"Presuppose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... jesters: but that which giveth greatest scope to their scorning humours is rhyming and versing. It is already said (and as I think, truly said) it is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry. But yet, presuppose it were inseparable (as indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth) truly it were an inseparable commendation. For if oratio next to ratio, speech next to reason, be the greatest gift bestowed upon mortality: that cannot be praiseless, which doth most polish that blessing of speech, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... orchestral relationships is contained in the massiveness of the harmonic texture, and in the cumulative effect of the climaxes and crescendi. He conveys an impression of extended tone-spaces, of a largeness, complexity, and solidity of structure, which are peculiar to his own music, and which presuppose a rather disdainful view of the limitations of mere strings and hammers; yet it is all playable: its demands are formidable, but ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... details, the unsubstantial nature of its forms, the uncertainty of their justification. Born a Catholic, he was no longer a believer in the divine inspiration of Catholicism; raised a member of the social elect, he had ceased to accept the fetish that birth and station presuppose any innate superiority; brought up as the heir to a comfortable fortune and expected to marry in his own sphere, he was by no means sure that he wanted marriage on any terms. Of course the conjugal state ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... that the facts alleged could not be true, because they were physically impossible. He raised, among other objections, this,—that the flexible, delicate nature of the skin, of the flesh, and of the viscera, is incompatible with a force and a consistency so extraordinary as the alleged facts presuppose; and, consequently, that it was impossible, without ceasing to be what they are,—without a radical change in their qualities,—that they should acquire a force superior to that of the hardest and most solid bodies. They let him quietly complete ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... mathematics in the American colleges and universities differ considerably. The normal beginning courses now presuppose a year of geometry and a year and a half of algebra in addition to the elementary courses in arithmetic, but much higher requirements are sometimes imposed, especially for engineering courses. In recent years several of the largest universities have ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... of holding. You must be alluding to some half-sentence or other of mine, which I have forgotten, and which was no real sample of my sentiments. Do you mean I have no worship? and does not worship presuppose faith? I have much to learn, I am conscious; but I wish to learn it from the Church under whose shadow my lot is cast, and with whom ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... Let a man dream dreams as gorgeous as De Quincey's, it does not at all follow that he can write like De Quincey; as related to literature, the grandeur of dreams depends absolutely upon the dreamer's mastery of the narrative art, which the dreaming faculty itself does not either presuppose or bestow. But, over and above all this, universal experience has declared that the use of opium is fatally hostile to any very protracted mental power. It ravages the mind no less fearfully than it does ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... questions about miracles, before coming to the question of the actual evidence of any, are questions about which reason—reason disengaged and disembarrassed from the arbitrary veto of experience—has a right to give its verdict. Miracles presuppose the existence of God, and it is from reason alone that we get the idea of God; and the antecedent question then is, whether they are really compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us. Mr. Mozley remarks that the question of miracles is ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Canons are without meaning or use apart from the Sections,—for the sake of which they were clearly invented. Those Sections, whatever convenience they may possess apart from the Canons, nevertheless are discovered to presuppose the Canons throughout: to be manifestly subsequent to them in order of time: to depend upon them for their very existence: in some places to be even unaccountable in the eccentricity of their arrangement, except when explained by the requirements of the EUSEBIAN Canons. I say—That particular ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... calf of gold, before which the multitude fell down and worshipped. Whether this image was a solid figure of gold, or a wooden effigy merely, coated with metal, is uncertain. To suppose the former,—knowing the size of the image made from such trifling articles as rings, we must presuppose the Israelites to have spoiled the Egyptians most unmercifully: the figure, however, is of more consequence than the weight or size of the idol. That the Israelite brought away more from Goshen than the plunder of the Egyptians, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... other arts beyond the single passion for hazard, which exists, I am inclined to think, in a greater or less degree in every human breast, were here employed to beguile the young and unsuspecting mind into indulgence. The establishment into which I had fallen, seemed to presuppose an acquaintance, already formed, of the gamester with his fascinating vice. It was evidently no place to seduce the uninitiate. The passion must have been already awakened—the guardianship of the good angel ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... find in his fifteenth Chapter: where he instructs his Prince to use such an ambidexterity as that he may serve himselfe either of vertue, or vice, according to his advantage, which in true pollicy is neither good in attaining the Principality nor in securing it when it is attaind. For Politicks, presuppose Ethiques, which will never allow this rule: as that a man might make this small difference between vertue, and vice, that he may indifferently lay aside, or take up the one or the other, and put it in practise as best conduceth to the end he propounds himselfe. I doubt our Authour would ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... But what is remarkable and well-nigh incredible is that even for a moment they should have supposed this non-Christian criterion in history and this non-Christian direction in metaphysics compatible with adherence to the Catholic church. That seems to presuppose, in men who in fact are particularly thoughtful and learned, an inexplicable ignorance of history, of theology, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of positivists and materialistic atheists generally. The wiser and stronger ground to take is, that the derivative hypothesis leaves the argument for design, and therefore for a Designer, as valid as it ever was;—that to do any work by an instrument must require, and therefore presuppose, the exertion rather of more than of less power than to do it directly;—that whoever would be a consistent theist should believe that Design in the natural world is coextensive with Providence, and hold fully to the one as he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in soma-laudations is that the soma-hymns are not only quite mechanical, but that they presuppose a very complete and elaborate ritual, with the employment of a number of priests, of whom the hotars (one of the various sets of priests) alone number five in the early and seven in the late books; with a complicated service; with ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... presuppose that there are funds which may be lawfully used to defray the expenses which must necessarily be incurred in the premises. By reference to the Secretary's report, it will be seen that there are no moneys lawfully ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... therefore require faith in revealed truths, of which they are but deductions, logical conclusions; they presuppose, in their observance, the grace of God; and call for a certain strenuosity of life without which nothing meritorious can be effected. We must be convinced of the right God has to trace a line of conduct ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... affairs of the community, in fact of the political community, forms their substance. They come within the category of political freedom, of civil rights, which does not, as we have seen, by any means presuppose the unequivocal and positive abolition of religion, and therefore of Judaism. It remains to consider the other aspect of human rights, the droits de l'homme apart ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... stated in the above extract is an unsolved problem. That it differs widely from the Egyptian metempsychosis is clear. In fact, since men usually people the other world with phantoms of this, the Egyptian doctrine would seem to presuppose the Indian as a more ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... their teaching on a number of Scriptural texts which either expressly declare or presuppose that grace is capable of being increased in the soul ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary: for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large. This idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose; and it forms Bacon's great contribution to the group of ideas which rendered possible the subsequent rise ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... attribute this simply and solely to the superior force of the Polish musician's patriotism. The same force of patriotism in an Italian, Frenchman, German, or Englishman would not have produced a similar result. Characteristics such as distinguish Chopin's music presuppose a nation as peculiarly endowed, constituted, situated, and conditioned, as the Polish—a nation with a history as brilliant and dark, as fair and hideous, as romantic and tragic. The peculiarities of the peoples of western Europe have been considerably modified, if not entirely levelled, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the original deployment of the brigade for combat and presuppose an enemy of equal or nearly equal training and morale. The limits necessitated by the subsequent progress of the combat can not ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... efforts, which, however well meant and earnestly pursued, are much more apt to end in disappointment, discouragement, and discredit to the newly developing industry than in anything else. It seems to me to be neither wise nor fair to furnish estimates of returns, which presuppose an organization of the industry, without mentioning the difficulties which must be encountered where the organization is lacking. The great difficulty is in selling the cocoons after they are raised, and this can only ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... "Don't presuppose anything of the kind, my dear, and there will be no danger. Rex will never be at home for long together, and Warham is going to India. It is the wiser plan to take it for granted that cousins will not fall in love. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air, and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense population, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... circus;—combining these considerations, we have already a key to the enormities and hideous excesses of the Roman Imperator. The hot blood which excites, and the adventurous courage which accompanies, the excesses of sanguinary warfare, presuppose a condition of the moral nature not to be compared for malignity and baleful tendency to the cool and cowardly spirit of amateurship, in which the Roman (perhaps an effeminate Asiatic) sat looking down upon the bravest of men, (Thracians, or other Europeans,) mangling each other for his recreation. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... already quoted, is by no means easy to follow, since there are not many who have the time and the inclination to acquire a 'superficial knowledge' of Rome by a ten years' visit. If, therefore, we merely presuppose an average knowledge of history and a guide-book acquaintance with the chief points in the city, the simplest and most direct way of learning more about it is to take the Regions in their ancient order, as the learned Baracconi has done in his invaluable little work, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... comfort in knowing at the end of the day that, although it had brought no delight to you, it had through you been made more tolerable to somebody. Disorders of the type with which you are afflicted are terribly selfish. Mind, I repeat it, I presuppose nothing but general depression. If it is more than that I can ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... the will has been supposed to be guided by the educator, but now another guide is to be followed, for it becomes the work of the educator to teach that "nothing in the world has any absolute value except Will guided by the Right." We must presuppose before we can produce any great effect in this direction a considerable education of the intellect, in order that the child may have some intelligent idea of the Right, otherwise we shall be leaving her to the saddest mistakes. The African chief, who, being convinced ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... in his own language have hitherto been at the service of the English student of Malay—grammars, more or less scientifically arranged, and vocabularies and books of dialogues, which presuppose some ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... that science is organised knowledge, we are met by the truth that all knowledge is organised in a greater or less degree—that the commonest actions of the household and the field presuppose facts colligated, inferences drawn, results expected; and that the general success of these actions proves the data by which they were guided to have been correctly put together. If, again, we say that science is prevision—is a seeing beforehand—is a knowing in what times, places, combinations, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... he left out the first, and second, and third likewise. To which I say, that was because the young man by his question did presuppose that he had been a doer of them: for he professed in his supplication, that he was a lover of that which is naturally good, which is God, in that his petition was so universal for every ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... schools, save special teachers of music and drawing, are required to hold certificates that presuppose proficiency in psychology, history of education, principles of education, school administration, and methods. Special teachers in music and drawing are required to have covered in professional lines only psychology and pedagogy. ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts," he said, opening his eye with childlike wonder. "Oh, yes, I got that. But the real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me since I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it is absolutely impeded by ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... issuing invitations a hostess may fairly presuppose that her guests will not make beasts of themselves. I often wish that this mere bit of ordinary civility were more rigorously observed by Ba and Hortanes and Fricco and Vul and Baal-Peor, and by all your other cousins who come to visit you in such a zoologically muddled condition. It shows a certain ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... with insistent earnestness the importance of certain difficult truths and the tremendous issues dependent on right conduct and right knowledge. The remaining collections, the Samyutta and Anguttara, classify the Buddha's utterances under various headings and presuppose older documents which they sometimes quote[606]. The Samyutta consists of a great number of suttas, mostly short, combined in groups treating of a single subject which may be either a person or a topic. The Anguttara, which is a still longer collection, is arranged ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the writers who have treated of chymistry before him, are useless to the greater part of students, because they presuppose their readers to have such degrees of skill as are not often to be found. Into the same errour are all men apt to fall, who have familiarized any subject to themselves in solitude: they discourse, as if they thought every other man had been employed in the same ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... containing a prayer for the building up of Zion, and a prediction of the continuous offering of sacrifice, present some difficulty. They do not necessarily presuppose that Jerusalem is in ruins; for "build Thou the walls" would be no less appropriate a petition if the fortifications were unfinished (as we know they were in David's time) than if they had been broken ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... ruined me! But what are you going to do?" How are you going to presuppose that a girl like Miss Pasmer is interested in an idiot like you? I mean me, of course." Mavering broke off with a dolorous laugh. "And if you can't presuppose it, what are you going to do when it comes to the point? You've got to shillyshally, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with a laugh, the duke colored and did not answer. Great people are to blame for joking with their social inferiors. Jesting is a game, and games presuppose equality; it is to obviate any inconvenient results of this temporary equality that players have the right, after the game is over, not ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... this union can be taken from the end of grace, since it is ordained to acting rightly, and action belongs to the suppositum and the individual. Hence action and, in consequence, grace ordaining thereto, presuppose the hypostasis which operates. Now the hypostasis did not exist in the human nature before the union, as is clear from Q. 4, A. 2. Therefore the grace of union ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... just as Minard junior and Professor Phellion were superior among the men. All the others, without ideas or education, and issuing from the lower ranks, presented the types and the absurdities of the lesser bourgeoisie. Though all success, especially if won from distant sources, seems to presuppose some genuine merit, Minard was really an inflated balloon. Expressing himself in empty phrases, mistaking sycophancy for politeness, and wordiness for wit, he uttered his commonplaces with a brisk assurance that passed for eloquence. Certain ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... conditions which affect the man's right to large or small wage; but all of them presuppose that men are perfectly free to look over the whole industrial field and choose their own employment,—they presuppose the perfect mobility of labor. Let us ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... sprites hovered over her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her father's art, floated in music around her. If we can presuppose such a situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character of Miranda not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results of such a situation? She retains her woman's heart, for that is unalterable ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were, a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that he had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong and positive spirit robustly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "it happened both to himself and to the other men of Thera according to their former evil fortune"; but this would presuppose the truth of the story told in ch. 151, and {paligkotos} may mean ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... very indeterminate abstraction "the public," and men find a vent for their opinions not in talk, but in "copy." We read the Athenaeum askance at the tea-table, and take notes from the Philosophical Journal at a soiree; we invite our friends that we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an exclusive desire in the "ladies" to discuss their own matters, "that we may crackle the Times" at our ease. In fact, the evident tendency of things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits makes us tremble ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... rule if he had ever succeeded in applying it properly. But there were always so many intruding details. Take the present predicament, for instance. He could scarcely picture his father in these precise circumstances. To do so would be to presuppose actions on the part of that astute ancestor quite out of keeping with his known character. Would Hamilton Spence, senior, have crossed a continent at the word of one of whom he knew nothing, save that he wrote an agreeable letter? Would he have engaged (and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Upani@sads, but the ideas contained in them are similar to the words "kratu" and "kama." Desire (ta@nha) is then said to depend on feeling or sense-contact. Sense-contact presupposes the six senses as fields of operation [Footnote ref 1]. These six senses or operating fields would again presuppose the whole psychosis of the man (the body and the mind together) called namarupa. We are familiar with this word in the Upani@sads but there it is used in the sense of determinate forms and names as distinguished from the indeterminate indefinable reality [Footnote ref 2]. Buddhagho@sa ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Paternoster, etc., had been regarded and memorized as sacred formulas, the vernacular being permitted only rarely, and reluctantly at that. Also in the Lutheran Church the Latin language was not immediately abolished. A number of Evangelical catechisms, antedating Luther's, were written in, and presuppose the use of, the Latin language, for example, Melanchthon's Enchiridion, Urerius's Paedagogia, Agricola's Elementa Pietatis, etc. The Brunswick Liturgy of 1528, drafted by Bugenhagen, prescribed that on Saturday evening and early on Sunday morning the chief parts of the ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... most confiding fellow under the sun; but since I became a doctor and saw what people really are, I have become thoroughly suspicious; for there is nothing in the whole world you may not have to presuppose, even with the best of mortals, if you do not want to be misled as to the cause of their disease. I suspect everybody and everything, even, as the reader has seen above, those sedate men who go out in stormy weather. An Indian does not steal more unperceived and noiselessly ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... presuppose assent to some sort of a proposition regarding the 'mind's eye,' and the 'images' which it sees.... This points to some initial fallacy.... It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a 'mental image' ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... that a site seemed to presuppose a church, he assented, and with one great plunge, during which he distinctly felt, both that his position as landlord was not to be defended, and that this good use of the money might make things more secure, he gave a promise to build one—felt a twinge ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... forth if the antithesis to voluntarism is called intellectualism. Intellectualism is based on the category of judgment, and judgment too is a ideological attitude. Phenomenalism does not presuppose a subject which knows its contents but a subject which simply has its contents; the consciousness which has the thought as content does not take through that the voluntaristic attitude of knowing it and the psychologist has therefore no reason to prefer the thought to the volition and ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Canadian Labrador, must for many years to come depend on outside support. I am Lloyd Georgian enough to feel that taxation should presuppose the obligation to look after the bodies of the taxed. The Quebec Government gives neither vote, representation, adequate mail service, nor any public health grant for the long section of the coast which it claims to govern, that lies west of the Point des Eskimo. It is ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... argument," since they generally rush in, where their betters fear to tread. A history of roads is, in great measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For highways and great cities not merely presuppose the existence of each other, but are also the issues and exponents of two leading impulses in the nature of man. Actuated by the one—the centripetal instinct—the shepherd races of Asia founded their great capitals on the ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... interrogatories—which are arguments in themselves—relating to the inevitable results of secession, he adds, that "every man must see that these are all questions which can arise only after a revolution. They presuppose the breaking up of the government. While the Constitution lasts, they are repressed";—and then, with that felicitous use of the imagination as a handmaid of the understanding, which is the peculiar characteristic of his eloquence, he closes ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... principal comfort must come from God, we must first presuppose, in him to whom we shall give any effectual comfort with any ghostly counsel, one ground to begin with, on which all that we shall build may be supported and stand; that is, the ground and foundation of faith. ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... consistency with the only law, whether of vegetable or animal reproduction, which is known to be in operation at the present day. And this law of reproduction, so far from being exclusive of a primary act of Creation, seems to presuppose and require it; for there must be a living organism before there can be vital transmission. But the theory of Physiological Development proceeds on a totally different supposition,—a supposition for the truth of which we have not only no historical evidence, but not even the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... bold and clear-sighted deduction from the lessons of history, which revolutionary politicians in Asia, where no nationalities have yet been formed, may well take to heart. Parliamentary institutions, as Lord Acton has well said, presuppose unity of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest—that is, all forms and natures of evil. For without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced. Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil. For men of corrupted minds presuppose that honesty groweth out of simplicity of manners, and believing of preachers, schoolmasters, and men's exterior language. So as, except you can make them perceive that you know the utmost reaches of their own corrupt opinions, they despise all morality. Non recipit stultus verba prudentiae, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... office to the consent of their constituency. These methods are entirely consistent with one another; and they owe their {162} adoption entirely to their better execution of the intent of democracy. Both presuppose that political authority is empowered by all the interests of the community to serve them, and that these interests shall in the end decide whether or not that ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... to be proof is more searching. At the same time, what is called "historical divination" can not be altogether excluded. Learned and sagacious scholars have conjectured the existence of facts, where a gap in recorded history—"the logic of events"—seemed to presuppose them; and later discoveries have verified the guess. This is analogous to the success of Leverrier and Adams in inferring the existence of an unknown planet, which the telescope afterwards discovered. An example of historical divination on a large scale is ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... face, bull-neck, bowed legs, keen, rough, obstinate, passionate, left England greater and freer, and yet with more of a personal despotism than he had found her. The trouble with such triumphs is that they presuppose the wisdom and goodness ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which presuppose each other, and can ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... mass, the principal act of divine worship during holy-week as at all other seasons of the year. This we do now the more readily, that we may not afterwards be obliged to interrupt our account of the peculiar ceremonies of Holy week, which presuppose an acquaintance ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... current and leading facts; and amid the numerous contradictory statements which are to be found respecting every one of them, I know no better ground of preference than comparative antiquity, though even the oldest tales which we possess—those contained in the Iliad—evidently presuppose others of prior date. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... in the case, not by the theories of American statesmen, the opinion of jurists, or even by constitutional law itself. The old Articles of Confederation and the later Constitution can serve here only as historical documents. Constitutions and laws presuppose the existence of a national sovereign from which they emanate, and that ordains them, for they are the formal expression of a sovereign will. The nation must exist as an historical fact, prior to the possession or exercise of sovereign ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... precarious engagements, all unhappy Carriages, and presuppose a sweet, lovable woman, contentedly married to a real man—a man who truly loves, even if he has not completely mastered the gentle art of love-making. No skeleton in the closet; no wishing the marriage undone; with no eternal fitnesses of things to make the ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... language, may unveil injustices and point the way to progress. And for a last word: in all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose the first; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... events should take the form of one gentleman conversing with another, in the easy tone of good society. The author who sets out to address a crowd defeats his own object; he eliminates the essence of good writing—frankness. You cannot be frank with men of low condition. You must presuppose a refined and congenial listener, a man or woman whom you would not hesitate to take by the hand and lead into the circle of your own personal friends. If this applies to literature of every kind, it applies to history in ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... excellence of the sentiments, and the artifice of the copy, the mind has two amusements together. But such compositions are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their effect is local and temporary; they appeal not to reason or passion, but to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom Spenser has never been perused. Works of this kind may deserve praise, as proofs of great industry and great nicety of observation; ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... creation. In ascribing all sorts of moral qualities to animals we simply exhibit the same {38} tendency which leads children to endow lifeless objects both with life and purposiveness. Moral attributes, however, whether good or bad, presuppose conscious choice, a faculty of weighing and if necessary repelling motives; and with such a faculty we have no reason for crediting animals. No doubt, our incurable habit of reading the facts of our own moral nature into the actions of beasts and birds ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... expanse of time, there where huge intermediary nations, destitute of great men, have disappeared without leaving their visiting cards on the globe. All works of genius are the epitome of a civilization, and presuppose an immense utility. Forsooth, a pair of boots will not outvie a stage-play in your eyes, and you will not prefer a windmill to the Church of Saint Ouen. So, a people is animated with the same sentiment as a man; and man's favourite ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... same established men, once partially inclined to patronize him, seem to withdraw their countenance, and give him up as "a man of genius" against which procedure he, in these Papers, loudly protests. "As if," says he, "the higher did not presuppose the lower; as if he who can fly into heaven, could not also walk post if he resolved on it! But the world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... extent, but like it in kind, and therefore properly transferred by the same means that ownership was. A right of way, it might have been argued, is not to be approached from the point of view of contract. It does not presuppose any promise on the part of the servient owner. His obligation, although more troublesome to him than to others, is the same as that of every one else. It is the purely negative duty not to obstruct or interfere with a right ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... metaphor. Written words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by metaphor, or substitution and transposition of ideas, that we can call them language. They are indeed potential language, and the symbols employed presuppose nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech; but for the most part it is in what we read between the lines that the profounder meaning of any letter is conveyed. There are words unwritten and untranslatable into any nouns that are nevertheless felt as above, about and underneath ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... and firmus, firm) is to add firmness or give stability to. Both confirm and corroborate presuppose something already existing to which the confirmation or corroboration is added. Testimony is corroborated by concurrent testimony or by circumstances; confirmed by established facts. That which is thoroughly proved is said to be established; so is that ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... may hold as to the nature of instinct, the accomplishments and habits of insects are not, properly speaking, connected with the external and visible form of their organs, and their acts do not necessarily presuppose the instruments which would be ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... all, presuppose that air has weight owing to the vapours and halations which ascend from the earth and seas to a height of many miles and surround the whole of our terraqueous globe; and this fact will not be denied by philosophers, even by those who may have but ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... Truths Universal.—All the general facts which have been thus far stated hold true wherever wealth is produced. They do not presuppose the facts of a division of labor and a system of exchanges, and they do not even require that there should be any social organization. Men in the most primitive tribes and even men living in Crusoe-like isolation would create ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... they have any external force or validity. Indeed, there is no human relation, not even the highest and the sweetest, but has its economic interests. It is, therefore, natural, that each of the sciences which relate to these various regions of human life should, in part, presuppose all others, and, in part, serve as a ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... is simple and without guile. It does not presuppose an abrupt period, but for the sake of convenience and in justification of its existence includes only the work of living writers produced during the present century and therefore most likely to be representative of the poetry of to-day. No editorial credit can be claimed for the selections; ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... people would not see that languages can be classified; and as languages always presuppose speakers of language, these speakers also can be classified accordingly. It is quite true that some of these Aryan speakers may in some cases have Negro blood and Negro features, as when a Negro becomes an English bishop. Conquered tribes also may in time have learnt to speak the language of their ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... theory it is most essential to separate these two activities, for it is easy to see that if every act of War is to begin with the preparation of military forces, and to presuppose forces so organised as a primary condition for conducting War, that theory will only be applicable in the few cases to which the force available happens to be exactly suited. If, on the other hand, we wish to have a theory which shall suit most cases, and will not be wholly useless in any case, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... disposal; the sketch—for it could be no more than a sketch—would be necessarily superficial and probably misleading. In the second place, even a sketch of primitive religion in general ought to presuppose in the sketcher a fairly complete knowledge of the whole subject, so that all the parts may appear, not indeed in detail, but in their proper relative proportions. Now though I have given altogether a good deal of time to the study of primitive religion, I am far from having studied it in all ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... night, or his sleep is disturbed, or be has feelings of mental depression, or he says that he "senses" his heart, perhaps for the first time in his life, with or without edema of the feet and legs, or pains referred to the heart or heart region, we should presuppose that there is weakening of the heart muscle until, by perfect examination, we have excluded the heart as being the cause ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... I would not speak at length. It may be tempting the caprice of the Seven Sisters to presuppose such misfortune. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... best be accounted an inelegant abbreviation of luncheon. The dictionaries barely recognize it. The proper phraseology to use is, "Have you lunched?" or, "Have you had your luncheon?" or, better, "Have you had luncheon?" as we may in most cases presuppose that the person addressed would hardly ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since, apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment, even in slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Thus a moment arrives when the minds of any given dominant type fail to meet the ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... being endowed with self-determining activity. It implies that man is responsible for his intentions, dispositions and actions. The idea of a supreme ideal at which he is to aim and a norm or standard of conduct according to which he ought to regulate his life, would have no meaning if we did not presuppose the power of self-determination. {13} Whatever is not willed has no moral value. Where there is no freedom of choice, we cannot speak of an action as either good or evil.[1] When we praise or blame a man's conduct we do so under the assumption that his action is voluntary. In ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander |
