"Theoretic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vigorous and skilful government, giving to the inhabitants the comforts and conveniences of municipal and industrial life at a reasonable charge, the narrow electoral basis on which it rested would have remained little more than a theoretic grievance, and the bulk of the people would have cared nothing for political rights. An exclusive government may be pardoned if it is efficient, an inefficient government if it rests upon the people. ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... different. Although he was more of a thinker than any of them, his boldness was not of the merely theoretic kind. He wished to interfere and re-model. None of those Frenchmen lacked firmness; if, from any consideration, they modified their utterances somewhat, their fundamental views, at any rate, were formed independently; but their firmness lay in defence, not in attack; they wished neither to rebuke ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... he had been impregnated with goodness and popular poetry, drawn from stories, legends, and tales to which he had been an ardent listener. We find the great Pushkin dedicating his most pathetic verses to his old nurse, and we often see him inspired by the most humble people. In this way, to the theoretic democracy imported from Europe is united, in the case of the Russian author, a treasure of ardent personal recollections; democracy is not for him an abstract love of the people, but a real affection, a tenderness made up of lasting reminiscences ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... puzzled to know how it is that the dinner which in London would cost about six shillings, can be had for three francs in a cafe in the Palais Royal. They need have no more wonder if they will but consider the classification which is a theoretic speciality of Parisian life, and adopt all round the fact from which the chiffonier ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... idea of liberty and embraced the State and politics. The struggle is bitter, the factions irreconcilable. This struggle is not merely between Anarchists and Socialists; it also finds its echo within the Anarchist groups. Theoretic differences and personal controversies lead to strife and acrimonious enmities. The anti-Socialist legislation of Germany and Austria had driven thousands of Socialists and Anarchists across the seas to seek refuge in America. John Most, having lost ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... great acquirements, who was looked upon by the ignorant populace alternately as a dreamer and a wizard. He was as indifferent to the cause of freedom as of despotism, but he had a great love for chemistry. He was also a profound mechanician, second to no man of his age in theoretic and practical engineering. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Mr. Ricardo's must be a most improper book as an elementary one. But, after all, you will admit that even amongst Mr. Ricardo's friends there is a prevailing opinion that he is too subtle (or, as it is usually expressed, too theoretic) a writer to be safely relied on for ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... that he would conduct a siege or a defence with all the science and all the proprieties of warfare, but we think he has proved himself singularly wanting in the qualities which distinguish the natural leaders of men. He had every theoretic qualification, but no ardor, no leap, no inspiration. A defensive general is an earthen redoubt, not an ensign to rally enthusiasm and inspire devotion. Caution will never make an army, though it may sometimes ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... him, were as two branches proceeding from a single stem; their differences, which were the type of those that created two parties in the community, were the inevitable result of the opposition between the practical and the theoretic temperaments. This opposition is organic; it is irreconcilable, but nevertheless wholesome; both sides possess versions of the same truth, and the perfect state arises from the contribution made by both to the common good—not from their amalgamation, or from a compromise between them, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... before whom they were hurried and tried, was a Mr. Cumberland Vane, a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, honourably celebrated for the lightness of his sentences and the lightness of his conversation. He occasionally worked himself up into a sort of theoretic rage about certain particular offenders, such as the men who took pokers to their wives, talked in a loose, sentimental way about the desirability of flogging them, and was hopelessly bewildered by the fact that ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... occur here and there in his epics and dramas; but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; Evening shews this, and Melancholy, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... and yet been so wholly secured against the pitfalls of emptiness and the vague. And it is instructive to compare the foundation of all his pleas for the colonists with that on which they erected their own theoretic declaration of independence. The American leaders were impregnated with the metaphysical ideas of rights which had come to them from the rising revolutionary school in France. Burke no more adopted the doctrines of Jefferson in 1776 than he adopted the doctrines ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of theoretic insecurity, which was in the air, conspiring with what was of like tendency in himself, made of Lord UFFORD a central type of disillusion. . . . He had been amiable because the general betise of humanity ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... assimilation and the assertion of difference. So long as we ignore difference, so long as we ignore individuality, and that I hold has been the common sin of all Utopias hitherto, we can make absolute statements, prescribe communisms or individualisms, and all sorts of hard theoretic arrangements. But in the world of reality, which—to modernise Heraclitus and Empedocles—is nothing more nor less than the world of individuality, there are no absolute rights and wrongs, there are no qualitative questions at all, but ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... souls, living on this practical Earth, should think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy theoretic demonstrations and laudations of the Church, instead of some unnoisy, unconscious, but practical, total, heart-and-soul demonstration of a Church: this, in the circle of revolving ages, this also was a thing we were to see. A kind of penultimate thing, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... they have neither time nor disposition for them, but because the friction set up between the individual and the community by the expression of unusual views of any sort is quite enough hindrance to the heretic without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus the theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life, whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other libertines, and excessively conventional in ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... Virginia and other eastern states that have not been plowed for more than one, and sometimes for more than five seasons. The application of this method to nut trees is still in the embryonic stage, with theoretic ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... and surely despotism is its properest complement. But when they exist, as they exist in England to-day, in hundreds of thousands, in town and country, think what a complication they introduce into your theoretic free system of government. Acts of Parliament passed by a "freely-elected" House of Commons, and an hereditary House of Lords under the threats of freely-electing citizens, however pure in intention and correct in principle, will ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... Jews was based upon, and directed by, rabbinical jurisprudence and discipline. The study of the Talmud was taken up for the sake of finding in it rules for the daily conduct of existence. Apart from certain questions purely theoretic in character and having no practical application, Talmudic studies, far from being confined to the school, responded to the needs of life and were of real, vital interest. But since the Talmud is not allcomprehensive, the rabbis in drawing inspiration from ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... foreign to the man. The single girl he at one time thought of was won away from him without making him quarrelsome, nobody had ever told him of the pangs and passions of other people, he had had no occasion to consider the theoretic possibility of such a thing, and so "jealousy'' remained utterly foreign to him. It is clear that his hearing now took quite another turn. All I thought I heard from him was essentially wrong; his "funded thought'' concerning a very important, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... cause to rue it. No sinner ever dreaded Charon, Nor was the mighty rod of Aaron, By ancient Egypt's magic men, In Pharoah's old despotic reign, More feared as symbol of a God Than was by us James Agnew's rod; With it he batter'd arithmetic, Lore practical and theoretic Latin too, and English grammar Into your head, a perfect "crammar," Was Agnew's most persuasive rod, Nor less his magisterial nod. How would such stern tuition suit In our Collegiate Institute? Amongst the unforgotten few Who rise to memory's magic view, While winging on her backward flight, ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... falsely for a good purpose. Was it not righteously executed? Away from the tragic figure in the room, she might have thought so, but the horror in the eyes and voice of this awakened Sacrifice, struck away the support of theoretic justification. Great pity for the poor enmeshed life, helpless there, and in a woman's worst peril,—looking either to madness, or to death, for an escape—drowned her reason in a heavy cloud of tears. Long on toward the stroke of the hour, Dahlia heard her weep, and she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... has since struggled, and which have made it waver between the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. To substitute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellect humility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a faculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind us, sprinkling over us, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... a sufficient acquaintance—one whom nature seemed to have first made generously and then to have added music as a dominant power using all the abundant rest, and, as in Mendelssohn, finding expression for itself not only in the highest finish of execution, but in that fervor of creative work and theoretic belief which pierces devoted purpose. His foibles of arrogance and vanity did not exceed such as may be found in the best English families; and Catherine Arrowpoint had no corresponding restlessness to clash with his: notwithstanding her native kindliness she was perhaps too ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... undisturbed by doubts or questionings. Under such conditions, a belief in evil spirits ever ready and watching to tempt a man into heresy of belief or sinful act, and thus to destroy both body and soul, although it may exist as a theoretic portion of the accepted creed, cannot possibly become a vital doctrine to be believed by the general public. It may exist as a subject for learned dispute to while away the leisure hours of divines, but cannot by any possibility obtain an influence over the thoughts ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... studied those principles deeply, and to some purpose; he became a theoretic artist of the first class, but he never could either draw ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... order clear-sightedly to act, is to render heroism impossible. Into it there enters an