikara/n/a as specially directed against the Se/s/vara-sa@nkhyas who indeed admit the existence of a highest Lord, but postulate in addition an independent pradhana on which the Lord acts as ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... confusion in intellectual method might be pronounced a thing of trifling import, or wholly indifferent. But such suppositions are the seemings only of postulates floating through the brains of Ignorance or Un-heed, who really postulate nothing at all. If, on the contrary, we admit this inflexible relation of cause and result in the mental, as well as in the material world, and if we admit also that our school-methods are yet fragmentary, varying ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... process of the redemption of matter through the interpenetration of spirit, what is a possible method of action? To explain what I mean I must use a diagrammatic figure, but I admit this must be not only inadequate but misleading, for instead of the two dimensions of a diagram, we must postulate three, with time added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well. Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the region of pure spirit, pure spirit itself, the creative energy ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... almost as soon as produced by the admixture of unvaried blood which would so greatly preponderate around it; and indeed the necessity for a nearly simultaneous and similar variation, or readiness so to vary on the part of many individuals, seems almost a postulate for evolution at all. On this ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... numbers. The table of the mediumistic seances contains much mathematics (in its physical assemblage), but in order to make it "tap" there must be somebody to move it: in fact, a "medium." In my view, as soon as the animal subject has been able to understand "numbers"—and this postulate of the new zoopsychology, I repeat, I believe to be indispensable to the whole edifice—the animal finds itself sufficiently in harmony with the master to become capable (in principle) of ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... taking possession of an object has brought it within the sphere of his will. He has extended his personality into or over that object. As Hegel would have said, possession is the objective realization of free will. And by Kant's postulate, the will of any individual thus manifested is entitled to absolute respect from every other individual, and can only be overcome or set aside by the universal will, that is, by the state, acting through its organs, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... which are up to a certain standard, and a minimum of profit or of surplus values besides. This lowest grade of ability is one of the postulates of their argument, just as in calculating agricultural rent the first postulate of our argument is ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... discussing the possibility of reconciling an isolated expression in S. Mark's Gospel with another in S. Matthew's: just as if on that depended the genuineness or spuriousness of the entire context: as if, in short, the major premiss in the discussion were some such postulate as the following:—"Whatever in one Gospel cannot be proved to be entirely consistent with something in another Gospel, is not to be regarded as genuine." Did then the learned Archbishop of Caesarea really suppose that a comma judiciously thrown ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... therefore, and Latin istud, postulate a Sanskrit tad, while Zend and Greek at all events do not conflict with an original final media. Everything therefore depends on what was the original form in Sanskrit; and here no Sanskrit scholar would hesitate for one moment between tat and tad. Whatever the origin of tat may have been, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... efficaciously, he must say what is already in his hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Mr Gladstone's fatal enterprise of 1886"; whilst on the other hand those Irish Nationalists who followed Mr Dillon's lead attacked the new movement with a ferocity that was as stupid as it was criminal. For at least it did not require any unusual degree of political intelligence to postulate that if The Times, Sir Edward Carson, The Northern Whig and other Unionist and Orange bravoes and journals were denouncing the Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists should have long hesitated before ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... between the electric light and our eyes. That medium scientists call ether, but it is so subtile that no instrument has been devised whereby it may be measured or analyzed and therefore the scientists are without much information concerning it, though forced to postulate ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... children of other women as to her own, because they were or might be by the same father. But in the first place this assumes that the relationship to the father was considered rather than the relationship to the mother, and this is against all analogy. In the second place, even granting Morgan's postulate, the relation of a mother to her son is not that of a wife to the children of other wives of a polygynous husband. Poverty of language is therefore established in this case, and may be taken for granted where the obvious relationships ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... the rate of change in the forms of life to have been the same formerly, Lyell concludes that geological phenomena postulate 200,000,000 years at least," [88] "to account for the undoubted facts of geology since life began." [89] On the other hand, mathematical astronomy, [90] on theories which Mr. Laing complains of as wanting the solidity of geological calculations (yet which do not involve ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... intelligence abiding in itself becomes evident from the fact that intelligence is the essential quality of spirit; and if we