"Incommensurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time, pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no great importance) that the form of Gulliver may have been to some extent determined by Robinson Crusoe and Defoe's other novels of travel. And there is a subtler ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... applicable in every formula for the estimation of conduct. If you admit your Moral Sense, you profess to settle values by some standard which has no definite relation to the standard which in fact governs the normal transactions. But any such double standard, in which the two measures are absolutely incommensurable, leads straight to chaos. Or, if again you appeal to reason in the abstract, you are attempting to settle an account by pure arithmetic without reference to the units upon which your operation is performed. Two ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... those beings, visible or invisible, intelligent or unintelligent, animate or inanimate, quick or dead, of which is composed the only real name of this Being of beings, the Infinite. But the idea of the incommensurable greatness, the sovereign fatality, the inflexible and absolute necessity of all the acts of this Being, whom you call God and we term Law, excludes from our thoughts all precise intelligibility, exact denomination, reasonable imagining, personal manifestation, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... substance having the attributes of thought and will. The fundamental argument for its existence was the immediate appeal to self-consciousness; and it was further defined as indestructible on the ground of its being utterly discontinuous and incommensurable with its material environment. This theory survives at the present day in the conception of pure activity, but on the whole the attributes of the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... here I should suppose a national industrial system like yours would find its main difficulty. How, I ask once more, can you adjust satisfactorily the comparative wages or remuneration of the multitude of avocations, so unlike and so incommensurable, which are necessary for the service of society? In our day the market rate determined the price of labor of all sorts, as well as of goods. The employer paid as little as he could, and the worker got as much. It was not a pretty system ethically, I admit; but it did, at least, furnish us a rough ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy |
