"Empirical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in evidence in the streets are, first and foremost, goats and sheep. I have to lump them together, for it is exceedingly difficult to tell one from the other. All along the Coast the empirical rule is that sheep carry their tails down, and goats carry their tails up; fortunately you need not worry much anyway, for they both "taste rather like the nothing that the world was made of," as Frau Buchholtz says, and own in addition a fibrous ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see later, one of the best norms here is phyletic emphasis, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... radiance, and her smile was angelic. She was short of stature, but it was impossible to imagine more beautiful features or hands. Her education had been very desultory; she had learned more from lovers than from teachers. She had a strong taste for empirical medicine and for alchemy, and was always compounding elixirs, tinctures and balms, some of which she regarded as valuable secrets. So it was that charlatans, trading on her weakness, made her consume, amid drugs and furnaces, a talent and a spirit which might have distinguished her in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Fitzjames, in fact, still accepts Mill's philosophy in the fullest sense. All truth, he declares, may be reduced to the type, 'this piece of paper is blue, and that is white.' In other words, it is purely empirical and contingent. The so-called intuitive truths 'two and two make four' only differ from the truth, 'this paper is white' in that they are confirmed by wider experience. All metaphysical verbiage, says Fitzjames, whether Coleridge's or Ward's, is ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... talking of building a new yacht out of his private purse, he having some contrivance of his own'. Also, Evelyn's Diary, February 4, 1685: 'a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping; not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines, and the easier mechanical mathematics.' Also, Buckingham, ed. 1705, p. 155: 'the great and almost only pleasure of Mind he seem'd addicted to, was Shipping and Sea-Affairs; which seem'd to be so much his Talent for Knowledge, as well as ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... everything clear, and furnish the best description of proof in the empirical sciences. This applies with more force to the Art of War than to any other. General Scharnhorst, whose handbook is the best ever written on actual War, pronounces historical examples to be of the first importance, and ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... that essential mastery has been achieved by the artist—the power, that is to say, of a full and free realisation. For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when art is dealing with religious objects, with ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 5.5561 Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The limit also makes itself manifest in the totality of elementary propositions. Hierarchies are and ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... the real, and theory of knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no other centre to the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition of the two terms, as also, perhaps, of their common origin. But, on the other hand, by dwelling ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... the earth would swallow him up. He was only used to Cambridge, and to a very small corner of that. He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results from a ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... rights of the State, a natural, prudential, utilitarian morality interested men. One of the consequences of this theory of the State was a complete alteration in the thought of the relation of State and Church. The nature of the Church itself as an empirical institution in the midst of human society was subjected to the same criticism with the State. Men saw the Church in a new light. As the State was viewed as a kind of contract in men's social interest, so the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the application of scientific knowledge to practice. The latter in carrying out its more practical aims requires, if it is to be saved from the narrowness of mere specialisation and from degenerating into empirical methods, the constant co-operation of those whose outlook is not narrowed down to the immediate practical end, but takes in the subject as a whole, and whose chief function is the better systematisation ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... educated at Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That empirical procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts of my crescograph {FN8-2} are evidence ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... diluvian billows fixed into stone in the midst of their stormy swell. I wandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought. Could I acknowledge in Julius Faber's conjectures any basis for logical ratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empirical Philosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severer faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of youth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by most as a wild and fantastic fable; that by some it ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... humble realm, where the little victorious martyr was fed from the best stores of the house, until there was as much danger from repletion as there had been from famine. How the experiment might have ended but for this empirical and most unphilosophical interference, there is no saying; but it settled the point that the rebellious nature was not to be subjugated in a ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ideas are, which in this view are essential to the different departments of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the understanding out of the observations it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... minds of the people to a proper appreciation of the blessings of limited reform and of the inevitable and necessary stages and degrees of progress, as well as of the danger of too sudden and radical change, effectually counteract the evil influence of the unmethodical and empirical reformer. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... sufferings of infancy, sickness, and old age. Laborers too will be less skillful, and perform less work—enhancing the price of that sort of labor. The poor laws of England are an attempt—but an awkward and empirical attempt—to supply the place of that which we should suppose the feelings of every human heart would declare to be a natural obligation—that he who has received the benefit of the laborer's services during his health and vigor, should maintain him when he becomes unable to provide for his own ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... degeneration consequent on adoption of the parasitic habit. All parasites seem to have descended from free living beasts. One asks 'what is degeneration?' without receiving a very satisfactory answer. After all, such terms must be empirical. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... profoundly religious and live by a passionate faith in the absolute value of certain states of mind; also they have fallen in love with the conclusions and methods of science. Being extremely intelligent, they perceive, however, that empirical arguments can avail nothing for or against a metaphysical theory, and that ultimately all the conclusions of science are based on a logic that precedes experience. Also they perceive that emotions are just as real as sensations. They find themselves ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole connection. The orator who has once seen things in their divine order will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... have dreamed of the Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth is growing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian and the art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highly valued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted to Tristan and to "l'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, and we think of them with all the pensive tenderness we cannot help feeling ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... lies inanimate at home. But even this, Dr. August Moehrlein could not do, for the yogis do not initiate men of Western nations into their mysteries. Dr. Moehrlein's knowledge of the occult of India was wholly empirical. He knew that certain things were done and could recount them, but as to how they were done, he could tell nothing. It must not be thought that of all the marvelous and awe-compelling things the yogis of India are accustomed ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... of British traditional jurisprudence, the seventh generation took up the work of revision and reform, and from the time of Bentham and Austin the progress of legal science has been toward codification. The contest between the aggregation of empirical rules and formulated customs which Coke taught as the common law, and the broad, harmonious application of scientific reason to the definition and enforcement of rights, still goes on; but with constant gains on the side of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... mentioning that dangerous and empirical morality, which cures one vice by means of another. But envy is so base and detestable, so vile in its original, and so pernicious in its effects, that the predominance of almost any other quality is to be desired. It is one of those lawless enemies of society, against ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... correspondence at this period between abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics, there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... original fertility. The scarcity induced by the natural increase of the population is counteracted by improved methods of cultivation. If the Chinese, who know nothing of natural science, have succeeded by purely empirical methods in perfecting agriculture to such an extent that a whole family can support itself on a few square yards of land, what may not the European do with the help of chemistry, botanical physiology, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... country people, but in this case it seemed to have been ordered by a medical practitioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not. How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would have skinned a hare or rabbit without ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... concludes his volume with an Appendix containing an exposition of the constituents of many favorite and famous cosmetics, pointing out at the same time their true character, the danger and unpleasantness of which, he says, are disguised with much empirical skill. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... imaginative knowledge is the unity with which philosophers start their study of the world. They can never perceive the world in its entire reality. Yet their imagination, with its magnificent allowance for error, its power of treating uncertainty as negligible, has pointed the way for empirical knowledge. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... strict application of authority and the rules grew partly out of the rationalistic and empirical temper of Englishmen in his age, but it also sprang from his learning. From various sources he drew the theory that Greek and Latin were but corrupted forms of ancient Phoenician, and that the degeneracy of Greek and Latin in turn had produced all, or most, of the present ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... you is merely an attempt to find the right beginning of a road, the end of which we shall know only when we have been taught the necessary lessons by actual experience with the conditions of the future. Let me ask you, therefore, to follow at first the same empirical road which the governments have followed, and to take conditions as they are, and not as we may wish they should be. If one has nothing better to put in the place of something that one does not entirely like, one had better, I believe, let matters ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... and cobalt for the blues, copperas for the greens, manganese for the violets and browns, iron for the yellows, and lead or tin for the whites. One variety of red contains 30 per cent of bronze, and becomes coated with verdegris if exposed to damp. All this chemistry was empirical, and acquired by instinct. Finding the necessary elements at hand, or being supplied with them from a distance, they made use of them at hazard, and without being too certain of obtaining the effects ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... posited by empirical idealism is borrowed without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... OF EMPIRICAL-MODERN THEOLOGY. The two leading representatives of this important branch of contemporary Dutch theology are Opzoomer and Pierson. The former, a professor in the University of Utrecht, left the sphere of theological instruction for a time, and took a prominent part in political debates in order ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Society; but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new habits of mind that spread outward from that centre played their part. The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this development invented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's engine was running along its rails and Evan's boat was walloping up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to application as occur ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... ether—but we haven't been able to find a point of attack yet that will let us get in anywhere. However, I'm getting 'way ahead of our subject. To get back to it, energy can be converted into something that acts like matter through Roeser's Rays, and that is the empirical fact underlying the drive of our space-ships, as well as that of almost all other vehicles on all three planets. Power is generated by the great waterfalls of Tellus and Venus—water's mighty scarce on Mars, of course, so most of our plants there use fuel—and is transmitted on light ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... Science, admits that it does not know these fundamental principles; that it reasons, not from underlying causes, but from external symptoms and personal experiences. It is, therefore, self-confessedly full of doubts, errors and confusion; in short, empirical—and necessarily, a failure. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... idea of the laws of nature; if they want to cure a man, they have no conception at all of true scientific remedies. If they try anything they must try it upon bare chance. The most useful modern remedies were often discovered in this bare, empirical way. What could be more improbable—at least, for what could a pre-historic man have less given a good reason—than that some mineral springs should stop rheumatic pains, or mineral springs make wounds heal quickly? And yet the chance knowledge of the marvellous ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... applied themselves to the study, so useful to their interests, of their brilliant expanse of heavens. By a prolonged and 'daily observation,' considerable knowledge must have been attained; but in the infancy of the science astronomy necessarily took the form of an empirical art which, under the name of astrology, engaged the serious attention and perplexed the brains of the mediaeval students of science or magic (nearly synonymous terms), and which still survives in England ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... subject, which betrays a want of definite conviction in the minds of the writers; and which tends quite as much to muddle as to enlighten the ideas of the reader. In so far as the directions are given, whether fortified by argument or not, they are clearly empirical, and are usually very much qualified by considerations which weigh with ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... even-toed and odd-toed. Now, whether an animal has an even or an odd number of toes may seem a curiously artificial distinction on which to found so important a classification of the mammalian group. But if we look at the matter from a less empirical and more intelligent point of view, we shall see that the alternative of having an even or an odd number of toes carries with it alternative consequences of a practically important kind to any animal of the digitigrade ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... bridges. Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Does not the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... first rise of his family, we have sufficient authority on record; and, as regards his dealings, he has certainly always acted in the dark; though many of his doings both moral, political, ecclesiastical, and empirical, have left such strong impressions behind them, as to mark their importance in some transactions, even at the present period of the christian world. These discussions, however, we shall leave in the hands of their respective champions, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... instinctive. It was so genuine and so instinctive as no hatred can be but that of self, of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man. But there was also something deeper in it than this. There was mixed with it the natural dread in the political diviner of the political logician,—in the empirical, of the theoretic statesman. Burke, confounding the idea of society with the form of it then existing, would have preserved that as the only specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as it then existed was but another name for ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the basis upon which we are to build, and studying the manners, customs, and moral judgments of all sorts and conditions of men, develop an empirical science of ethics which will be ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... resistance and the screw the smaller pitch/diameter, the higher revolutions permit the use of a smaller screw. But from this example the influence of the high revolutions in diminishing the size of screw does not appear so great as some empirical rules would indicate. The screws for A and B are also worthy of attention. Although the ship A has a much greater resistance than B, the screw of the former is much the smaller, both in the blade area and the disk. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... not more than two or three of simian glands upon human beings. His statement, therefore, that successful transplantation of the glands of the goat into a human being is "impossible, and cannot succeed," is empirical, and entirely unsupported by any experience of his own in the matter. Against it, and completely confuting it, we set the clear conclusions of Dr. Brinkley, backed by his unequalled record of over 600 successful transplants of goat-glands into men and women, during the past three years. ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... literature, and travel, bring the library up to date. He would devote his leisure to the study of various subjects—especially natural science—regarding which he was conscious of a knowledge, deficient, or merely empirical. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... indiscretion. I squeezed him by the hand and winked at MM. de Beaufort and de La Mothe. At length two other Presidents came over to my opinion, being thoroughly convinced that succours from Spain at this time were a remedy absolutely necessary to our disease, but a dangerous and empirical medicine, and infallibly mortal to particular persons if it did not pass first through ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... is very generally believed to be a modern expansion of an old empirical philosophy, but, according to Dr. Gall's account, it arose with him as the result of independent observations. The popularity of phrenology has waned in the public mind, and cultivation of the system is confined to a few ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... how little he wanted to make this admission. "However," he went on, brightening, "there is some evidence which seems to show that it is basically the same process as psychokinesis. And we do have quite a bit of empirical data on psychokinesis." He scribbled something on a sheet of paper and said, "For instance, there's this." He held the paper up to the screen so that Malone could ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... general aesthetics; while historically it is a sort of landmark in Shakespearian literature. Standing chronologically almost midway between Dryden and Johnson, Kames, and Richardson, the Remarks shows decisively the direction in which criticism, under the steadily mounting pressure of liberal, empirical thought, is traveling. This little unpretentious book gathers into itself, either in faint adumbration or in fairly advanced form, the tendencies in method and ideas that are to remake criticism in the eighteenth century. There are reflected here ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... of apparent cures were due solely to nature; which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical. Of course many persons experienced at least temporary relief from the strong impression made upon their minds by this novel and ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... shorter and less empirical way must be found in which to acquire the understanding of sound play. My system of teaching differs from the usual ones, in that it sets down at the outset definite elementary principles of chess strategy by which any move can be gauged at its true value, ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... essentially historical though by no means empirical. On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly styled il maestro di color che sanno, may be said to have apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... thirty hours is considered sufficient to fit the future physicians to guide their patients in the selection, combination and preparation of food. Dietetics should be the principal subject of study. It should be approached both from the scientific and from the empirical side. It is not a rigid subject, but one which can be treated in a very elastic way. The scientific part is important, but the practical part, which is the art, is vastly more important. A part of the art of feeding and fasting is scientific, for we get the same ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... pictorial as this edition will supply), there would have been so many accidents and so many failures, that Mr. Rarey would have had great difficulty in obtaining a hearing, and for many years our splendid colts would have been left to the empirical treatment of ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... offended those whose love he might have conciliated, converted friends into enemies, and let those perish who were his most faithful partisans." Thus it must be acknowledged that even his boasted knowledge of human nature and his power of dealing with men was rather superficial and empirical than the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with those it is brought to illustrate, you have only to suppose that, although the boomerang thrown by me went forward to a definite place, and at least appeared to subserve a purpose, and the bystanders, after a while, could get traces of the mode or the empirical law of its flight, yet they could not themselves do anything with it. It was quite beyond their power to use it. Would they doubt, or deny my intention, on that account? No: they would insist that design on my part must be presumed from the nature of the results; ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... was in contact, and it was not long before I definitely abandoned all hope of obtaining, by any of the means I found in use, the results for which I was striving. Consequently, from that time to the present my work has necessarily been more or less independent and empirical in its nature, and, while I trust I am neither prejudiced nor intolerant in my attitude towards pianoforte education in its general aspect, I cannot help feeling that a great deal of natural taste is stifled and a great deal of mediocrity created by the persistent and unintelligent ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... not aware of a 'shining forth' as an attribute of those things, and as something different from consciousness; nor can the assumption of an attribute of things called 'light,' or 'shining forth,' be proved in any way, since the entire empirical world itself can be proved only through consciousness, the existence of which we both admit. Consciousness, therefore, is not something which is inferred or proved through some other act of knowledge; but while proving everything else it is proved by itself. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... to place all that one may have to say of the education of girls in America on some proved, rational basis, for in no country is the work of education carried on in so purely empirical a way. We are deeply impressed with its necessity; we are eager in our efforts, but we are always in the condition of one "whom too great eagerness bewilders." We are ready to drift in any direction on the subject. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... investigations of Aldrovandus, Coiter, and Fabricius. Concerned with description and depiction of the anatomy of the embryo, they established a period of macro-iconography in embryology. The macro-iconographic era was empirical and based upon first-hand observation; it was concerned more with the facts than with the theories of development. This empiricism existed in competition with a declining, richly vitalistic Aristotelian rationalism which had virtually eliminated empiricism ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... This ratio, to which the name speed-strength modulus has been given, may be expressed as a coefficient which, if multiplied into any proportional change in speed, will give the proportional change in strength. This ratio is derived from empirical curves. (See Table XVII.) ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... probably no less effective than most of the modern drugs recommended for the same purpose. Concerning a function over which so many fond superstitions still linger in the public mind we may, perhaps, charitably forgive Gilbert for the introduction of an empirical remedy for sterility, which, he assures us, he has often tried and with invariable success, and which enjoys the double advantage ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... characteristics considered in this chapter is that they are innate, due to brain and nerve structure, and acquired by each generation through biological heredity. If closely examined, however, this is seen to be no explanation at all. Accepting the characteristics as empirical inexplicable facts, the real problem is evaded, pushed into prehistoric times, that convenient dumping ground of biological, anthropological, and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... of Goethe's hint that Byron had too much empeiria (an excess of mondanite—a this-worldliness), found it hard to read Beppo after Macbeth. "I felt," he says, "the predominance of a nefarious, empirical world, with which the mind which introduced it to us has in a certain measure associated itself" (Conversations of Goethe, etc., 1874, p. 175). But Beppo must be taken at its own valuation. It is A Venetian Story, and the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... specific weight diminishes; but the variations in pressure are assumed to be so small that u and [Delta] may be considered constant. As regards the quantity f(u), or the friction per unit of length, the natural law which regulates it is not known, audit can only be expressed by some empirical formula, which, while according sufficiently nearly with the facts, is suited for calculation. For this purpose the binomial formula, au bu squared, or the simple formula, b1 u squared, is generally adopted; a b and b1 being coefficients deduced ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... efficient secrets of manipulation, or perceive the true limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened on these matters, there will be found, as I ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... John Brown, ex-clergyman and quack-doctor, harangued the people of Chaudiere from his gaily-painted wagon. He had the perfect gift of the charlatan, and he had discovered his metier. Inclined to the picturesque by nature, melodramatic and empirical, his earlier career had been the due fruit of habit and education. As a dabbler in mines he had been out of his element. He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic had not availed him, though it had tempted Billy Wantage to forgery; and because Billy hid himself ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam, by turns, court and are accepted by the compilable mutton hash—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... that it should be stated frankly, at the start, that the words Sulphite and Bromide, and their derivatives, sulphitic and bromidic, are themselves so sulphitic that they are not susceptible of explanation. In a word, they are empirical, although, accidentally it might seem, they do appeal and convince the most skeptical. I myself balked, at first, at these inconsequent names. I would have suggested the terms "Gothic" and "Classic" to describe the fundamental types of mind. But it took but a short conversation ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that 'complexus' of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the light ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... had defined species by the criterion of fertility. Now not only the great explorers, but every ship's captain, knew by this time that white men, at all events, would form fertile unions with all known kinds of humanity. But in the eighteenth century it became known also, and in the same empirical way, that the fertility of unions between white men and black was imperfect; and as this was the only human cross for which there was any large quantity of evidence, the impression grew that the zoological distance between these races was ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... sense it is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, looked at in this way, I combatted it in my book on Socialismo e Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism were not ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... be filled with pity and disapproval to see the independent existence of the soul, as it were, authoritatively reaffirmed by a purely empirical science, and also brought into the field all the defensive forces at her command. But throngs flocked to the camp of Materialism, for the trumpets of her leaders had a clearer, more confident sound than the lower and less readily understood opposing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a part. Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of time and place in the most common and empirical sense; as though there were any place but the bare ideal one, or any other time than the mere sequence ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent which alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we are mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells which is a better argument for the American social and political system than any empirical theories that can be constructed ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... that men were naturally good, in a sense. Their theory was that, if people were left to themselves, and if the restraints imposed by authority on thought and commerce were removed, the operation of ordinary human motives would produce the most beneficent results. But their theory was quite empirical; worked out in various ways by Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence of the English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... long followed its early cow-paths through the wilderness of sense that great hardihood is required even to suggest that there may be other and better ways of traversing the empirical common. So it is that the fear of being proclaimed a Brazenhead has restrained me until this eleventh hour from telling of my discoveries concerning the fourth-dimensional reaches of our Exposition. That I have the courage now is due to my desire to ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This is obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of the time, has a typical quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That anti-papal ardor is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward from the death of Queen Jeanne of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It is possible to conjecture what it would be fruitless ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... all other phases of dairying, has been developed mainly as a result of empirical methods. Within the last decade or so, the subject has received more attention from the scientific point of view and the underlying causes determined to some extent. Since the subject has been investigated from the bacteriological point of ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... his new theory. Non-Euclidean geometry is a study of which the primary motive was logical and philosophical; few of its promoters ever dreamed that it would come to be applied in physics. Some of Euclid's axioms were felt to be not "necessary truths," but mere empirical laws; in order to establish this view, self-consistent geometries were constructed upon assumptions other than those of Euclid. In these geometries the sum of the angles of a triangle is not two right ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... area contributing water to the stream passing through the culvert under consideration is computed from contour maps or from a survey of the ground, and the size of culvert determined by one of the empirical formulas applicable to that purpose. In these formulas, the solution depends upon the proper selection of a factor "C" which varies in accordance with the nature of the drainage area. Two of these that are quite ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... don't think it. About fifteen deaths a day don't incite a man to shoot anything but himself. And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them. Lord knows, I've tried everything. My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; but I ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... rank and order of the sciences or arts, which agrees generally with the scheme of knowledge in the Sixth Book of the Republic. The chief difference is, that the position of the arts is more exactly defined. They are divided into an empirical part and a scientific part, of which the first is mere guess-work, the second is determined by rule and measure. Of the more empirical arts, music is given as an example; this, although affirmed to be necessary ...
— Philebus • Plato
... marking out the grounds in human life, then lying waste, or covered with superstitious and empirical arts and inventions, in merely showing the fields into which the inventor of this new instrument of observation and inference by rule, was then proposing to introduce it, and in presenting this new report, and this so startling proposition, in those ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... that medicines, no matter how powerful, could only be expected to assuage the pain; but magic alone, incantations, spells and prayers, could remove the disease. Experience brought much of the wisdom we call empirical, and the records, extending for thousands of years, show that the Egyptians employed emetics, purgatives, enemata, diuretics, diaphoretics and even bleeding. They had a rich pharmacopoeia derived from the animal, vegetable and mineral ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... the theory of the prevention of crime. Some say: "it is better to repress than to prevent." Others say: "It is better to prevent than to repress." In order to solve this conflict we must remember that there are two widely different kinds of repression. There is the immediate, direct empirical repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but waits until the crime is about to be committed. That is police prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an indirect and more remote function, which does not wait until crime is about to be committed, ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... watches know nothing about watchmaking. A watch goes wrong and it stops; you see the owner giving it a shake, or, if he is very bold, he opens the case, and gives the balance-wheel a turn. Gentlemen, that is empirical practice, and you know what are the results upon the watch. I should think you can divine what are the results of analogous operations upon the human body. And because men of sense very soon found that such were the effects of meddling with very complicated machinery they did not ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... world did very well without us for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even—not one! In practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course—frightfully clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like sheep—but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there were none." ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... and experiment (which is, in fact, only the observation of abnormal social states), a certain peculiarity of verification. We begin by deducing every well-known historical situation from the series of its antecedents. Thus we acquire a body of empirical generalisations as to social phenomena, and then we connect the generalisations with the positive theory of human nature. A sociological demonstration lies in the establishment of an accordance between the conclusions of historical analysis and the preparatory conceptions of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... Almost every word which deals with man's mind reflects the moral and religious values and is thus removed from pure psychology into ethics. Or we find comparisons which suggestively illuminate the working of the mind without amplifying our psychological understanding. We approach empirical psychology most nearly in verses like these: "Foolishness is bound in the heart of the child, but the word of correction should drive it far from him"; or "He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least, is unjust also in ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... however, a movement discernible which may be called the New Buddhism, and has not only new wine but new wineskins. It is democratic, optimistic, empirical or practical; it welcomes women and children; it is hospitable to science and every form of truth. It is catholic in spirit and has little if any of the venom of the old Buddhist controvertists. It is represented by earnest writers who ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... stone walls for an increase of their appointments. From the marrowless bones of these skeleton establishments, by the use of every sort of cutting and of every sort of fretting tool, he flatters himself that he may chip and rasp an empirical alimentary powder, to diet into some similitude of health and substance the languishing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... which are clearly beyond the reach of mathematics. The proportion of criminals in a given population, the number of suicides, or of illegitimate births, may throw some light upon judicial and political, and even religious or ethical problems. Nor are such formulae useless simply because empirical. The law of gravitation, for example, is empirical. Nobody knows the cause of the observed tendency of bodies to gravitate to each other, and therefore no one can say how far the law which represents the tendency must be universal. Still, the ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... gross feeders;* [Dr. Campbell's definition of the Lepcha's Flora cibaria, is, that he eats, or must have eaten, everything soft enough to chew; for, as he knows whatever is poisonous, he must have tried all; his knowledge being wholly empirical.] rice, however, forming their chief sustenance; it is grown without irrigation, and produces a large, flat, coarse grain, which becomes gelatinous, and often pink, when cooked. Pork is a staple dish: and they also eat elephant, and all kinds of animal ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... theory could only pass beyond the rank of a hypothesis, if we should succeed in showing the impelling forces of such an origin of species through development. Such an attempt can be made in two ways—the metaphysical and the scientific-empirical. The first, the metaphysical, although it may be justified in its general principles, will always, from the point at which it attempts to approach the concrete questions as {100} to the origin of single species, expose itself to the fate of being a priori rejected by science as unjustified, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... individual man is identical with the citizen, and has become a generic being in his empirical life, in his individual work, in his individual relationships, not until man has recognized and organized his own capacities as social capacities, and consequently the social force is no longer divided by the political power, not until then ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... mastered and thereby built up a reputation for unusual efficiency. His collapse, when analyzed, can usually be traced to the fact that his previous experience contained nothing on which he could directly base a decision. His prior efficiency was based on empirical knowledge rather than on judgment or ability ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. What all good men desire, here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected gradually and peaceably. We do not find fault with men for being born ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... constantly engaged in enlarging his outlook and in endeavouring to envisage vital problems both theoretically and practically—both with precision and with depth. To one whose mind was thus habitually occupied, the empirical activities of Palmerston, who had no notion what a principle meant, resembled the incoherent vagaries of a tiresome child. What did Palmerston know of economics, of science, of history? What did he care for morality and education? How much ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... remarked the Rajput with a smile, "and, what is more, he is very ignorant. The truth is, he has been brought up in a Shivaite pagoda, like all the real snake-charmers. Shiva is the patron god of snakes, and the Brahmans teach the bunis to produce all kinds of mesmeric tricks by empirical methods, never explaining to them the theoretical principles, but assuring them that Shiva is behind every phenomenon. So that the bunis sincerely ascribe to their god the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... for years and cared nothing whatever about, and then Howard West—who probably wasn't interested in her either, but would be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica herself sat between Carl Leaventritt of the university—a great acquisition, since whatever you might think of him as an empirical psychologist, there was no doubt of his being an accomplished diner-out—and Violet's husband, as he vociferously proclaimed himself, John Williamson, an untired business man who, had their seasons coincided, could have ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... second, knowledge of the human mind which he is trying to stimulate; and third, knowledge of the way to bring these two together in a helpful manner. Of the three, I am afraid that university instructors have, in the main, but the first. At any rate, all they know of the other two is of an empirical character and what they have picked up incidentally. There are exceptions, to be sure. Every worthy institution has them, striking exceptions, too, some of them are. A few of our older men have become good ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... impossibility of miracles may be described as a very subtle turning the tables on Hume and the empirical philosophy. For when it is said that it is contrary to reason to believe in a suspension of the order of nature, he asks on what ground do we believe in the order of nature; and Hume himself supplies the answer. There ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... but his pupil and helper, with characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted the discovery as "a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical, and in no way connected with any laws of either force or beauty." "Many a hard and pleasant fight we had over it," wrote Jenkin, in later years; "and impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the arguments ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the nature of this force adherent to moonlight, and to no other light, we may inquire why, in all ages and in all lands, the verdict of experience points to moonlight as a factor in the production and aggravation of lunacy. An empirical hypothesis, of course; but in the better sense, as well as in the worse. For the perturbing influence of moonlight, if it be a myth, is about the most tenacious one on earth. This anomalous form of Force may or may ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... connection between what in common language is called the theoretical and practical, but in more technical phraseology, the ideal and the actual. The actual, or true practical, consists in the uses of the forces of nature, according to the laws of nature; and here we must distinguish between it and the empirical, which uses, or attempts to use, those forces, without a knowledge of the laws. The true practical, therefore, is the result, or actual, of an antecedent ideal. The ideal, full and complete, must exist in the mind before the ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... Freiber, my assistants, were invited. Dr. Bruno and Lucca proposed having recourse to antispasmodics and other remedies employed in the last stage of typhus. Freiber and I maintained that they could only hasten the fatal termination, that nothing could be more empirical than flying from one extreme to the other; that if, as we all thought, the complaint was owing to the metastasis of rheumatic inflammation, the existing symptoms only depended on the rapid and extensive ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... benevolence His minute and multifarious creations, winking at our pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatly caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts, and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and practical and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... radioactive, as you know, and Dick thinks that this may account in part for its ability to suspend animation. However, since it was impossible to determine the molecular weight, he could not say what the gas was, save that the empirical formula was C{62}TH H{39}O{27}N{5}. It broke down at a temperature of only 89 deg. centigrade. The gases left consisted largely of methane, nitrogen, and methyl ether. Dick is still in the dark as to what the gas is." He paused, ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... her, in silence, the colour that flowed and ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her unflinching willingness to submit herself ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... organic compounds is probably best taught in connection with the course in organic chemistry. It is here that the student is introduced to the use of the combustion furnace and the method of working out the empirical formulae of the compounds which he has carefully prepared and purified. The laboratory practice in organic chemistry generally requires the use of larger pieces of apparatus. Some of the experiments also are connected ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... discovered by himself; viz., to wear wash-leather, or something equivalent, over the burn, and keep it constantly wet. It prevents all pain, and cures by the exclusion of the air. He evidently has a great tendency to empirical remedies, and would have made a natural doctor of mighty potency, possessing the shrewd sense, inventive faculty, and self-reliance that such persons require. It is very singular that there should be an ideal vein in a man of ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... evolves. Repeated episodes of subjugation and suppression mixed with countless incidents of predaceous cupidity and rapacity have made Man what he is today. Indeed, by a sort of instinct, society has constructed its institutions upon empirical observations and assumptions agreeing with this principle. The deductions concerning human nature and human traits that an interplanetary visitor would draw from a study of our common law would be at least slightly humiliating to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil contract and criminal ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... namely, the facts of nature or of the external world. This usage is not universal, nor is it fixed. In Germany, especially, the word Wissenschaft is used of all kinds of ordered knowledge, whether transcendental or empirical. So we are accustomed to speak of mental, moral, social, as well as of natural science. Nevertheless, the more restricted use of the word is very common and very influential. It is important that this fact should be recognized. In common usage, a scientific man is distinguished ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... basis of investigation is still in a great measure empirical; and of this the most obvious criterion is the confusion attaching to the use of the very word 'Cellulose.' This is due to various causes, one of which is the curious specialisation of the term in Germany as the equivalent of 'wood cellulose.' The restriction of this general ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but less compact body ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... the individual has its counterpart in humanity as a whole. For there, too, the real life is the life of the will, both in the empirical and in the transcendental meaning of the word. The purely intellectual life of humanity lies in its effort to increase knowledge by means of the sciences, and its desire to perfect the arts. Both science and art thus advance slowly from one generation to another, and grow with the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 minor ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... bound up together; every modification of a function entails therefore the modification of an organ. Hence from the shape of one organ you can infer the shape of the other organs—if you have sufficiently extensive empirical knowledge of functions, and of the relation of structure to function in each kind of organ. Given an alimentary canal capable of digesting only flesh, and possessing therefore a certain form, you know that the other functions must be adapted to this particular function of the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... considered both as an empirical fact and as an aetiological theory or philosophy. Considered as a fact, it is the statement of observed processes, and belongs to positive science like the observed courses of the planets, or any other observed regularities and uniformities. Science professes to have found ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... in the American and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction, first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early organized to serve national ends. The new American States, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... unit construction, clearance, staging, etc., which supersede the matter of economical adaptation of material to loading. The designing of form work is at best, therefore, a compromise between rules of thumb and scientific calculation. In wall work empirical methods are nearly always followed. In girder and floor slab work, on the other hand, design is ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... himself a man of moderate political opinions; recognized the existence of manufacturing and commercial distress, but referred it to causes of only a temporary nature, unconnected with the corn-laws; repudiated the empirical expedients proposed by the late ministry; and pledged himself to maintain the principle of protection to our agricultural interests; declaring his deliberate preference of a sliding scale of duties, to a fixed duty, upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... or "God-given," or absolute in any sense. The morality of a group at a time is the sum of the taboos and prescriptions in the folkways by which right conduct is defined. Therefore morals can never be intuitive. They are historical, institutional, and empirical. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... secondary ones, for the inevitable interdependence of the whole. In other words, they do not subordinate facts; they co-ordinate them. Your politicians and all your public men are guided by impulse—by expediency, as they prefer to call it; they are empirical; they never attempt to codify their conduct; they despise it as theorizing. What happens? This old-fashioned hand-to-mouth system of theirs invariably breaks down here and there. And then f Then they trust to some divine interposition, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... a summary of all present knowledge of the voice. First, the insight into the singer's vocal operations is considered, which the hearer obtains by attentive listening to the tones produced. This empirical knowledge, as it is generally called, indicates a state of unnecessary throat tension as the cause, or at any rate the accompaniment, of every faulty tone. Further, an outline is given of all scientific knowledge of the voice. The anatomy of the vocal organs, and the acoustic and ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... call the empirical view of the League. There are those of us in this country, and indeed all over the world, who, profoundly impressed with the horrors of war, hating war from the bottom of their hearts as an evil thing—a company which must include, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert as a biological fact that the ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... take place in so regular an order as to admit of being predicted with a precision which to the notions of those days must have appeared perfect. And though an equal degree of regularity had not been discerned in natural phaenomena generally, even the most empirical observation had ascertained so many cases of an uniformity almost complete, that inquiring minds were eagerly on the look-out for further indications pointing in the same direction; and vied with one another in the formation of theories which, though hypothetical and essentially premature, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... mysteries; and a wise humility persuades them to forego the unexampled enlightenment a mastery of the difficulties would yield. Others, who are devoutly wedded to what they consider the unreservedly empirical character of modern (that is, true) philosophy, avoid the Ethics because they are convinced, on general principles, that only a mind hopelessly lost in the dark night of medieval speculation could conceive of philosophy in such ultra-deductive fashion. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... immediately after sensitizing, I use a larger proportion of citrate of iron and ammonia. Before arriving at the conclusion that these proportions were the best to be used, I made a series of purely empirical ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... extent are the notions formed of the nature of women, mere empirical generalizations, framed, without philosophy or analysis, upon the first instances which present themselves, that the popular idea of it is different in different countries, according as the opinions and social circumstances of the country ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... arrived at a point where we can show the connection between changes in nature, not only in specific cases, but also in the relation of the specific cases to the whole and so give a bird's eye view of the interrelation of nature in an approximately scientific form by means of the facts shown by empirical science itself. To furnish this complete picture was formerly the task of the so-called philosophy of nature. It could then only do this by substituting ideal and imaginary hypotheses for the unknown real interconnection, ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... right," said Paresi, still working; then, as if to keep his mind going with words to avoid conjecture, he went on didactically, "This is the other fear reaction. Johnny's was 'flight.' Ives' is 'fight.' The empirical result is very ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... prejudice and the armed forces' failure to understand the fundamental needs of black servicemen remained. The committee's investigation, with its emphasis on off-base realities and its dependence on statistics and other empirical data, did not lend itself to more than a superficial treatment of these subtle and stubborn, if ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately put aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons, and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by abstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of the antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but insists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... friendly, full of unaccountable instincts; obstinate and capricious, given up to irrational and inexplicable superstitions; sluggish, suspicious, cautious, hostile to theory, enamoured of inconsistencies, humorously critical of all ideals, realistic, empirical, wayward, ready to listen to any magical whisper, to any faint pipings of the flutes of Pan, but grumblingly reluctant to follow the voices of the prophets and the high doctrines ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... and was too much inclined to mysticism. It may at least be said that he had an open mind, and a modest estimate of the discoveries of modern medical science. He had perceived while still a young man (he was now about forty) that all medical practice—as distinct from surgical—is inexact and empirical, that, like English common law, it is based merely on custom, and a narrow range of experience; and he had therefore argued that a wider experience and research, especially among decaying nations, might lead to the ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... often recurring question of the wisdom of a change to Colorado, from some safe standpoint and not merely from hearsay reports unsupported by evidence or reasonable inference. Viewing this subject of Climate as resting upon a scientific basis, and not alone upon empirical knowledge gained in particular regions, I have followed the plan of first stating the facts and opinions that are generally known or accepted concerning the features and essentials of climates in general, and their influence upon the healthy ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money |
