"Generalisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Apostles, as in the compositions of Raphael, belong less to the Holy Land than to the Roman Forum. This treatment of draperies was adhered to through all subsequent works, the only change being further generalisation and a wider departure from naturalism. In fact it is curious to observe in this early work how much nature enters; figures and incidents come direct from life, as witness portraits of contemporaries, groups of little children, young mothers and aged women. ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... this highly abstract generalisation as a preliminary to a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation that was to lead up to ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... third, a clear enunciation of the fact of community of plan within each of the big groups; fourth, an attempt to explain certain instances of the correlation of parts; fifth, a pregnant distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous parts; sixth, a generalisation on the succession of forms in development; and seventh, the first enunciation of the idea ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... make us happy here. We are constantly taught to renounce sensual pleasure and selfish gratifications, to forget our body and sensible organs, to associate our pleasures with mind, to fix our affections upon the great ideal generalisation of intelligence in the one Supreme Being. And that we are capable of forming to ourselves an imperfect idea even of the infinite mind is, I think, a strong presumption of our own immortality, and of the distinct relation which our finite ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... human mind an intuitive sense of any sort, were to assert that I had such a sense while you denied that you had, it would be impossible for me to prove you to be mistaken, while, unless you were mistaken as to your individual experience, I should clearly be mistaken as to the generalisation which I had based upon mine. But I never said a word about an intuitive sense of right and wrong. How could I, seeing, as no one who chooses to look can fail to see, that the instincts of untutored children prompt them to disregard all rights but their own, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Mr. Stanhope Forbes still continues at the point where Bastien-Lepage began to curtail, deform, and degrade the original inspiration. Mr. Clausen, I said, overcame the difficulty of the trousers by generalisation. Mr. Stanhope Forbes copied the trousers seam by seam, patch by patch; and the ugliness of the garment bores you in the picture, exactly as it would in nature. And the same criticism applies equally well to the faces, the hands, the leather aprons, the loose iron, the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... spectators of the commonty. In Delphine there is not a glimmer of amusement from first to last, and the whole story is compact (if that word were not totally inapplicable) of windbags of sentiment, copy-book headings, and the strangest husks of neo-classic type-worship, stock character, and hollow generalisation. An Italian is necessarily a person of volcanic passions; an Englishman or an American (at this time the identification was particularly unlucky) has, of equal necessity, a grave and reserved physiognomy. Orthodox religion is a mistake, but a kind of moral-philosophical Deism (something ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... she was fearless, and had the instinctive tendency to directness possessed by all forceful characters. Her veracity rested on no principle. She was not like Jeanie Deans, that triumph of culture, in whom a generalisation had so far prevailed that it was able to overcome the strongest of passions and prevent a lie even to save a sister's life. Miriam had been brought up in no such divine school. She had heard that lying ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... anatomy which deals with the ultimate visible structure of organisms, as revealed by the microscope; and, from that day to this, the rapid improvement of methods of investigation, and the energy of a host of accurate observers, have given greater and greater breadth and firmness to Schwann's great generalisation, that a fundamental unity of structure obtains in animals and plants; and that, however diverse may be the fabrics, or tissues, of which their bodies are composed, all these varied structures result from the metamorphosis of morphological ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the benefit of its assistance; we must not, therefore, say that a successful War without it cannot be imagined; and we draw especial attention to that point, in order the more to individualise the conception which is here brought forward, that the idea may not dissolve into a generalisation and that it may not be thought that military virtue is in the end everything. It is not so. Military virtue in an Army is a definite moral power which may be supposed wanting, and the influence of which may therefore be estimated—like any instrument the ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... did Darwin recognise the importance of the fact that most of the oceanic islands appear to be of volcanic origin, though he was careful to point out the remarkable exceptions which somewhat invalidate the generalisation. In his "Origin of Species" he has elaborated the idea and suggested the theory of the permanence of ocean-basins, a suggestion which has been adopted and pushed farther by subsequent authors, than we think its originator ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... discovering that the mature art, while it appeared at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay, but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age. He grasped a clue to the puzzle, in the generalisation that Art is the product of human happiness; it is contrary to asceticism; it is the expression of pleasure. But when the turning point of national progress is once reached, and art is regarded as the laborious incitement to pleasure,—no longer the spontaneous ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... place him in the front rank among mathematicians of all time; and yet the services that he rendered to mathematical science were surpassed by his extraordinary capacity for the combination of theory with practice. His powers of invention, of broad generalisation, of originality of thought were almost unbounded. Among the mathematical problems with which he dealt successfully were the theory of numbers, the squaring of the circle and the calculation of chances. To him we owe the conception of the law of the conservation of energy, of the motion of the centre ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... a definite object, in accomplishing which its members have indeed a share, but not a complete and concrete one (calling their whole being into play). Free individuals are sacrificed to the severe demands of the national ends, to which they must surrender themselves in this service of abstract generalisation. The Roman state is not a repetition of such a state of individuals as was the Athenian polis. The geniality and joy of soul that existed there have given place to harsh and rigorous toil. The interest of history ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... rehearsing [174] the praises of fire and strength to ourselves, who dwell too exclusively on them already? When Mr. Sidgwick says so broadly, that the world wants fire and strength even more than sweetness and light, is he not carried away by a turn for powerful generalisation? does he not forget that the world is not all of one piece, and every piece with the same needs at the same time? It may be true that the Roman world at the beginning of our era, or Leo the Tenth's Court at the time of the Reformation, or French society in the ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... said Annie. She saw this side of the affair with surprise. The minister seemed to have thought more about such matters than she had, and she insensibly receded from her first hasty generalisation of him, and paused to reapproach him on another level. The little girl began to play with her glasses, and accidentally knocked them from her nose. The minister's face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... case of Greece that gave rise to the profound observation that just as a man must die to live, so peoples must die that men may live through them. Renan, who, among the moderns, gave fullest value to this truth, included Judaea with Greece in the generalisation. Certainly as a nation, whether temporarily or irrevocably, Judaea perished no less than Athens, that a new world might be born. And a new Jewish nation would no more be the old Judaea of Isaiah than the Athens of to-day is the Athens ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... a work of generalisation as this, space will not permit of a detailed account of the return voyage, but on the 20th of March they reached the camp on the Murrumbidgee from which they had started. The relief party were not there, and there was nothing left but to toil on, though the men were falling asleep at the oars, ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... "God and the World," says that the word God "becomes a name for the infinite system of law regarded as a whole" (p. 122). If that were really all that was meant by the word the matter would not be worth discussing. "God" as a symbol of a generalisation is a mere name, and as such is as good as any other name. But, again, it is plain that people mean more than that when they speak about God. If God is a name for universal law, let any really religious man try the plan of substituting ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... may be obtained: measurement, enumeration, valuation, sampling, generalisation—Precautions to be observed ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois |
