"Abstractly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... learn, and to let our boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" in examination, is the test ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... just in proportion as he gives himself up to the dominion of one of these loves and rejects the sway of the others he leads a consistent life. Society may assert that life is everything, and faith nothing, when it talks abstractly; but its common sense ever shows more wisdom by transferring the quality of the motive to the act, as often as it finds any clew to the knowledge of motive. Of course, society makes many blunders in these judgments, because it reads the heart ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... of propositions that may occur, with the various types of facts, and with the classification of the constituents of facts. In this way logic provides an inventory of possibilities, a repertory of abstractly tenable hypotheses. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... female suffrage, it is not probable that the patriarchal institution of polygamy will be regarded otherwise than as debasing to both sexes; but perhaps a greater latitude of divorce will be sought as not inconsistent with public morality. Looking at the question abstractly, and apart from all religious and social prejudice, it certainly seems the height of cruelty and absurdity to compel parties to keep up the relations of man and wife when one of them feels towards ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... the path in two couples, Anna with Sviazhsky, and Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in the new surroundings in which she found herself. Abstractly, theoretically, she did not merely justify, she positively approved of Anna's conduct. As is indeed not unfrequent with women of unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of respectable existence, at ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the attainment of such a dominant purpose may, however trivial in itself, acquire a vital importance and be eagerly desired. To a man of mature mind there can be little interest in hitting a small ball with a stick, abstractly considered. Nor is the dropping of a bit of paper into a box with a slit in it an action in itself calculated to stir profound emotion. But if the hitting of the ball in the right way marks the critical point in winning an eagerly contested game of golf, the interest in it may be absorbing. And ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the very edge of making him, as well as himself, a multifold millionaire. However, President Pierce did what he could for him by giving him the Portuguese mission (after first offering it to my father), and O'Sullivan did excellent work there. But he became interested—abstractly—in some copper-mines in Spain, which, as he clearly demonstrated, could be bought for a song, and would pay a thousand per cent, from the start. Partly to gratify him, and partly with the hope of at least getting his money back, my father finally, in 1858 or 1859, advanced him ten ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... human eye sees anything abstractly, but only in relation to other things known and observed. With more than half the world in its grip, the towering wave of green bore no more resemblance to its California prototype than a brontosaurus to the harmless lizard ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... elaborate the technique of its realization. I have not done that because this rational procedure inverts the natural order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical tangles and pseudo-problems. They come from an effort to state abstractly in intellectual terms qualities that can be known only by direct experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if you begin by announcing that politics must achieve "justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly what these words mean ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... such as she had never dreamed of as existing; one absolutely disinterested, who treated people—even people like Clementine Willis—as abstractly as a master mechanic goes about repairing a worn-out engine. Perhaps it was a characteristically feminine decision at which she presently arrived, but anyway she made up her mind, then and there, to know more ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... French, for example, is really taught; pupils do not acquire a mere smattering of the language. And, what is more important, the course of study is directly related to life, and to practical experience, instead of being set forth abstractly, as something which at the time the pupil perceives no possibility of putting into use. At one of the new schools in the south, the ignorant child of the mountains at once acquires a knowledge of measurement and elementary arithmetic by laying out a garden, of letters by inscribing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... brief, that anything is obscene that is not fit to be handed to a child just learning to read, or that may imaginably stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. It is held further that words that are perfectly innocent in themselves—"words, abstractly considered, [that] may be free from vulgarism"—may yet be assumed, by a friendly jury, to be likely to "arouse a libidinous passion ... in the mind of a modest woman." (I quote exactly! The court ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... only because he takes pleasure in grumbling, and this seems to afford him a good excuse for it. He would not be deprived of it if he could: witness the discussions of the Income Tax, which every body denounces while no one justifies it abstractly; and yet it is always upheld, and I presume always will be. If the question could now be put to a direct vote, even of the tax-payers alone—"Shall or shall not a system of Common School Education for the United Kingdoms be maintained by a National Tax?"