"First principle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wrangling. They in truth, when urged in such cases, teach nothing: that is already done by the intermediate ideas made use of in the debate, whose connexion may be seen without the help of those maxims, and so the truth known before the maxim is produced, and the argument brought to a first principle. Men would give off a wrong argument before it came to that, if in their disputes they proposed to themselves the finding and embracing of truth, and not a contest for victory. And thus maxims have ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... upon a larger scale. There is reason to believe that the utility of a system like Labour Exchanges, like utility of any other market, increases in proportion to its range and scope. We therefore propose, as a first principle, that our system shall be uniform and national in its character; and here, again, we are supported both by the Minority and by the Majority Reports of ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... which is a physical element, and union and contentment, which are moral elements—and to reserve the strength of the Empire, to reserve the expenditure of that strength, for great and worthy occasions abroad. Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home. My second principle of foreign policy is this: that its aim ought to be to preserve to the nations of the world—and especially, were it but for shame, when we recollect the ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... should be made to these differences. The first was to state the fundamental principles of Distributism. The crux of the quarrel was the question of machinery. But even those who held that machinery should be abolished in the Distributist State held it, he claimed, not as a first principle, but as a deduction from their first principles. Chesterton himself felt that machinery should be limited but not abolished; the order of things had been historically that men had been deprived of property and enslaved on the land before the machine-slavery of industrialism ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... that it is better the guilty should escape punishment than the innocent suffer. Satius esse nocentem absolvi quam innocentem damnari. This is the temper we ought to set out with, and these the rules we are to be governed by. And I shall take it for granted, as a first principle, that the eight prisoners at the bar had better be all acquitted, though we should admit them all to be guilty, than that any one of them should, by your verdict, be found ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... "The first principle in the art of painting a picture is to know where to sit down;" in other words, everything depends upon the point of view. Now that David began to look for evidences of the weaknesses and follies of his fellow men, he saw them everywhere. For the first time in his life ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... revived.[121] It swept away the strong Calvinism of the old Genevan theology. The clergy were little better than the English Deists. D'Alembert says, "All the religion that many of the ministers of Geneva have is a complete Socinianism, rejecting everything called mystery, and supposing that the first principle of a true religion is to propose nothing to be received as a matter of faith which strikes against reason." Rousseau declares that those who filled the pulpits of that venerable city had no answer to the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... an anomaly, upon that one, white, unruffled consciousness! His first principle once recognised, all the rest, the whole array of propositions down to the [110] heartless practical conclusion, must follow of themselves. Detachment: to hasten hence: to fold up one's whole self, as a vesture put aside: to anticipate, by such individual ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... as near as possible to first principles. It's a better way, too, of keeping out the rain, than my t'other plan of flogging people when they're young, to make their hides hard and water-proof. A good licking is a sound first principle for juveniles, but they've ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... his wider views on civilisation, it might be suspected that it is of him that Condorcet was chiefly thinking. Yet we need not limit the scope of his statement when we remember that as a sect the Economists assumed as their first principle the eudaemonic value of civilisation, declared that temporal happiness is attainable, and threw all their weight into the scales against the doctrine of Regress which had found a powerful advocate ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... 1. The first principle is that the existence of the energy of electric currents, and also the energy of magnetic attractions, must be sought for not so much in the wire that carries the current, or in the bar of steel or iron that we call a magnet, as in the space that surrounds the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... Astronomy which prevailed during the Middle Ages, and was only discredited at an epoch nearly simultaneous with that of the discovery of the New World by Columbus. The true arrangement of the solar system was then expounded by Copernicus in the great work to which he devoted his life. The first principle established by these labours showed the diurnal movement of the heavens to be due to the rotation of the earth on its axis. Copernicus pointed out the fundamental difference between real motions and apparent motions; he proved that the appearances presented in the daily rising and setting ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... expression. The reply to this is given us by Immanuel Kant. He has shown that our reason, dwelling on the facts of experience, constantly seeks the principles which connect them together, and only rests satisfied in the conviction that there is a highest and first principle which reconciles all their discrepancies and binds them into one. This he calls the Ideal of Reason. It must be true, for it is evolved from the laws of reason, our only test of truth. Furthermore, the sense