were to conceive of the primordial substance as something apart from spirit, then we should have to postulate some other power which is neither spirit nor matter, and originates both; but this is only putting the idea of a self-evolving power a step further back and asserting the production of a lower grade of undifferentiated spirit by a higher, which is both a purely gratuitous ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... with God, like that which in the seventy-third Psalm marks the very high-water mark of Old Testament faith in regard to a future life, where the Psalmist finds himself so completely blessed and well in present fellowship with God, that he must needs postulate its eternal continuance, and just because he has made God the portion of his heart, and is holding fellowship with Him, is sure that nothing can intervene to break that sweet communion. They did not get it from any clear definite revelation, such as we have in the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... under equal circumstances, have been the better man. But the circumstances were not equal. The Dost could not have been more than a provincial ruler in the land; consequently he could not have undertaken that responsibility for the whole which formed the precise postulate of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... position at Kamfers Dam, and placed a second gun there. We had good people in Kimberley who asserted that the gentle Boer knew not how to use a gun; that he considered it so much lumber, an incumbrance. These were apart from the school given to postulate that the farmers had no guns to use. No need to say that both theories were dispelled, by sight as well as by hearing. Much attention was devoted to Otto's Kopje—our most exposed position—and many missiles dropped ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... school—and that, by intense application to his studies, "which he took to be his portion in this life," he rose to distinction as a robber of orchards, seems so probable, upon the whole, that I am willing to accept it as a postulate. That he married—that, in fullness of time, he was hanged, or (being a humble, unambitious man) that he was content with deserving it—these little circumstances are so naturally to be looked for, as sown broadcast up and down the great fields of biography, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the same species is known to have existed previously; but when we find new races coming into being, for which the ordinary law of derivation cannot account, we are not at liberty to apply the same rule to a case so essentially different, and still less to postulate a spontaneous generation, or a transmutation of species, for which we have no experience at all. In such a case, we can only reason on the principle that like effects must have like causes, that marks of design imply a designing ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... but that only irritated her. She had not called for help. She had not needed help and this rush of volunteers to her rescue was, after all, only a denial of the principle for which she so militantly fought; the postulate that when she played a man's game she wished to be treated as ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... only writer we have who gives us anything of himself. Quite unconsciously, every sentence he writes is saturated with his own identity; he is, then, a man of courage, and—the postulate assumed that we are not speaking of fools—courage in such case springs only from two sources, carelessness of opinion and possession of power. Now no one, of course, can be entirely indifferent to the audience he strives to please; and it would seem, then, that that daring ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... inertia, rigidity, and mutual impenetrability, we can thoroughly model not only an elastic solid, and any combination of elastic solids, but so complex and recondite a phenomenon as the passage of polarized light through a magnetic field. But now, with the view of ultimately discarding the postulate of rigidity from all our materials, let us suppose some to be absolutely destitute of rigidity, and to possess merely inertia and incompressibility, and mutual impenetrability with reference to the still remaining rigid matter. With these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... with a typewriting machine and some beehives, to a little farm I have acquired in a sleepy locality on the south coast. There I hope to be spared for some few years to develop the economic products of the honey-bee, to meditate on the Universal Postulate, and to watch, from afar, my children cultivating the difficult fields of Experience. May their task be easier than mine ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... to-day has hitherto failed to demonstrate any actual knowledge of the human soul, or even to postulate its existence, as a ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... postulate be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth, if one preeminent mind, or spiritual subsistence, unconnected with matter, possessed an ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... the first place it developed the utmost fire-face by bringing both broadsides into play. Secondly, by breaking up the enemy's line into fragments it deprived their admiral of any shadow of control over the part attacked. Thirdly, by seizing the leeward position (the essential postulate of the French method of fighting) it prevented individual captains making good their escape independently to leeward and ensured a decisive melee, such as Nelson aimed at. And, fourthly, it permitted a concentration on any part of the enemy's line, since it actually ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... priority of monotheism or of polytheism. The tradition is in favor of the latter, while on a priori grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the Hindus only another illustration ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the ground of our irresistible belief that like causes must always be followed by like effects, Mr. Mill's answer was that it is the result of an induction coextensive with the whole of our experience; Mr. Spencer's answer was that it is a postulate which we make in every act of experience;[20] but the authors of the "Unseen Universe," slightly varying the form of statement, called it a supreme act of faith,—the expression of a trust in God, that He will not "put us to permanent intellectual confusion." ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... pain more vividly than he remembered pleasure. His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... century. Yet when we come to consider their constructive programmes we find the positive demands put forward are based either on ideal conceptions derived from reminiscences of primitive communism, or else that they distinctly postulate a return to a state of things—the old mark-organisation—upon which the later feudalism had in various ways encroached, and finally superseded. Hence they were, in these respects, not merely not in the trend of contemporary progress, but in actual opposition to it; and ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... the multitudes who confess Christianity at this hour how many have clear in their minds the cardinal distinction established by its Founder between "born of the flesh" and "born of the Spirit?" By how many teachers of Christianity even is not this fundamental postulate persistently ignored? A thousand modern pulpits every seventh day are preaching the doctrine of Spontaneous Generation. The finest and best of recent poetry is colored with this same error. Spontaneous Generation is the leading theology of the modern ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... "the postulate, George Douglas, the most active of the gang. Let him arise at your call—the claimant of wealth which he does not possess, the partaker of the illustrious blood of Douglas, but which in his veins is sullied ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... reviewed, complications analyzed into principles, and knowledge disentangled from opinion. It is not always possible, without a close inspection, to separate the genuine shoots of consequential reasoning, which grow out of some radical postulate, from the branches which art has ingrafted on it. The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Buckle would have some difficulty in maintaining his favorite postulate, that tolerance is the result of progressive intelligence. It is also the result of courtesy, as we may occasionally see in well-bred persons of limited intellect. Such, undoubtedly, is the basis of that tolerance which no one who has had much personal intercourse ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... applied to the sewerage and the church-yards of London, and even more violently to the river Thames. As a tidal river, even: beyond the metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters. And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the Times starts in all its arguments, namely, this, that supposing the Thames to be even a vast sewer, in short, the cloaca maxima of London, there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach applying to our mighty English capital. On the contrary, all great ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... that such a principle constitutes in the highest degree a metaphysical thesis which it would be on all hands illegal to assert previously as a postulate of method. Secondly, and above all, it must be observed that on this head experience is decisive, and manifests more plainly every day the failure of the theories which try to assimilate the world of consciousness to that of matter, to copy ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... that the perception of Good might perhaps be an instinct, you objected that instincts conflict one with another, and that we therefore require another faculty to choose between them. Now it seems to me that your own argument is open to the same objection. You postulate some faculty—which perhaps you might as well call an instinct—and this faculty, as I understand you, in the effort to realize itself, proceeds to discriminate various objects as good. But, now, does this same faculty also know that the Goods are good, and which is better than which, and ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... vessel, It is none the less toute sainte cose; and also for the presence in the tale of distinctly popular, and Folk-lore, elements. Such an interpretation would also explain features irreconcilable with orthodox Christianity, which had caused some scholars to postulate a heterodox origin for the legend, and thus explain its curiously complete disappearance as a literary theme. In the first volume of my Perceval studies, published in 1906, I hinted at this possible solution of the problem, a solution ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... well with our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence. They occasionally suggest that wisdom of Gotham which is ever ready to postulate the certainty of a fulfilment because of the existence of a desire. It is this that vitiates so much of his poetic reasoning. Truth may ring regnant in the lines ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... for all knowledge is susceptible of definition and, therefore, relative. The Absolute includes the idea of necessity, which the mind cannot cognize. (2) The Absolute exists for thought only. In this theory the absolute is the unknown x which the human mind is logically compelled to postulate a priori as the only coherent explanation and justification of its thought. (3) The Absolute exists but is unthinkable, because it is an aid to thought which comes into operation, as it were, as a final explanation beyond which thought cannot go. Its existence is shown ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... all events, the systematic exposition of our economic arrangements) have furthermore accustomed us to think of everything like work as done under compulsion, fear of worse, or a kind of bribery. It is really taken as a postulate, and almost as an axiom, that no one would make or do anything useful save under the goad of want; of want not in the sense of wanting to do or make that thing, but of wanting to have or be able to do something else. Hence everything which is manifestly done from no such motive, but from ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... June, 1784, on the question: 'What can a good permanent theater really effect?' It is an excellent, thoughtful essay, instinct with lofty idealism and at the same time full of sound observation. Setting out from the postulate that the highest aim of all institutions whatsoever is the furtherance of the general happiness, the paper discusses the theater as a public institution of the state. Its claims are examined, and the sphere and manner of its influence discussed, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... reasons thus: The more perfect organisms have not been discovered in the earlier strata; therefore, they do not exist in them. When, in a different connection, it suits our author's purpose to throw doubt on the very postulate which is here admitted, he ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... coincidental almost to the minute: it would be impossible to prove that life was utterly extinct, when Alice seemed to die, 'as the clock in the distant village tolled one, just before' Ravenswood's experience. We do not, like him, postulate 'a breach in the laws of nature,' only a possible example of a law. The tale was not 'unfolded to the ear,' as the telepathic impact only affected ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... day of the season of nuts, there will be the commencement of a great moral eclipse, in that portion of the monikin region which lies immediately about the pole. The property in eclipse will be the great moral postulate usually designated by the term Principle; and the intervening body will be the great immoral postulate, usually known as Interest. The frequent occurrence of the conjunction of these two important postulates has caused our moral mathematicians to be rather ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... also postulate the existence of God as the necessary condition of the attainment of the summum bonum. As the perfect good can only be promoted by accordance of the will with the moral law, so also this summum bonum is possible only through the supremacy of an Infinite Being possessed ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... finest air of the season, and he adopted the weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts when every one else produces a cigar—he puffed the spasmodic, defensive cigarette. He accepted as to what he had done the postulate of the obscurely tortuous, abounding so in that sense that his critics were themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase is, little out of him—he rose in his good humour so much higher than the "rise" they had looked for—on ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... There can be no 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can perceive, and do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it. However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not only a law-giver, but in himself also the realisation ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... laws. But this ubiquitous correlation among general laws, considered as the cause of cosmic harmony, itself requires some explanatory cause such as the persistence of force and the indestructibility of matter cannot conceivably be made to supply. For unless we postulate some one integrating cause, the greater the number of general laws in nature, the less likelihood is there of such laws being so correlated as to produce harmony by their combined action. And forasmuch as the only cause that I am able to imagine as competent ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... seriously perplexed by this assertion of Mr Cobden's; and others, we have heard, not generally disposed to view that gentleman's doctrines with favour, who insist upon it, that, in mere candour, we must grant this particular postulate. "Really," say they, "that cannot be refused him; the law was for the purpose he assigns; its final cause was, as he tells us, to keep up artificially the price of our domestic corn-markets. So far he is right. But his error commences ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... of the assumption. Ricardo, who has always to state an argument at the cost of an intellectual contortion, is content to lay down a rule without introducing troublesome qualifications and reserves. Yet he probably held that his postulate was a close approximation to the facts. Looking at the actual state of things at the worst time of the poor-law, and seeing how small were the prospects of stirring the languid mind of the pauper to greater forethought, he thought that he might assume the constancy ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... energy which these investigators have devoted to formulating and testing this hypothesis, in the light of the principles of mechanics, has been commensurate with the importance of the subject. They postulate that the materials now composing the Sun, planets, and satellites, at one time existed as a spiral nebula, or as a great spiral swarm of discrete particles, each particle in elliptic motion about the central nucleus. The authors ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... fares the good, so fares the sinner," ix. 2. This is a direct and deliberate challenge of the law of retribution in which the writer had been brought up. It may be urged, of course, that his belief in a divine judgment is a postulate of his faith which he retains, though he does not find it verified by experience. But such words—and there are many such—seem to carry us much farther. Here, then, is the essential problem of the book. Can it be regarded as ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... now the question of ideas, and postulate again that these too must conform both to the subject and to men's character. Ideas agree with the subject if they are true, if they are appropriate, and if they so to speak get into the insides of the thing. They are in ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.'—'A very unreasonable postulate,' said the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... than conquest for conquest's sake and mere race glorification. To go far and to endure, it must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived righteousness. But it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies. So be it. The world is ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... essential invisibility, and consequent upon this their ubiquity under the dominant categories of time and place, precludes any possibility of their incarnation, we are compelled to postulate that their complex vision's attribute of sensation, in the absence of any bodily senses, finds its contact with "the objective mystery" and with the objective "universe" in some definite and permanent "intermediary" which serves in their case the same primal necessity as is served in our case ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... with decision and self-reliance, and to burnish his quiet, contemplative vein with the very frequent friction of the tricks of mankind. These he now was strictly bound not to study, but anticipate, taking it as first postulate that every one would cheat him, if permitted. To a scrimpy and screwy man, of the type most abundant, such a position would have done a deal of harm, shutting him up into his own shell harder, and flinting its muricated horns against the world. But ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Mathematics and Metaphysics excluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume's account of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts. Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development of Science from this origin. The increasing ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... of the individual, as an alien being distinguished from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the present, and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... youth had hated sums. All arithmetical difficulties had confused and sickened him. But now he worked with indefatigable industry on an imaginary slate; put his postulate, counted probabilities, allowed for chances, added, deducted, multiplied, and unknowingly performed algebraic feats, till his brows were stiff with frowning, and his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that this far-reaching socialization has been actually carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of the workless income will show the downfall ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... evidently felt relieved, and, perhaps, thought that he had bravely met a great responsibility, and had done his whole duty faithfully to his son. He honestly believed that the Honorable Mr. Medway was a villain of the blackest dye, not only politically, but morally and socially; and, this postulate admitted, it followed, by his narrow reasoning, that Mrs. Medway, Miss Medway, and all that related to the fountain Medway were, utterly vile and villanous. He hated the father, and he could ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... we may venture on a practical suggestion, Assuming that your postulate's indubitably true, And all should be examined—there must yet remain the question, Custodes quis ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... in these objections are that abstract thought does not postulate being; and that possibly all intelligence is not one in kind. To the former objection the most satisfactory, reply has been offered by Professor J. F. Ferrier. He has shown that the conception of object, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... changes than the individual body.—A full perception of the truth that society is not a mere aggregate, but an organic growth, that it forms a whole, the laws of whose growth can be studied apart from those of the individual atom, supplies the most characteristic postulate of modern speculation.—L. STEPHEN, Science of Ethics, 31. Wie in dem Leben der einzelnen Menschen kein Augenblick eines vollkommenen Stillstandes wahrgenommen wird, sondern stete organische Entwicklung, so verhalt es sich ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... will recognize in this account of the battle of Stromboli all the features to which he called the attention of English seamen in his thesis on the methods of action employed by them and their adversaries in and before his time. Clerk's thesis started from the postulate that English seamen and officers were superior in skill or spirit, or both, to the French, and their ships on the whole as fast; that they were conscious of this superiority and therefore eager to attack, while the French, equally ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... "vertebrates"; or (2) by making a general assumption covering the particular point in dispute; for instance, maintaining the uncertainty of medicine by postulating the uncertainty of all human knowledge. (3) If, vice versa, two things follow one from the other, and one is to be proved, you may postulate the other. (4) If a general proposition is to be proved, you may get your opponent to admit every one of the particulars. This is the converse ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... tactual Space as all different and yet apparently harmoniously blended in our Experience. He is, however, sadly wanting in clearness of statement. He never tells us when and where exactly we do have a sensation of Space. In truth he never gets behind the postulate of an all-enveloping tridimensional world; so that he throughout assumes Space as a datum, and his inquiry is an effort to rediscover Space where ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... characteristic of the Middle Ages, are still preserved. The aristocracy and the clergy possess an influence almost unknown in Germany, but solely over the people, not over the government. As corporative bodies they still are, as in the days of Charles VI., convoked for the purpose of holding postulate diets, whose power, with the exception of that of the Hungarian diet, is merely nominal. The nobility, even in Hungary, as everywhere else throughout the Austrian states (more particularly since the Spanish system adopted by Ferdinand II.), is split into two inimical classes, those of the higher ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... few of the methods used have become organized into specialties, such as the study of the head or phrenology, and the study of the hand or palmistry. All of these systems are really "materialistic" in that they postulate so close a union of mind and body ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... implication, the belief that the present order of things was brought about suddenly and irrespective of any pre-existent order; and it is important to hold clear ideas as to which of these beliefs is the true one. In the first place, we may postulate that the world had a beginning, and, equally, that the existing terrestrial order had a beginning. However far back we may go, geology does not, and cannot, reach the actual beginning of the world; and we are, therefore, left ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... way as in the chordonia in a number of invertebrates which have no chorda (for instance, Sagitta, Figures 1.76 to 1.78). Moreover, in the amphioxus the first outline of the chorda appears later than that of the coelom-sacs. Hence we must, according to the biogenetic law, postulate a special intermediate form between the gastrula and the chordula, which we will call coelomula, an unarticulated, worm-like body with primitive gut, primitive mouth, and a double body-cavity, but no chorda. This embryonic form, the bilateral coelomula (Figure 1.81), may in turn be ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... slowly, come to the belief that the same laws operate throughout the entire Universe, just as they do here on the Earth. This is the Uniformity Postulate. ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... basic survey first, of course," Neel told him. "Chances are that that will be enough to straighten things out. Since the completion last year of the refining equations of Debir's Postulate, all sigma-110 and alpha-142 graph ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... are lost in mystery. No objection can lie against this postulate about the way in which folkways began, on account of the element of inference in it. All origins are lost in mystery, and it seems vain to hope that from any origin the veil of mystery will ever be raised. We go up the stream of history to the utmost point for which we have evidence of its ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Chapter III., where it is shown that they are atomicity, heaviness or weight, elasticity, density, inertia, and compressibility. To be strictly logical and philosophical, the author was compelled to postulate similar properties for the aether, or else his hypotheses would contravert the results ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... be said with truth that the Bible is a book which reads History, and the perplexities of Man, in the light of one great postulate, viz. that there is a God. The natural sequences, which are now partially explained by scientific discoveries, are in the Bible attributed to God's guidance: and of course there is no contradiction between the two. Science ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... "So it presents a dilemma. To resolve it, it is necessary to postulate a Supreme Mind, and to say that all things are just thoughts in God's Mind. That makes us both the same then and there is no argument about ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... there a theorem in geometry more certain, more peremptory, than that? How then, upon what conditions, in what sense, can a principle which is its own denial enter into science? How can it become an organic law of society? If competition is necessary; if, as the school says, it is a postulate of production,—how does it become so devastating in its effects? And if its most certain effect is to ruin those whom it incites, how does it become useful? For the INCONVENIENCES which follow in its train, like the good which it ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... looks too happy and content, For whose least pleasure he would die; Oh, cruelty, she cannot care For one to whom she's always kind! He says he's nought, but, oh, despair, If he's not Jove to her fond mind! He's jealous if she pets a dove, She must be his with all her soul; Yet 'tis a postulate in love That part is greater than the whole; And all his apprehension's stress, When he's with her, regards her hair, Her hand, a ribbon of her dress, As if his life were only there; Because she's constant, he will change, And kindest ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... those rights inhere in the individual, are part of his existence, and not the gift of any man or aggregation of men. If they were, equality under a despotism might find its justification in the postulate just as well as equality under a republic. Caesarean Democracy could claim like paternity with American Democracy. The assumption, then, that freedom in any of its forms is a privilege conceded by society is utterly unwarrantable, because ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... nervous theorizers—who has wavered about the military policy of the country; but there have naturally been some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there have been such people: one would have had to postulate them if they had not come within one's experience. There have been some to whom it was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or a certain kind of breakfast-roll; though the French, being fundamentally ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... got you," cried Brett "I thought I recognised the source of your new-born philosophy in the first postulate. The second convinces me. You have been reading 'The ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... facts as such in a chain, of causal events, we have first to conceive them as parallel to physical events. The principle of psychophysical parallelism, that is, the principle that every psychical process accompanies a physiological change is thus not a mere result of observation. It is simply a postulate. Every science begins with postulates and only that which fulfills such postulates has the dignity of truth in the midst of that scientific realm. The astronomer cannot find by observation that there is no star the movements of which are ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... England would be just: but she must first be obeyed. England might forgive the debt, but must insist upon acknowledgment that the debt was due, and upon the right to collect it at pleasure. As for the plea that taxation should postulate representation, it would not bear examination. It might be true that Parliament was a theoretically representative body; but, in fact, it was a gathering of the men in England best qualified to govern, who were rather selected than elected. Many of the commons held their seats by favor ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... leaves us liable to be taken in by a false postulate of any man's, however well turned the postulate or able the man, then I have no respect for culture. The fact that Schopenhauer said such a thing does not prove it true. An assertion like that is a ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... school, or playground give him an impulse and an impetus toward this event? Or, in other words, are the activities of his earlier life functioning on the bit of paper before him? If this is an effect, what and where was the cause? In the case of any type of human behavior can we postulate antecedent causes? If a hundred musicians were writing musical compositions at the same moment, would they offer similar explanations of ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... truth. By its theory all people are entitled to the same political power, and they can only be so entitled on the ground that in politics they are equally wise. But at the outset of an agricultural colony this postulate is as near the truth as politics want. There are in such communities no large properties, no great capitals, no refined classes—every one is comfortable and homely, and no one is at all more. Equality is not artificially established in a ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... nothing unreasonable in a miracle which so powerfully contributed to their conquest of Canaan, and we have yet to learn that there is anything unreasonable in the belief that they were the depositaries of revelation. The fundamental postulate of the Old Testament is a supernatural revelation, and that opens the door for any miracle needful for its accomplishment. It is folly to seek to conciliate by minimising the miraculous element. However much may be thrown out to the wolves, they will not cease to pursue and show their teeth. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the body had been demonstrated, it seemed necessary in some instances to postulate a blastema or exudation to account for certain new formations. But the moment I could show the universality of cells—the moment I could show that bone corpuscles were real cells, and that connective tissues contained cells—from that moment cellular material for the building of new formations ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some sort or other,—the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,—with it every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight." Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... of insubordination, or indiscipline.... We will carry this conflict through to the end as a civilized people, and we answer for this upon our good name and upon our honor!" Why this humble and pitiful repudiation? Perhaps because their theory of war rested upon the postulate of their invincibility, and that, in the first shiver of their defeat upon the Marne, it collapsed, and now their repudiation quickly follows—in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... honorers nor the honored ones, and had resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover, the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of the heavenly bodies to ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the day before he visited the Academy'; from 'A is greater than B' we infer 'B is less than A'; and so on without limit. Such inferences as these are material, not formal. No law can be laid down for them except the universal postulate, that ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... of humanity; God unable to approach the world other than as a lover—sacrificing Himself for the sake of love. We cannot conceive the Sublime with any other principal function than that of love; for love is the deepest and profoundest emotion of the human heart, and, in accordance with the first postulate, must therefore be the soul of the universe. On this point all mystics and all metaphysical ecstatics are agreed; "God is love" is written in the Gospel of St. John. "Love which moves the sun and all the stars," stands at the termination of Dante's masterpiece: and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... matters not how far we press our speculations, how extravagant our hypotheses, how distant our vision, we reach at length the confines of our thought and admit the inconceivable. The inconceivable is a postulate as essential to reason as is the conceivable. That the inconceivable exists is as certain as the existence of the conceivable; it is in a sense more certain, since we constantly find ourselves in error in our conclusions concerning the existence of the things we know, while we can never ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy |
