"Hypothesis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... investigations it is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts it rises to the rank of a well-grounded theory. The {9} undulations of the ether and even its existence are hypothetical, yet every one now admits the undulatory theory of light. The principle of natural selection may ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... has read Suarez and has totally misrepresented him—a hypothesis which, I hope I need hardly say, I do not for a moment entertain: or, he has got his information at second hand, and has himself been deceived. But in that case, it is surely an imprudence on his part, to reproach me with having "read Suarez ad hoc, and ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Designs. In this they cunningly evade the acknowledgment of our Confession of Faith and Catechisms, decline to own the doctrine of the holy Trinity in unity, and do professedly adopt and avow the hypothesis of the famous modern Socinian, Dr. Taylor, of Norwich, anent the person of Christ. According to which he is no more than "a glorious being, truly created by God before the world." This pre-existent ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... extend—whether it exist simply as a feature of the immediate region, or as part of a great and unexplored area communicating with the Polar basin, and what may be the argument in favor of one or the other hypothesis, or the explanation which reconciles it with established laws—may be questions for men skilled in scientific deductions. Mine has been the more humble duty of recording what we saw. Coming as it did, a mysterious fluidity in the midst of vast ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... principle; neither could they explain paganism—that gigantic, millennial aberration of humanity—by merely human causes, much less lay the blame on God alone. But ultimately all this rests on one and the same thing—the supernatural and dualistic hypothesis. Consequently demonology is the kernel of the Christian conception of paganism: it is not merely a natural result of the hypotheses, it is the one and only correct expression of the way in which the new ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... equal facility. A political maxim is the work of induction, and cannot stand against experience, or stand on anything but experience. But this maxim, or definition, or whatever else it may be, sets facts at defiance. If you go back to antiquity, you will obtain no countenance for this hypothesis; and if you look at home you will gain still less. I have read that Sparta, and Rome, and Athens, and many others of the ancient family, were republics. They were so in form undoubtedly—the last approaching nearer to a perfect ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... what it does not contain—prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion—should ever have gained ground in the political world? The modern politicians, particularly those of the Socialist school, found their different theories upon one common hypothesis; and surely a more strange, a more presumptuous notion, could never ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... reach positions of fame and honour. What offence have these poor people committed that they, too, should not share the benefits of Western civilisation? . . . By some, indeed, their condition is explained on the hypothesis that their desires do not prompt them to better themselves. There is no truth in such a supposition. They have desires, but nature has limited their capacity to satisfy them; their duty as men limits it, and the amount of labour physically possible to a human being ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... dubitatively. 'But as he's probably neither the one nor the other, the hypothesis isn't worth seriously discussing. I must go off now; I've got a lecture at twelve. Good-bye. Don't forget the tickets for ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... absent, and upon this fact he asserted it to be physically impossible that there could have been a recent delivery; and, moreover, in his "Remarks," he proved mathematically that the mark was four times the size it ought to have been on that hypothesis. Miss Burns had not been attended professionally by any one as she was averse to doctors. Mr. Angus in his defence ascribed the whole of the legal proceedings against him to the malevolence of two interested parties, and had it ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... life,"—are all the forms of organic existence due to that? But how did the struggle for life cut these grooves, paint these ornamental lines? "Beauty is its own excuse for being"; and that Nature respects beauty is, to my mind, nothing less than fatal to the Darwinian hypothesis. That his law exists as a modifying influence I freely admit, and accredit him with an important addition to our thought upon such matters; that it is the sole formative influence I shall be better prepared to believe when I see that beauty is not regarded in Nature, but is a mere casual attendant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... which he traces the human race to an extinct quadrumanous animal related to that which produced the orang-outang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla. He may be said to have taken evolution out of the region of pure imagination, and by giving it a basis of fact, to have set it up as a reasonable working hypothesis. Prof. A. R. Wallace claims for Darwin "that he is the Newton of natural history, and has ... by his discovery of the law of natural selection and his demonstration of the great principles of the preservation ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... social offenders is not merely a proof of the spiritual nature of her rule, but the vindication of her self-idolatry. Again, she would forfeit the peculiar influence which she is every day exerting in a greater degree on the course of religion and the Church. The hypothesis of a superior spiritual nature in woman lies at the root, for instance, of the great modern institution of sisterhoods, and of the peculiar relation which is slowly attaching his Paula and his Eustochium to every Jerome ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... quiescent when the primary current had been once established, was not in its natural condition, its return to that condition being declared by the current observed at breaking the circuit. He called this hypothetical state of the wire the electro-tonic state: he afterwards abandoned this hypothesis, but seemed to return to it in later life. The term electro-tonic is also preserved by Professor Du Bois Reymond to express a certain electric condition of the nerves, and Professor Clerk Maxwell has ably defined and illustrated the hypothesis ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... the hypothesis of British defeat rather than that of British victory? Because it is the invariable practice of the masters of war to consider first the disagreeable possibilities and to make provision for them. But also because, according to every one of the tests which can be applied, the probability ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... will have placed in our hands no golden gift of a new society; both the ways and the direction of progress must be sought and determined by ideals. The point of view in regard to progress, at least as a working hypothesis, becomes an educational one, in a broad sense. Our future we must make. We shall not make it by politics. The institutions with which politics deals are dangerous cards to play. There is too much convention clinging to them, and they are too closely related to all the supports of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... feeling, until it has come so nearly to resemble the acquiescence of reason, that I find it difficult to distinguish between the two. I am enabled, too, plainly to trace this effect to the mesmeric influence. I cannot better explain my meaning than by the hypothesis that the mesmeric exaltation enables me to perceive a train of ratiocination which, in my abnormal existence, convinces, but which, in full accordance with the mesmeric phenomena, does not extend, except through its effect, into my ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world. The soul of man has a common being in all. There could be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphysics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the identity of mind in all, nor any science of ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to the identity of the will in all, nor any ground of expression even, of communication between man ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... my friend figured it. But isn't that a staggering hypothesis? I have never had a sealed letter read, but the psychic research people seem to have absolutely proved psychometry to be a fact. After you read Myers you are ready to believe ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... speculations old and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit Altruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human freedom, in ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... summit we re-embarked and pulled up Munster Water, supposing that it was connected with the strait at the back of Greville Island; but as the tide then flowing was running in a contrary direction to what was expected from the hypothesis we had formed, we began to suspect some other communication with the sea, and in this we were not deceived; for a narrow but a very deep strait opened suddenly to our view, at the bottom of the Water, through which some of the islands in the offing were recognised. In pulling through ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... and the majestically-fretted vault of heaven, with its planets, stars, and galaxies. It takes a special education to reconcile any one to this theory. Even if it were everything that a scientific hypothesis should be, the previously established modes of speech would be a permanent obstruction to its being received as ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... the nebulous star we call the Sun, If that hypothesis of theirs be sound' Said Ida; 'let us down and rest;' and we Down from the lean and wrinkled precipices, By every coppice-feathered chasm and cleft, Dropt through the ambrosial gloom to where below ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... resolutions declared that whenever the General Government assumed undelegated powers, its acts were unauthoritative, void, and of no force; and that, as in all cases of compact having no common judge, each party had a right to judge of infractions and redress. This hypothesis being assumed, the remainder of the resolutions supports it with arguments, using generally the ones employed by the opposition speakers in Congress to prove that the Alien and ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... just see what are the prospects of the next twenty years—a long enough space for a man to look forward to in anything else than a dream. War, it is true, may intervene, or some other terrible catastrophe; but we shall not admit this into our hypothesis, which proceeds on the assumption, that although people may wrangle here and there, and here and there fly at each other's throats, still the bulk of civilised mankind will go on tranquilly enough to present no direct barrier to the advancing tide. Here ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... of the people, and a policy contrary to the further interests of Bulgaria, which are incompatible with the building up of a strong Turkey in the Balkans, a Turkey that would be the bulwark of Germany. The most essential part of it is that this policy is based on a most improbable hypothesis, that is to say, the final triumph of the Austro-German arms. If the Bulgarian Government had left prejudices to one side and looked clearly at the events, they would not have been slow to understand that from the moment ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... three: for the goodness of his heart enjoyed the blessings which were exulting in the breasts of both the other two, together with his own. But we shall leave such disquisitions, as too deep for us, to those who are building some favourite hypothesis, which they will refuse no metaphysical rubbish to erect and support: for our part, we give it clearly on the side of Joseph, whose happiness was not only greater than the parson's, but of longer duration: for as soon as the first tumults ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... indisposition of students of nature to look upon the universe as a whole. But since the great theory of evolution has been brought to general notice no one will be satisfied at knowing a fact without also trying to establish its relation to other facts. Therefore a working hypothesis, which shall not be held to with tenacity, is not only allowable but necessary. It is also important to examine with proper respect the theories advanced by others. Some of these, suggested in the few publications on the subject and also by ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... for the generative source of that creative power of thought in him, from his own mysterious intellectual being to its first cause, he still reflected, as one can but do, the enlarged pattern of himself into the vague region of hypothesis. In this way, some, at all events, would have explained his mental process. To him that process was nothing less than the apprehension, the revelation, of the greatest and most real of ideas—the true substance of all things. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... LEIBNITZ, we are told, laughed at the fanciful system revealed in his Theodicee, and acknowledged that he never wrote it in earnest; that a philosopher is not always obliged to write seriously, and that to invent an hypothesis is only a proof of the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... opinions and beliefs may differ, among music critics, as to the necessity of Form in music, and the conditions of its existence, no reasonable objection can be taken to the hypothesis that Clearness and Attractiveness are the two vital requisites upon which the enjoyment of any art depends. The artist's utterances or creations must be intelligible, and they must be interesting. The lack, partial or total, of either of these qualities neutralizes ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... a very ingenious but most unhappy man, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, who, many years since, was obliged to retire from his profession, and from society, who hides himself under a borrowed name. This hypothesis seems to account satisfactorily for the rigid secrecy observed; but from what I can recollect of the unfortunate individual, these are not the kind of productions I should expect from him. Burley, if I mistake not, was on board the Prince of Orange's own vessel at the time of his death. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... hypothesis that gained more credit than this. It was that Captain Roblado was the man whom the cibolero had desired to make a victim; that he was guided against him by motives of jealousy; for the conduct of Carlos on the day of the fiesta was well-known, and had been ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... comfort, the faculty of sacrifice, the power to face death) belong exclusively to the most primitive, the least happy, the least intelligent of peoples, those which are least capable of reasoning, of taking danger into account." It was the common hypothesis among moralists that, as men's nerves grew more sensitive and the means of destruction more cruel and irresistible, no human being would be able to support the strain of actual fighting. It seemed inevitable that soldiers would rapidly become demoralized, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... which appeared in the air in the reigns of Constantine and Constantius were merely natural solar halos; and that under Julian, which appeared in the night, a lunar halo, or circle of colors, usually red, round those celestial bodies. But in opposition to this hypothesis we must observe that those natural phenomena do not ordinarily appear in the figure of a cross, but of a ring or circle, as both experience and the natural cause show. We ought also to take nonce, that this prodigy ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of the yoke? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress! The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated. The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical sentence of death in the sad eyes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... follows logically," Entman admitted, "provided the original hypothesis is true—that they cannot ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... thought of the application of this hypothesis to some parts of the Bible, there are others to which it is plainly inapplicable, and of these the narrative of the Creation is evidently one. No theory of limited inspiration can be admitted to explain any supposed inaccuracies ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... of the trees in colonies points to a genetic variation. At first I was unable to account for the grouping of the trees, for I had expected to find immune or resistant trees singly, here and there. But if we adopt the hypothesis of a heritable protoplasmic variation—something in their "blood," so to speak, the explanation is easy. We know that chestnut fruits or nuts do not travel far, like the seeds of willow, poplar, maple or ash, and therefore, in any given stand of chestnut, if we could go back from generation ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... are the Jehovist and Elohist of the Hexateuch; but considering the fact that the older notices in i.