of personality ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... neglected. In fact, he had a long list of specific standards that he kept continually in mind, the progress toward which he constantly watched. And last, but by no means least, he carried with him wherever he went an atmosphere of breezy good nature and cheerfulness, for he had mastered the first principle in the art of both supervision and teaching; he had learned that the best way to promote growth in either pupils or teachers is neither to let them do as they please nor to force them to do as you please, but to get ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... this, however, is not, cannot be rigorously the same in any two. It suffices to know that by his essence man tends to conserve himself, to render his existence happy: this granted, whatever may be his actions, if he recurs back to this first principle, to this general, this necessary tendency of his will, he never can be deceived with regard to his motives. Man, without doubt, for want of cultivating reason, being destitute of experience, frequently deceives himself upon the means of arriving at this end; ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... Creator. Nothing in man, in nature, in the universe, is explicable without the creative act of God, for nothing exists without that act. That God "in the beginning created heaven and earth," is the first principle of all science as of all existences, in politics no less than in theology. God and creation comprise all that is or exists, and creation, though distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... his Father, hee hath, like leane, stirrill, and bare Land, manured, husbanded, and tyll'd, with excellent endeauour of drinking good, and good store of fertile Sherris, that hee is become very hot, and valiant. If I had a thousand Sonnes, the first Principle I would teach them, should be to forsweare thinne Potations, and to addict themselues to ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... down-and-out-o'-works—they went, each man a little kink. Jimmie wandered into the city of Ironton, and got himself a job in a big automobile shop at eight dollars a day, and set to work agitating for ten dollars. It was not that he had any need of the extra two dollars, of course, but merely because his first principle in life was to make trouble for the profit-system. The capitalist papers of this middle-Western metropolis were furiously denouncing working-men who struck "against their country" in war-time; Jimmie, on the other hand, denounced those who used "country" ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... sphere and as descending, consequently, from God to things. The Alexandrians, we think, do no more than follow this double indication when they speak of procession and conversion. Everything is derived from the first principle, and everything aspires to return to it. But these two conceptions of the divine causality can only be identified together if we bring them, both the one and the other, back to a third, which we hold to be fundamental, and which alone ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... go-ahead velocity as they go to caucus, and seem to care as little about the matter. John Bull often calculates much more sedately and to the purpose than his restless offspring, who seem to hold it as a first principle of the declaration of independence that a man has a right to be blown ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... of truth,—which is after all little more than a fine phrase for forms of falsehood,—what can be more futile than to suppose that such a compromise will be listened to for a single moment by a caste whose first principle is that they are the possessors and ministers, not of an inferior or superior form of truth, but of the very truth itself, absolute, final, complete, divinely sent, infallibly interpreted? The disciples of the relative may afford to compromise. The ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... willing that every one should be himself, and work out his salvation in his own way, seems to be the first principle of the working plan drawn from the law of loving your neighbor as yourself. If we drop all selfish resistance to the ways of others, however wrong or ignorant they may be, we are more free to help them to better ways when they ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... doing very bad service if he were to go among the doctors and nurses on the field and tell them not to give drugs, as they give morphia in a hospital. But it is the whole hypothesis of war, it is its very nature and first principle, that the man in the trench is almost as much a suffering and abnormal person as the man in the hospital. Hit or unhit, conqueror or conquered, he is, by nature of the case, having less pleasure than is proper and natural to ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... was the craziest thing that ever touched water. It was a most excellent diver, but was in profound ignorance of the first principle of the ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... that an individual exists in this world who doubts this great first principle?' said the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... "The knowledge of God must first be, before there can be knowledge of any particular things,"[36] and God must be assumed as present in the soul before any basis of truth or of religion can be found. "The Light is the first Principle of Religion; for, seeing there can be no true Religion without the knowledge of God, and no knowledge of God without this Light, Religion must necessarily have this Light for its first Principle."[37] "Without thyself, O Man," he concludes, "thou hast no {131} means ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Hermogenes, I believe that there was a power of philosophy and talk among the first inventors of names, both in our own and in other languages; for even in foreign words a principle is discernible. Hestia is the same with esia, which is an old form of ousia, and means the first principle of things: this agrees with the fact that to Hestia the first sacrifices are offered. There is also another reading—osia, which implies that 'pushing' (othoun) is the first principle of all things. And here I seem to discover a delicate allusion to the flux of Heracleitus—that ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... which we have no taste. In all vital libraries, such a process of progressive refection is continually going on, and to realize what we do not want in books, or cannot use, must, obviously, be a first principle in our getting the ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... incorporeal, [Footnote: Ritter, b. iv. chap i.] and is put into the body by the means of number and harmonical relation, and thus subject to a divine regulation. Every thing was regarded by him in a moral light. The order of the universe is only a harmonical development of the first principle of all things to virtue and wisdom. [Footnote: Our knowledge of Pythagoras is chiefly derived from Aristotle. Both Ritter and Brandis have presented his views elaborately, but with more clearness than was ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... is education? I consider that education commences before a child can walk: the first principle of education, the most important, and without which all subsequent are but as leather and prunella, is the lesson of obedience—of submitting to parental control—"Honour thy ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... you will, of the governors and imperial ministers, but not on the recommendation of the local executive." Secondly, they "should be conferred, as much as possible, on the eminent persons who are no longer engaged actively in political life." The first principle has, generally speaking, guided the action of the Crown in the distribution of honours to colonists, though the governors may receive suggestions from and also consult their prime ministers when the necessity arises. These honours, too, are no longer conferred ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... a similar catastrophe at home. The moral which too many people drew was too often, that all reforms should be stopped; with the result that the evils grew worse and social strata more profoundly alienated. It is a first principle of scientific reasoning, that a break-down of social order implies some antecedent defect, demanding an adequate remedy. It is a primary assumption of party argument, that the opposite party is wholly wrong, that its action is perfectly gratuitous, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and Pain. The Stoics agreed with the Peripatetics (anterior to Epicurus, not specially against him) that the first principle of nature is (not pleasure or relief from pain, but) self-preservation or self-love; in other words, the natural appetite or tendency of all creatures is, to preserve their existing condition with its inherent capacities, and to keep clear of destruction or disablement. This appetite (they said) ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... with each of us; he is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the influence of each person about him, and reflects it while transforming it after his his own nature. He is a magnifying mirror. This is why the first principle of education is, Train yourself; and the first rule to follow, if you wish to possess yourself of a child's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The stranger was glad; he had put the Royalist precisian in a dilemma, between the dogma of passive obedience on the one hand (for the upholders of the Monarchy maintained that obedience was the first principle of military law), and the equally important dogma which turns respect for the person of a King into a matter of religion. In the priest's indecision he was eager to see a favorable solution of the doubts which seemed to torment him. To prevent too prolonged reflection on the part of the reverend ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... Even this difference, however, disappears at some of the climacteric moments, and the actors resort to the elocutionary devices which belong to the spoken drama, and, foregoing pitch and rhythm, shout or whisper or hiss out the words which tell of the feelings by which they are swayed. Thus the first principle of music, which is melody, in Wagner as much as it was in Cimarosa or Mozart, is sacrificed. Quite as significant as the degradation of music thus illustrated is the degradation of the drama which has brought it about. There has always been a restrictive and ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... be laid down as a first principle, that we should preserve children from the knowledge of any vice, or any folly, of which the idea has never yet entered their minds, and which they are not necessarily disposed to learn by early example. Children ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... together with life, it was implanted in man from God. Unless this its state, which was most perfect, be known, it is in vain to attempt the discovery of its differences by any investigation; for there is no other fixed point, from which as a first principle those differences may be deduced, and to which as the focus of their direction they may be referred, and thus may appear truly and without fallacy. This is the reason why we here undertake to describe that love ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... to have been, to take the phenomena of human goodness, such—for instance—as pity, love, and self-abnegation, which are already to hand, and seriously to explain them and show their relation to his Darwinian first principle. But no; he preferred to soar into the imperative, and thus escape the task of explaining. But even in his flight he was irresponsible enough to soar beyond the very first principles ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... The first principle laid down by Paul is the superiority of love over knowledge, the bearing of which on the question in hand will appear presently. We note that there is first a distinct admission of the Corinthians' intelligence, though there is probably a tinge of irony ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... imagine that a being full of goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an eternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here is almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for Jesus Christ and the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... modern style entirely sets at nought the first principle of writing, which is accuracy. The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government—the rights of the people. Conclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... an entire field of operations, like butter over bread, but by occupying the centres with aggregated forces—fleets or armies—ready to act in masses, in various directions from the centres. This commonplace of warfare is its first principle. It is called concentration, because the forces are not spread out, but drawn together at the centres which for the moment are ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... myself called upon to assert the dignity of the Persian faculty, and give proofs of my superior wisdom, said, 'Take blood! what doctrine is this? Do not you know that death is cold, and that blood is hot, and that the first principle of the art is to apply warm remedies to cold diseases? Pocrat,[61] who is the father of all doctors, has thus ordained, and surely you cannot say that he eats his own soil. If you take blood from that body, it dies; and go tell the world that I ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... Governments, to be resolutely withstood—the policy of trying "to conciliate our enemies by giving away our friends." We shall hear of it again in dealing both with Ireland and with certain colonies when Germany claims their return. On the other hand, the first maxim in all negotiation, the first principle of sound diplomacy, is always to give to the other side, and give without grudging, all he wants, provided it does not interfere with what it is important for your side to secure. Never be afraid of ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... distinguish between pruning, and training, or the way in which the vines are placed—will determine more than anything else the success of the undertaking. Grapes depend more upon proper pruning than any other fruit or vegetable in the garden. Two principles must be kept track of in this work. First principle: the annual crop is borne only on canes of the same year's growth, springing from wood of the previous season's growth. Second principle: the vine, if left to itself, will set three or four times the number of bunches it can properly mature. ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... impersonal concretion of which one is, so to speak, the spectator. In thus letting my course be shaped by the force of events, I believed myself to be conforming to the rules of the seventeenth century school, especially to those of Malebranche, whose first principle is that reason should be contemplated, that man has no part in its procreation, and that his sole duty is to stand before the truth, free from all personal bias, ready to let himself be led whither the balance of demonstration wills it. So far from having at the outset certain results in view, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... down the aisle, and there sat Aunt Jennie, with her two lanky girls who have grown inches every time I run into them; and also Uncle Timothy. Uncle Timothy was my guardian until I came of age, so I am a little in awe of him, and now I had to listen to his whispered reproaches—it being the first principle of our family never to "get into the papers." I told him that it wasn't my fault I had been knocked down by a mob, and surely I couldn't help it if this man Carpenter found me while I was unconscious, and made me well. Nor could I fail to be polite to my benefactor, and try to help him ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... not only the point whence all extension proceeds, but it further symbolised the First Principle, the origin of all. The duad represented the line, as being bounded by two points or monads. The triad stood for surface as length and width. The tetrad for the perfect figure, the cube, length, depth, and width. The decad, or denarius, indicated comprehensively ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... Hopkins all day, and in the evening, a lecture from Dr. Follen on Pantheism. The most abstract of all pantheistic systems he described to be that of the Brahmans, as taught in the Vedas and Vedashta, and also at first by Schelling, viz., that the absolute is the first principle of all things; and this absolute is not to be conceived of as possessing any attribute at all—not even that of existence. A system a little less abstract is that of the Eleatics, who believed in the absolute as existing. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... thought of metempsychosis was connected with a theory, yet more fantastic, of the visible heaven above us. For Pythagoras, the Pythagoreans, had had their views also, as became the possessors of "a first principle"—of a philosophy therefore which need leave no problem untouched—on purely material things, above all on the structure of the planets, the mechanical contrivances by which their motion was effected (it came to just that!) on the relation ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... is the first principle and fountain of writing well. The Socratic papers will direct you in the choice of your subjects; and words will spontaneously accompany the subject, when it is well conceived. He who has learned what he owes to his country, and what ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... expense under an Irish Territorial Council a Territorial Force similar to that of England but not removable from Ireland. Military conscription could never be permitted except by Act of the Irish Parliament. It would be a denial of the first principle of nationality if the power of conscripting the citizens of the country lay not in the hands of the National Parliament but was exercised by ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... unto that place of torment and woe, where they shall have an eternity to bewail their infidelity, impiety, avarice, ambition, cruelty, and stupidity in.—And, in fine, if the following hints shall serve for no other purpose, they will stand for an incontestable evidence of the very first principle of religion, that there is a God to reward the righteous and punish the wicked:—So that men shall say, Verily, there is a reward for the righteous; verily there is a God that judgeth in ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... through much study of books and knowledge of letters, so increases (in lore) as to attain the talent of discerning the nature of things, and the vigour of mind to fathom the Taoist reason as well as to comprehend the first principle, he is not in a position ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... physical geography, as the first-born of the continents, we may discover another beautiful harmony. For our democratic system, in basing itself on the idea of political equality does, in effect, start from the very first principle of all true government; and this first principle of government thus finds its temple and home in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at the loss of rest in behalf of her early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the direction of the barnacles, that being a first principle ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... is mind's eye." "He who has cultivated and learned to open his heart to the touch of outward Nature illuminates his inner being by the elevation and refinement of his emotional and imaginative nature. This is the first principle in the objective world of the higher education of mind and soul. The first lesson of Mother Earth is to instruct her children to be softened and sympathetic toward the moods of outward Nature. Thus mankind ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... Since the first principle of abundant living is to produce two or three times as much as you think you'll need, my overly-large garden yields dozens and dozens of such stumps and still more dozens of uneaten savoy cabbages, more dozens of three foot tall Brussels sprouts stalks and cart loads of enormous blooming ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... matter of fact, England is more like America than she realizes; her British reticence has kept her ignorant about herself. I could not carry on my business in England, because of the libel laws, which have as their first principle "the greater the truth, the greater the libel". Englishmen read with satisfaction what I write about America; but if I should turn my attention to their own country, they would send me to jail as they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... down as the first principle of politics, that peace, and not war, is the true aim of the legislator, and briefly discussed music and festive intercourse, at the commencement of the third book Plato makes a digression, in which he speaks of the origin of society. He describes, first of all, the family; secondly, the patriarchal ...
— Laws • Plato
... to study this by a comparison of the zodiacal sign, Capricorn, as set forth in the "Light of Egypt," Vol. 1, wherein we read: "This sign signifies the knees, and represents the first principle in the trinity of locomotion, viz., the joints, bending, pliable, movable." The analogy is perfect. The soul, which has been pliant, bending to material forces, now reverses this action, and bows the knee in awe and reverence ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... over poetry. And he was right; music appeals to the heart, whereas writing is addressed to the intellect; it communicates ideas directly, like a perfume. The singer's voice impinges not on the mind, not on the memory of happiness, but on the first principle of thought; it stirs ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... of such distinguished reputation as the Abbe Raynal, it might very well become me to apologize for the present undertaking; but as to be right is the first wish of philosophy, and the first principle of history, he will, I presume, accept from me a declaration of my motives, which are those of doing justice, in preference to any complimental apology, I might otherwise make. The Abbe, in the course of his work, has, in some instances extolled, without a reason, and wounded without ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... untruth; life is not so coarse-fibred as that. And only the grossest natures can be satisfied with a blunt yes or no. Truth?—it is one of the many miserable conventions the human brain has tortured itself with, and its first principle is an utter lack ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of the great Theodosius in so far as he upheld orthodoxy, and endeavoured to unite all his subjects in one belief and one centre of unity. The greatest of the Roman emperors had for their first and chief motive, in upholding this first principle of imperial policy, the conviction that thus only they could hope to maintain the peace and security of the empire. Schism in the Church betokened rebellion in the State. In the fourth century heresy had driven the empire to the very brink of destruction. Besides ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... extinguished, cannot itself be restored by anything else, nor can it produce anything else from itself; inasmuch as all things must necessarily arise from some first cause. And thus it comes about, that the first principle of motion must arise from that thing which is itself moved by itself; and that can neither have a beginning nor an end of its existence, for otherwise the whole heaven and earth would be overset, and all nature ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... accurately, and left to make its appeal to men's minds. It may be stated theologically by saying, as the Christian theology says, that all men are equal before God. Or it may be stated in the form which Jefferson uses—that all men are equal in their "inalienable rights." But it must be accepted as a first principle or not at all. The nearest approach to a method of proving it is to take the alternative proposition and deduce its logical conclusion. Would those who would maintain that the "wisest and best" have rights superior to those of their neighbours, welcome a law which would enable any person ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... is the first principle of society, but it cannot supply all the wants of society, and may easily cause more evils than it cures. Plato is aware of the imperfection of law in failing to meet the varieties of circumstances: he ...
— Statesman • Plato
... of government under heaven, that does not, in the very pursuit of the good it proposes, naturally and inevitably lead into some inconvenience, which makes it absolutely necessary to counterwork and weaken the application of that first principle itself; and to abandon something of the extent of the advantage you proposed by it, in order to prevent also the inconveniences which have arisen from the instrument of all the good you had ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... began with the sudden ascendency of Marat—a hideous assassin, who regarded the knife as the only instrument of governing, and proclaimed as his first principle of political regeneration, that "half a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... you use, but I think I know what you mean," said Mrs. Dennistoun. "How dreadful it is to think that in business, where honesty is the very first principle, there should be such terrible ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... plays, in his philosophy of life, the part that Reason fills for Hegel, or the Blind Will for Schopenhauer; and he is as fearless as they are in reducing all phenomena into forms of the activity of his first principle. Love not only gave him firm footing amid the wash and welter of the present world, where time spins fast, life fleets, and all is change, but it made him look forward with joy to "the immortal course"; for, to him, all the universe is love-woven. All life is but treading the "love-way," ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... first principle, all the successive actions, and the final consummation of religion in the heart, to the Spirit of God. It is the subject of express promise: "And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... increased use of structures leads to an increase of their functional efficiency; while, on the other hand, disuse leads to atrophy. The arms of a blacksmith, and the legs of a mountaineer, are familiar illustrations of the first principle: our hospital wards are full of illustrations of the second. Again, we know that the characters of parents are transmitted to their progeny by means of heredity. Now the hypothesis in question consists in supposing that if any particular organs in ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... in my reckoning, is the first principle, I will not say of artistic perfection, but of all true excellence in Art. And the same law, which thus requires that in a given work each earlier part shall prepare for what comes after, and each later part shall finish what went before, holds with equal force ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Mind Toward Nature.—Greek philosophy began in the seventh century before Christ. The first philosopher of note was Thales, born at Miletus, in Asia Minor, about 640 B.C. Thales sought to establish the idea that water is the first principle and cause of the universe. He held that water is filled with life and soul, the essential element in the foundation of all nature. Thales had great learning for his time, being well versed in geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. He travelled in Egypt ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... judgments, however eager to have one heart and one soul, but must deny themselves, for the sake of each other, much which they like or desire, if they are to live together happily. Compromise, in a large sense of the word, is the first principle of combination; and any one who insists on enjoying his rights to the full, and his opinions without toleration for his neighbour's, and his own way in all things, will soon have all things altogether to himself, and no one to share them with him. But most true as this confessedly is, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... now to the first principle of all ball games, whether tennis, golf, cricket, baseball, ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... to begin with, by all means, being a first principle, (3) without which there is no man living ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... the ballot in the hand of every qualified citizen constitutes the true political status of the people and to deprive one-half of the people of the use of the ballot is to deny the first principle ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... difficult to see why this should be. The first principle, on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be enlightened self-interest, it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... must consider more in detail something concerning the will. There is an Eternal Will, which is a first principle and substance in God, apart from all works and all externalisation; and the same will is in man, or the creature, willing and bringing to pass certain things. For it pertains to the will, to will something. For what else does it exist? It would be a vain thing if it had no work to ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... pleasures of travelling cannot be said to be altogether unalloyed—a consideration which the journey from Segowly to Lucknow irresistibly forced upon our minds, how determined soever we might be to adhere to the traveller's first principle of making the best of everything. We left the station about dusk, upon a night in which the elements seemed to have combined to cause us as much discomfort as possible, and the violence of the storm about midnight compelled us to take shelter in every tope of trees we came to, or, ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular — because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote "Beowulf,'' our other English epic, grasped the great fact ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... "It's a first principle of law that what a prisoner says is untrue," said the King. "I always go on that principle, and that is ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Fremantle will deliver this to you, I have not the same difficulties which attend the writing a post letter. I go to town to-morrow, in order to settle our winter arrangements. My first principle will be to throw Ireland out of the book of opposition, unless I am attacked upon it, which I sincerely hope may be the case; although I have but little hopes that by any management in either House, Ministry will be brought to acknowledge the language which their agents uniformly ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... monstrously magnifying spectacles, which are on his nose night and day. If once he could take off the spectacles he would smash them. He deduces all his fantasies about the Sixth Seal or the Anglo-Saxon Race from one unexamined and invisible first principle. If he could once see the first principle, he would see that it ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... according to sound strategy or sound military principles. In short, whoever deals in war ought to understand war. The reader may think that a commonplace, but in reality it is like too many commonplaces—a truth that very important people forget at critical moments. The first principle of action in war is to have two men to one at the decisive point. How comes it, then, that for six weeks Sir George White has to defend Natal with one against two? Evidently the first principle has been violated. ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... The first principle of that great and wonderful wave of "New Thought" which is sweeping over America, and is beginning to find some understanding in this country, is that the responsibility of each individual's well-being rests with himself, and that his environment ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... that, as I have said, not one of the boys have ever been taught the first principle, prayer, or moral duty. They are, as far as the Public School-training went, perfectly ignorant of the Divine law as rule of our life; they are, in fact, but educated apes or animals. How can this young man reconcile "poverty and wealth," "labor and ease," "sickness ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... The first principle laid down by Mr. Adams is, that the same code of international law does not apply to all nations alike, but that it varies with the condition and character of the people; that one code of laws applies to the enlightened ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the spark bravely to the match. The spark—a feeble spark, first principle of conflagration—shone in the darkness like a glow-worm, then was deadened against the match which it set fire to, Porthos enlivening the flame with his breath. The smoke was a little dispersed, and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the Allies were scattered over a wide area, and unable to support each other. Before they could come together, Napoleon, moving with the utmost rapidity, struck the first blow, and they were defeated in succession. The first principle of war is to concentrate superior force at the decisive point, that is, upon the field of battle. But it is exceedingly seldom that by standing still, and leaving the initiative to the enemy, that this principle can be observed, for a numerically inferior force, if it once ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Is the first principle of the movement of the heart in animals properly understood? does one know clearly how generation is accomplished? has one guessed what gives us sensations, ideas, memory? We do not understand the essence of matter ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... fair copy for the printer. Borrow's subsequent remark that the manuscript "was written by a country amanuensis and probably contains many ridiculous errata," was scarcely gracious to the wife, who seems to have comprehended so well the first principle of wifely duty to an illustrious and, it must be admitted, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... by any of the stern necessities of war. So decided the majority. It was then proposed that we should scatter, and take shelter individually as best we could until harvest time. But Mr. O'Brien refused to hear counsel which involved, as its first principle, the idea of becoming fugitives. A middle course was therefore decided on. It could not fairly be said that the country had been tested, and we were not, at the time, aware how far people at a distance were prepared to second our efforts. ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... we cannot know the ultimate nature of being, then philosophy is impossible, for philosophy differs from other kind of knowing by seeking a first principle." "The objects of philosophy then include those of ontology. They are first the nature of the ultimate being of the universe, the first principle, the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... hypotheses, not as principles, but as veritable hypotheses, that is to say, as steps and starting-points, in order that it may ascend as far as the unconditioned ([Greek: mechri tou anypothetou]), to the first principle of the universe, and having grasped this, may then lay hold of the principles next adjacent to it, and so go down to the end, using no sensible aids whatever, but employing abstract forms ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... man, without reaching the comprehension, or exciting the interest, of the country people; but that if they would not understand the propagation of the rights of man, they would very easily comprehend an abolition of the rights of their landlords. Accordingly, the first principle of liberty they were taught from the new code was, that they had a right to assemble in arms, to force the surrender of title-deeds; and their first revolutionary notions of equality and property seem to have been manifested ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... with meows and spitting! And mind, all foolery and making faces The childish simpleness of Vice disgraces. Thou shouldst—to-day I speak emphatically— Speak naturally and not unnaturally, For the first principle in every art, Since earliest times, was True and ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind |
