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Predicate   Listen
noun
Predicate  n.  
1.
(Logic) That which is affirmed or denied of the subject. In these propositions, "Paper is white," "Ink is not white," whiteness is the predicate affirmed of paper and denied of ink.
2.
(Gram.) The word or words in a proposition which express what is affirmed of the subject.
Synonyms: Affirmation; declaration.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Predicate" Quotes from Famous Books



... learn, also, that "sometimes the first is called the premises (sic), and sometimes the first premiss"; as also that "the first is sometimes called the proposition, or subject, or affirmative, and the next the predicate, and sometimes the middle term." To which is added, with a mark of exclamation at the end, "but in analyzing the syllogism, there is a middle term, and a predicate too, in each of the lines!" It is clear that ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... historical works are a series of pictures or tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth. In his essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration of the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another. His picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets: "dark ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... grant it, I think I shall have something to say on this point presently; but this is not a necessary result, it is but an incidental evil, a danger which may be realized or may be averted, whereas we may in most cases predicate guilt, and guilt of a heinous kind, where the mind is suffered to run wild and indulge its thoughts without training or law of any kind; and surely to turn away a soul from mortal sin is a good and a gain so far, whatever comes of it. And therefore, if a friend in ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... have in anywise reflected on the divine nature deny that God has a body. Of this they find excellent proof in the fact that we understand by body a definite quantity, so long, so broad, so deep, bounded by a certain shape, and it is the height of absurdity to predicate such a thing of God, a being absolutely infinite. But meanwhile by other reasons with which they try to prove their point, they show that they think corporeal or extended substance wholly apart from the divine nature, and say it was ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza

... may predicate a) that one half of them is flat, and the other half sharp, and b) that some are continuous, and that ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... for Jesus. On the contrary, it was always quite definite occasions which led them to speak of Christ as of a God or as God. In the first place there were Old Testament passages such as Ps. XLV. 8, CX. 1 f. etc. which as soon as they were interpreted in relation to Christ led to his getting the predicate [Greek: theos]. These passages, with many others taken from the Old Testament, were used in this way by Justin. Yet it is very well worth noting that the author of the Epistle of Barnabas avoided ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... acta aetas decursaque. For certus cf. below, 72 senectutis certus terminus. — AETATIS: here vitae; see n. on 5. — EAQUE: this is a common way of introducing with emphasis a fresh epithet or predicate. Often idque ([Greek: kai touto]) occurs, the pronoun being then adverbially used, and not in agreement with the subject. Cf. n. on 65 illius quidem; also neque ea in 22. — SIMPLEX: life is compared to a race, in which ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... observing here, in a reverential parenthesis "(never Shakspere, by-the-bye)—and at others my heart aches and I cry real, bitter, warm tears as earnestly as if I was in earnest." Reading which last sentence, one might very safely predicate that in the one instance, where she could turn her words into burlesque, she would be certain to act but indifferently, whereas in the other, with the hot, scalding tears running down her face, she could not by necessity do ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... other hand, it is equally little in question that this degree of mental development had been attained long before the opening of our historical period. The primeval man, then, whose scientific knowledge we are attempting to predicate, had become, through his conception of fishes, birds, and hairy animals as separate classes, a scientific zoologist ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... thought I was getting older and older; at last I acquired the reputation of a prophet, and was held in veneration by a great many religious people. Of course I could not prophesy, but as I had such a vast deal of experience I was able to predicate intelligently something about the future from my knowledge of the past. I became famed as a wonderful seer, and there were a great many curious ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton

... concerning the physical causes of insanity, and have scarcely done more than recognize the possibility of molecular disease of the brain. Hereafter science will, probably, succeed in unveiling the obscure facts of molecular brain pathology, and enable the medical psychologist to predicate disease of recognized classes of brain elements from the special phenomena of mind disturbance. This is the line of inquiry, and the result, to which the progress already made distinctly tends. For the present, the inferences we can surely draw from known ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... philosophers speak of reason as if it were a jewel that can be placed in a drawer or in a human skull, they are simply myth-makers. It is precisely in this ever recurring elevation of an adjective or a verb to a noun, of a predicate to a subject, that this disease of language, as I have called mythology, has its deepest roots. Here lies the genesis of the majority of gods, not by any means, as it is generally believed I have ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... unintelligible and unsuited to the popular taste. This, even in Italy, was often the case, and not only so during the whole period of the Renaissance, but down to a still later time. To produce the confusion, it was enough if a predicate of the allegorical figures was wrongly translated by an attribute. Even Dante is not wholly free from such errors, and, indeed, he prides himself on the obscurity of his allegories in general. Petrarch, in his 'Trionfi,' ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... Orthodox priesthood profess faith in, is even more arbitrary than the assertions of the Catholics or the Orthodox. If we admit the idea of a church in the sense Homyakov gives to it—that is, a body of men bound together by love and truth—then all that any man can predicate in regard to this body, if such an one exists, is its love and truth, but there can be no outer signs by which one could reckon oneself or another as a member of this holy body, nor by which one could put anyone outside it; so that no institution ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... style of the artistic treatment as distinguished from the original creative power—which Dryden, the translator of the Roman poet, familiar therefore with his weakness and with his strength, meant in this place to predicate ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... would dine at some cheap, even dubious, restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question without an answer, a cause without an effect, a gulf stream in life's salt ocean. He had not dressed for evening; he wore a dark business suit that would not be questioned ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... timony of the senses, which say that sin is an evil power, and substance is perishable. Intelligent Spirit, Soul, is substance, far more impregnable and solid than matter; for one is temporal, while the other is eternal, the ultimate [5] and predicate of being. ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... under the antithesis of a subject and an object known only in correlation, and mutually limiting each other"[318] Thought necessarily supposes conditions; "to think is simply to condition," that is, to predicate limits; and as the infinite is the unlimited, it can not be thought. The very attempt to think the infinite renders it finite; therefore there can be no infinite in thought, and, consequently, the infinite can not ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... to make, with the acc. and predicate adj.: prs. (god) ged him sw gewealdene worolde dlas, makes the parts of the world (i.e. the whole world) so subject that ..., 1733; inf. ne hyne on medo-bence micles wyrne drihten wereda gedn wolde, nor would the leader of the people much honor him at the mead-banquet, ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.

... conception of God as a Person cannot be included under this pseudo-concept of the Infinite. Whereas Mr. Mill, by laying down the maxim that the meaning of the abstract must be sought in the concrete, quietly assumes that this pseudo-infinite is a proper predicate of God, to be tested by its applicability to the subject, and that what Hamilton says of this infinite cannot be true unless it is also true of God. Of this refutation, Hamilton, were he living, might truly say, as he said of a former criticism ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... sort of fellow—we who are used to studying boys all know him well enough—of whom you can predicate with almost positive certainty, after he has been a month at school, that he is sure to have a fight, and with almost equal certainty that he will have but one. Tom Brown was one of these; and as it is our well-weighed intention to give a full, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... tends, in which it is absorbed or even annihilated. Awful as such a mysticism may appear, yet it leaves still something that exists, it acknowledges a feeling of dependence in man. It knows of a first cause, though it may have nothing to predicate of it except that it is [Greek: to kinoun akineton]. A return is possible from that desert. The first cause may be called to life again. It may take the names of Creator, Preserver, Ruler; and when the simplicity and helplessness of the child ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... perfect Liberty is the entire absence of all limitation, and to have no limitation in Being is to be co-extensive with All-Being. We are all grammarians enough to know that the use of a predicate is to lead the mind to contemplate the subject as represented by that predicate; in other words, it limits our conception for the time being to that particular aspect of the subject. Hence every predicate, however extensive, implies some limitation of the subject. But the ideal subject, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... impudence.... I am not ignorant," he adds, "of Mr. Southey's calumnies on a different occasion, knowing them to be such, which he scattered abroad on his return from Switzerland against me and others.... What his 'death-bed' may be it is not my province to predicate; let him settle it with his Maker, as I must do with mine. There is something at once ludicrous and blasphemous in this arrogant scribbler of all works sitting down to deal damnation and destruction upon his fellow-creatures, with Wat Tyler, the Apotheosis of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... civilization, and that he must not look for articles or particles or passive voice or case or grammatic gender, or even what appears in those languages as a substantive or a verb, as a subject or a predicate, or as qualifiers or inflexions. The sign radicals, without being specifically any of our parts of speech, may be all of them in turn. There is, however, a grouping and sequence of the ideographic pictures, an arrangement of signs in connected succession, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... follows, from this doctrine, that there is not, and cannot be any such thing as sin. If man be not a free agent—if he be incapable of acting otherwise than as predetermined by Jehovah—he is incapable of either virtue or vice. It would be as reasonable to predicate virtue or vice of the flux and reflux of the tides, or the circulation of the blood, as of man or angel under ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson

... naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, A good name is a proof of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... hath existence; or, who hath a soul, hath a soul. What is this more than trifling with words? It is but like a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand to the other: and had he but words, might no doubt have said, 'Oyster in right hand is subject, and oyster in left hand is predicate:' and so might have made a self-evident proposition of oyster, i.e. oyster is oyster; and yet, with all this, not have been one whit the wiser or more knowing: and that way of handling the matter would much at one have satisfied the ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... manner of the eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, the possessor of that complete culture, does not "weep" over the failure of "a theory of the quantification of the predicate," nor "shriek" over the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mental attitude, in the criticism of by-past stages of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... the Absolute Reason; unseen, tremendous, immovable, in distant glory; yet himself amenable to that abysmal unity which Homer calls Fate, the source of all which is, yet in Itself Nothing, without predicate, unnameable. ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... subject predicate. In Old English, the Normal order is found chiefly in independent clauses. The predicate is followed by its modifiers: S hwl bi micle l:ssa onne re hwalas, That whale is much smaller than other whales; Ond h geseah tw scipu, And ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... a man walked upon water, the idea of the subject is not contradictory of that in the predicate. Naturalists are familiar with insects which walk on water, and imagination has no more difficulty in putting a man in place of the insect than it has in giving a man some of the attributes of a bird and making an angel of him; or ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... seemed to be shifted from Mrs. Ormond to her convert, whom he followed with his tolerant eyes. "Nothing in all this sort of inquiry is so impossible to predicate as the effect of any given instance upon a given mind. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells

... experience, which rise up in unanimous and spontaneous testimony against the monstrous fiction that we are either nothing or God. The fallacy upon which this fiction rests is not a {27} very subtle one. When we speak of God's indwelling in man, we predicate that community of nature which the writer of Gen. ii expresses by saying that God created man in His own image; we predicate, i.e., what we already called homogeneity—likeness of substance—and not identity, which is a very different thing. We do not commit ourselves to the proposition ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... Nobody can predicate as to her object or fancy; she may have done the deed in the very abstraction of deep sadness. She may have been moaning from the bottom of her heart, 'How unhappy am I!' But the impression produced on Knight was not a good one. He dropped his eyes moodily. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... residence direct intimate continent digest levity finance indivisible defensible hilarious reticent imitate equidistant predicate maritime reticule piazza nobility finance ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins

... Philistines, the Conservatives, the Bores and so on, ad nauseam. The Bromide does his thinking by syndicate. He follows the main traveled roads, he goes with the crowd. In a word, they all think and talk alike—one may predicate their opinion upon any given subject. They follow custom and costume, they obey the Law of Averages. They are, intellectually, all peas in the same conventional pod, unenlightened, prosaic, living by rule and rote. They have their hair cut every ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess

... combining of separate elements or minor wholes into an inclusive unity. It differs from mere "disintegration', in proceeding on a definite scientific plan. In grammar, analysis is the breaking up of a sentence into subject, predicate, object, &c. (an exercise introduced into English schools by J. D. Morell about 1852); so the analysis of a book or a lecture is a synopsis of the main points. The chief technical uses of the word, which retains practically the same meaning in all the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... rather their descriptions of its effects. Kindly observe that I am far from accepting either one or the other. Love is, according to me, somewhat akin to mania, a temporary condition of selfishness, a transient confusion of identity. It enables man to predicate of others who are his other selves, that which he is ashamed to say about his real self. I will suppose the beloved object to be ugly, stupid, vicious, perverse, selfish, low minded, or the reverse; man finds it charming by the same rule that makes his faults and ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... perhaps see, from the tenor of my discourse, I would find it difficult to say whether I should give them a good name or a bad—to speak more scientifically, and of course more clearly, whether I should characterise them by a predicate eulogistic, or a predicate dyslogistic. On the whole, I am content with my first idea, and continue to stick to the title of "The Book-Hunter," with all the more assurance that it has been tolerated, and even liked, by readers of the kind I am most ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... alert, and somewhat self-congratulatory that I was not more scared. No man can predicate how efficient he is going to be in the presence of really dangerous game. Only the actual trial will show. This is not a question of courage at all, but of purely involuntary reaction of the nerves. Very few men are physical cowards. They will and do face anything. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... heat. But I have heard of those imaginary engineering hopes so long that I begin to believe them vague, and that we shall yet for a few generations measure the power applied by the number of pounds of coal consumed. From past experiences and present indications we can predicate nothing with more certainty of fuel than that it will indefinitely increase in price. I am satisfied, therefore, that with all of the capabilities of steam it can never be applied to general ocean transportation; first, because undesirable; and second, because impossible even if desirable. But to ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey

... light by the researches, and translated by the energy of science from forgotten and buried ages. The deductions to be drawn from it, I leave to those who have a taste for the speculative, neither believing in, nor quarrelling with the theory which they may predicate ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

... is well known that this | rule of invention originates in | Ramus's methodology and, more | formerly, in Aristotle's POSTERIOR | ANALYTICS. To characterize the nature | of the premises required for the | foundation of true demonstrations, | Aristotle had set down three | criteria: the predicate must be true | in every instance of its subject; it | must be part of the essential nature | of the subject; and it must be | universal, that is, related to the | subject by itself and QUA itself. | Aristotle was ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon

... infinity. There cannot be two infinities, nor can there be an infinite and also a finite beyond it. What infinity may be we have no means of knowing. Here the most devout Christian is just as much of an agnostic as Professor Huxley; we can predicate nothing with confidence concerning the all-comprehending unity wherein we live and move and have our being, save and except as we see it manifested in that part of our universe which lies open to us. One would think ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... "Female Heroism," and as she sought among the dusky annals of the past for instances in confirmation of her predicate, that female intellect was capable of the most exalted attainments, and that the elements of her character would enable woman to cope successfully with difficulties of every class, her voice grew clear, firm, and deep. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... sentence is made up of distinct parts or elements. The essential or PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS are the Subject and the Predicate. ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... be cold to the centre—cold as the temperature of space. If the materials of the moon were what a mathematician would call absolutely rigid, there can be no doubt that the tides could no longer exist, and the moon would be emancipated from tidal control. It seems impossible to predicate how far the moon can ever conform to the circumstances of an actual rigid body, but it may be conceivable that at some future time the tidal control shall have practically ceased. There would then be no longer any necessary identity ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... its object and ideal: yellowness is only some sensation of yellow raised to the cognitive power and employed as the symbol for its own specific essence. It is consequently capable of entering as a term into rational discourse and of becoming the subject or predicate of propositions eternally valid. A thing, on the contrary, is discovered only when the order and grouping of such recurring essences can be observed, and when various themes and strains of experience are woven together into elaborate progressive harmonies. When consciousness first becomes cognitive ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... like a German sentence, with its predicate at the end. Trifling incidents occurred at haphazard, as it seemed, and I never guessed they were by way of making sense. Then, this morning, somewhat of the suddenest, came the ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... and unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which marks complete culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, he who possesses that complete culture, does not 'weep' over the failure of 'a theory of the quantification of the predicate', nor 'shriek' over the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the conditions of the true mental attitude in the criticism of past stages of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a man of good sense can ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... the predicate "felt" and because of the importance of the idea it takes a long rising inflection; "with all a monarch's pride" being subordinate and incomplete also requires the voice to be kept up, but takes a ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... often used to separate a subject with several modifiers, or with a long modifier, from the predicate verb. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... flush of mingled pride and shame with which she had spoken, and never had it looked more lovely. The father considered it for a moment, less with admiration than with curiosity: this daughter of his was an unknown quantity: he never could predicate what she would do or say. Certainly she surprised him once more when she lifted ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... of the maxims of the first edition, 1665, it is omitted from the 2nd and 3rd, and reappears for the first time in the 4th edition, in 1675, as at present, at the head of the Reflections.—Aime Martin. Its best answer is arrived at by reversing the predicate and the subject, and you at once form a contradictory maxim equally true, our vices are most frequently ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld

... all form by which one could predicate the existence of the saint is abandoned and uprooted like a fan palm[515], so that it will never grow up in future. The saint who is released from what is styled form is deep, immeasurable, hard to ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... Mark and the Clementines a predicate, in Matthew the subject. In the introduction to the Eschatological discourse the Clementines approach more nearly to St. Mark than to any other Gospel: [Greek: Horate] ([Greek: blepeis], Mark) [Greek: tas] ([Greek: megalas], Mark) [Greek: ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... language. Admitting that language is a sign, are we to take that as signifying a spiritual necessity (phusis) or as a psychological convention (nomos)? Aristotle made a valuable contribution to this difficult question, when he spoke of a kind of proposition other than those which predicate truth or falsehood, that is, logic. With him euchae is the term proper to designate desires and aspirations, which are the vehicle of poetry and of oratory. (It must be remembered that for Aristotle words, like poetry, belonged to mimetic.) The ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... North and South Frisian areas may readily be admitted. There are, of course, reasonable objections against it—the want of proof of Frisian character of the language of Ditmarsh being the chief. Still, the principle which would lead us to predicate of Suffolk what we had previously predicated of Norfolk and Essex, induces us to do the same with the district in question, and to argue that if Eydersted, to the North, and the parts between Bremen and Cuxhaven, to the South, were ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... with new agencies at our command, new morality, new wisdom, predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,—a handful of soldiers and philosophers ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... she would step up to one of her charts and, placing a finger on a point, she would say: "Here is General ——'s detachment; here is the rebel army; such and such are the fortifications and surrounding circumstances; and she would then begin thoughtfully to predicate the result and suggest ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell

... to do with characters and places which are tied to the present by stronger cords than those of the divine age. What the events really were which are involved in the myths of the preceding chapter it is impossible to predicate. That the celestial invasion of the island of Kyushu means the coming thither of a chief and his followers from the continent by way of Korea seems most reasonable. The inter-mixture of Izumo with these legends may mean that another ...
— Japan • David Murray

... example, the unorganized myriads that one can cover by the phrase "mechanics and engineers," if one uses it in its widest possible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describe such a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universally applicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced, oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough, until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his additions of crockery and plumbing, the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... of what is. Thus we get, in fact, four forms of existence: there is the Idea or Limiting (apart); there is the Negative or Unlimited (apart), there is the Union of the two (represented in language by subject and predicate), which as a whole is this frame of things as we know it; and fourthly, there is the Cause of the Union, which is God. And God is cause not only as the beginning of all things, but also as the measure and law of their perfection, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... and Predicate, Inflection, Number, Nominative Subject, Possessive Genitive, Agreement of Verb, Direct Object, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge

... points out that some of these verses need not mean actual transformation, but mere likeness, through "a primitive formation of predicate without the aid of a particle corresponding to such a word as 'like.'"[1214] Enough, however, remains to show the claim of the magician. Taliesin, in many poems, makes similar claims, and says, "I have been in a multitude of shapes before ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... since at a Broadway hotel, from which she was expelled at a very short notice by the proprietors in presence of a number of the guests. It is presumed that at present she is almost penniless, though no one can safely predicate at what place or in what guise she may appear hereafter. For an adventurer, like a cat, ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

... into its logical consequence—agnostic theism. Philo will allow of no point of contact between God and a world in which evil exists. For him God has no relation to space or to time, and, as infinite, suffers no predicate beyond that of existence. It is therefore absurd to ascribe to Him mental faculties and affections comparable in the remotest degree to those of men; He is in no way an object of cognition; He is [Greek] and [Greek] [33]—without quality and incomprehensible. That is to say the Alexandrian ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... contrary, Whatever is predicated accidentally, predicates, not substance, but quantity, or quality, or some other mode of being. If therefore the human nature accrues accidentally, when we say Christ is man, we do not predicate substance, but quality or quantity, or some other mode of being, which is contrary to the Decretal of Pope Alexander III, who says (Conc. Later. iii): "Since Christ is perfect God and perfect man, what foolhardiness have some to dare to affirm that Christ ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... gospels have founded it. Here, sir, have I not an occasion of some little complaint? If you really thought that the gospels were, none of them, written in the life time of the apostles, and considered it safe to predicate an argument on this ground, why should you withhold the proof of this fact? Why did you not inform me of the authority by which your argument is supported in your own mind? And furthermore, why do you try to get away from ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou

... making his will. The metaphysical subtleties, with which Hamilton often filled his sheets, did not seem to have the same attraction for De Morgan that he found in battles about the quantification of the Predicate. De Morgan was exquisitely witty, and though his jokes were always appreciated by his correspondent, yet Hamilton seldom ventured on anything of the same kind in reply; indeed his rare attempts at humour only produced results of the most ponderous description. But ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... Cookery was taught in 925 schools, in the latter year in 2,665. In 1899, Laundry Work was taught in 11 schools, in 1910 in 691. If this is not progression—and progression under the Legislative Union—to what can the predicate be more truthfully applied? Statistics are apt to be barren and uninforming and can be adapted, with almost equal plausibility, to support the arguments of either side; but these figures are eloquent and speak for themselves. ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... In particular the essays on self-reliance and idealism were moulding my life. We approached him with some awe, "If he asks me where I live," said one of our number, a boy who was slain in the Civil War, "I shall tell him I can be found at No. So-and-so of such an alley, but if you mean to predicate concerning the spiritual entity, I dwell in the temple of the infinite and I breathe the breath of truth." But when Emerson met us at the gate, things were not at all on a high transcendental plane. There was a ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... or settled" is a predicate common to natural and supernatural, not the differentia of either. And here let me remark that the expression, "Laws of Nature," is a modern technical expression which the Catholic philosopher would require, probably, to have defined before employing it. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... claim from us the particular mood called seriousness,—which means the willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be in se, it is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be our rule of life. There can be no greater incongruity than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is unknowable, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... persuaded the Misses Emmering and Lutzer, and the Messrs. Wild, Cicimara, and your Frederick to perform some music at the honoured man's house; almost from beginning to end the performance was deserving of the predicate "parfait." I never heard the quartet from Moses better sung; but Miss Gladkowska sang "O quante lagrime" at my farewell concert at Warsaw with much more expression. Wild was in excellent voice, and I acted in ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... simply a question of Honor herself. She was not the woman lightly to withdraw her love, once given. And yet—in a year—who could tell? Love, like the spirit, bloweth where it listeth; and Paul's failure did not of necessity predicate his own. For all her sudden bewildering reserves, she had drawn very near to him in those last terrible weeks at Kohat; and now—now—if he could believe there was the veriest ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... toward the audience, as he declaims sonorously of his haste to perform his vital errand, while making but a snail's progress. Truly then his plea of exhaustion would not be without excuse! This is an explanation at once simpler, more potentially comic, more in accord with what we predicate as the spirit of Plautus, and furthermore we have seen roars of laughter created by the similar device of a low comedian in a modern extravaganza. Taking advantage of the same subjective license, we see nothing ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... that the term Magnets is coextensive with the term A B C, therefore of all Magnets I may predicate that ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... axis. But while all admit that Vertebrates are highest and Radiates lowest, how do the Articulates and Mollusks stand to these and to each other? To me it seems, that, while both are decidedly superior to the Radiates and inferior to the Vertebrates, we cannot predicate absolute superiority or inferiority of organization of either of these groups as compared with each other; they stand on one structural level, though with different tendencies,—the body in Mollusks having always a soft, massive, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... well-established monarchies! One cannot help desiring, nevertheless, that men of honour should have the management of it. Were they men of humane feeling too, it would be so much the better. Is it possible to predicate these things of the persons who gave poor Carteret his orders? Is it possible to believe he was expected to circumnavigate the world in the Swallow? An opinion has already been ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... larger analogies," my father would continue, "why are we not further permitted to conclude that there is a more intimate and minute correlation. Why can not we predicate that under similar climatic and atmospheric vicissitudes, with a very probably similar or identical origin with our globe, this planet Mars, now burning red in the evening skies, possesses life, an organic retinue of forms like our own, or at least involving such primary principles as respiration, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... mathematical line, or space within time, as in the circle. But to form the first conception of a real thing, we state both as one in the idea, duration. The formula is: (ABBA)(AA) or the oneness of space and time, is the predicate of ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... can be sweet intellectualism outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate rationally. Nothing 'between' things can connect them, for 'between' is just that third thing, 'between,' and would need itself to be connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... which bore the painted legends: on the west wall, "Last Chance"; on the east wall, "First Chance." Next to this, and separated by two or three acres of weedy vacancy from the corners where the population centred thickest, stood-if one may so predicate of a building which leaned in seven directions-the house of Mr. Robert Skillett, the proprietor of the saloon. Both buildings were shut up as tight as their state of repair permitted. As they were furthest to the east, they formed the nearest shelter, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... ceased, "to have the honour of being wracked (for so the steward, in conformity with the Doric of the forecastle, pronounced the word,) in such company. I should deem it a disgrace to be cast away in some society I could name, although I will predicate, as we say in America, nothing on their absence. As to what inwolves the stores, it surgested itself to me that the ladies would like delicate diet, and I intermated as much to Mrs. Sidley and t'other French waiting-woman. Do you imagine, gentlemen, that the souls of the dead are permitted ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... words in the vocabulary of thought are "Christian" and "Science." The former is the highest style of man; the latter reveals and interprets God and man; it aggregates, amplifies, unfolds, and expresses the ALL-God. The life of Christ is the predicate and postulate of all that I teach, and there is but one standard statement, one rule, and one Principle for ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy

... may, therefore, with better grace tell the story, which, happily for my readers, is a very brief one. A custom prevailed in Mrs. Clanfrizzle's household, which from my unhappy ignorance of boarding-houses, I am unable to predicate if it belong to the genera at large, or this one specimen in particular, however, it is a sufficiently curious fact, even though thereby hang no tale, for my stating it here. The decanters on the dinner-table were never labelled, with their more appropriate ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever

... is predicated of another, all that which is predicable of the predicate will be predicable also of the subject. Thus, 'man' is predicated of the individual man; but 'animal' is predicated of 'man'; it will, therefore, be predicable of the individual man also: for the individual man is both ...
— The Categories • Aristotle

... Kragans an entirely different semantic orientation. For instance, they have nothing like a subject-predicate sentence structure. That's why, Stanley-Browne to the contrary notwithstanding, they are entirely non-religious. Their language hasn't instilled in them a predisposition to think of everything as the result ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... can not discover in the facts and circumstances of the case any just principles upon which Sir Howard Douglas could predicate his protest. He has, however, submitted the note which he had the honor to receive from Mr. Vaughan to the President of the United States, and is by him directed to say in reply that although this Government could feel no ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson

... sentence, has, like the word, a psychological as well as a merely logical or abstracted existence. Its definition is not difficult. It is the linguistic expression of a proposition. It combines a subject of discourse with a statement in regard to this subject. Subject and "predicate" may be combined in a single word, as in Latin dico; each may be expressed independently, as in the English equivalent, I say; each or either may be so qualified as to lead to complex propositions ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... sceptic in Mr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate "good," which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And he answers at once: The predicate "good" is indefinable. This answer he shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might perhaps have been absolved from ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... three terms,—major, minor, and middle. The middle term is found in both the premises, but not in the conclusion. It is the link connecting the major and minor terms. The major term is usually the predicate of the major premise and the predicate of the conclusion. The minor term is the subject of the minor premise and the subject of the conclusion. "Men" is the middle term, "are mortal" the major term, and "Socrates," ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... where the subject is qualified rather than the verb, as with verbs of incomplete predication, 'being,' 'seeming,' 'arriving,' etc. In 'the matter seems clear,' 'clear' is part of the predicate of 'matter.' 'They arrived safe': 'safe' does not qualify 'arrived,' but goes with it to complete the predicate. So, 'he sat silent,' 'he stood firm.' 'It comes beautiful' and 'it comes beautifully' have ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... mortified that the soul may, unhampered by its own entanglement, reach that consummation which is supposed to be final. And what is it? Who can tell? The Aryan philosopher himself stands mute in its presence. All that we can predicate of it is not life and happiness, according to any standard of human experience known or imagined. The idea that the individual soul will finally sink into and blend with the Absolute Being as a drop of water returns to and mingles with its mother ocean may seem plausible to the philosopher; ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... primitive men we have spoken of, nor of those who immediately succeeded them, can we rightly predicate any knowledge of nature. The rude primitive child of nature at this lowest stage of development is as yet far from being the restless Ursachenthier (cause-seeking animal) of Lichtenberg; his demand ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... be defined as the process of raising the level of appreciation. This definition will stand the ultimate test. Here is bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation as a goal in every rational system of education. Appreciation has been defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. It must be so or civilization cannot be. Without appreciation there ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... may be perceived by sense, but they are names, and cannot be defined. When we assign to them some predicate, they first begin to have a meaning (onomaton sumploke logou ousia). This seems equivalent to saying, that the individuals of sense become the subject of knowledge when they are regarded as they are in nature in relation to ...
— Theaetetus • Plato



Words linked to "Predicate" :   interrelate, assert, predicative, predication, asseverate, logic, predicate calculus, relate, proclaim, maintain



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