-ii. 5, on account of the prominence of Judah and for other reasons, are usually assigned to J, and that some of the characteristics of these two documents recur in the course of the book, the hypothesis that J and E are continued at least into Judges must be regarded as not improbable. [Footnote 1: In the story of Jephthah, ch. xi. 12-28, which interrupt the connexion and deals with Moab, not with Ammon, is ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... spirit," so an acute American critic defined it recently in an essay on Carlyle,—who was devoid of it and detested it,—"the scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and verification, between statement and proof, between appearance and reality. It is inspired by the impulse of investigation, tempered with distrust and edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty and skeptical ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... finds its way by experiment; and this finding of the way varies according to the stage of development reached, from the blindest groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual speculation, with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification; or to observation, induction, and deduction; or even into so rapid and intuitive an integration of all these processes in a single brain that we get the inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperate resolution of the teacher of new truths ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... were indignant at the attempt to impose boiled oatmeal upon them, instead of such a banquet as Ude would have displayed when peers were to partake of it. Here, therefore, is one instance of actual insanity, in which the sense of taste controlled and attempted to restrain the ideal hypothesis adopted by a deranged imagination. But the disorder to which I previously alluded is entirely of a bodily character, and consists principally in a disease of the visual organs, which present to the patient ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... means."[11] He was consequently the only conspirator who remained behind and at large after Fawkes was taken and the others had fled. There can be no reasonable doubt that Tresham, though not the writer, was the sender of the letter; and upon this hypothesis all investigators must go, as there is none other ...
— The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605 • William Parker
... matter to make thirty-seven big paces from one point and eighty-nine big paces from another, but, as every student of angles knows, it was very difficult to make the two lines converge at the proper point. But though their methods were rough, they succeeded at last in getting a very fair working hypothesis. A rough circle of forty feet in diameter was drawn about the stake Drew set up, and within that circle they were convinced the ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... mastered all knowledge bearing upon the question, but even when this was communicated to Priestley, he could not accept it, and, after making new experiments, he writes Watt, April 29, 1783, "Behold with surprise and indignation the figure of an apparatus that has utterly ruined your beautiful hypothesis," giving a rough sketch with his pen of the apparatus employed. Mark the promptitude of the master who had deciphered the message which the experimenter himself could not translate. He immediately writes in ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... sorrows had been caused by the people's guilt. In this connexion the Prince alluded to those acts of condemnation which the Governor-General had promulgated under the name of pardons, and treated with scorn the hypothesis that any crimes had been committed for Alva to forgive. "We take God and your Majesty to witness," said the epistle, "that if we have done such misdeeds as are charged in the pardon, we neither desire nor deserve the pardon. Like ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and some books of travel, and who can deny that Blasco Ibanez is a great universal genius? Read his novels and you will find that he has looked at the stars and knows Lord Kelvin's theory of vortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currents and the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Iceland waters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez and the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... these are men whose understandings are cast into a mould, and fashioned just to the size of a received HYPOTHESIS. The difference between these and the former, is, that they will admit of matter of fact, and agree with dissenters in that; but differ only in assigning of reasons and explaining the manner of operation. These are not at that open defiance with their senses, with the former: they can endure ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... fictitious law concerning the increase of population disproportionate to the means of subsistence. This fictitious law, this writer encompasses with mathematical formulae founded on nothing whatever; and then he launches it on the world. From the frivolity and the stupidity of this hypothesis, one would suppose that it would not attract the attention of any one, and that it would sink into oblivion, like all the works of the same author which followed it; but it turned out quite otherwise. The hack-writer who penned this treatise instantly ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... if the syce can extort two pice from you for repairs and get the work done for five pies, one clear pie will adhere to his glutinous palm. I do not assert that this is what happens, for I know nothing about it. All I maintain is that there is no hypothesis which will satisfactorily explain all the facts, unless you admit the general principle that the syce derives advantage of some kind from the manipulation of the smallest copper coin. One notable phenomenon which this principle helps to explain is the syce's anxiety to ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... between physical hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at the same time much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to turn hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no occasion to ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... merely moral strength the Democratic party would have gained had it remained united, it is impossible to estimate. Such a supposition can only be based on the absence of the extreme Southern doctrines concerning slavery. Given the presence of those doctrines in the canvass, no hypothesis can furnish a result different from that which occurred. In the contest upon the questions as they existed, the victory of Lincoln was certain. If all the votes given to all the opposing candidates had been concentrated and cast for a "fusion ticket," as was wholly or partly ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... lips of D'Avenant, Shakespeare's godson, and of Taylor, Shakespeare's acting colleague, intervened between the dramatist and the Hamlet of Pepys's diary. Those alone, who have heard the musical setting of "To be or not to be" adequately rendered, are in a position to reject this hypothesis altogether. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... "Planck's hypothesis consists in the supposition that each of these resonators can acquire or lose energy only by abrupt jumps, in such a way that the store of energy that it possesses must always be a multiple of a constant quantity, which he calls a 'quantum'—must ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... could hardly be established, but the action of juries is always problematical, and this was a case composed entirely of circumstantial evidence. The jury would be obliged to find that no reasonable hypothesis consistent with the innocence of the accused could be formulated upon the evidence. Thus, even in the face of the facts proven against him, some "freak" juryman might still have said, "But, after all, ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... century, the properties of bodies were investigated by several distinguished French mathematicians on the hypothesis that they are systems of molecules in equilibrium. The somewhat unsatisfactory nature of the results of these investigations produced, especially in this country, a reaction in favour of the opposite method of treating bodies as if they were, so far at least as our experiments are ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... Orientalists may say, undistinguished Occidentalists may be pardoned for inquiring when it was that this stream of Phoenician emigration flowed to the American shores, in what manner such an enormous body of colonists as the hypothesis necessarily supposes were conveyed hither, and what has become of their descendants. With an uncommon indulgence to our weakness of faith, Mr. Wilson condescends to meet these obvious questions. The time he cannot exactly fix; but it was "thousands of years ago,"—"before the time of Moses." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it, is highly disputable, and is at best a suggestion. But there is one broad truth in the matter which may in any case be considered as established. A country like Russia has far more inherent capacity for producing revolution in revolutionists ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... have you observe that we are reasoning upon a hypothesis, without which this book will be unintelligible to you; namely, we suppose that your honeymoon has lasted for a respectable time and that the lady that you married was not a widow, but a maid; on the opposite supposition, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... what direction to make the new inquiry—which, should it cast no immediate light on the answer sought, can yet hardly fail to be a step towards final discovery. Every experiment has its origin in hypothesis; without the scaffolding of hypothesis, the house of science could never arise. And the construction of any hypothesis whatever is the work of the imagination. The man who cannot invent will never discover. The imagination often gets a glimpse of the law itself long ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... wonderful order of the universe. The human mind was, indeed, helpless to conceive such a First Cause in any form and lay prostrate before the Unknown, yet she herself was an enthusiastic delver into scientific hypothesis and the teachings of Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel had satisfied her intellect if they had failed to content her soul. The theory of evolution as applied to life on her own little planet appealed strongly to her because it accounted plausibly for the presence ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... tries to execute a quick flank movement to the left. Just at this moment the other suddenly remembers that he would have avoided all this tomfoolery if he had only kept to the right, and tries to make good on this hypothesis. The result is that they bump into each other violently and begin side-stepping again. After another round or two of Terpsichorean gymnastics one of them breaks through the other's guard and escapes and each continues on his belated ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... explanations. Animal magnetism was animal magnetism—it was a fact, and not a theory. Its effects were not to be doubted; they depended on testimony of sufficient validity to dispose of any mere question of authenticity. All that he attempted was hypothesis, which he invited us to controvert. He might as well have desired me to demonstrate that the sun is not a carbuncle. On the modus operandi, and the powers of his art, the doctor was more explicit. There were a great many gradations in quality ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Eleanor's conversation after. Transmigration, done into the vernacular, and applied with startling directness, was evidently a fascinating subject from the first. She brought back as well a vivid and epigrammatic version of the nebular hypothesis. ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly meaningless if the features had not been emphasized—italicized, so to speak—by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, which ever one that was) in all her glory was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow crape bonnet profusely decorated with ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... God's image, and bears the divine impress in all the lineaments of body and soul. His degradation cannot wholly obliterate his inherent nobility, and indeed his actual corruption bears witness to his possible holiness. Granting the hypothesis of evolution, matter even in its crudest beginnings contains potentially all the rich variety of the natural and spiritual life. The reality of a growing thing lies in its highest form of being. In the light ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... country, - very early, it must be admitted, since it goes back to the deluge. The first part of this treatise is chiefly occupied with an argument to show the identity of Peru with the golden Ophir of Solomon's time! This hypothesis, by no means original with the author, may give no unfair notion of the character of his mind. In the progress of his work he follows down the line of Inca princes, whose exploits, and names even, by no means ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... and he has since taken every opportunity of testing it by all the newly-ascertained facts with which he has become acquainted, or has been able to observe himself. These have all served to convince him of the correctness of his hypothesis. Fully to enter into such a subject would occupy much space, and it is only in consequence of some views having been lately promulgated, he believes, in a wrong direction, that he now ventures to present his ideas to the public, with only such obvious illustrations of the arguments ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... what could be developed out of eight hundred years of Divine revelation and discipline. But Jesus is the Son of Man: there is a width, a breadth, a universality about Him which cannot be accounted for save on the hypothesis which John himself declared, that "He who cometh from above ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... taken up for the most part by actual work on the enormous mass of calculation necessary. It is inconceivable to the layman what tremendous labor is involved in the development of a single mathematical hypothesis, and a concrete illustration of it was the long time, with tremendously advanced calculating machines, that was ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... Years ago Edison expressed his contempt for the man who watched the clock, and now every Christmas his office family take up a collection and buy him a clock, and present it with great ceremony. He replies in a speech on the nebular hypothesis and all are very happy. One year the present assumed the form of an Ingersoll Dollar Watch, which the Wizard showed to me with great pride. In the stockade is a beautiful library building and here you see clocks galore, some of which must have cost a thousand dollars a piece, all silent. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... grains of quartz, with a considerable admixture of quartzite and sandstone. The large quartz pebbles were probably derived from the large lenses of quartz in the Catoctin schist, for no other formation above water at the time contained quartz in large enough masses to furnish such pebbles. On the hypothesis that they were of local origin and merely worked over during submergence, they might be connected with the quartz veins of the Piedmont plain. That theory, however, with difficulty accounts for their well-rounded condition, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... may seem so erroneous as to be absurd. It is little more than a century since one of the greatest of astronomers, Sir William Herschel, contended that the central globe of the sun might be a habitable world, sheltered from the blazing photosphere by a layer of cool non-luminous clouds. Such an hypothesis was not incompatible with what was then known of the constitution of the heavenly bodies, though it is incompatible with what we know now. It was simply a matter on which more evidence was to be accumulated, and the holding ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... evolution is the attraction of particles of matter for one another. This leads to the condensation of matter into suns and their planets, and the geological evolution of the earth, for example. Laplace's nebular hypothesis is an attempt to give an adequate statement of the cosmic phase of evolution. While this hypothesis has been much criticized of late, in its essentials it seems to stand. We are not, however, as students of society, concerned with this ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... and dextrin, they had the properties of mixtures of these two substances. On the assumption of the existence of these compounds, Brown and his colleagues formulated what is known as the maltodextrin or amyloin hypothesis of starch degradation. C.J. Lintner, in 1891, claimed to have separated a sugar, isomeric with maltose, which is termed isomaltose, from the products of starch hydrolysis. A.R. Ling and J.L. Baker, as well as Brown and Morris, in 1895, proved that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of 1653 enjoin it. They must therefore lie between 1648 and 1653, and it seems worth while to give them here conjecturally as being possibly the supplementary, or 'more particular instructions,' which the government contemplated; particularly as this hypothesis gains colour from the unusual form of the heading 'Instructions for the better ordering.' Though this form became fixed from this time forward, there is, so far as is known, no previous example of it except in the orders which Lord Wimbledon propounded to his council of war in ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... she brought herself with difficulty to frame the dread hypothesis—"the dinner is not good?" Her voice sank. She waited, tense, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... remarked, that one of the positions assumed by M. de Gasparin, as the basis of his hypothesis, does not tally with some of the facts detailed by Montgeron. It was pushes with swords, the former alleges, never thrusts, to which the convulsionists were exposed. I have already stated that this was usually the fact; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... blood. Until the occurrence of dancers among varieties of mice which are known to be unmixed with true dancers is established, and further, until the inheritance of this peculiar deviation from the normal is proved, Saint Loup's account of the origin of the dancing mouse race must be regarded as an hypothesis. ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... Dark Lady broke Shakespear's heart, as Mr Harris will have it she did, is an extremely unShakespearian hypothesis. "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for love," says Rosalind. Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespear put all his own impish superiority to vulgar ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... forming literary taste faith enters. You probably will not specially care for a particular classic at first. If you did care for it at first, your taste, so far as that classic is concerned, would be formed, and our hypothesis is that your taste is not formed. How are you to arrive at the stage of caring for it? Chiefly, of course, by examining it and honestly trying to understand it. But this process is materially helped by an act of faith, by the frame of mind which says: "I know on the highest authority ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... must be attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron that the fire does not literally "draw the fire out," which is her hypothesis. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... investigation which my researches into the character of the Etruscan "Involuti" have necessitated, I frequently encounter the root Kad, k2ad, or Qad. Schnitzler's recent and epoch-making discovery that d in Etruscan b2, has led me to consider it a plausible hypothesis that we may convert Kad or Qad into Kab2, in which case it is by no means beyond the range of a cautious conjecture that the Involuti are identical with the Cab-iri (Cabiri). Though you will pardon me for confessing, what you already know, that I ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... of the English school define intelligence as a "common central factor" which participates in all sorts of special mental activities. This factor is explained in terms of a psycho-physiological hypothesis of "cortex ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... on which Skene mainly founds his assertion that Johanna of Strathnaver was Earl John's daughter, is just as easily explicable, and with equal verisimilitude, if she was not. Snaekoll went to Norway in 1232, leaving behind him, on our hypothesis, one child, an infant daughter of tender years, or possibly as yet unborn. The child of a younger child of Ragnhild would probably be still younger. Heiress to very large landed estates and justly entitled to claim a moiety of the Erlend Thorfinnson half of Caithness and all the Moddan ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... No hypothesis has yet been formulated which will account for the structure of the corona, or for its variation in shape. The great difficulty with regard to theorising upon this subject, is the fact that we see so much of the corona under conditions ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... creation, and having a ransom annexed to it. But the enmity of the heathen gods was original—that is, to the very nature of man, and as though man had in some stage of his career been their rival; which indeed he was, if we adopt Milton's hypothesis of the gods as ruined angels, and of man as created to supply the vacancy thus arising ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... of his dissertation upon the hypothesis of the poisoning of Charles, relates the following anecdote:—"Mr. Henley, of Hampshire, told me that the Duchess of Portsmouth having come to England in 1699, he learned that she had caused it to be understood that Charles ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Ajaccio, arriving on the fifteenth. Weighing the probabilities, it seems likely that the latter was doubtful, since there is but the slenderest possibility of his having been at Douay in the following year, the only other hypothesis, and there exists no record of his activities in Corsica before the spring of 1787. The chronology of the two years is still involved in obscurity and it is possible that he went with his regiment to Douay, contracted his malaria ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... disadvantage in regard to him who is contented with a theodicy, and who, for instance, regards the whole of man's existence as a punishment for sin or a process of purification. At this stage, and in this embarrassing position, Strauss even suggests a metaphysical hypothesis—the driest and most palsied ever conceived—and, in reality, but an unconscious parody of one of Lessing's sayings. We read on page 255: "And that other saying of Lessing's— 'If God, holding truth in His right hand, and in His left only the ever-living ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... effectiveness upon pure reasoning is called conviction; the part that consists of an emotional appeal to the people addressed is called persuasion. If the only purpose of argumentation were to demonstrate the truth or falsity of a hypothesis, conviction alone would be sufficient. But its purpose is greater than this: it aims both (1) to convince men that certain ideas are true, and also (2) to persuade them to act in accordance with the truth presented. Neither conviction nor persuasion can with ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... he would not do. She gave no manifestation. She was almost glum. Her French, though free, was markedly inferior to Laurencine's. She denied any interest in music. George decided, with self-condemnation, that he had been deliberately creating in his own mind an illusion about her; on no other hypothesis could either his impatience to meet her to-night, or his disappointment at not meeting her on the night of the Cafe Royal dinner, be explained. She was nothing, after all. And he did not deeply care for Miss Irene Wheeler, whom he could watch at ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... they floundered about in the waves of doubt Rose a fearful Hypothesis, Who gibbered with glee as they sank in the sea, And the ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... your hypothesis, O'Dowd," said Barnes. "It seems sound and reasonable. The extraordinary precautions taken by Roon and Paul to prevent identification, dead or alive, supports your whimsey, as you call it. The thing that puzzles me, however, is the ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... of it the more extraordinary did my companion's hypothesis, that the man had been poisoned, appear. I remembered how he had sniffed his lips, and had no doubt that he had detected something which had given rise to the idea. Then, again, if not poison, what had caused the man's death, since there was neither wound ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... But the consequences would be unpleasant, if the inquirer, as soon as he had finished his calculation, were to begin to throw stones about in all directions, without considering that his conclusion rests on a false hypothesis, and that his projectiles, instead of flying away through infinite space, will speedily return in parabolas, and break the windows and heads of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hypothesis has no room for this enormous percentage of carbon-dioxide in the primitive atmosphere. Hinc illoe lachrymoe: in plain English, hence the acute quarrel about primitive climate, and the close scanning of the geological chronicle for indications that ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... startled to the edge of flight by the grunting upheaval of what had seemed a black shadow under the moon. Bob in especial acquired concentrated practice in horsemanship for the simple reason that his animal refused to dismiss his first hypothesis of bears. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... any geological proofs of the correctness of Darwin's opinions, but, like that distinguished writer, he is obliged to take refuge behind the deficiency of the geological record, and to suppose facts and proofs may hereafter be discovered, when few are now known to favor the new hypothesis. We can see no more reason why a giraffe should have had a long neck, because he wished to crop the leaves of tall trees, than that mankind should have become winged, because in all times both children ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wrought by the Igorot when the Spaniards came to the Philippines, and they wrote regarding it that it was then an old and established industry and art. It may possibly be that bronze was made in the Philippines before the arrival of the Spaniard, but there is no proof of such an hypothesis. ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... arrived at Jaffa on 24th May, and stayed there the 25th, 26th, and 27th. We left it on the 28th. Thus the rear-guard, which, according to these writers; left-on the 29th, did not remain, even according to their own hypothesis, three days after the army to see the sick die. In reality it left on the 29th of May, the day after we did: Here are the very words of the Major-General (Berthier) in his official account, written under the eye and under the dictation of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... is not a theory. In this question of practical morality, as in the others, life has preceded hypothesis, and there is no room to believe that she ever yields it place. This liberty—relative, I admit, like everything we are acquainted with, for that matter—this duty whose existence we question, is none the less the basis of all the judgments we pass upon ourselves and our fellow-men. We hold each ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... taken place, especially between physicists and chemists, over the nature of the substances with which all space must, according to scientific hypothesis, be filled. One side contends that it is infinitely thinner than the thinnest gas, absolutely frictionless and without weight; the other asserts that it is denser than the densest solid. In this substance the ultimate atoms of matter are thought ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... sepulchre, how was it possible for belief in the Resurrection to have been originated, or maintained? If His body was not in the grave, what had become of it? If His friends stole it away then they were deceivers of the worst type in preaching a resurrection; and we have already seen that that hypothesis is ridiculous. If His enemies took it away, for which they had no motive, why did they not produce it and say, 'There is an answer to your nonsense. There is the dead man. Let us hear no more of this absurdity of His having ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... was indeed the simple one; in most cases it would have been accepted without demur; or recourse would have been had to the hypothesis of a sudden change in the Professor's opinion; indeed Marchmont broached this solution in an off-hand way. Neither view was explicitly rejected, but a third possibility was in their minds, one which would not and could not ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... the denial was purely a "diplomatic" one. Others ventured the hypothesis that the whole thing was an advertising dodge, designed to set the country agog with excitement and stimulate big ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... that man was Sir Isaac Newton. The first chapter therefore deals with the generally recognized rules which govern philosophical reasoning, the same being three in number; the fundamental rule being, that in making any hypothesis, the results of experience as obtained by observation and experiments ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... Maud Gorka when she uttered that sentence. Involuntarily Dorsenne looked at him, and involuntarily, master as he was of himself, he looked at Dorsenne. It was no longer a question of a simple hypothesis. That Boleslas Gorka had returned to Rome unknown to his wife constituted, for any one who knew of his relations with Madame Steno, and of the infidelity of the latter, an event full of formidable consequences. Both men were possessed by the same thought. Was there still time to prevent ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... occasion to Abp. Parker to imagine it might have belonged to Theodore of Canterbury, which however Hody was of opinion could not be of that age. "Th. Gaza," continues Dr. James, "died in 1478; the suggestion here made is quite compatible with the hypothesis that Sellinge was the means of conveying the Homer to England, and does supply a rather welcome interpretation of the inscription." This reasonable hypothesis may be strengthened if we point out that Gaza was in Rome from 1464 to 1472, and Selling visited that city ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... what they took from the rich. Diligent enquiries have been made to ascertain whether the personage known as Robin Hood had a real existence, but without positive results. The story of his life is purely legendary, and the theories in regard to him have never advanced beyond hypothesis. It is exceedingly probable that such a man lived in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and that the exploits of other less prominent popular heroes were connected with his name and absorbed in his reputation. The noble descent which has often been ascribed to him is in all likelihood ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... earth came to the conclusion that its manifold structures had developed by a slow and orderly process that was entirely natural; for they found no evidence of any sudden and drastic world-wide remodeling such as that postulated by the Cuvierian hypothesis of catastrophe. The battle waged for many years; but now naturalists believe that the forces, of nature, whose workings may be seen on all sides at the present time, have reconstructed the continents and ocean beds in the past in ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Italy would naturally reject a consul, the enemy of their sovereign; but any ingenious hypothesis that might explain the silence of Constantinople and Egypt, (the Chronicle of Marcellinus, and the Paschal,) is overturned by the similar silence of Marius, bishop of Avenche, who composed his Fasti in the kingdom of Burgundy. If the evidence of Gregory of Tours were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Mrs. Raikes's gipsy face, and Evelyn Howard's warnings, but wisely decided to hold my peace, whilst Cynthia exhausted every possible hypothesis, and cheerfully hoped, "Aunt Emily will send him away, and will never ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... think; but behaviourists say that the talk they have to listen to can be explained without supposing that people think. Where you might expect a chapter on "thought processes" you come instead upon a chapter on "The Language Habit." It is humiliating to find how terribly adequate this hypothesis turns out to be. ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... way, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. "Does this have anything to do with the hypothesis you presented to me some time ago? ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... strengthened, encouraged and directed, and the elements opposing its action are demoralized. Now, to any one who has thought out and connected the various evolution theories, as taken, not from any occult source, but from the ordinary scientific manual accessible to all—from the hypothesis of the latest variation in the habits of species—say, the acquisition of carnivorous habits by the New Zealand parrot, for instance—to the farthest glimpses backwards into Space and Eternity afforded by the "Fire Mist" doctrine, it will be apparent that they all rest on one basis. That ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... this late date, and the commander's expedition, lacking any qualified geneticists or genetic engineers, had no way of determining—and, indeed, no real interest in determining—whether this was or was not true. None the less, historical evidence seems to indicate the validity of the hypothesis. ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... should wear. After all, I thought, it was not always wealth and beauty that accomplished the greatest things. I might surprise our little world yet, though my face had no extraordinary beauty, nor my form any marvellous grace—with which hypothesis I laid a rich spray upon my breast and, finding it ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... epics attributed to him. It was left to modern critics to maintain the contrary. In 1795 Professor F. A. Wolf, of Germany, published his Prolegomena, or prefatory essay to the Iliad, in which he advanced the hypothesis that both the Iliad and the Odyssey were a collection of separate lays by different authors, for the first time reduced to writing and formed into the two great poems by the despot Pisis'tratus, of Athens, and his friends. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... to De Sylva, yet it evoked no comment. Its first real effect was observable in the counting-house of the Hamburg owners. There it was believed that Captain Schmidt had either become a lunatic himself or was in touch with a rich one. Schmidt was so well known to them that they acted on the latter hypothesis. They cabled him their hearty commendation, "drew" on the Paris bank by the next post, and awaited developments. To their profound amazement, the money was paid. As they had obtained 8,750 pounds for a vessel worth about ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... natural character, even on the hypothesis of his sincerity, was arbitrary, and the very opposite of what we look for in the character of a champion of freedom. It seems to us supremely ridiculous to talk of such a man as being capable of having his conduct determined ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... the Prince; "I was just going to show that the instalment of 4 per cent. on the advance of 30 millions is L1,200,000 a year. Very well; suppose that in one year, though the hypothesis is utterly impossible, that not one single sixpence of annuity is paid. How would that be?" (Here the left coat-tail was observed to be violently agitated, and ARTHUR leaning over, JOKIM half-rising, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... former of whom "very much praised Mr Newton's mathematics; shook his head at the name of Hobbes, and told me he thought him a pauvre esprit." Here follows a genuine Addisonianism: "His book is now reprinted with many additions, among which he shewed me a very pretty hypothesis of colours, which is different from that of Cartesius or Newton, though they may all three be true." Boileau, now sixty-four, deaf as a post, and full of the "sweltered venom" of ill-natured criticism, nevertheless received Addison kindly; and when presented ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... If this hypothesis is demonstrated, division of labor plays a role much more important than that which has ordinarily been attributed to it. It is not to be regarded as a mere luxury, desirable perhaps, but not indispensable to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... imitation is opposed to historic imitation. It would only be a historic imitation if it proposed a historic end, if its principal object were to teach us that a thing has taken place, and how it took place. On this hypothesis it ought to keep rigorously to historic accuracy, for it would only attain its end by representing faithfully that which really took place. But tragedy has a poetic end, that is to say, it represents an action to move us, and to charm our souls by the medium of this emotion. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and in 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of Faraday's notion, that electric induction takes place through an intervening medium, or 'dielectric,' and not by some incomprehensible 'action at a distance.' He also devised an hypothesis of electrical images, which became a powerful agent in solving problems of electrostatics, or the science which deals with the forces ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... guest's last words made him take them up. "But is the lady you allude to more than a hypothesis? Surely you're ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... is some bodily ailment or other. The hypothesis that the 'thorn in the flesh' was the sting of the animal nature inciting him to evil is altogether untenable, because such a thorn could never have been left when the prayer for its removal was earnestly presented; nor could it ever have ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the object of general wonder and curiosity. Every one pitied the poor Rosabella for what she had suffered, execrated the villain who had bribed Matteo to murder her, and endeavoured to connect the different circumstances together by the help of one hypothesis or other, among which it would have been difficult to decide ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... as they all recognize a common grievance, the dull murmurs of the people become cries of impatience. Rossini has proceeded on this hypothesis. After the outcry in C major, Pharoah sings his grand recitative: Mano ultrice di un Dio (Avenging hand of God), after which the original subject is repeated with more vehement expression. All Egypt appeals to Moses ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... thing to observe is that if we can succeed in finding out such a sequence of cause and effect as the one we are in search of, somebody else may find out the same creative secret also; and then, by the hypothesis of the case, we should both be armed with an infallible power, and if we wanted to employ this power against each other we should be landed in the "impasse" of a conflict between two powers each of which was irresistible. Consequently it follows that the first principle of ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... be imagined, yet Samuel Adams imagined it perfectly. Before there was any material evidence of the fact, he was able, by reasonable inference, to erect well-grounded suspicions into a kind of working hypothesis. Mr. Hutchinson, Governor of the Province, was an Enemy of Liberty with many English friends; he would be required by official duty and led by personal inclination to maintain a regular correspondence with ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... must have considered superhuman. The remarkable nature of the mystery, its picturesque and unique features, the fact that three men had been killed within a few days in precisely the same manner, and the absence of any reasonable hypothesis to explain these deaths—all this served to rivet public attention. Every amateur detective in the country had a theory to exploit—and far-fetched enough most of ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... he said, amid strident cheers from Opposition, welcoming their old captain back to the fighting line, "asked to force through under the Parliament Act a Bill which by hypothesis requires amendment. What is worse than that is that we are to be compelled to read it a third time and to part with it while we know that it is to be amended, but while we have not the smallest conception in what respects or in what way." Insisted that before Home Rule ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... an authodox opinion among physiologists that tea contributes nothing towards support of the human system; that it only rouses it into action, an effect which should, consistently, be followed by corresponding reaction and depression, which plainly is not the case. This hypothesis leaves the enquiring layman in a dilemma. Tea must either enable the system to draw more heavily or more economically upon the resources afforded by recognized food, or it is itself nutriment. Otherwise, an established principle of physics—that there ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... further possible to calculate chemical equilibria from heats of reaction and specific heats. The circumstance that chemical affinity and heat-evolution so nearly coincide at low temperatures may be derived from the hypothesis that chemical processes are the result of forces of attraction between the atoms of the different elements. If we may disregard the kinetic energy of the atoms, and this is legitimate for low temperatures, it follows that both heat-evolution ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... from the past and running on to the future,—lines receding, therefore, from our view in either direction. Within our limited view they appear to be parallel lines, as a general thing neither approaching to nor diverging from each other. The first hypothesis assumes that they were parallel from the unknown beginning and will be to the unknown end. The second hypothesis assumes that the apparent parallelism is not real and complete, at least aboriginally, but approximate or temporary; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... passage of a fluid through the pores of the circumjacent body, whether of earth, stone, or water; I answer, that it is not within the usual economy of nature, to use two processes for one species of production. While I withhold my assent, however, from this hypothesis, I must deny it to every other I have ever seen, by which their authors pretend to account for the origin of shells in high places. Some of these are against the laws of nature, and therefore impossible; and others are built on positions more difficult ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in the credulity with which we accept its excuses, can be regarded as a scientific investigator of it. Those who accuse vivisectors of indulging the well-known passion of cruelty under the cloak of research are therefore putting forward a strictly scientific psychological hypothesis, which is also simple, human, obvious, and probable. It may be as wounding to the personal vanity of the vivisector as Darwin's Origin of Species was to the people who could not bear to think that they were cousins to the monkeys (remember ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... mountain regions of India, human couples have been discovered living alone, and who, ape-like, fled to the trees as soon as they were met; but there is no further knowledge on the subject. If verified, these claims would only confirm the previous superstition and hypothesis concerning the development of the human race. The probability is that, wherever human beings sprang up, there were, at first, single couples. Certain it is, however, that so soon as a larger number of beings existed, descended from a common parent stock, they ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... a very safe premise upon which to base any further calculations that the total amount of nitrogen in the silage was identical with that in the grass. There may have been a loss, but that is not yet proved. Arguing then upon the first hypothesis, it is evident that 100 parts of the organic matters of silage represent more than 100 parts of the organic matter of grass, and by the equation we obtain 10.75:11.43 :: 100:106 approximately. If now we calculate the composition ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... disproved,—because denial, like affirmation, must, in order to be final, be logically supported; and spirit is, if not illogical, at any rate outside the domain of logic,—but as being a hopelessly vague and untrustworthy hypothesis. The Bible is a human book; Christ was a gentleman, related to the Buddha and Plato families; Joseph was an ill- used man; death, so far as we have any reason to believe, is annihilation of personal existence; life is—the predicament of the body previous to death; morality is the enlightened ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... facts and principles above set forth and considered, we may begin to see that there is nothing "unnatural" in the hypothesis that there may be reports conveyed to the consciousness of man by means of higher vibrations than those of ordinary sound, or ordinary sight, providing that man has either (1) highly developed his ordinary senses ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... chief merit on which I value myself, and found my hopes for future regard, is that faithful veracity with which I have compiled this invaluable little work; carefully winnowing away the chaff of hypothesis, and discarding the tares of fable, which are too apt to spring up and choke the seeds of truth and wholesome knowledge. Had I been anxious to captivate the superficial throng, who skim like swallows over the surface of literature; ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... very little—an insignificant detail from an immense picture—the picture in its totality, that is to say, the whole universe remains. To make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is a contradiction in terms, since the brain is, by hypothesis, a part of this image."[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 4 (Fr. pp. 3-4).] The data of perception are external images, then my body, and changes brought about by my body in the surrounding images. The external images transmit ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... and elegance might produce an equality of swiftness. This consideration naturally produced another, which is, that the blood of all Horses may be merely ideal; and if so, a word of no meaning. But before I advance any thing more on this hypothesis, and that I may not be guilty of treason against the received laws of jockey-ship, I do here lay it down as a certain truth, that no Horses but such as come from foreign countries, or which are of extraction ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... thought and feeling must be probably unwholesome while her vitals are being eaten out by an abominable falsehood, only half believed by the masses, and not believed at all by the higher classes, even those of the priesthood; but only kept up for their private aggrandisement.' But there was more than hypothesis in favour of the men who might say this; there was universal, notorious, shocking fact. It was a fact that Italy was the centre where sins were invented worthy of the doom of the Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all nations who had connection with ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... lost the trail, and wandered over the plateau; but Haig could not have missed him, if he had been anywhere in sight before the storm revealed him. No, nothing could explain it; and there remained only one hypothesis, which was untenable, preposterous and mad. And yet it fascinated and held him. He had once said jocularly that Sunnysides was not a real horse at all; that he was a demon—a spirit. Well, it was a real horse, right enough, that ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... mere hypothesis that the venerable and reverend Dr. Peters could ever by any possibility have been guilty of such misdemeanors was so overwhelming, not to say paralyzing, that the minister's wife could only drop her jaw, open her mouth, ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... two limiting conditions or in itself. In other passages also we find that devout meditation on Brahman is made dependent on Brahman being qualified by limiting adjuncts; so, for instance (Ch. Up. III, 14, 2), 'He who consists of mind, whose body is pra/n/a.' The hypothesis of Brahman being meditated upon under three aspects perfectly agrees with the pra/n/a chapter[135]; as, on the one hand, from a comparison of the introductory and the concluding clauses we infer that the subject-matter of the whole chapter is one only, and ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... old. Phagocytes will remove cells which are dead and often cells which are superfluous in a part, but there is no evidence that this is ever other than a conservative process. Since it is impossible to single out any one condition to which old age is due, the hypothesis of Metschnikoff should have no more regard given it than the many other hypotheses which ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... not known since Luther nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints' Church at Wittenberg. The older folk as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine. I recollect a botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he had no opinions on Darwin's hypothesis. The young men of the time I am describing grew up with the new ideas and accepted them as a matter of course. Herbert Spencer, then deemed the greatest of English thinkers, was pointing out in portentous phraseology the enormous significance of ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... imps of witches are sometimes wicked spirits of our own kind and nature, and possibly the same that have been witches and sorcerers in this life: this supposal may give a fairer and more probable account of many of the actions of sorcery and witchcraft than the other hypothesis, that they are always devils. And to this conjecture I will venture to subjoin another, which hath also its probability, viz. that it is not improbable but the familiars of witches are a vile kind ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... the elevation of Alpha Draconis at its lower culmination when 3 deg. 42' from the pole. The last epoch when the star was thus placed was circiter 2160 B.C.; the epoch next before that was 3440 B.C. Between these two we should have to choose, on the hypothesis that the slant tunnel was really directed to that star when the foundations of the pyramid were laid. For the next epoch before the earlier of the two named was about 28,000 B.C., and the pyramid's date cannot have been more remote than ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... upon an admission of the hypothesis, that the ice in those seas comes from the rivers, there are others which give great room to suspect the truth of the hypothesis itself. Captain Cook, whose opinion respecting the formation of ice had formerly coincided with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... am blaming you, my dear Eleanor," said Mrs. Markham. "For Heaven's sake assent to the wildest and most extravagant hypothesis they can offer, if it will leave us free to arrange our own plans for getting away. I begin to think we were not a very harmonious party on the Excelsior, and most of our troubles here are owing to that. We forget we have fallen among a lot of original saints, as guileless and as ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... happen to my friend if James did not keep his promise? I said to myself that the greatest punishment that could befall a man who was an accomplice in aiding another to escape, was imprisonment in turn; thus, admitting this hypothesis, once free, although compelled to hide myself, I had sufficient resources at my disposal not to quit England before having, in my turn, liberated Sidney. What more can I say to you? The instinct of life, ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... river, the weather clouded, but afterwards cleared up with a change of wind from the South-East, which, from its heat, and from the listless sensations it caused, resembled the hot land-wind of Port Jackson: this seems to afford additional ground for the hypothesis that the interior of this immense island is ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King |