element of insanity. The sacrificer must feel that he cares nothing for what is rational, but only for what is holy, for his duty. The rational and the holy,—in the mind of him who has not been disturbed by theoretic controversy these two stand in harsh antithesis, and the antithesis has been approved by important ethical writers of our time. The rational man is, of course, needed in the humdrum work of life. His assertive and sagacious spirit clears ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... Horn, returning home respectively by the opposite capes; and if both were to arrive again in England at the same time, there would be found in the reckoning of the eastern vessel two entire days more than in that of the western vessel. Nor would this difference be merely theoretic or imaginary; on the contrary, it would be a real and substantial gain on the part of the eastern vessel: her crew would have consumed two whole rations of breakfast, dinner, and supper, and swallowed two days' allowance of grog more than the other crew; and they would have enjoyed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... psychologist, and it is noteworthy that the best recent contributions to the science have been made by men who were either known as psychologists or at least had trained themselves in psychological analysis. A word or two must suffice to indicate the more important directions of the theoretic interpretation. We may in illustrating this set out from the convenient triple division of the factors in aesthetic experience: (A) the sensuous, (B) the perceptual or formal, (C) the imaginative, including all that is suggested by the aesthetic presentation, its meaning ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sought to render clear a difficult but profoundly interesting subject. My aim has been not only to describe and illustrate in a familiar manner the principal laws and phenomena of light, but to point out the origin, and show the application, of the theoretic conceptions which underlie and unite the whole, and without which no real interpretation ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... culture certainly means something quite different from learning or technical skill. It implies the possession of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by comparison with a theoretic standard. Perfect culture should apply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... laws of reason. He gets rid of the crux by taking the aesthetic faculty away from the jurisdiction of Kant's rather mysterious 'judgment', and turning it over to the 'practical reason'. His argument is that the practical reason demands freedom, just as the 'pure' or theoretic reason demands rationality. Freedom is the form which the practical reason instinctively applies upon presentation of an object. It is satisfied when, and only when, the object is free, autonomous, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... interfere. Nothing short of a constitutional declaration can decide the question; which is, in fact, an important one, and is growing more and more so to the country in proportion as the towns and villages increase in numbers and population. For, independent of the theoretic question, it is evident that the admission of these votes gives a vast advantage to the thickly settled places over the more dispersed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... circumstances, no less so, however, than true. They may serve as an illustration of the wonderful and mysterious workings of Religion on the soul, and, at the same time, afford an instance of the absolute insufficiency of speculative belief or theoretic religion, without the every-day practice of her sublime and ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... hand, nothing is changed in the theoretic principles of the case if the effect of these automatic processes in the nervous system is not an external muscle action at first, but an influence on other brain centers which may furnish the consciousness with new contents. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... all the general theories concerning the "rights of men" as any of the discoursers in our pulpits or on your tribune: full as well as Dr. Price, or as the Abbe Sieyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen to that vague, speculative right which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of England, but his chief prose work was his Defence of Rhyme. He had companions in the critical task; but it is curious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creative production of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered the theoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actual performance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe and Puttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting and Englishing ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the predominant wish of his heart,—preparations for the next campaign,—by impressing on congress a conviction of the real causes of the present calamitous state of things. However the human mind may resist the clearest theoretic reasoning, it is scarcely possible not to discern obvious and radical errors, while smarting under their destructive consequences. The abandonment of the army by whole regiments of the flying camp, in the face of an advancing ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... quite another question, however, whether this theoretic circulation, true cause as it may be, is competent to give rise to such movements of sea-water, in mass, as those currents, which have commonly been regarded as northern extensions of the Gulf-stream. I shall ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... contrary, they had that sort of friendly contempt for each other which is always conducive to a good understanding between professional men; and when any new surgeon attempted, in an ill-advised hour, to settle himself in the town, it was strikingly demonstrated how slight and trivial are theoretic differences compared with the broad basis of common human feeling. There was the most perfect unanimity between Pratt and Pilgrim in the determination to drive away the obnoxious and too probably unqualified intruder as soon as possible. Whether the first wonderful cure ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of 'Modern Painters,' but which is not its real equivalent, for Anschauung does not (I believe) include bodily sensation, whereas Plato's Theoria does, so far as is necessary; and mine, somewhat more than Plato's. "The first perfection," (then I say, in this so long in coming paragraph) of the theoretic faculty, "is the kindness and unselfish fullness of heart, which receives the utmost amount of pleasure from the happiness of all things. Of which in high degree the heart of man is incapable; neither what intense enjoyment ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... destroyed the source of scepticism, and then the resulting scepticism itself. And thus was subverted the thorough doubt as to whatever theoretic reason claims to perceive, as well as the claim of Hume that the concept of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London; where he was quite ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... not with the living.[15] The other kind of facts certainly seem to defy physico-chemical analysis, even if they are not anagenetic in the proper sense of the word. As for the artificial imitation of the outward appearance of protoplasm, should a real theoretic importance be attached to this when the question of the physical framework of protoplasm is not yet settled? We are still further from compounding protoplasm chemically. Finally, a physico-chemical explanation of the motions of the amoeba, and a fortiori ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... were fighting in Italy, they were singing in France: the operas of Rameau began to make a noise there, and once more raise the credit of his theoretic works, which, from their obscurity, were within the compass of very few understandings. By chance I heard of his 'Treatise on Harmony', and had no rest till I purchased it. By another chance I fell sick; my illness was inflammatory, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... drivers of cars, or both at once, stretcher-bearers, lifters, healers, consolers, handy Anglo-French interpreters, (these extremely precious,) smoothers of the way; in short, after whatever fashion. We ask of nobody any waste of moral or of theoretic energy, nor any conviction of any sort, but that the job is inspiring and the honest, educated man a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of a very philosophical examination of any mooted point in ethics, was sufficiently embarrassing to the several individuals, who were so unexpectedly required to answer for a conduct which, in their simplicity, they had deemed so meritorious. The life of Obed had been so purely theoretic, that his amazement was not the least embarrassing at a state of things which might not have proved so very remarkable had he been a little more practised in the ways of the world. The worthy naturalist was not the first by many, who found himself, at the precise moment when he ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Relations of the Theoretic Faculty. PAGE Sec. 1. With what care the subject is to be approached. 1 Sec. 2. And of what importance considered. 2 Sec. 3. The doubtful force of the term "utility". 3 Sec. 4. Its proper sense. 4 Sec. 5. How falsely applied in these ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... however, that either the Philistines, or Judah, or Israel, or any of the petty tribes which had momentarily gravitated around David and Solomon, were disposed to dispute Osorkon's claim, theoretic rather than real as it was. The sword of the stranger had finished the work which the intestine quarrel of the tribes had begun. If Rehoboam had ever formed the project of welding together the disintegrated elements of Israel, the taking of Jerusalem ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... that the river and the sea would swallow up and melt in their salt waves the whole of this accursed property of ours. I am afraid the horror of slavery with which I came down to the south, the general theoretic abhorrence of an Englishwoman for it, has gained, through the intensity it has acquired, a morbid character of mere desire to be delivered from my own share in it. I think so much of these wretches that I see, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... expected from Bonaparte, but rather that of a profoundly studious and contemplative man, who "o'er books consumes" not only the "midnight oil" but his own daily strength, "and wastes the puny body to decay" by abstruse speculation and theoretic plans or rather visions, ingenious but not practicable. But the look of the commander who heads his own army, who fights his own battles, who conquers every difficulty by personal exertion, who executes all he plans, who performs even all he suggests; whose ambition is of the ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... involved in his fees and maintenance, they could not honestly advise his entering upon another term. It would only be a deplorable throwing away of money on a useless scheme. His son Michael had no thoroughness, no practical ability, and no grasp whatever of theoretic detail. From Herr Harrison's point of view this was the more regrettable inasmuch as the young man had colossal decision and persistence and energy of his own. He was an indefatigable dreamer. Very ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... and was accounted, by those who had had the privilege of hearing him, the best amateur pianist on this side of the Tweed. Little wonder, then, that he was idolised by the undergraduates of his day. He did not, however, honour many of them with his friendship. He had a theoretic liking for them as a class, as the "young barbarians all at play" in that little antique city; but individually they jarred on him, and he saw little of them. Yet he sympathised with them always, and, on occasion, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... impulse to say some words of comfort, which I feel you need, is very strong. I only sang of what I wished on Sunday evening. I have little philosophy, and still less of definite belief in regard to the future life. While I am not a theoretic skeptic, all questions of faith are to me so vague and incomprehensible that I am a practical materialist, and live only in the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... another every field contains very many. The normoblastic type is found most frequently, but side by side with it, megaloblasts and forms transitional between the two are occasionally found. Mitoses within the red blood discs have been described by different authors, but possess no theoretic or clinical importance. The appearance of erythroblasts in leukaemia may be either a specific phenomenon, or merely the expression of an anaemia accompanying the leukaemia. We are inclined to the first supposition, since the occurrence in such numbers of nucleated red cells is hardly ever observed ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... him, not thus according to aim, but according to method, then he takes rank among men of a very different type from these. What distinguishes him in method from his contemporaries is his discernment that the social order cannot be transformed until all the theoretic conceptions that belong to it have been rehandled in a scientific spirit, and maturely gathered up into a systematic whole along with the rest of our knowledge. This presiding doctrine connects Comte with the social thinkers of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... of international morality, particularly in matters of commercial intercourse, is on a still lower level. If, indeed, one were to press the theoretic issue, whether a state or a nation is a morally independent being, or whether it is in some sense or degree a member of what may be called an incipient society of states or nations, nearly every one would sustain the latter view. We should be reminded that there was such a ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... can do for us is still but what the first school began doing—teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... perfect certainty. But the former postulates the possibility of an object itself (God and the immortality of the soul) from apodeictic practical laws, and therefore only for the purposes of a practical reason. This certainty of the postulated possibility then is not at all theoretic, and consequently not apodeictic; that is to say, it is not a known necessity as regards the object, but a necessary supposition as regards the subject, necessary for the obedience to its objective but practical laws. It is, therefore, merely a necessary ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... to be destructive. The belief is theoretic,—or not even quite that. It is hardly more than romantic. As long as acres are dear, and he can retain those belonging to him, the country gentleman will never really believe his country to be in danger. It is the same with commerce. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... find himself compelled to say—"the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophers has fallen upon evil days and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers . . . like the word 'cause' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap . . . it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy . . . let us leave out the soul, then, and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... plain form it drags in the omniscient author and may make him exceedingly conspicuous. Why is this a disadvantage, is it asked? It is none, of course, if the author has the power to make us admire and welcome the apparition, or if his picture is so dazzling that a theoretic defect in it is forgotten. But a novel in which either of these feats is accomplished proves only the charm or genius of the author; charm and genius do what they will, there is nothing new in that. And I believe that the defect, even though ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... contended that the Irish Episcopal Church had fallen out of harmony with the spirit and use of the time, and must be judged by a practical rather than a theoretic test. In concluding the author puts antithetically the case for and against the maintenance of the Church of Ireland: "An establishment that does its work in much and has the hope and likelihood of doing it in more; that has a broad and living way open to ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... order of precedence and capability, but also as admitting the temporal relations to a share in the nomenclature. As far as our knowledge goes there is no psychic apparatus possessing only the primary process, and in so far it is a theoretic fiction; but so much is based on fact that the primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes develop gradually in the course of life, inhibiting and covering the primary ones, and gaining complete mastery over them perhaps only ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... ... Let's better ride to the girlies, that will be nearer the mark," said peremptorily Lichonin, an old student, a tall, stooping, morose and bearded fellow. By convictions he was an anarchist—theoretic, but by avocation a passionate gambler at billiards, races and cards—a gambler with a very broad, fatalistic sweep. Only the day before he had won a thousand roubles at macao in the Merchants' Club, and this money was still burning a hole in ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The Bed-Post; Its Significance—Security Essential to Idea of Sleep—Night Felt as Infinite—Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on. He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind—Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil—Is Modesty Natural?—Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc." None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton |
