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Hypothetical   /hˌaɪpəθˈɛtəkəl/  /hˌaɪpəθˈɛtɪkəl/   Listen
Hypothetical

noun
1.
A hypothetical possibility, circumstance, statement, proposal, situation, etc..



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"Hypothetical" Quotes from Famous Books



... seizing on the administration of the State, he had been justly slain." It was merely a restatement of the old constitutional theory that one who aimed at monarchy was by that very fact an outlaw. But the answer, hypothetical as was its expression, implied a suspicion of Gracchus's aims. It did not please the crowd; there was a roar of dissent. Then Scipio lost his temper. The contempt of the soldier for the civilian, of the Roman for the foreigner, of the man of pure for the man of mixed blood—a ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... The rate of overblocking or precision is measured by the proportion of the things a classification system assigns to a certain category that are appropriately classified. The plaintiffs' expert, Dr. Nunberg, provided the hypothetical example of a classification system that is asked to pick out pictures of dogs from a database consisting of 1000 pictures of animals, of which 80 were actually dogs. If it returned 100 hits, of which 80 were in fact pictures of dogs, and the remaining 20 were pictures of cats, horses, and ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

... the other hand, has with equal justice insisted upon a practically unlimited bank of time, ready to discount any quantity of hypothetical paper. It has kept before our eyes the power of the infinitely little, time being granted, and has compelled us to exhaust known causes before ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... "Ulster Day," September 28th. Sir Edward Carson was provided with a guard carrying swords and wooden rifles, and in one instance dummy cannon made a feature of the pageant. These things excited a good deal of derision, and the language of the Covenant was held to be only "hypothetical treason." ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... philosophy," he tells us, "falls naturally into five divisions, or five fundamental sciences, whose order of succession is determined by the necessary or invariable subordination (estimated according to no hypothetical opinions) of their several phenomena; these are, astronomy, mechanics, (la physique,) chemistry, physiology, and lastly, social physics. The first regards the phenomena the most general, the most abstract, the most remote from humanity; they influence all others, without ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... to ensure that the general public be kept in ignorance of the existence of such an organization as the Hashishin, but I must assume that this hypothetical third party were well aware that they had Hassan, as well as the authorities, to count with. Granting the existence of such a party, my beautiful acquaintance might be classified as one of its ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer

... the several sorts of documents emanating from the Old South have a character of true depiction inversely proportioned to their abundance and accessibility. The statutes, copious and easily available, describe a hypothetical regime, not an actual one. The court records are on the one hand plentiful only for the higher tribunals, whither questions of human adjustments rarely penetrated, and on the other hand the decisions were themselves largely ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... if hypothetical murder of an equally hypothetical spouse, she groped vainly for adequate words. Before she could ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... remarks which I might otherwise put into a preface. For as I have confessions to make which amount almost to an apology, I had rather address them to one who is pledged to express the most favourable possible view of my literary efforts, such as they are, than to that hypothetical reader, of whose tastes I feel most shamefully ignorant, though I am ready to assume everything in ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various

... re-examine Stephenson, with the view of removing from the minds of the committee an impression so unfavorable, and as they supposed, so damaging to their case. "With regard," asked Mr. Joy, "to all those hypothetical questions of my learned friend, they have been all put on the supposition of going twelve miles an hour; now that is not the rate at which, I believe, any of the engines of which you have spoken have traveled?" "No," replied Stephenson, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... the way in which the law works Lamarck takes the hypothetical case of a gastropod mollusc, which as it creeps along experiences dimly the need to feel the objects in front of it. It makes an effort (unconscious, be it noted) to touch these objects with the anterior portions of its ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... different matters. But if one proceeds steadily in his investigations from this historic point, then a stop is put, once and for all, to the demand for final solutions and for eternal truths; one is firmly conscious of the necessary limitations of all acquired knowledge, of its hypothetical nature, owing to the circumstances under which it has been gained. One cannot be imposed upon any longer by the inflated insubstantial antitheses of the older metaphysics of true and false, good and evil, identical and differentiated, necessary and accidental; ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... that however honest you are—and your honesty has been tested repeatedly—and however strong your imagination—about half of your training has been devoted to developing it—you can't possibly be sure, answering a hypothetical question, that you are giving the answer you would choose if you knew it ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell

... the Skate, which appears to be the homologue of the electrical organ of the Torpedo,' by R. McDonnell, 'Nat. Hist. Review,' 1861, page 57.) so that some of the difficulty is removed; and is it not satisfactory that my hypothetical notions should have led to pretty discoveries? McDonnell seems very cautious; he says, years must pass before he will venture to call himself a believer in my doctrine, but that on the subjects which he knows well, viz., Morphology and Embryology, my ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... realm of the unconscious just as in consciousness, only without a message to me; that in clear consciousness the work may be followed up step by step, while in unconsciousness it proceeds likewise, but unknown to us. It is evident that all this is purely hypothetical. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... not be improper to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of two persons, (one of them the Madame Deluc of the narrative) made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... derivative corresponds literally to "hypothesis"? Ans. Supposition.—Show this. Ans. Supposition is composed of sub hypo (under), and position (from ponere, to place) thesis, a placing—What adjective from "supposition" would correspond to "hypothetical"? Ans. Supposititious. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton

... the final page compresses the last two pages (one full page plus seven lines of text and a four-line footnote) of the 1851 edition into one, using a noticeably smaller font. 1870? New York, Leavitt & Allen. The date is hypothetical, based on librarian's notation. The book is probably a reprint of the 1836 Boston edition, which has the same page count (significantly different from other known editions); 1836 is also a ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.

... to his attempt to lead a better life—or at least so he tells me," said Lady Agatha. "Morality does not come easy to Elmer, he says, and I believe him. Elmer's time is largely taken up by inward moral debate as to the right or wrong of particular hypothetical cases which his imagination insists ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... conversation was a comradeship and a sympathetic understanding which both the man and the girl would have found it difficult to define. Was he in love with her? He was shocked at the possibility of such a catastrophe overtaking him. Love had never come into his life. It was a hypothetical condition which he had never even considered. He had known men to fall in love, just as he had known men to suffer from malaria or yellow fever, without considering that the same experience might overtake him. A shy, reticent man, behind that hard mask was a diffidence ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace

... Negro opportunists that the political power of the Negro having long ago been suppressed by unlawful means, his right to vote is a mere paper right, of no real value, and therefore to be lightly yielded for the sake of a hypothetical harmony, is fatally short-sighted. It is precisely the attitude and essentially the argument which would have surrendered to the South in the sixties, and would have left this country to rot in slavery for another ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.

... gentlemen, not to be behindhand, composed more elaborate pieces in proof of their wit; and that, finally, Goldsmith resolved to bind these fugitive lines of his together in a poem, which he left unfinished, and which, under the name of Retaliation, was published after his death. This hypothetical account receives some confirmation from the fact that the scheme of the poem and its component parts do not fit together well; the introduction looks like an after-thought; and has not the freedom and pungency of a piece of improvisation. An imaginary dinner is described, the guests being ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black

... Opposite this hypothetical gate-way stood the Five-cornered tower. The lower part dates, we have seen, from no earlier than the eleventh century. It is referred to as Alt-Nuernberg (old Nuremberg) in the Middle Ages. The title of "Five-cornered" ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... altogether human head, incapable of falsity, was seldom heard of in the world. For King: open your mouth, let the first gentleman that falls into it (a mass of Hanover stolidity, stupidity, foreign to you, heedless of you) be King: Supreme Majesty he, with hypothetical decorations, dignities, solemn appliances, high as the stars (the whole, except the money, a mendacity, and sin against Heaven): him you declare Sent-of-God, supreme Captain of your England; and having done so,—tie him up (according to Pitt) with Constitutional straps, so that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... into the tree's existence notions borrowed from an alien sphere. Indeed, to assert that there has been any genuine development from the seed up to the finished tree is to use terms in an accommodated, metaphoric, and hypothetical way. Development there certainly has been as estimated by an outsider, an onlooker, but not as perceived by the tree itself. It has not known where it was going. Out of the unknown earth the seed pushes its way into the still less known ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... the "Faerie Queene," and one of England's greatest poets; details of his life are scanty and often hypothetical; born at London of poor but well-connected parents; entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a "sizar" in 1569, and during his seven years' residence there became an excellent scholar; took a master's degree, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... resurrection body. Belief in a resurrection of the physical body, despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, had been incorporated into the formula evolved during the early Christian centuries and known as the Apostles' Creed, and was held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all." This hypothetical bone was therefore held in great veneration, and many anatomists sought to discover it; but Vesalius, revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented himself with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of such a bone to the theologians. He could not lie; he did not ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... manage it himself. He counted upon Risler for the funds. Opportunely enough, a small theatre on the boulevard happened to be for sale, as a result of the failure of its manager. Delobelle mentioned it to Risler, at first very vaguely, in a wholly hypothetical form—"There would be a good chance to make a fine stroke." Risler listened with his usual phlegm, saying, "Indeed, it would be a good thing for you." And to a more direct suggestion, not daring to answer, "No," he took refuge behind such phrases as "I will see"—"Perhaps ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... attempts at declension in nouns. No one who has read Curtius' arguments in support of this chronological arrangement would deny their extreme plausibility; but there are grave difficulties which made me hesitate in adopting this hypothetical framework of linguistic chronology. Ishall only mention one, which seemed to me insurmountable. We know that during what we called the First Radical Period the sway of phonetic laws was already so firmly established, that, from that period onward to the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... received by the Eureka Mining Company lying on their backs on the grassy site of the prospective quartz mill, not far from the equally hypothetical "slide" to the gulch. He came by the future stage road—at present a thickset jungle of scrub-oaks and ferns. He was accompanied by Captain Jim, who had gone to meet him on the trail, and for a few moments all critical inspection of himself was withheld by the extraordinary ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... the previous night, in which the Sultan asked our advice as to offers of alliance in the event of immediate general war, which had probably been made him by both sides. We replied to it after the Cabinet (No. 68): "We cannot enter into hypothetical engagements or make arrangements in contemplation of war between friendly Powers now at peace. The Sultan must be aware that Germany is the most powerful military nation on the Continent, and that she has no ambitious views against Turkey. Strongly advise ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... putting forward some hypothetical case, in which, if certain other states were to do something which would cause another country to do something else, then England would be found in that case—— God ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... reader will receive this hypothetical statement as he finds it agreeable, or not, to his own experience,—a better guide, in all probability, than mere philosophy. The writer has his doubts upon the subject. But let every one judge for himself. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... which young Trevannion declared himself, there was something in his manner that arrested the attention of his uncle. While pronouncing his hypothetical forecast of a storm, he had turned his glance towards the sky, and kept it fixed there, as if making something more than a transient observation. The fog had evaporated, and the moon was now coursing across the heavens, not against ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... sheets of foolscap folio paper, tied up with a red string; he has more books than one could read in a year, or comprehend in seven; he walks slowly, speaks hesitatingly, and receives fees from those who visit him, for giving "hypothetical answers" to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various

... vegetable product of a red colour; and many of these versions reveal a definite confusion between the red fruit and the red clay, thus proving that the confusion of didi with the mandrake is no mere hypothetical device to evade a difficulty on my part, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... by Mr. Astor to Captain Sowle, the commander of the Beaver, were, in some respects, hypothetical, in consequence of the uncertainty resting upon the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... known, and if they were, they would have no authority on that account. The mother never changes her name, the children are named after her, or, at least, are not named after the father. The system of gentes prevails, each gens consisting of a hypothetical female ancestress, and all her descendants through females. These primitive men and women, having no other resort, hit upon this device to hold a band of kin together. Here was the first social tie on earth; the beginning of the state. The first empire was a woman and her ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... many other unworthy things, from the mere promptings of present impulse, and let consequences take care of themselves. Moses met Sally that afternoon in just the frame to play the lover in this hypothetical, supposititious way, with words and looks and tones that came from feelings given to another. And as to Sally? Well, for once, Greek met Greek; for although Sally, as we showed her, was a girl of generous impulses, she was yet in no danger of immediate translation on account of superhuman goodness. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... telescope, or even, in some cases, by the naked eye. It assumed a more definite form in the hands of La Place, although even by him it was offered, not as an ascertained discovery of science, but simply as a hypothetical explanation of the way in which the production of the planets and their satellites might possibly be accounted for by the operation of ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... event, the suspended officer, according to the proposed law, should be restored to his place. The substance of the original Act was gone, but the Senate sought shelter from its record of inconsistency under the small shadow of this distant and hypothetical restoration of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... associate, and forces balance. Violence and inertia are found only among the poor and the aristocratic. And in that lies the philosophy of political economy, the mystery of human brotherhood. Hic est sapientia. Let us pass from the hypothetical state of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... far as to declare that, let the Governor do as he would (in the inconceivable case of his being so foolish as to do anything of the kind), she at least would not receive Mr. Medland. Having launched this hypothetical thunderbolt, she asked Alicia Derosne to give her another cup of tea. Alicia poured out the tea, handed it to her ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope

... shambling legs carried him fastest, and he was first at the edge, the neighborhood looking on, prepared to build a Tower of Babel heaven high on the foundation of a single brick. Leam Dundas had not yet been fitted with her hypothetical mate, and people wanted to see to whom they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... fourth Vote then, growls indignant Patriotism:—this vote, and who knows what other votes, and adjournments of voting; and the whole matter still hovering hypothetical! And at every new vote those Jesuit Girondins, even they who voted for Death, would so fain find a loophole! Patriotism must watch and rage. Tyrannical adjournments there have been; one, and now another at midnight on plea of fatigue,—all Friday wasted in hesitation and higgling; in re-counting ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... quite a hypothetical point, though," began Mr Bickers, airily. "I just wanted to ask, supposing one of us becomes aware of a riot in a neighbouring house, during the absence of the master of that house, and ascertains, moreover, that the prefects on duty, so far from making any attempt to control the disorder, are participating ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed

... lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified emotion as hers. His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite. Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he could pardon the excesses and irregularities ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... recovered from the snappishness from which you were suffering when I last saw you;" and if the person saluted has not been good, or is still snappish, he says so at once and is condoled with accordingly. Indeed, the straighteners have gone so far as to give names from the hypothetical language (as taught at the Colleges of Unreason), to all known forms of mental indisposition, and to classify them according to a system of their own, which, though I could not understand it, seemed to work well in practice; for they are ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... allow you to read the alleged statements of a hypothetical witness who is acknowledged to have been dead for nearly two thousand years. I cannot admit the alleged letters ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... many of his modern critics, the charge is doubtless true that his writings are not free from prejudice in favour of his country. That he definitely regarded history rather as a moral agency and a lesson for the future than as an irrefutable narrative of the past, I consider highly hypothetical; but it is probable that his mind was not of the type that is most diligent in the close, exhaustive, and logical study so necessary to the historian of today. "Superficial," if we could eliminate the reproach in the ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... which she has been placed. That her real condition differs not much from the result of this reasoning from probability, must, with whatever regret, be confessed by all who take a careful and impartial survey of the actual situation of things among us. But our hypothetical delineation, if just, will have approved itself to the reader's conviction, as we have gone along, by suggesting its archetypes; and we may therefore be spared the painful and invidious task of pointing out, in detail, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... attempt to describe the continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly, but it is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate constructions of chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that things and qualities are more easily mistaken for facts than more obviously hypothetical assumptions. Bergson points out that the various things of which this common sense world consists, solid tables, green grass, anger, hope, etc., are not facts: these things, he insists, are only abstractions. They are convenient ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen

... are signs of the mood and tense, as well as of the person and number, of the verb. They are not applicable to a future uncertainty, or to any mere supposition in which we would leave the time indefinite and make the action hypothetical; because they are commonly understood to fix the time of the verb to the present or the past, and to assume the action as either doing or done. For this reason, our best writers have always omitted those terminations, when they intended to represent the action as being doubtful ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... which, after expressing their unabated respect for all the rights and privileges of the admiral, they declared, that whatever shall be found in their previous license repugnant to these shall be null and void. (Doc. Dipl., 113.) The hypothetical form in which this is stated shows that the sovereigns, with an honest desire of keeping their engagements with Columbus, had not a very clear perception in what manner ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... money out of their sight, especially do not like to let it out of sight without securitystill more, cannot all at once agree on any single person to whom they are content to trust it unseen and unsecured. Hypothetical history, which explains the past by. what is simplest and commonest in the present, is in banking, as in most things, ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot

... Biscay. This language is commonly known as the Basque or Biscayan, which words are mere modifications of the word Euscarra, the consonant B having been prefixed for the sake of euphony. Much that is vague, erroneous, and hypothetical, has been said and written concerning this tongue. The Basques assert that it was not only the original language of Spain, but also of the world, and that from it all other languages are derived; but the Basques are a very ignorant people, and know nothing of the philosophy of language. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... fixed points, which at length have been obtained, all the necessary materials for this are still wanting. The diligent Malone has, indeed, made an attempt to arrange the plays of Shakspeare in chronological order; but he himself only gives out the result of his labours for hypothetical, and it could not possibly be attended with complete success, since he excluded from his inquiry a considerable number of pieces which have been ascribed to the poet, though rejected as spurious by all the editors ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... cognition and its condition, constitute the different kinds of syllogisms. These are just threefold—analogously with all judgements, in so far as they differ in the mode of expressing the relation of a cognition in the understanding—namely, categorical, hypothetical, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... commenced between the fictitious Mrs. Chump on sea and Mr. Pole, dyspeptic, in his armchair. Arabella took the doctor aside to ask him, if in a hypothetical instance, it would really be dangerous to thwart or irritate her father. She asked the curate if he deemed it wicked to speak falsely to an invalid for the invalid's benefit. The spiritual and bodily doctors agreed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... hang upon another; but there would not be any thing fixed to one end of it, capable of sustaining the whole; and consequently there would be no belief nor evidence. And this actually is the case with all hypothetical arguments, or reasonings upon a supposition; there being in them, neither any present impression, nor ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... censure being laid on them by critics, so different from each other as Dr. Johnson and Mr. Matthew Arnold. As the alleged Paganism of some of Herrick's sacred poems exists only in the imagination of readers, so the alleged insincerity is equally hypothetical, and can only be supported by the argument (notoriously false to history and to human nature) that a man who could write the looser Hesperides could not sincerely write the Noble Numbers. Every student of the lives of other men—every ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... grace, with whatever delirium of delight, with whatever ingenious preciosity, we go through its process. Only as an image of beauty mated in some strange hermaphroditic ecstasy is that possible. I mean only as a dream projected into a hypothetical, a real heaven. But on earth we cannot complete the cycle in consciousness that would give us the freedom of an image in which two identities mysteriously realize their separate unities by the absorption ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes

... resist, allowed Mrs. Hawkins to put her to bed and make a cup of tea over the stove, while Miss Mellins, always good-naturedly responsive to any appeal for help, sent down the weak-eyed little girl to deal with hypothetical customers. ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... similar influence to that of post-hypnotic suggestion; that is to say, that a dream may be the actual originating cause of sexual perversion. This is a matter which I cannot discuss further, more especially in view of the fact that the whole idea is too hypothetical. ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll

... and contradictions, and such strange hypothetical adjustments and re-adjustments of the data and calculations, entirely upset the groundless and extraordinary theory of the base of the pyramid being a standard of linear measurement; or a segment of any particular ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... of Nottingham. The whole plan was opened to him; and he approved of it. But in a few days he began to be unquiet. His mind was not sufficiently powerful to emancipate itself from the prejudices of education. He went about from divine to divine proposing in general terms hypothetical cases of tyranny, and inquiring whether in such cases resistance would be lawful. The answers which he obtained increased his distress. He at length told his accomplices that he could go no further with ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Along with the disappearance of matter, everything disappears—qualities, thoughts, "ego"—and passes into a latent slate within the germ; along with the return of the form, qualities and attributes gradually reappear without any hypothetical soul whatever having any concern in the matter. So long as the form is in its germ stage, the being is nothing more than a mass of potentialities; when fully developed its faculties reappear, but they remain strictly attached to the form, and if the latter ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... that the secondary wire, though 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 ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall

... the catastrophic bursting of the bubble, had left men rather sobered in their outlook upon the future possibilities of speculation in this alluring direction. It had witnessed the formulation of no fewer than 1,263 separate railway schemes, involving an (hypothetical) expenditure of 560 millions sterling, of which 643 got no further than the issue of a prospectus, while over 500 went through all the necessary stages of being brought before Parliament and 272 actually became Acts—"to the ruin of thousands who had afterwards to find the money to ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... in a N.E. and S.W. direction, parallel to that one connecting the Asses' Ears, Lot's Wife, and probably Lot. The number of these masses of injected rock is a remarkable feature in the geology of St. Helena. Besides those just mentioned, and the hypothetical one beneath Flagstaff Hill, there is Little Stony-top and others, as I have reason to believe, at the Man-and-Horse, and at High Hill. Most of these masses, if not all of them, have been injected subsequently to the last volcanic eruptions from the central crater. The ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin

... but a few scattered hints. But although the rigorous requirements of science could only be fulfilled by the employment of all these means, yet in their absence it was permissible to draw from the tables and the exclusion a hypothetical conclusion, the truth of which might be verified by the use of the other processes; such an hypothesis is called fantastically the First Vintage (Vindemiatio). The inductive method, so far as exhibited in the Organum, is exemplified ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... reading lately an extremely interesting book on celebrated criminal cases, and I was particularly impressed by the way in which circumstantial evidence can be built up out of harmless trifles. Since reading it I have been rather amusing myself by constructing hypothetical cases. For instance"—Scorpa pursed his lips and lowered his eyes, as though trying to invent a fanciful story—"take a transaction such as your letting me have that picture. One could build a very stirring ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... of evolution does not in any degree explain the mystery of the universe. All it does is to offer us an hypothetical picture—true or false—of the manner in which the changes of organic and inorganic life succeeded one another in their historic creation. Evolutionists have to make their start somewhere, just as "personalists" ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... in the introduction of The Heart of Midlothian, by Sir W. Scott, and again in the introduction of The Bride of Lammermoor. He is a hypothetical assistant teacher at Gandercleuch, and the feigned author of The Tales of My Landlord, which Sir Walter Scott pretends were published by Jedediah Cleishbotham, after the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... that of the Old. They simply suggest that after the people of the Mediterranean regions had become well civilized and after those of America were also sufficiently civilized to assimilate new ideas, a stray ship or two was blown by the trade-winds across the Atlantic. That hypothetical voyage was the precursor of the great journey of Columbus. Without the tradewinds this historic discoverer never could have found the West Indies. Suppose that a strong west wind had blown him backward on his course when his ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... conceded at once that the chief factor in the purification is the nitrification produced by the bacteria in the upper layers of the sand. On the other hand, the purification by sand filters of a hypothetical water containing no organic matter, but only finely-divided mineral matter in suspension, could take place only by the physical deposition of the particles upon the sand grains. Between these two extremes lie all classes ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy

... and very acrimonious; for what reason it is hard to conceive, since the philosophers professed not to advance doctrines, but to produce facts: and the most zealous enemy of innovation must admit the gradual progress of experience, however he may oppose hypothetical temerity. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... poor, half-starved painter, in Great Howland Street, whose landlady was daily abating in her respect, and the butcher daily abating in his punctuality; whose garments were getting threadbare, and his dinners hypothetical, and whose day-dreams of fame and fortune had faded into the dull-gray of penury and disappointment. I was broken-hearted, ill, hungry; so I accepted an invitation from a friend, a rich manufacturer in Birmingham, to go down to his house for the Christmas holidays. He had a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various

... habit," he went on, "to introduce religion into everything, in the way that English people are so fond of doing. It decreases their pleasures by casting its shadow over purely human and natural joys; and it increases their sorrow and want by teaching them to lean upon some hypothetical Power, instead of trying to do the best that they can for themselves. Also it enervates their reasoning faculties; for nothing is so detrimental to one's intellectual strength as the habit of believing things which one knows ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... felt to be that which in the long run would be just sufficient to afford "normal" incomes to labor and to capital, to call forth the necessary effort, skill, judgment, and forethought, if competition were at work, as it is not.[10] Only this rule of hypothetical competition redeems these public rates ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... It is now sufficiently known by experience of what things they are the causes in the State; how indiscriminately they bring forth fruit, of which good men and wise rightly do repent. If there should be in any place a State, either actual or hypothetical, that wantonly and tyrannically wages war upon the Christian name, and it have conferred upon it that character of which we have spoken, it is possible that this may be considered more tolerable; yet the principles upon which it rests are absolutely such that, of themselves ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... and that subsequently the Attorney General may conclude that it was a violation of the statute, and that which was supposed by the combiners to be innocent then turns out to be a combination in violation of the statute. The answer to this hypothetical case is that when men attempt to amass such stupendous capital as will enable them to suppress competition, control prices and establish a monopoly, they know the purpose of their acts. Men do not do such a thing without having ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... the province of literary criticism to deal with hypothetical conditions in authors' lives; but it is at least a matter of some interest to conjecture whether Byron would have become a great poet if this stinging review had not been published. It is evident that the Hours of Idleness gave few signs of promise, and the poet, fully intent upon a political ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... of the paper from which we have quoted so freely, exclaim: "Strangest of foods! most impalpable of aliments! defying all the research of animal chemistry, tasking all the ingenuity of experts in hypothetical explanations, registering its effects chiefly by functional disturbance and organic lesions, causing its very defenders as a food to stultify themselves when in fealty to facts they are compelled to disclose its destructions, and to ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur

... was radically the same, to return to its earliest and simplest devices if it would find itself in the embrace of science, and practise the make-beliefs of its infancy. Out of so many there were chances of some coming true if they were carried far enough and long enough. In fact, the hypothetical method of science had apparently been used in the art of advertising the works in which the appetite of the new reading public was flattered. The publishers had hypothesized from the fact of a population of seventy millions, the existence of an immense ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... speaking again, still revolving this hypothetical scheme in his thoughts—"I may want to—well, here's what occurs to me as an off-chance. I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye see? and it seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be so poor. Well, then—I might say to you, here's two thousand a year, say, made over to you ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... up under a heap of documentary evidence about the Judsons. That's another reason why we should put our trust in Matthew Haygarth. The Judson line is the obvious line to follow, and there are very few who would think of hunting up evidence for a hypothetical first marriage until they had exhausted the Judsons. Now, I rely upon you to throw dust in Paget's eyes, so that there may be no possibility of my brother getting wind of our ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... delicate emanations from a beautiful soul. The first stanzas alone, however, continued to occupy the attention of some orthodox and over-scrupulous minds: poetry not necessarily being a mode of teaching philosophy. We must besides remark that the meaning of the lines is purely hypothetical. In saying that the soul might not be immortal, is it not saying much the same as was said by Locke in the words the soul is perhaps spiritual? Is not that perishable which is capable of dissolution according ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... father's fame and genius, it is not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray's. We fall back upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism, for a simple reason. We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our own literature and ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... tweedledum and tweedledee reminds me of Heidelberg days, when a few of us roamed about the Odenwald, chopping off flowers with our canes and discussing philosophy. Rare jargon we made of it; talking of cosmothetie idealism or hypothetical dualism, of noetic and dianoetic principles, of hylozoism and hypostasis, and demonstrating the most undemonstrable propositions by appeals to the law of contradiction or of excluded middle. I fancied then that I was ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... To take a hypothetical case, suppose that misfortune visits the home of John H. Jones, who lives at 79 Liberty Street. A defective flue sets his house on fire and it burns to the ground. By inquiry we find that the house is worth about $4,000 and ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... where to draw the line (de Vignolles didn't). And he wasn't ugly, like de Vignolles. On the contrary, he was, as men go, distinctly good looking; he knew he was; the glances of the beautiful and hypothetical stranger assured him of it, and he had looked in the glass not half an hour ago to reassure himself. Solid he was, and well built, and he had decorative points that pleased: a fresh color, eyes that flashed blue round a ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... preaching heresies; but it can never be a question that a man should be silent if unprepared to speak the truth as he conceives it. Deference to popular opinion is one great source of bad writing, and is all the more disastrous because the deference is paid to some purely hypothetical requirement. When a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent. He may be excused if he shrink from the lurid ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... it split in fissures radiating from points of weakness, such, for instance, as the craterlets. And he goes on to suggest that the two tiny Martian satellites, with which we shall deal next, are the last survivors of his hypothetical swarm. Finally, with regard to the habitability of Mars, Dr. Wallace not only denies it, but asserts that the planet ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... parent-species exist in every hybrid in a double state, namely, blended together and completely separate. How this is possible, and what the term specific essence or element may be supposed to express, I shall attempt to show in the hypothetical ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... years of study of the text and after almost despairing of a plausible solution of its mysteries. And it seems surprising that Apicius has never been suspected before of withholding information essential to the successful practice of his rather hypothetical and empirical formulae. The more we scrutinize them, the more we become convinced that the author has omitted vital directions—same as we did purposely with the two modern examples above. Many of the Apician recipes are dry enumerations of ingredients supposed to belong to a given dish ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... to occur, and would we not be stupid to refuse to follow the lead of other governments who utilize its advantages for defence or aggression in war and for rapid communication in time of peace? And is it not just as stupid and even senseless to oppose suffragism on speculative or rather hypothetical grounds, instead of being guided by the experience of other countries in this respect and accepting suffragism as part and parcel of our modern customs ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma

... be astonished that I speak of the Phinuit personality as if it were already established that the hypothetical doctor were really a spirit; that is to say, a personality as distinct from that of the medium as the reader and I are from one another. I must hold this point in reserve. The investigators of the Piper case, finding as decided a difference between the controls and the subject ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage

... because their minds are fixed upon that distant time when they hope to enjoy life on twenty thousand a year. And if ever they attain that twenty thousand they will not enjoy it either; but will merely peer forward to a hypothetical enjoyment at fifty thousand a year. And this is the essence of their tragedy:—they have not learned to ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... jeopardy, she waits to be killed—as in the notable case at Minneapolis, Minn.,—and Society permits itself to be called in simply to attend the funeral of the murdered woman, who, however, is often buried as a victim of some hypothetical disease, invented to take the blame off the prevailing order of ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... Zambezi delta is also an archaic type of great interest. The Zulu-Kaffir language, though it exhibits marked changes and deviations in vocabulary and phonetics (both probably of recent date), preserves a few characteristics of the hypothetical mother-tongue: so much so that, until the languages of the Great Lakes came to be known, Zulu-Kaffir was regarded as the most archaic type of Bantu speech, a position from which it is now completely deposed. It is in some features unusually divergent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... continued to grow on the submerged soil; and the nuts when ripe, being lighter than water, rose to the surface, instead—as is the habit of supermarine arboreal produce—of falling to the ground. Scarcely could a more splendid illustration of the fallacies of hypothetical reasoning be found, than the pages that contain this specious and far-fetched argument. Even the celebrated Rumphius, who wrote so late as the eighteenth century, assures his readers that 'the Calappa laut,' the Malay term for the nut, 'is not a terrestrial ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various

... interruption. "And those that proceed from this text to rail at the instability of opinion are either knaves or fools for their pains. Modern medicine, which passed (it is its fairest title to glory) from a hypothetical to a positive science, through the influence of the great analytical school of Paris, has proved beyond a doubt that a ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac

... spiritual and the teleological. It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical. After all, says Huxley, in one of his essays:—'What do we know of this terrible matter, except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen, except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... rotation and are parallel to each other the result is the same as if a single set of currents circulated around the body of the magnet. More will be found on this subject under Magnetism. The Amprian currents are purely hypothetical and are predicated on the existence of a field of force about a permanent magnet. (See Magnetism, ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... observed phenomena, and supported by such indirect evidence as can be had. Even when the upholders of the former and more popular system mix up revelation with scientific discussion,—which we decline to do,—they by no means thereby render their view other than hypothetical. Agreeing that plants and animals were produced by Omnipotent fiat does not exclude the idea of natural order and what we call secondary causes. The record of the fiat—"Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed," etc., "and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Following that hypothetical first man, how many real first men there have been, each discovering new things about God and the beyond, giving mankind new letters in the Sanscrit, and each discovery accompanied ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... arising from practice is discoverable from this table, and we may safely conclude that this hypothetical factor may be disregarded, although among the experimenters on auditory time Mehner[13] thought results gotten without a maximum of practice are worthless, while Meumann[14] thinks that unpracticed and hence ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... hypothetical illustration, which must be taken for what it is worth, without prejudice to the general argument, let us descend to a more certain order of evidence. It is now generally agreed among geologists and physicists that the Earth was at one time a mass of molten matter. If so, it was at that time ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... brain repeated, over and over, this obvious fact; then began a hypothetical reversal of it. Supposing the books had gone, and her presence had remained? . . . Presently a catalogue formed itself in his mind of all those things which might have gone, unmissed, unmourned, if her dear presence ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... protested. "Either I'm still foggy from the dope, or you are suddenly unable to speak a word of less than four syllables. You know—whenever this happens with you, I get the distinct impression that you are trying to cover up something. For Occam's sake, be specific! Bring me together two of these hypothetical individuals and tell me ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... course this is a merely hypothetical argument. There may never be a Farmer Administration in Ottawa. And if there ever should be, we may trust to conservative and progressive old C.P.R. to do its share of injecting a "sense of responsibility" ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... Immediate Surroundings of the South Pole to face Chart of the Ross Sea Chart of the Bay of Whales 1. Hypothetical Representation of the Surface Currents in the Northern Atlantic in April 2. The "Fram's" Route from June 20 To July 7, 1910 3. Temperature and Salinity in the "Fram's" Southern Section, June, 1910 4. Temperature and Salinity in the "Fram's" Northern ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... in France when he died of apoplexy. I do not know," added Mrs. Cresswell, "I may be wrong and—I hope I'm not glad." Then there leapt to her mind a hypothetical question which had to do with her own curious situation. It was characteristic of her to brood and then restlessly to seek relief in consulting the one person near who knew her story. She started to open ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... additional proposition, viz. We must think of the two together; while but is an abbreviation of two additional propositions, viz. We must think of them together, and we must recollect there is a contrast between them. But hypothetical propositions, i.e. both disjunctives and conditionals, are true complex propositions, since with several terms they contain but a single assertion. Thus, in, If the Koran comes from God, Mahomet is God's prophet, we ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... idea which he had explained to Keats. Meanwhile, however, his conception had ripened. There are marked changes in organisation, method and intention. In organisation the reserve squadron is reduced from the original twelve or fourteen to eight, or one fifth of his hypothetical fleet instead of about one third—reduced, that is, to a strength at which it was much less capable of important independent action. In method we have, instead of an attack with the two main divisions, an attack with ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... our aim should be to ascertain within how wide limits aesthetically pleasing unequal divisions fall; and an interpretative principle must be flexible enough to include persistent variations from any hypothetical norm, unless they can be otherwise accounted for. If it is not forced on us, we have, in either case, nothing to do with the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... been taking place under the eyes of the police authorities of Europe. It can only be poison—an unknown poison, perhaps. We shall be empowered to exhume the body of the late Sir Frank Narcombe in a few days' time, I hope. His case puzzles me hopelessly. What obstacle did a surgeon offer to this hypothetical Eastern movement? On the other hand, what can have been filched from him before his death? The death of an inventor, a statesman, a soldier, can be variously explained by your 'Yellow' hypothesis, M. Max, but what of the ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer

... discovered, I shall still continue to believe that it is more safe to trust what we have already tried; and cannot but think bread a product of too much importance to be made the sport of subtilty, and the topick of hypothetical disputation. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... was silent for a moment; then she said meditatively, "Oh, don't you think so?", and fell again into a long silence. The Dean did not break it; his thoughts had wandered from the hypothetical lady who was to redeem Quisante to the realities of the ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... his honest conviction that his trains could run on such a road as he could make twelve miles per hour. This rashness alarmed his friends, and they tried in vain to smooth it over by declaring such speed to be purely "hypothetical." ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... state of the country—about the desire for change and the general restlessness that prevails. We discussed the different members of the Government, and he agreed that John Russell had acted unwarrantably in making the speech he did the other day at Torquay about the Ballot, which, though hypothetical, was nothing but an invitation to the advocates of Ballot to agitate for it; this, too, from a Cabinet Minister! Then comes an awkward sort of explanation, that what he said was in his individual capacity, as if he had any right so to speak. Melbourne ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... number of proximate compounds, more or less stable, from organic structures. It has invented others which form the basis of long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we are perhaps becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles, demonstrated and hypothetical. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... sure," I replied, "that it is more hypothetical than the other. At any rate it is a hypothesis adopted by one of your authorities. Mr. Herbert Spencer, you will remember, conceives the process of Nature to be one, not, as you appear to think, of continuous progress, but rather of a circular movement, from the utmost ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson

... at the very outset of naval history, the vital truth that the man counts more than the machine. In these later days, when the tendency is to measure naval power merely by counting dreadnoughts, and to settle all hypothetical combats by the proportion of strength at a given point on the game board, it is well to remember that the most overwhelming victories have been won by the skill and audacity of a great leader, which overcame odds that would be reckoned by ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... holds, for American children of that age do ordinarily know something about making wills. As for the danger of shock from the first problem, we have never once found the slightest evidence of this much-feared result. The subject always understands that the situation depicted is hypothetical, and so answers either in a matter-of-fact ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... into the first proposition of an hypothetical syllogism, I defy the man born in Ireland, who is now in the fairest way of getting a collectorship, or a cornet's post, to give a good reason for ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... the Daltonian atom, not with the molecule of the modern physicist, and his "infinite, self-powerful, and unmixable" particles are not comparable with anything but the ether of the modern physicist, with which hypothetical substance they have many points of resemblance. But the "infinite, self-powerful, and unmixed" particles constituting thus an ether-like plenum which permeates all material structures, have also, in the mind of Anaxagoras, a function which carries them perhaps a stage ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... Hesychius. This writer, however, (whoever he may have been,) is careful to convince us that individually he entertained no doubt whatever about the genuineness of this part of Scripture, for he says that he writes in order to remove the (hypothetical) objections of others, and to silence their (imaginary) doubts. Nay, he freely quotes the verses as genuine, and declares that they were read in his day on a certain Sunday night in the public Service of the Church.... To represent ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... nothing else offers itself, but traditional beliefs are so apt to take the color of new eras that they should be employed only in the last emergency, and then with the understanding that they are of very hypothetical value. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... letter to Rose, for the two things evidently stood or fell together. So the theories grew and prospered without interfering with each other as Molly's health and strength returned, except that the delirium theory insisted at times on the other theory being purely hypothetical; as, for instance, it had to be "Even supposing I was not delirious, and the will had been there, it is still ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... 2001 prevalence rate of 2.7%, which represents the cumulative result of the past incarceration experiences of the living adult population, the lifetime likelihood is a hypothetical projection of the future if a birth cohort were to experience a fixed set of rates of first incarceration and mortality ...
— Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population, 1974-2001 • Thomas P. Bonczar

... the mutton for the carver, and bowed low to the right and left, picked up an imaginary bouquet, and threw three kisses to hypothetical "gods." ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... the profile of a girl of another dimension—ethereal, sensuous, the eternal feminine—the Nervina of the story. Filmy crystalline earrings swept back over her bare shoulders. Dominating the background was a huge flaming yellow ball, like our Sun as seen from the hypothetical Vulcan— splotched with murky, mysterious globii vitonae. There was an ancient quay, and emerging from the ultramarine waters about it a silhouetted metropolis of spires, domes, and minarets. It was 1921, and that generation ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... not think that if all compositions were written in the key of C it would materially conduce to the greatest happiness of the greatest number?—The President has already deprecated the multiplication of hypothetical questions, which have reached a total of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various

... integrity of his neck and made his teeth snap, lurched heavily to the other side, oscillated critically for a few moments, and muttered: "Brdgtpnd—." It was too much for him; he went down into his pocket, fumbled feebly round, and finally drawing out a paper of purely hypothetical tobacco, conveyed it to his mouth and bit off about two-thirds of it, which he masticated with much apparent benefit to his understanding, offering what was left to me. He then resumed the conversation ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... balance of power between rival states, adds that 'this is precisely the language of modern policy'. At the same time, the speech has in places a somewhat academic and theoretical air: it is much occupied with the weighing of hypothetical considerations and obligations against one another: and though it enunciates some plain and reasonable political principles, and makes an honest attempt to satisfy those who wished to help the Arcadians, but at the same time desired to regain ground ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes

... class of hypothetical creations which do not belong to my subject, because they are acknowledged to be fictions, as those of Lucian,[177] Rabelais,[178] Swift, Francis {103} Godwin,[179] Voltaire, etc. All who have more positive notions as to either the composition ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... such an apparition and reason? Reason, I say, Reason!" Here the ghost proceeded to analyze reason, cited from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, part II, section I, book 2, chap. 3, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, then went on to construct a hypothetical system of ghosts, piled one syllogism on another, and concluded with the logical proof that there are absolutely no ghosts. Meanwhile the cold sweat ran down my back, my teeth clattered like castanets, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... preliminary orders; and at the proper time, sighting through the periscope as he did so, he pressed the button of a little arrangement which he held, half concealed, in the palm of his hand. There was a soft explosion, a sort of woof!—and a torpedo was on the way to a hypothetical enemy, with only the captain able to see that it reached ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly

... was pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that, on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her all the thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was purely hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he WERE. But Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... alias Van Busch, otherwise the man who had come in through the enemy's lines as a runner from Diamond Town, bringing the letter from a hypothetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist. His light eyes, that were set flat in their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked about and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... determine how far the unknown element affects the known, whether, for example, new discoveries may not one day supersede our most elementary notions about nature. To a certain extent all our knowledge is conditional upon what may be known in future ages of the world. We must admit this hypothetical element, which we cannot get rid of by an assumption that we have already discovered the method to which all philosophy must conform. Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract, in setting actuality ...
— Sophist • Plato

... the breaking strength of a beam is expressed in terms of unit stress by a modulus of rupture, which is a purely hypothetical expression for points beyond the elastic limit. The formulae used in computing this modulus is ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record

... performance it will be asked, how it was possible in 1784 to have had an idea of what did not take place till the year 1790? The solution is simple. In the original plan the legislator was a fictitious and hypothetical being: in the present, the author has substituted an existing legislator; and the reality has only ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... may be repeated concerning most of the phenomena of nature; and the true conclusion to which it leads is this—that to inquire what the Deity might have done, could have done, or, as we even sometimes presume to speak, ought to have done, or, in hypothetical cases, would have done; and to build any propositions upon such inquiries against evidence of facts, is wholly unwarrantable. It is a mode of reasoning which will not do in natural history, which ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... moment had kept on spinning, rose, and seated herself as usual at the end of the table. We had already emptied some bottles, and I began to relate the hypothetical history of my life in the best humor. "First of all, then, I commend myself to you," said I, "that you may continue the custom you have begun to bestow on me. If you gradually procure me the profit ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... throbs within him of a higher life which could not be stilled. His conscience reproached him continually amidst all his amusements, and left him uneasy even in the most exulting moments of the love that filled his heart. This is no hypothetical picture, but one suggested by himself in conversation with his sister. She tells us from her retreat how her brother came to see her, fascinated by the steadfastness of her faith, in contrast with his own indifference and vacillation. Formerly it was his zeal which had drawn her ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... relief valves. In other words, the obvious deduction is to set the turbine relief valve to blow off at a higher pressure than the condenser relief valve, even when considering the question with respect to condensing conditions only. In this second hypothetical case, then, with a closed and disabled atmospheric valve, the exhaust must take place through the condenser, until the turbine can be shut down, or the circulating water regained without the ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... of a psychical instant (e. g., clenching a fist in threatening). Generally they stand in no causal relation, so that explanations drawn from physiological, anatomical, or even atavistic conditions are only approximate and hypothetical. In addition, accidental habits and inheritances exercise an influence which, although it does not alter the expression, has a moulding effect that in the course of time does finally so recast a very natural expression as to make it altogether unintelligible. The phenomena, moreover, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... one meal. They were in such a state that they would not have been looked at a second time under ordinary circumstances, but to us on a floating lump of ice, over three hundred miles from land, and that quite hypothetical, and with the unplumbed sea beneath us, they were luxuries indeed. Wild's tent made a pudding of ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... in the Rogron household while he, the colonel, had no hold there except by the extremely hypothetical tie of his mendacious affection for Sylvie, which it was not yet clear that Sylvie reciprocated. When the lawyer told him of the priest's manoeuvre, and advised him to break with Sylvie and marry Pierrette, he ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... are subjected at the close of the examination to what you are pleased to term a "hypothetical question." The theory of this "hypothetical question" is that it embraces or expresses in a few words, and not always so very few either [laughter], the main features of the case under consideration. In nine cases out of ten if the expert makes a direct and unqualified answer to the question ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... which to base a pretty fair argument along this line. Admitting that Don Pendleton was what she had been crying about,—a purely hypothetical assumption for the sake of a beginning,—she was able to start with the premise that a woman was a fool for crying about any man. Coming down to concrete facts, she found herself supplied with even less comforting excuses. If she had been living of late in a little fool's ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... whose names are found in the history of science are not mere hypothetical constituents of a crowd, to be reasoned upon only in masses. We recognise them as men like ourselves, and their actions and thoughts, being more free from the influence of passion, and recorded more accurately than those of other men, are all ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell

... his peculiar kind of intellectual piety lacked the imagination of Pascal. He could play, cleverly enough, with hypothetical infidelity, and refute it, so to say, "in his study" with his eye on the little chapel door; but there was a sort of refined shrinking from the jagged edges of reality in his somewhat Byzantine temperament which ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... unless he was anxious to be among the "reported missing"—which he sure would be if a bunch of non-treaty Indians ever got within gunshot of him. I damned Major Lessard earnestly for what I considered his injustice to MacRae, and wondered if he would send his troopers out to look for that hypothetical gold-dust. I didn't see how he could avoid making a bluff at doing so, even if he secretly classed Rutter's story as a fairy-tale, and I promised myself to find out what he was going to do before I ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... swimming, and that the tentacles are a later development correlated with its adult sessile life. Yet we must not forget that the hydra is even now not quite sessile, it moves somewhat. And our ancestor was almost certainly a free swimming gastraea, or hypothetical form corresponding in form and structure to the gastrula. The ancestor of man never settled down lazily into a ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... In the hypothetical case, above suggested, of the whole surface being equally heated, and consequently the whole atmosphere at the same temperature, there would be a universal calm, whatever might be the rotatory motion ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... knocking his heels rhythmically against the side of the box while he thought the matter over from start to hypothetical finish and back again. Meanwhile Andy Green went on with his work and scowled over his well-earned reputation that hampered him now just when he needed the confidence of his fellows in order to save their beloved Flying U from slow annihilation. Perhaps his mental suffering ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower



Words linked to "Hypothetical" :   theoretical, hypothesis, theory, theoretic, possibility, divinatory



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