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Hypothetical   /hˌaɪpəθˈɛtəkəl/  /hˌaɪpəθˈɛtɪkəl/   Listen
Hypothetical

adjective
1.
Based primarily on surmise rather than adequate evidence.  Synonyms: conjectural, divinatory, hypothetic, supposed, suppositional, suppositious, supposititious.  "The supposed reason for his absence" , "Suppositious reconstructions of dead languages" , "Hypothetical situation"



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"Hypothetical" Quotes from Famous Books



... reality they were exaggerated presentations of notorious facts. That they were largely founded upon facts Judge Willis probably knew from common hearsay. But while sitting on the bench he had nothing to do with common hearsay. A fortiori, he was not justified, upon the mere assumption of a hypothetical case,[102] in admonishing the Attorney-General in the presence of his accuser, and in humiliating him in the presence of the bar of which he was the rightful head. An English judge would be considered as departing widely ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... and arguments now briefly set forth, afford an explanation of the phenomena of male ornament, as being due to the general laws of growth and development, and make it unnecessary to call to our aid so hypothetical a cause as the cumulative action of female preference. There remains, however, a general argument, arising from the action of natural selection itself, which renders it almost inconceivable that female ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... life on five thousand a year 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

... Gaelic there is no such necessity for a continental origin; indeed at the first view, the probabilities are in favour of its having originated in Britain. It cannot be found on the continent; and, such being the case, its continental origin is hypothetical. One thing, however, is certain, viz., that if the Gaelic were once the only language of the British Isles, the conquests and encroachments of the Britons who displaced it, must have been enormous. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... hare-lipped," a man in the greatest distress, one day called on the rich Barmecide, who in merry jest asked him to dine with him. Barmecide first washed in hypothetical water, Schacabac followed his example. Barmecide then pretended to eat of various dainties, Schacabac did the same, and praised them highly, and so the "feast" went on to the close. The story says Barmecide was so pleased that Schacabac had the good sense and good temper to enter into ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... glad of the interruption. If the youngsters and amateurs wanted to amuse themselves plotting hypothetical attacks on unclimbable sierras, that was all very well, but it was, if nothing worse, a great waste of time. I showed Kendricks a notch in the ridge, thousands of feet lower than the peaks, and well-sheltered from the icefalls on ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with some severity, and intimated—in the usual hypothetical case of the Church being "thrown open"—what kind of sermon he would have given them. After favoring them with some heads of that discourse, he remarked that he considered the subject of the day's homily, ill ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... cunning ass-dealer (449 ff.). In Cas. 815 ff. Chalinus enters disguised as the blushing bride. In Men. 828 ff. Menaechmus Sosicles pretends madness in a clever scene of uproarious humor. In the Mil. (411 ff.) Philocomasium needs only to change clothing to appear in the role of her own hypothetical twin sister, and in 874 ff. and 1216 ff. the meretrix plays matrona. Sagaristio and the daughter of the leno impersonate Persians (Per. 549 ff.), Collabiscus becomes a Spartan (Poen. 578 ff.), Simia as Harpax gets Ballio's money (Ps. 905 ff.), the sycophant ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... feeling of distrust on the part of persons incapable, from an imperfect, and still oftener from no knowledge of science, of drawing the line of demarcation, which Liebig frequently omitted to do, between the positive fact and the hypothetical inference, which, however probable, is, after all, merely a suggestion requiring to be substantiated by experiment. This omission, which the scientific reader can supply for himself, becomes a source of serious misapprehension in a work ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson

... amount of unstable organic matter, it will be 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 ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy

... "A New Quere, at this time seasonably to be considered, &c.. viz. Whether it be fit, according to the principles of true Religion and State to settle any Church-government over the Kingdom hastily or not." Burton was already in the same mood of hypothetical Voluntaryism (ante, p. 109), and I think it was spreading now among the Independents. Certainly, however, the perception of the necessary identity of the principle of Independency with absolute Voluntaryism, or the doctrine of No State Church, was not universal among them.] It was the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... wants melody. The versification is eccentric to the ear, and the subject (the factory miseries) is scarcely an agreeable one to the fancy. Perhaps altogether you had better not see it, because I know you think me to be deteriorating, and I don't want you to have further hypothetical evidence of so false an opinion. Humbled as I am, I say 'so false an opinion.' Frankly, if not humbly, I believe myself to have gained power since the time of the publication of the 'Seraphim,' and lost nothing except happiness. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... illustration of a planet whose axis is almost at right angles to the plane of its orbit, being inclined but about a degree and a half. The hypothetical inhabitants of this majestic planet must therefore have perpetual summer at the equator, eternal winter at the poles, and in the temperate regions everlasting spring. On account of the straightness of the axis, however, even the polar inhabitants—if there ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery over things. Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with the hypothetical and ideal cogency of his science, and puts its dignity in that. Moreover, M. Bergson has the too pragmatic notion that the use of mathematics is to keep our accounts straight in this business world; whereas its inherent use is emancipating ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... brand. Then he said he could make two hundred and fifty feet answer; but to do it right, and make the best job in town of it, and attract the admiration of the just and the unjust alike, and compel all parties to say they never saw a more symmetrical and hypothetical display of lightning-rods since they were born, he supposed he really couldn't get along without four hundred, though he was not vindictive, and trusted he was willing to try. I said, go ahead and use four hundred, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... universe; and when we turn from one to the other, and say that now energy has emerged from the bosom of God, we are turning over a new leaf, or rather picking up an entirely different volume. The natural world is composed of objects and events which theory may regard as transformations of a hypothetical energy; an energy which M. Benda—who when he comes down to the physical world is a good materialist—conceives to have condensed and distributed itself into matter, which in turn composed organisms ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... 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 ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... and sense; that is, Thou would'st have Presbyters to go 1315 For bears and dogs, and bearwards too; A strange chimera of beasts and men, Made up of pieces heterogene; Such as in nature never met In eodem subjecto yet. 1320 Thy other arguments are all Supposures, hypothetical, That do but beg, and we may chose Either to grant them, or refuse. Much thou hast said, which I know when 1325 And where thou stol'st from other men, Whereby 'tis plain thy Light and Gifts Are all but plagiary shifts; And is the same that Ranter said, Who, arguing with me, broke my ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... since. But of the intermediate period between the close of the first century and the close of the second, the notices are sparse, the literature is scanty and fragmentary. Hence modern criticism has busied itself with hypothetical reconstructions of Christian history during this interval. It has been maintained that the greater part of the writings of our Canon were unknown and unwritten at the beginning of this period. It has been supposed that there was a complete discontinuity in the career ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... surface—namely, about the poles—there must thus have resulted the first geographical distinction of parts. To these illustrations of growing heterogeneity, which, though deduced from known physical laws, may be regarded as more or less hypothetical, Geology adds an extensive series that have been inductively established. Investigations show that the Earth has been continually becoming more heterogeneous in virtue of the multiplication of sedimentary strata which form its crust; also, that ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting such hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct demands of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly unconscious. The thought brought a wholesome ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... to the dissecting-table, and I see now the fearless eye with which she approached the cadaver. 'For that's what it is, you know,' she flashed out at me, at the end of my long demonstration. 'It's a dead body, like all the instances and examples and hypothetical cases that ever were! What do you expect to learn from thai? The first great anatomist was the man who stuck his knife in a heart that was beating; and the only way to find out what doing a thing will be like is to ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... published an ordinance, June 2d, 1497, in 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

... the difference lies in the area of consciousness," Ernst Mallin was saying. "You all know, of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness. Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose entire mentation ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... facts by a retardation at one time and an acceleration at another of a process which we know from its nature and from observation to have been unequal,—a cause so simple may surely be preferred to one so obscure and hypothetical ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... 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 chapter ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... 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 of a third thing, the constructive rhythm of a work of ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes

... 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 former ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... the explanation of his having been sent with his splendid regiment on a useless expedition through the deadly fever country just to the south of Delagoa Bay, between the Lebomba Mountains and the sea, and of his now having to go with the effective remnant of his veterans on a quest for copper to a hypothetical spot ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully

... reduced, in less than twenty-five years, from 1,000,000 to 14,000 souls. (Indias Occidentales, dec. 1. lib. 10, cap. 12.) The numerical estimates of a large savage population, must, of course, be in a great degree hypothetical. That it was large, however, in these fair regions, may readily be inferred from the facilities of subsistence, and the temperate habits of the natives. The minimum sum in the calculation, when the number had dwindled to a few thousand, might ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott

... 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 be looked at as a mere hypothesis, but rendered in some degree probable by what we positively know of the variability of organic beings in a state of nature,—by ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... right, and what she, Nature, wished. Also this same persistent Nature seemed to suggest to him that Isobel was her most willing and obedient pupil, and that perhaps if he could look into her heart he would find that she did care, and very much more than for the wealth and the hypothetical lord. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... round our shores; but the safety of England rests on the courage and enterprise of its people, not on ramparts and fortifications. And after all the plan is unauthorised by the report of the board; the opinion of naval officers has been withheld; and the opinion of military officers is founded on hypothetical or conditional suggestions, and on such data as were proposed to them, for the truth or probability of which they refuse to make themselves responsible." In the debates, both Sheridan and all the orators on his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Hitty," Nancy coaxed. "I could make perfectly good baby clothes if I needed to. Don't you think I'll be of more use in the world serving nourishing food to hordes of hungry men and women than making baby clothes for one hypothetical baby?" ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... much jealousy against him, and came to be called Dunkirk House, from the insinuation that it was built out of the funds paid by the French for Dunkirk. Abbey-lands are supposed by many to carry ill-luck with them, and quickly to change hands. Audley End has proved no exception to this hypothetical fate. Only a portion of it now remains, but this, though much marred by injudicious alterations, is amply sufficient to show how grand it was. It has long since passed out of the hands of the Howards, and now belongs to Lord Braybrooke, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... the end of the election was only 63. This happened on the occasion of the first trial of the system in Johannesburg and Pretoria, and further experience will lead to an even fuller exercise of the privilege of marking preferences. There is no case for a criticism based on such a hypothetical example as that hinted ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys

... 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

... denotes end, and end denotes "commencement"; how, then, in the Absolute can there be either? Nevertheless, in the Absolute must we seek for the hypothetical starting-point of life. ...
— Hebrew Literature

... fast. Presenting the case to O'Connor was impossible; it was too complicated, and it might violate governmental secrecy somewhere along the line. He decided to wrap it up in a hypothetical situation. "Doctor," he said, "I know that all the various manifestations of the psi powers were investigated and named long before responsible scientists became interested ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett

... the changing seasons, and the anatomy of the human body were the chief subjects of study. The human cadaver was never dissected, but a knowledge of anatomy was obtained from diagrams which were wholly hypothetical. In early times medical officers were appointed to experiment with medicines upon monkeys, and also to dissect the bodies of monkeys. From these dissections, as well as from the printed diagrams of Chinese books the imperfect knowledge which ...
— Japan • David Murray

... not only tetanisation, but also CO2 has the power of converting the modified response into normal. Hence it has been suggested that the conversion under tetanisation of modified response to normal, in stale nerve, is due to a hypothetical evolution of CO2 in the ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose

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

... destined to be still more triumphantly vindicated. On the 31st of January, 1862, while in the act of trying a new 18-inch refractor, Mr. Alvan G. Clark (one of the celebrated firm of American opticians) actually discovered the hypothetical Sirian companion in the precise position required by theory. It has now been watched through nearly an entire revolution (period 49.4 years), and proves to be very slightly luminous in proportion to its mass. Its attractive power, in fact, is ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... because, as it is speculatively certain that the substance of mind must be unknowable, it seems a priori probable that, whatever is the cause of the unknowable reality, this cause should be more difficult to render into thought in that relation than would some other hypothetical substance which is imagined as more akin to mind. And if it is said that the more conceivable cause is the more probable cause, we have seen that it is in this case impossible to estimate the validity of the remark. Lastly, the statement that the cause must contain actually ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... he said affectionately to himself. "He's playing go to the hotel, I suppose. Perhaps when that imagination of his gets to work at hypothetical bread and butter he'll find the reality preferable ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond

... compound "caffetannic acid," and there is even less likelihood of its being present in roasted coffee. The conditions, high heat and oxidation, to which coffee is subjected in roasting would suffice to decompose this hypothetical ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... humility when discovered by the passing Boffins taking the air in a mutton grove. Presents are made to the Boffin servants, and bland strangers with business-cards meeting said servants in the street, offer hypothetical corruption. As, 'Supposing I was to be favoured with an order from Mr Boffin, my dear friend, it would be worth my while'—to do a certain thing that I hope might not prove wholly ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... distinctly be borne in mind that these two forces are also north of the passes: that of Von Bojna being stationed at the elbow where the Germanic line turned from the Carpathians almost due north along the Dunajec-Biala front, or across the neck of our hypothetical jar. The Dukla and Lupkow passes were still in Russian hands; these were the only two that the Germanic offensives of January, February, and March, 1915, had failed to capture; all the others, from Rostoki eastward, were held by the Austrians and Germans. It was through ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... has excited my curiosity to detect the first modern who obtruded such formless things on public attention. I conjectured that, whoever he might be, he would be distinguished for his egotism and his knavery. My hypothetical criticism turned out to be correct. Nothing less than the audacity of the unblushing Pietro Aretino could have adventured on this project; he claims the honour, and the critics do not deny it, of being the first ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... "recall"). 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, ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

... thought as any aspect of the arrangements. The trouble is 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

... 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various

... 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 ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... from the facts. He met Archie at dinner without resentment, almost with cordiality. You must take your friends as you find them, he would have said. Archie couldn't help being his father's son, or his grandfather's, the hypothetical weaver's, grandson. The son of a hunks, he was still a hunks at heart, incapable of true generosity and consideration: but he had other qualities with which Frank could divert himself in the meanwhile, and to enjoy which it was necessary that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Water. In former times all liquid substances were supposed to be liquid because they possessed something in common; this hypothetical something was called the Element, Water. Similarly, the view prevailed until comparatively recent times, that burning substances burn because of the presence in them of a hypothetical imponderable fluid, called "Caloric"; the alchemists preferred to call this indefinable ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir

... The 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. For his part, he is convinced that frequent ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... biscuits soaked with sea-water were distributed at 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

... 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

... Law, does not get nearer to a real apprehension of them than to be led to accuse Englishmen of considering that the queen is impeccable and infallible, and that the Parliament is omnipotent. Mr. Kingsley has read me from beginning to end in the fashion in which the hypothetical Russian read Blackstone; not, I repeat, from malice, but because of his intellectual build. He appears to be so constituted as to have no notion of what goes on in minds very different from his own, and moreover to be stone-blind to his ignorance. A modest man or a philosopher ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... not be told. This, in Darwin's opinion, is a nearly parallel case, with the objection that selection explains nothing because we know not the cause of each individual difference in the structure of each being. The shape of the fragments of stone at the base of the hypothetical precipice may be called accidental, but the term is not strictly applicable; for the shape of each depends on a long sequence of events, all obeying natural laws; on the nature of the rock, on the lines of deposition or cleavage, on the form of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... waists, leaving the upper and lower parts of their bodies naked. Their color is a dingy black, although what exact shade they would represent were they washed quite clean is a matter of conjecture. A more filthy race of beings I never saw; and if we adopt the hypothetical theory of eminent medical gentlemen, that when the pores of the skin are closed, and perspiration ceases to flow, the patient dies, then the natives in Australia should, according to that reasoning, have all been under ground years ago; for I am confident ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... minor posts, but which he had not had the power to enforce. It seems to have become clear to his mind that, if a chess-player acquired skill, not only by playing actual games and by studying actual games played by masters, but also by working out hypothetical chess problems, it ought to be possible to devise a system whereby army officers could supplement their necessarily meagre experience of actual war, and their necessarily limited opportunities for studying with full knowledge the actual campaigns of great strategists, by working ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... then it was not Severus; if Severus, then not 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 such an one,—(it matters nothing, I repeat, whether we call him ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... Now that hypothetical reader will say, "Why didn't that silly old fool, Allan, think of all these things? Why didn't he remember that he was commanding a pack of savages with whom he had no real acquaintance, among whom there were sure to be traitors, especially ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... such general laws as its results are found to verify. Apart from particular observations, science need presuppose nothing except the general principles of logic, and these principles are not laws of nature, for they are merely hypothetical, and apply not only to the actual world but to whatever is possible. The second error consists in the identification of a constant quantity with a persistent entity. Energy is a certain function of a physical system, but is not a thing or substance ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... 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 "specious questions." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various

... shaped itself. I think of something which I may perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out of court, or as the Void without Implications, or as Nothingness or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of human thought, and thither I think all negative terms reach at last, and merge and become nothing. Whatever positive class you make, whatever boundary you draw, straight away from that boundary begins the corresponding negative class and passes into the illimitable ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... tell the people, pointing to ruined mills and unused water power, that the country once had diversified industries, and that if they were allowed to apply their panacea, Ireland would quickly rebuild her industrial life. If our hypothetical traveller were to ask whether there are no other leaders in the country besides the eloquent gentlemen who proclaim her helplessness, he would be told that among the professional classes, the landlords, ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... thinking aloud on that proposition and don't want to be bound by what I say." The students in the office, to whom he was unfailingly courteous, apostrophized him as "the fox." He called them all "Mister," and occasionally flattered them by presenting a hypothetical ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... 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 ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... domesticated varieties. No one doubts at all that particular circumstances may be more favourable for one plant and less so for another, and the moment you admit that, you admit the selective power of nature. Now, although I have been putting a hypothetical case, you must not suppose that I have been reasoning hypothetically. There are plenty of direct experiments which bear out what we may call the theory of natural selection; there is extremely good authority for the statement that if you take the seed of mixed varieties ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley

... that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical, and depending more upon invention than experience: every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... excited about life as men do and could laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend. He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... 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 ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems, can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... space. We wish to handle space and say 3 ft. or 7 ft. in order to handle space relations. In other words, to handle space we utilize a formulation which we call a measure of space. In the same manner in order to handle time we make a hypothetical unit to be pragmatic. In handling the phenomena of electricity, we formulate other units. In my own mind there has grown up therefore the analogy that in order to handle psychological phenomena we have formulated the Oedipus by hypothesis. This hypothesis I would define as the unconscious ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... 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 of all the occasional poems, and we ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... Gracchus had formed the intention of 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 ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... was gradually introduced. I do not say there have never been introductions of any kind; but let us see what they amount to here. Select for yourself your doctrine, or your ordinance, which you say was introduced, and try to give the history of its introduction. Hypothetical that history will be, of course; but we will not scruple at that;—we will only ask one thing, that it should cut clean between the real facts of the case, though it bring none in its favour; but it will not be able to do ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... present state of our knowledge, our conclusions respecting the beginning of the earth's history, the way in which it took form and shape as a distinct, separate planet, must, of course, be very vague and hypothetical. Yet the progress of science is so rapidly reconstructing the past that we may hope to solve even this problem; and to one who looks upon man's appearance upon the earth as the crowning work in a succession ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... attainable by the means which they employ. Thus blinded by the prejudice of a false analogy, they do not even endeavour to gratify the human understanding (which naturally goes in quest of wisdom and design) by forming a hypothetical or specious theory of the mineral system; and they only amuse themselves with the supposition of an unknown operation of water for the explanation of their cabinet specimens, a supposition altogether ineffectual for the purpose of forming a habitable earth, and a supposition ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... when I tell him that I am but an unhappy tool—I, an honest man whom a rich tempter, taking advantage of my unmerited poverty, has betrayed into crime. Monsieur himself shall judge me when I have told him all!" And then—with creditably imaginative variations on the theme of a hypothetical dying wife in combination with six supposititious starving children—the man came close enough to telling all to make clear that his backer ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... 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 ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... of gas, instead of being placed under our hypothetical building, is plunged into a cold medium, which will permit its heat-vibrations to exhaust themselves without being correspondingly restored. Then, presently, the temperature is lowered below the critical point, and, presto! the mad struggle ceases, the atoms lie amicably ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... sense, without the irony, is: 'Nor can it be supposed that you consider the matter indeed difficult, but that you are without fear. You are, on the contrary, full of fear, but you hesitate.' [296] Immo vero, 'oh no; on the contrary.' See Zumpt, S 277. [297] Respecting this form of hypothetical sentences, see Zumpt, S 524, note 1. The verb in the apodosis might be implorabis, without altering the meaning. [298] This statement differs in two points from the current tradition of history. First, the praenomen of this Manlius is commonly Titus, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... provisional explanation of his own mind's existence with that of the existence of Mind in the abstract; he must not be allowed to suppose that, by thus hypothetically explaining the existence of known minds, he is thereby establishing a probability in favour of that hypothetical cause, an Unknown Mind. Only if he has some independent reason to infer that such an Unknown Mind exists, could such a probability be made out, and his hypothetical explanation of known mind become ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... activity. 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 ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... ages of seventeen and fifty years; later the ages were extended both ways to sixteen and sixty years. Grant remarked that the Confederates had robbed "the cradle and the grave" in order to fill the armies[36]. Jefferson Davis began to see the futility of a hypothetical discussion as to the advisability or values in the use of Negroes as soldiers and in a letter to John Forsythe, February, 1865, stated "that all arguments as to the positive advantage or disadvantage of employing them are beside the question, which ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... 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.

... say that if Johannes Mueller had told Huxley any such thing, he would have at once concluded that the great anatomist was joking or suffering from hallucination. As a matter of fact trained investigators do not see these incredible monstrosities, and Huxley's hypothetical case goes far beyond every attested miracle. But I do say that if Johannes Muller, or anyone else, alleged that he had seen a centaur, Huxley would never ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... have been fired by my hypothetical Russian as far as the rifle was concerned; but he would have found it difficult to borrow Sir David's boots, and it seemed unlikely that any stranger would not only have dared to do so, but afterwards have had the audacity to return them. ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... coming out depended upon what was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that inherited; it sometimes reveals surprises. Neither Lorne Murchison ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... devachanic faculty), is that of magnifying at will the minutest physical or astral particle to any desired size, as though by a microscope—though no microscope ever made or ever likely to be made possesses even a thousandth part of this psychic magnifying power. By its means the hypothetical molecule and atom postulated by science become visible and living realities to the occult student, and on this closer examination he finds them to be much more complex in their structure than the scientific man has yet realised them to be. It also enables him to follow ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... the highest of them—the natural leaders of the rest,—must be prepared to overcome their collective resistance by winning to his side the lowest of them, by terrifying Man's weaker self with threats, by corrupting his baser self with bribes. The ruin of Man's nature, whether hypothetical or actual,[4] has left intact (or relatively intact) only the animal base of it. It is to his animal instincts, then, that legalism must appeal in its endeavour to influence his conduct. In other words, the punishments and the rewards to which Man is to look forward must be of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... man may see in the world, and experience in himself. To be separated from God, which is the immediate effect of sin, is to pass into hell here. 'Every transgression and disobedience,' not only 'shall receive its just recompense,' away out yonder, in some misty, far-off, hypothetical future, but down here to-day. All sin works automatically, and to do wrong is to be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of Truth. Its practical application to benefit the race, heal the sick, enlighten and reform the sinner, makes divine metaphysics need- [20] ful, indispensable. Teaching metaphysics at other col- leges means, mainly, elaborating a man-made theory, or some speculative view too vapory and hypothetical for questions of ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... 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, and formed an important friendship with Gabriel ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... somewhat curious that almost all savages entertain an abhorrence at hair on any other part of the body than the head; and some of them even to that. Two reasons, at least, may be assigned for it, both of them, however, somewhat hypothetical, it must be owned. 1. Their admiration of youth—the same principle which induces some civilized people to powder their heads, and dye their whiskers, &c. when assuming the silvery hue of age! And, 2. Their having learned by experience that it rendered them more obnoxious ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... a reconstruction of events as we could get. Strictly hypothetical, of course. Deathlanders trying to figure out what goes on inside a "country" like Atla-Alamos and why are sort of like foxes trying to understand world politics, or wolves the Gothic migrations. ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... made, and much may be prevented, in the examination of any really difficult human problem, by thus approaching it on the hypothetical side. Such approach is easy to the foolish, pleasant to the proud, and convenient to the malicious, but absolutely fruitless of practical result. Our modesty and wisdom consist alike in the simple registry of the facts ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... of higher causes when lower ones are found sufficient to explain the observed effects—this law constitutes the only logical barrier between science and superstition. For it is manifest that it is always possible to give a hypothetical explanation of any phenomenon whatever, by referring it immediately to the intelligence of some supernatural agent; so that the only difference between the logic of science and the logic of superstition consists in science recognising a validity in the law of parsimony which superstition ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes

... is a science of wealth, it must give rules for gaining wealth and disposing of wealth, and can do nothing more; it cannot itself declare that it is a subordinate science, that its end is not the ultimate end of all things, and that its conclusions are only hypothetical, depending on its premisses, and liable to be overruled by a higher teaching. I do not then blame the Political Economist for anything which follows from the very idea of his science, from the very moment that it is recognized as a science. He must of course ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... 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 controlled ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... others, of this sympathetic artistic temperament, may become so through their sympathies plus their conditions of life." It is possible there may be some element of truth in this view, which my correspondent regarded as purely hypothetical. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... this 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... for her need not have gone to the knife-hilt. Much information is lacking to make the tale complete, but what follows is enough. Listen to it and fill in the blanks if you can—with surmise of alleviation, with interstices of hypothetical happiness—however little warrant the known facts of the case ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... to a real or historical classification, following lines of actual descent and based on proven facts of historical evolution. But Aristotle (as it seems to me) neither was bound to a museum catalogue nor indulged in visions either of a complete scala naturae or of an hypothetical phylogeny. He classified animals as he found them; and, as a logician, he had a dichotomy for every difference which presented itself to his mind. At one time he divided animals into those with blood and those without, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... 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 ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope

... my question yet. It's a hypothetical question—yes, hypothetical. I'm sure that's what I want to say. Hypo—hypothetical question. Question; yes, that's right. Now, suppose you'd been a pretty wild young shark, and had kept your mother anxious ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... from the center of the Circle; from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the hypothetical base of algebraical science—the unknown quantity of which sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from cause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete, perfect, and likewise simple; but it is simple only after we have deciphered ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... had gripped the imagination of all. It was sufficiently theoretical, so absolutely hypothetical, in fact, so utterly impossible, that Evelyn's alert intellect found pleasure in grappling ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... act of God and an elder from all eternity. Even his youthful thoughts and imaginations adjusted themselves to the scope of the Westminster Confession, abhorring any horizon unillumined by the gray light which flowed in mathematical exactitude from a hypothetical heart in ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles

... refinement amidst the general disorder and decay. All collectivist schemes, all rational Socialism, if only Socialists would realise it, all hope for humanity, indeed, are dependent ultimately upon the hypothetical possibility of a better system of government than ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... disjunctive form is resolvable into the conditional; every disjunctive proposition being equivalent to two or more conditional ones. "Either A is B or C is D," means, "if A is not B, C is D; and if C is not D, A is B." All hypothetical propositions, therefore, though disjunctive in form, are conditional in meaning; and the words hypothetical and conditional may be, as indeed they generally are, used synonymously. Propositions in which the assertion is not dependent on a condition, are said, in the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... the laws of nature, and also that physical systems in their behaviour would be dependent on the orientation in space with respect to the earth. For owing to the alteration in direction of the velocity of revolution of the earth in the course of a year, the earth cannot be at rest relative to the hypothetical system K[0] throughout the whole year. However, the most careful observations have never revealed such anisotropic properties in terrestrial physical space, i.e. a physical non-equivalence of different ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein

... its starting-point any attenuated materialistic hypothesis, such as may be indicated by the arbitrary words "life" or "movement" or "ether" or "force" or "energy" or "atoms" or "molecules" or "electrons" or "vortices" or "evolutionary progress," because it recognizes that all these hypothetical origins of life are only projected and abstracted aspects of the central reality of life, which is, and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... can be called nothing else) will do well to read Dr. Haeckel's "History of Creation," only they must be on their guard at every step. The author constantly states as facts (or, perhaps, with an impatient "must have been") the existence of purely hypothetical forms, of which there is no kind of evidence. To such ends does the love ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... remove wrong ideas, which are the no less essential foundations and fertile mothers of every description of error in practice. And inasmuch as, whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas, it is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things, and even of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error. ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley

... resolution vanished like other more eccentric impulses. Music, he once told Johnson, affected him intensely, producing in his mind "alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and of daring resolution so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest of the [purely hypothetical] battle." "Sir," replied Johnson, "I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool." Elsewhere he expresses a wish to "fly to the woods," or retire into a desert, a disposition which Johnson checked by one of his habitual ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... he could not see the Stetson inside, he noted that the cab was engaged, and, therefore, possibly occupied. It was sufficient, in these days of constant surveillance, to arouse his suspicion; it was more than sufficient to-day to set his brain working upon a plan to elude the hypothetical pursuer. He had become, latterly, an expert in detecting detectives, and now his wits must be taxed ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... Alderson sitting down, Mr. Joy proceeded to 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 ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... its thoughtless throng, there were 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. ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... will furnish as vivid a picture as it is possible to give of the state of contemporary belief upon the subject of possession. It is impossible not to notice that nearly all the allusions in the play refer to the performance of the youth Richard Mainy. Even Edgar's hypothetical account of his moral failings in the past seems to have been an accurate reproduction of Mainy's conduct in some particulars, as the quotation below will prove;[1] and there appears to be so little necessity for these remarks of ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... indicates that the interrogator is beyond a comprehension of the reply. He is like a congenital blindman, who asks: "Of what use is seeing?" The question was, indeed, propounded in the third section of this paper, but only as the hypothetical question of an outsider, much as an Englishman might ask, "Of what value are the Chinese?" to secure an external, historical justification of their existence. However, if the great majority of Jews ever seriously ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... and prelatic usurpations, was never resorted to till the attempt was made to remove the ark of the tabernacle from her. I therefore counsel you, my young friends, not to lend your ears to those that trumpet forth their hypothetical politics; but to believe that the laws of the land are administered with a good intent, till in your own homes and dwellings ye feel the presence of the oppressor—then, and not till then, are ye free to gird your ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... I am charmed with your metaphor of the streamlet never running against the force of gravitation. Your distinction between an hypothesis and theory seems to me very ingenious; but I do not think it is ever followed. Every one now speaks of the undulatory THEORY of light; yet the ether is itself hypothetical, and the undulations are inferred only from explaining the phenomena of light. Even in the THEORY of gravitation is the attractive power in any way known, except by explaining the fall of the apple, and the movements of the Planets? It seems to me that an hypothesis is DEVELOPED into a ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... in which, in the debatable question whether there really was an authoritative revision of the so-called Syrian text at about A.D. 350, Dr. Hort speaks of this Syrian revision as a vera causa, as opposed to a hypothetical possibility. This tendency in a subject so complicated as that of textual criticism must be taken note of by the student, and must introduce some element of hesitation in the acceptance of confidently expressed decisions when the subject-matter may still be very ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott

... affidavits produced in 1814, in favor of Lord Portsmouth's soundness of intellect (for I have attentively perused the whole catalogue) did not go into the investigation of the supposed difference between this hypothetical unsoundness and lunacy; but attested, as far as his Lordship's conversation and conduct had been the subject of their observation and judgment, that he was not a man labouring under any infirmity, or morbid state ...
— A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect • John Haslam

... had to obey. For the first time in her life she was of no account. For the first time she had been made conscious of the inferiority of her sex. The training of years had broken down under the experience. The hypothetical status in which she had stood with regard to Aubrey and his friends was not tolerated here, where every moment she was made to feel acutely that she was a woman, forced to submit to everything to which her womanhood exposed her, forced to endure everything that he might ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... to becoming a tree. That would be to carry over 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

... declares, that the perception is the proximate and that the matter is the remote object of the mind. Then scepticism declares, that the existence of the matter which has been separated from the perception is problematical, because it is not the direct object of consciousness, and is consequently hypothetical. And, last of all, idealism takes up the ball and declares, that this hypothetical matter is not only problematical, but that it is non-existent. These are the perplexities which rise up to embarrass reason whenever she is weak enough ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... d'Epire, dans une salle du palais de Pyrrhus'—could anything be more discouraging than such an announcement? Here is nothing for the imagination to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no wondrous vision of 'blasted heaths,' or the 'seaboard of Bohemia'; here is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for five acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may have a place to meet in and make their speeches. The 'three unities' and the rest of the 'rules' are a burden which the English reader ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... wanting Some voice at her side, with an evil enchanting To conjure them to her." "O lady, beware! At this moment, around me I search everywhere For a clew to your words"— "You mistake them," she said, Half fearing, indeed, the effect they had made. "I was putting a mere hypothetical case." With a long look of trouble he gazed in her face. "Woe to him,..." he exclaim'd... "woe to him that shall feel Such a hope! for I swear, if he did but reveal One glimpse,—it should be the last hope of his life!" The clench'd ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith



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



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