—I believe Free Schools would be ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... differences in my fellow men. I know that there are distinguishing marks, that heads are shaped differently, and that hair and eyes have different colors, corresponding to the various types, as blondes or brunettes. All this I know abstractly, but it is just one of the bits of information tucked away in memory's storehouse. I do not suppose many of you have ever heard a smile. I have. I hear a smile almost before the lips can register it, and to ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... term ought to mean, ignoring the clear and fairly consistent meaning the term actually possesses in the business world around them. The business world has indeed two views of Capital, but they are consistent with one another. Abstractly, money or the control of money, sometimes called credit, is Capital. Concretely, capital consists of all forms of marketable matter which embody labour. Land or nature is excluded except for improvements: human powers are excluded as not being matter; commodities in the hands of consumers ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... unrelenting organization of an imperialist campaign. We were looked upon, not so much as individual men, but abstractly as colonial statesmen, to be impressed and hobbled. The Englishman is as businesslike in his politics, particularly his external politics, as in business, even if he covers his purposefulness with an air of polite indifference. Once convinced that the ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... still original, but they are public, and of the hue of the heavens over his house,—a certain out-of-door obviousness and transparency not to be disputed. What he does, his manners are not to be complained of, though abstractly offensive, for it is what man does, and in him the race is exhibited. When he eats, he is liver and bowels, and the whole digestive apparatus to the company, and so all admit the thing is done. He must have no idiosyncrasies, no particular bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... a didactic poem: it is not a mere philosophic treatise written in verse, like the fragments of Xenophanes. Its lessons are conveyed concretely and not abstractly; and its characters are not mere lay figures, but living poetical conceptions. Considered as a poem among classic German poems, it must rank next to, though immeasurably below, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... right in his reasoning? Why does the delusion persist among plain people that the creditor is not always a benefactor? It is a very old and persistent delusion, so strong in the Middle Ages that interest was considered illegal and the despised Jews were the only people who dared finance the world. Abstractly the economists are undoubtedly right, yet I am fain to believe that the popular notion has some ground of truth in it too. Obviously, according to modern notions a country rich in natural resources, but poor in capital, inherited savings, must borrow ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... last the great man looked up, and somewhat abstractly asked, "Well, my boy, what ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... were open in violation of GQ—it was a hot summer night—and the slight breeze that blew off the swelling sea smelled clean and cool. It was the only kind of air for a man to breathe, the Captain mused abstractly. ...
— Decision • Frank M. Robinson
... abstractly as he could: "The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... lay resting on their elbows in blissful contemplation of the heat they had escaped. "Wot do you say," said Johnson, slowly, without looking at his companion, but abstractly addressing himself to the landscape beyond,—"wot do you say to two straight ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... depicted death and sleep as twin boys, one black, one white, borne slumbering in the arms of their mother, night. In this instance the phenomenon of dissolving unconsciousness which falls on mortals, abstractly generalized in the mind, is then concretely symbolized. It is a bold and happy stroke of artistic genius; but it in no way expresses or suggests the scientific facts of actual death. There is also a classic representation ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that principle calls. Once yield the alphabet, and we abandon the whole long theory of subjection and coverture; the past is set aside, and we have nothing but abstractions to fall back upon. Reasoning abstractly, it must be admitted that the argument has been, thus far, entirely on the women's side, inasmuch as no man has yet seriously tried to meet them with argument. It is an alarming feature of this discussion, that it has reversed, very ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... where it makes no difference], will yet more surely be truthful where there is a stake [or where it does make a difference]; for he will [then] shun the lie as shameful, since he shuns it simply because it is a lie."[5] And, again, "Falsehood abstractly is bad and blamable, and truth honorable and praiseworthy; and thus the truthful man being in the mean is praiseworthy, while the false [in either extreme, of overstating or of understating] are both blamable, but the exaggerating man more ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... door was louder. This and the drug-induced buzzing in Brion's ear made thinking difficult. "Abstractly, I of course agree with you," he said haltingly. "But you know there is nothing I can do personally without being emotionally involved. A logical decision is valueless for action without ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... devil had you to do with that steamboat?" He would say that we struck the first blow. Now, admit that,—and none of your state rights men can deny it,—admit that, and all the rest follows of course. They will say it was wrong—abstractly, if you please. Talking of abstractions, it was wrong for an expedition to come over and burn the steamboat, and send her over the falls. But what was your steamboat about? What had she been doing? What was she to do the next morning? And what ought ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... books; but he is not forward to recognise the heroic under the traits of any contemporary man, and least of all in a brawling, dirty, and eccentric teacher. But as the years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida continued in vain to look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began more and more to understand the drift of his instructions, they learned to look back upon their comic schoolmaster as upon the noblest ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... act that makes this pow-wow necessary. There exists a matrimonial jumble to be straightened out. But before I give you names I want your honest—well, anyhow, your professional opinion on the merits of the mix-up. I want you to size up the catastrophe—abstractly—you understand? I'm Mr. Nobody; and I've got a story to tell you. Then you say what's what. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... however, now to content ourselves with a mere outline of our intended observations on a subject—our victory over the Emperor of China—which is pregnant with matter for long and profound reflection. Abstractly, our triumphant assault on these distant and vast dominions, affords matter for national pride and exultation, as far as concerns our naval and military renown; and the names of Parker and Gough will never be forgotten in British history. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the necessity of their employments and other dependences; and as others retired, really frighted with the distemper, it was a mere desolating of some of the streets. But the fright was not yet near so great in the city, abstractly so called, and particularly because, though they were at first in a most inexpressible consternation, yet as I have observed that the distemper intermitted often at first, so they were, as it were, alarmed and unalarmed again, and this several times, till it began to be familiar to them; and ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... would here observe, that we do not affirm of either Good or Evil any irresistible power of enforcing love or exciting abhorrence, having evidence to the contrary in the multitudes about us; all we affirm is, that, when contemplated abstractly, they cannot be viewed otherwise. Nor is the fact of their inefficiency in many cases difficult of solution, when it is remembered that the very condition to their true effect is the complete absence of self, that they must ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... mercy, are altogether needless; they rest fundamentally on false dogmatic views of this propitiation, as if there were not existing in the Father's being the same love which is expressed in the Son,—as if the Father needed abstractly to be propitiated in order to entertain this love! We are not to seek Christ himself as mediator in the person of this father; nor (though Melancthon has strangely ventured to affirm it), afterwards in the fatted calf, as sacrificially slain. His place ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... himself nodding only to jerk awake with that suddenness that is like a physical blow. Each one of these awakenings took away a little more of his self-control till he was reduced to near hysteria, muttering abstractly, sometimes whimpering like a lost child; now seized with a feverish concern for his air supply. He would at one instant cut it down to a dangerous minimum, then, remembering the near disaster of his first attempt at economy, frantically turn it up till he was in danger of an oxygen ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... we must not allow our love of constitutional liberty and local self-government to blind us to the distinction between theoretical and historical possibility. What seems to political philosophers abstractly the best possible government may be utterly inapplicable in certain concrete cases. We need not attempt to decide whether it is better for humanity that Russia should exist as a nation, but we may boldly assert ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of a poetical work is, ceteris paribus, the measure of its merit, seems undoubtedly, when we thus state it, a proposition sufficiently absurd—yet we are indebted for it to the Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned which has so continuously elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets! A mountain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude which it conveys, does impress us with a sense ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... my view!" he said. "Abstractly, perhaps, all natures may be considered vitiated; but practically, as I see it in life, the divine grace keeps pace with the perverted instincts from infancy in many natures. Besides, this perversion ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and no effort has been or will be spared to promote that end. We are under no disadvantage in any foreign market, except that we pay our workmen and workwomen better wages than are paid elsewhere—better abstractly, better relatively to the cost of the necessaries of life. I do not doubt that a very largely increased foreign trade is accessible to us without bartering for it either our home market for such products of the farm and shop as our ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... as it is, may be too abstractly interpreted. Man is not a pure spirit, but a spiritual being whose roots strike to the very depths of nature, and who is connected by the most intimate and vital relations not only with his fellow-creatures of the ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes of speech. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... undoubtedly have underestimated these immediate effects. They have been too abstractly doctrinaire, have argued too absolutely for the merits of free trade to be applied instantly regardless of the existing distribution of investments and of occupations. They have opposed one extreme ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... should lead to the science of them. If things are not interesting in themselves, how can any amount of knowledge about them be? To be sure, there is such a thing as a purely or abstractly intellectual interest—the pleasure of the mere operation of the intellect upon the signs of things; but this must spring from a highly exercised intellectual condition, and is not to be expected before the pleasures of intellectual ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... reached my ideal; and when a woman's home isn't the hub of her universe,—well, she takes to china painting, or gossip, or philanthropy; a man takes to poker or politics. I took to politics, second-hand. Personally and concretely I abhorred the whole miserable farce, but abstractly, and as a means to an end which I greatly desired, I found it interesting. I admired you infinitely more than I liked you in those days, but I wouldn't have married you under ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... uncorrupted truth (so the lawyers tell us). The faculty of observation differs, and the faculty of language is variable. Some people have no intellectual apprehension of the truth, although they morally believe in it. People who abstractly revere the truth have never been able to tell anything but falsehoods. To such the power of making a statement either favorable or prejudicial depends upon the mood of the moment, not upon fact. Therefore a habit of poetizing the truth would seem to be of ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... adopted by us, with some improvement for the worse, from France. When two Frenchmen are presented to one another, each presses the other's hand with delicate affection. The English, however, never do so: and the practice, if abstractly correct, is altogether inconsistent with the caution of manner which is characteristic of their nation and our own. If we are to follow the French, in shaking hands with one whom we have never before seen, ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... Protestantism and Catholicism, and between England and Spain. In some places, also, it represents other events and aspects of European politics. Many of the single persons of the story, entering into each of these overlapping interpretations, bear double or triple roles. Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, is abstractly Glory, but humanly she is Queen Elizabeth; and from other points of view Elizabeth is identified with several of the lesser heroines. So likewise the witch Duessa is both Papal Falsehood and Mary Queen of Scots; Prince Arthur both Magnificence and (with sorry inappropriateness) the Earl of Leicester; ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... limited." Helen paused, then went on more rapidly: "First it was my father. He and I travelled after mother's death continually, and alone. He educated me and interpreted life for me; he was a man of the world, I suppose, but he managed to keep me most unworldly wise. Of course I knew, abstractly, the lights and shadows; but I wonder if you will believe me when I tell you that, until after my marriage, I never suspected that—that certain codes of honour and dishonour had place in the lives of those closest to me? The evil of the world was classified ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... What we are doing in these sentences is what most languages, in greater or less degree and in a hundred varying ways, are in the habit of doing—throwing a bold bridge between the two basically distinct types of concept, the concrete and the abstractly relational, infecting the latter, as it were, with the color and grossness of the former. By a certain violence of metaphor the material concept is forced to do duty for (or intertwine itself ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... justice, as might have occurred in the court of the old [Greek: polemarchos], will allow us to conclude that they are in possession of a rule coercing them to be just and brotherlike towards the unprotected stranger, abstractly and for justice's sake. Now, with us you may find many individual rogues, but never a roguish court, nor tolerated roguish public body. And of this difference between us Christians and them Turks, it will not be difficult for any one to supply the reason, who will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... my view!" he said, "Abstractly, perhaps, all Nature may be considered vitiated; but practically, as I see it in life, the divine grace keeps pace with the perverted instincts from infancy in many natures. Besides, this perversion itself may often be disease, bad habits transmitted, like drunkenness, or some hereditary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... deserves consideration by those who think on human affairs, and the probable form of government which may be expected to prevail in future among men, whether universal suffrage is the real evil to be dreaded; and whether equality of suffrage is not the real poison which destroys society. Abstractly considered, there is much justice in the plea so constantly advanced by the working-classes, that being members of the community, and contributing to its support or opulence by their labour, they are entitled to a certain voice in the direction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... of the poet, and not that of the moralist or preacher, how shall he sort and sift, culling this virtue and that, giving parts and fragments instead of the entire man? He must give all, not abstractly, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... especially and properly, a luminous variety of low CHROMA; also, abstractly, the respect in which a color may be raised by more or less admixture of white, which at once increases the luminosity and diminishes ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher described in the Phaedo. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness, is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse. One of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... it, I answer, in the same Place where Chastity was, before there were any Creatures that had an Appetite to procreate their Species. This puts me in mind of the inconsiderate Zeal of some Men, who even in Metaphysicks, know not how to think abstractly, and cannot forebear mixing their own Meanness and Imbecillities, with the Idea's they form of the ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... ideas; concrete terms call up pictures. If we say "Honesty is the best policy," we speak abstractly. Nobody can see or hear or touch the thing honesty or the thing policy; the apprehension of them must be purely intellectual. But if we say "The rat began to gnaw the rope," we speak concretely. Rat, gnaw, and rope are tangible, perceptible things; the words bring to ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... differences. We know well what great influence is exercised by the multiplicity of talents, superpositions, knowledge, and apprehensions. When we consider the qualities of things, we discover that we never apprehend them abstractly, but always concretely. We do not see color but the colored object; we do not see warmth, but something warm; not hardness, but something hard. The concept warm, as such, can not be thought of by anybody, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... I heard this story of Bismarck. If it is not true, it ought to be. And if it is not true specifically, it is true abstractly. He had just returned from one of his notable diplomatic victories at the beginning of his career; great crowds had ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... motive which prompted it was generous, honorable, and praiseworthy, nothing could be expected to ensue from its advocacy but accumulated disaster and greater misfortunes still. Of either case, then, abstractly considered, religion cannot ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... four things altogether. If, however, this were the source of our knowledge that two and two are four, we should proceed differently, in persuading ourselves of its truth, from the way in which we do actually proceed. In fact, a certain number of instances are needed to make us think of two abstractly, rather than of two coins or two books or two people, or two of any other specified kind. But as soon as we are able to divest our thoughts of irrelevant particularity, we become able to see the general principle that two and two are four; any one instance is ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... accuse him of being superficial. I think that a very shallow criticism of him. He saw and states the whole rebels' position—"In Memoriam" is largely a debate between the Shelley-Swinburne point of view and the Christian. Only he states it so abstractly that to people familiar with Browning's concrete and humanised dialectic it seems cold and artificial. But it's really his sincerest and deepest thought, and he deliberately rejects the rebel position as intellectually and morally untenable: ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... Brand nodded abstractly, and concentrated on the control board. Rapidly the ship rocketed down toward the surface. The disk became a whirling, gigantic plate; and then an endless plain, with cloud formations beginning to take ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... up to be independent of the parents,' said the colonel, somewhat abstractly. 'It is the way of nature. It must be; for the old pass away, and the young step forward to fill their places. What I wish is that you should get ready to fill your place well. That is what we have ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... my son, can you not see that there is force in my objection to her—that she really possess any character distinctively her own, that is founded upon a clear and rational appreciation of abstractly correct principles ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary Mr. Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers which it exerts during (and, as I think, in consequence of) its combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... George abstractly in the same key. "I was thinking what a rum, unfathomable old beggar Slavin is. Fancy him springing that comical old yarn at such ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... on the subject, or to modern State constitutions, there is hardly a change in this particular. Naturally, we find no new legislation confirming the right of property abstractly, or restating that that institution is part of our civilization. There is but one significant exception to this statement. While most of the States in their constitutions declare that men have a natural right to acquire, possess, and protect property, and Kentucky and Arkansas go to the length ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... to find that they had been all along in error in thinking that slavery was an evil, and hoping that some day it would be removed, that they had been wrong in speaking of being "opposed to slavery in the abstract," it was abstractly not wrong, but right; they had been mistaken when regretting the circumstances which made emancipation ought not to be desire. This change of sentiment an doctrine was not gradual, but sudden; it went with telegraphic speed. The reason was that events were pressing upon the aristocracy of the ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... because the system of traditional American ideas provided no positive principle, in relation to which these conflicting liberties could be classified and valued. It is in the nature of liberties and rights, abstractly considered, to be insubordinate and to conflict both one with another and, perhaps, with the common weal. If the chief purpose of a democratic political system is merely the preservation of such rights, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... we have said all that is necessary to say. That, however, is very far from being the case. We soon realize here, as at every point in the practical application of sexual psychology, that it is not sufficient to determine the abstractly right course along biological lines. We have to harmonize our biological demands with social demands. We are ruled not only by natural instincts but by inherited traditions, that in the far past were solidly based on intelligible grounds, and that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... parted from the individuals who compose it? No more than an individual who does not embody social relationships. The two are mutual conceptions, different aspects of the same thing. We may view a person abstractly, fixing attention on his single centre of consciousness; or we may view him conjunctly, attending to his ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... are wrong. Politically a man is not entitled to do what he chooses with his own. There are limitations. For instance, a man owns a house. Abstractly, he is entitled to burn it down if he chooses. But if his house abuts upon mine, he may not set it on fire if he chooses, because in so doing he would set fire to my house also, which is very much ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... breach of the philosophic peace; while, on the other hand, those who oppose them, albeit on no sort of ground but a mere pronunciation of contrary opinion, obtain all the credit due to the genuine philosopher. Abstractly, it would be generally admitted that any doctrine for which a certain amount of evidence is shewn, can only be overthrown by a superior force of evidence on the other side. But practically this is of no avail. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... kind and reassuring, were almost as sinister to Helen as the menace to her own life. Long had she known how cheap life was held in the West, but she had only known it abstractly, and she had never let the fact remain before her consciousness. This cheerful young man spoke calmly of spilling blood in her behalf. The thought it roused was tragic—for bloodshed was insupportable to her—and then the thrills ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... much to say that one season had much transformed her. She had been so ignorant of the world a year ago. She had taken for granted all that was abstractly right. Now she saw that the conventions of life were like sand-dunes and barriers in the path she was expected to walk. She had learned for one thing what money was. Wealth had been such an accepted part of her life, since she could remember, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... he must not be discouraged if his efforts appear to be abortive and the results ridiculous. The secret of a republic seems abstractly to be very simple, for it is merely that all good men shall act together and elect good officers. But good men cannot act together if they do not think together, and the best method of obtaining results which all desire is the very problem ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... of most {benchmark} claims, said attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers and {marketroid}s. The singular is sometimes '1 MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also {KIPS} and {GIPS}. 2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of {computron}s. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement." 3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among other things, they designed the processor ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... but a purely verbal one, as I apprehend it. Call your a and b distinct, they can't interact; call them one, they can. For taken abstractly and without qualification the words 'distinct' and 'independent' suggest only disconnection. If this be the only property of your a and b (and it is the only property your words imply), then of course, since you can't ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then, shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... great perfection," and then, to top it off, "a plate of beautiful peaches, another of pears, and another of plums, and a musk-melon were placed upon the table." Nevertheless, in spite of the friendliness shown to him personally, in spite of the sympathy which, abstractly considered, the New Yorkers expressed for the sad state of Boston, Mr. Adams was made to understand that if it came to practical measures for the support of Massachusetts, many diverse currents of opinion and interest ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... with the manner in which her rude companion spoke of serious things, and she improved the opportunity to embody the prayer of her heart in words. It was a fervent utterance, and Ethan seemed to join her in spirit. Both of them were grateful—not abstractly grateful, but grateful to God for his mercy in saving them from torture and death at ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... are incomparably finer than anything else in the tragedies and are much more dramatic than the dialogue. It is in the emotion of a spectator belonging to our own time rather than in that of an actor of those past times that the poet shows his dramatic strength; and whenever he speaks abstractly for country and humanity he moves us in a way that permits no ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... to say that the philosophical laws which govern the outward manifestations of a moving force, as equilibrium or self-propagating activity, are for personal study, and are never to be spoken of abstractly to the child, but merely to be illustrated with ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... proportion as he was less primitive by nature and training. He distinguished between Emmet the mayor and Emmet the lover; for he was familiar with the phenomenon of official probity combined with a lack of that quality in some personal relationship. Had Emmet's quandary been presented to him abstractly, he would have been quite tolerant in his judgement, with the understanding of a man of the world; but, in spite of resentment and chagrin, he still continued to love Felicity Wycliffe, and this fact made him scornful of the man who ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... sensation is only conceived of under the form of the object which is presented to the eye, but not as human sense-activity, "praxis," not subjectively. It therefore came about that the active side in opposition to materialism was developed from idealism, but only abstractly; this was natural, since idealism does not recognize real tangible facts as such. Feuerbach is willing, it is true, to distinguish objects of sensation from objects existing in thought, but he conceives of human activity itself not as objective activity. He, therefore, in the "Wesen des Christenthums," ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... the analogue of Nothing; Matter, wholly apart from Space, is only a theoretical Something, really and actually as much a Nothing as Space itself, when abstractly considered in its equally impossible separation from Matter. But Matter, completely separated from Space, is the exact external analogue of the Something opposed to the Nothing of abstract Metaphysical Thinking. Here, then, is a lucid exposition, by virtue ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Tom managed to get many side glances at the old man, who sat looking steadily and abstractly before him into the fireplace, and was much struck and touched by the picture. The sailor wore a well-preserved old undress uniform coat and waistcoat, and white drill trousers; he was a man of middle ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... point of view opens up the very fruitful conception of an Empire or Realm of Ends. As a Realm is the systematic union of rational beings by means of common laws, so the ends determined by the laws may, abstractly viewed, be taken to form a systematic whole. Rational beings, as subject to a law requiring them to treat themselves and others as ends and never merely as means, enter into a systematic union by means of common objective ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... during the last twenty or thirty years a strong feeling has grown up in the public mind against the principle, and a still stronger feeling against the practice, of capital punishments. Many people who will admit that the execution of the murderer may be, abstractly considered, just enough, sincerely doubt whether such execution be expedient, and are in their own minds perfectly certain that it cannot fail to demoralise the spectators. In consequence of this, executions ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... readers understand how, when the Constitution of the United States was adopted, slavery was regarded entirely as a domestic matter, left to each of the States to manage and dispose of as each saw fit. But at that period there was no dissenting voice to the proposition, that, abstractly considered, slave-holding was wrong; yet the owner of a large number of negroes could honestly declare he was himself innocent of the first transgression, and ignorant of any practicable way to get rid of the evil,—for it was counted an evil. When the rice, cotton and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... temperance speaker paints a drunkard coming home to abuse his wife and strike his children. It is much more effective than telling the truth in abstract terms. To depict the cruelness of war, do not assert the fact abstractly—"War is cruel." Show the soldier, an arm swept away by a bursting shell, lying on the battlefield pleading for water; show the children with tear-stained faces pressed against the window pane praying ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... have had no previous growth of trust in unseen forces should be left to those alone. In the present stage of progress in mind healing, there should be nothing which would require anyone to dispense with reasonable nursing nor with common sense. Some things which are ideally and abstractly true, can only be fully realized in the future, and it is not well to prematurely use them before ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension of the moral laws in their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive determination to form, in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to couch ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of them necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, they are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far from perfect; all I claim is that ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... meet this want must have theory; yet the theory must not be made obtrusive, nor stated too abstractly. The theory must be deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commend itself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by its ability to comprehend in a rational and intelligible order the concrete facts with which ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... is the Far Oriental's ideal of life. The repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar system is slowly tending as its death,—this to him appears, though from no scientific deduction, the end of all existence. So he sits and ponders, abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general,—synonym, alas, to man's finite mind, for nothing in particular,—till even the sense of self seems to vanish, and through the mist-like portal of unconsciousness he floats out into the vast indistinguishable ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... What a destiny! Certainly Blent was in the same valley, but—— Well, a "seat" is one thing, and a farm's another; the world is to blame again, no doubt. And with men who want nothing, for whom the word "opening" has no magic, what is to be done? Abstractly they are seen to be a necessary element in the community; but they do not make good sons or sons-in-law for ambitious men. Janie, when she had seen Bob, an unrepentant cheerful Bob, on his way, came back to ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... dollars a year; and the one hundred and twenty dollars is just so much taken from me, which ought to be used to make me and my children comfortable." Indeed, broken as was their speech and limited as was their knowledge, they reasoned abstractly on their rights as well as white men. Locke or Channing might have fortified the argument for universal liberty from their simple talk. So true is it that the best thoughts which the human intellect has produced have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... signal in the shape of an overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter. Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... but narrow fields, it should be remembered that every philosophy deals with the whole cosmos. An explanation of all things is sought—not alone the great movements of the heavens, or the phenomena that startle even the unthinking, but every particular which is observed. Abstractly, the plane of demarkation between the two methods of philosophy can be sharply drawn, but practically we find them strangely mixed; mythologic methods prevail in savagery and barbarism, and scientific methods prevail in civilization. Mythologic philosophies ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... of these phrases, shows no relation—it serves merely to introduce. The complements good and great are adjectives used abstractly, having no noun to ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... stocks. Yet we have to remember that though this control, with the limitation of offspring it involves, fails to answer all the demands which Social Hygiene to-day makes of us, it yet achieves much. It may not improve what we abstractly term the "race," but it immensely improves the individuals of which the race is made up. Thus the limitation of the family renders it possible to avoid the production of undesired children. That in itself is an immense ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... your own strictly subjective point of view that's very natural. I also look at the question abstractly from the side of the empirical ego, and correctly deduce a corresponding conclusion. Only then, you see, the terms of the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Messiah; and I have decided to accept Him as such." Did he say that? That would have been the simple truth. But such a remark plainly would have aroused a storm of criticism, and he dreaded that. Yet he felt that something should be said. So, lawyer-like, he puts the case abstractly. "Hmm—does our law judge a man without giving him a fair hearing?" That sounds fair, though it does seem rather feeble in face of their determined opposition. But near by sits a burly Pharisee, who turns sharply around and, glaring savagely at Nicodemus, says sneeringly: "Who are you? ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... ecclesiastical; yet, from what is above hinted, it may be inferred, that the Revolution state has still preserved the very soul and substance of that blasphemous supremacy (though possibly they may have transferred it from the person of the king, abstractly considered, and lodged it in the hand of the king and parliament conjunctly, as the more proper subject thereof): for, in the words of Mr. John Burnet, in his testimony against the indulgence, quoted by Mr. Brown in his history of the indulgence, "To settle, enact ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... tends toward the polish of a classicist; in quality and freedom of thought he is very responsive to the mysteries of romanticism. He is introspective in his thinking and symbolical in his writing. Naturally he thinks abstractly, but is compelled to construct concrete methods of presenting his ideas. He never describes a strong emotion in detail, but delights in using suggestions and sidelights. His pure and refined manhood, his delicate fancy and deep interest in moral and religious questions, his conscience ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... vivid lips slightly upcurled, the straight delicate nose, the cheeks so smoothly rounded where the dark thick lashes swept their bloom as she looked downward at the water—all this was abstractly beautiful; very lovely, too, the full column of the neck, and the rounded arms guiltless of sunburn ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... constitutional limitation differ from ordinary statutes in this, that these rules are made impersonally, abstractly, dispassionately, impartially, as the people's expression of what they believe to be right and necessary for the preservation of their idea of liberty and justice. The process of amendment is so guarded by the constitution itself ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... it mean? So I tried to persuade these women of the truth of that which I supposed had been settled about one hundred and twenty-one years ago. It is necessary to make women believe that suffrage is a natural right rather than a privilege; that, while abstractly it seems well for an intelligent citizen to govern an ignorant one, human nature is such that the intelligent will govern selfishly and leave the ignorant ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... long lain slumbering beneath this vast superstructure of glacial learning began to break their way to the light, and startled him very much as the earth must have been startled when the first patch of green sod broke into view, steaming under the hot rays of the noonday sun. Abstractly considered, the thing seemed preposterous enough for the plot of a dime novel, while in the light of her sweet presence the development of his love seemed as logical as an algebraic problem. At all events, the result was in both cases equally inexorable. It was useless ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... tries to sustain his objection by the following argument: "The fixing of rates upon a railroad is as delicate a process as that of determining the pulse of a sick man. They cannot be determined abstractly, or in advance of the wants of business, but must be adjusted from hour to hour to conform to its fluctuations. Five thousand men find active employment in the United States in connection with the important duty of making rates. Each case requires particular investigation and involves, ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... To speak less abstractly. In England, for example, no mere parade of costly appurtenances would be so likely as with us, to create an impression of the beautiful in respect to the appurtenances themselves—or of taste as regards the proprietor:—this for the reason, first, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
