"Postulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Security Mutual of Binghamton, N. Y., does not support such a postulate. During a twelve years' experience the mortality among the abstainers was one-third that of the tabular expectation, and their occupations were ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... The postulate of the One Wise man is repeated in KRATYLUS, on the unpromising subject of Language or ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... belongs to the same class, though at first sight it seems to postulate the preexistence of a fatal event and a vision of the future corresponding exactly with a vision of the past. A traveler in South America is descending a river in a canoe; the party are just about to run close ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of predestined circumstance—predestined from the instant when that primal atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If through the years still ahead of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. The web becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... suppose, among the most difficult themes to treat convincingly in fiction. To name but one handicap, the author has in such cases to postulate at least some degree of acquaintance on the part of the reader with his celebrated subject. "Everyone is now familiar," he will observe, "with the sensational triumph achieved by the work of X——;" whereat the reader, uneasily conscious of never having heard of him, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... psychologists and casuists; but every open-minded student of Napoleon's career must at times pause in utter doubt, whether this or that act was prompted by mad ambition, or followed naturally, perhaps inevitably, from that world-embracing postulate, the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... conservation of energy, sometimes the metaphysical principle that the quantity of existence is unalterable, sometimes the logical principle that nothing can happen without a reason, sometimes the practical postulate that in the absence of any assignable difference you must call a thing the same. This law is one vast vagueness, of which I can give no clear account; but of his special vaguenesses "mental force" and "social ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... He remembered former pain more vividly than he remembered pleasure. His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. That whole of which ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Buckle would have some difficulty in maintaining his favorite postulate, that tolerance is the result of progressive intelligence. It is also the result of courtesy, as we may occasionally see in well-bred persons of limited intellect. Such, undoubtedly, is the basis ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Claim and perform your natural duties, show yourselves capable of self-abnegation, evince your determination to support the cause of justice, to be loyal to the humane principles of our Constitution—and all the rights which you may postulate, will be conceded you. This war in which you have suffered so much, made so many sacrifices, has developed your energies, shown your capabilities, revealed your noble hearts, and convinced the world that woman is the strong and vigorous helpmate, and not the weak, if beautiful, toy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in which I had espied the rough monks' habits, and pulling one out I held it for her to don. She sat there now, in that garment of coarse black cloth, the cowl flung back upon her shoulder, the fairest postulate that ever entered upon ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... postulate in all military problems is that, other things being equal, numbers are the decisive factor in war. This does not mean that absolute superiority of numbers decides a campaign necessarily in favour of the superior power. What it means is that in any particular field, if armament and ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... origins are lost in mystery. No objection can lie against this postulate about the way in which folkways began, on account of the element of inference in it. All origins are lost in mystery, and it seems vain to hope that from any origin the veil of mystery will ever be raised. We go up the stream ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... be observed that such a principle constitutes in the highest degree a metaphysical thesis which it would be on all hands illegal to assert previously as a postulate of method. Secondly, and above all, it must be observed that on this head experience is decisive, and manifests more plainly every day the failure of the theories which try to assimilate the world of consciousness ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... regarded morals, were the best and ultimate achievements of the pagan world. Now Christianity, said he, is the synthesis of whatever is separately excellent in either. It will abate as little as the haughtiest Stoicism of the ideal which it contemplates as the first postulate of true morality; the absolute holiness and purity which it demands are as much raised above the poor performances of actual man, as the absolute wisdom and impeccability of the Stoic. Yet, unlike the Stoic scheme, Christianity is aware of the necessity, and provides for it, that ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... spontaneously suggested whenever man confronts the phenomena of creation with reflective observation, and ponders the eternal round of birth and death. Accordingly, we find traces of this belief all over the world; from the ancient Hindu metaphysics whose fundamental postulate is that the necessary life of God is one constant process of radiation and resorption, "letting out and drawing in," to that modern English poetry which apostrophizes the glad and winsome ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... This is clear and explicit. There is no controversy, he truly says, that voluntary actions, that is, external actions proceeding from the will, are necessitated by the will. And as according to his postulate, the will or volition is also caused by other things of which it has no disposal, so they are also necessitated. In other words, external voluntary actions are necessarily caused by volitions, and volitions are necessarily ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... and this policy was nothing more nor less than that of re-establishing tradition. The practice of the church was the standard applied; many an unhistorical assertion was made to justify it and many a practice of comparatively recent growth was sanctioned by the postulate that "it had descended from apostolic use." "By show of antiquity they introduce novelty," was ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... importance of Israel as the depositaries of revelation, there is nothing unreasonable in a miracle which so powerfully contributed to their conquest of Canaan, and we have yet to learn that there is anything unreasonable in the belief that they were the depositaries of revelation. The fundamental postulate of the Old Testament is a supernatural revelation, and that opens the door for any miracle needful for its accomplishment. It is folly to seek to conciliate by minimising the miraculous element. However much may ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... these facts, assuming the rate of change in the forms of life to have been the same formerly, Lyell concludes that geological phenomena postulate 200,000,000 years at least," [88] "to account for the undoubted facts of geology since life began." [89] On the other hand, mathematical astronomy, [90] on theories which Mr. Laing complains of as wanting the solidity of geological calculations (yet which do not involve more, but ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... imagined, to be the roots out of which they are fed. That they depend directly on the heart's belief in the sympathy of God with individual man,[7] I am well assured: but that doctrine does not rest upon the Bible or upon Christianity; for it is a postulate, from which every Christian advocate is forced to start. If it be denied, he cannot take a step forward in his argument. He talks to men about Sin and Judgment to come, and the need of Salvation, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... as to her own, because they were or might be by the same father. But in the first place this assumes that the relationship to the father was considered rather than the relationship to the mother, and this is against all analogy. In the second place, even granting Morgan's postulate, the relation of a mother to her son is not that of a wife to the children of other wives of a polygynous husband. Poverty of language is therefore established in this case, and may be taken for granted where the obvious relationships ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... lurid light it was only natural that the ethical perspective should be still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things should be banished by the persecutions of the bullying mate. It is easy to postulate a storm-driven world when the personal horizon is dark and lowering; easy, also, to justify the past by the present. From theorizing never so resolutely upon the rights of man in the abstract to robbing a bank is a broad step, ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... hypothesis is hardly in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for the fourth gospel—a theosophic romance of the first order—it could have been written by none but a man of remarkable ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Socialism that found a voice in Ruskin and in Maurice and Kingsley and the Christian Socialists, was certainly not democratic. It kept much of what was best in the "public spirit" of contemporary English life, and it implied if it did not postulate a "governing class." Benevolent and even generous in conception, its exponents betray all too often the ties of social habituations, the limited circle of ideas of English upper and upper middle-class life, easy and cultivated, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... without some key. But having once proved the existence of such examples as the clan Coneely and the Ossory wolves, this difficulty, though still great, is very much lessened. Our method would be as follows. We first of all postulate that totem peoples did actually exist in ancient Britain, or whence such extraordinary survivals? We next examine and classify the beliefs and customs which are incidental to totemism in savage society, and having set these forth by the aid of Mr. Frazer's admirable study on the subject, we ascertain ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... medium scientists call ether, but it is so subtile that no instrument has been devised whereby it may be measured or analyzed and therefore the scientists are without much information concerning it, though forced to postulate its existence. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... inertia, rigidity, and mutual impenetrability, we can thoroughly model not only an elastic solid, and any combination of elastic solids, but so complex and recondite a phenomenon as the passage of polarized light through a magnetic field. But now, with the view of ultimately discarding the postulate of rigidity from all our materials, let us suppose some to be absolutely destitute of rigidity, and to possess merely inertia and incompressibility, and mutual impenetrability with reference to the still remaining ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... the honored ones, and had resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover, the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of the heavenly bodies to ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... by taking possession of an object has brought it within the sphere of his will. He has extended his personality into or over that object. As Hegel would have said, possession is the objective realization of free will. And by Kant's postulate, the will of any individual thus manifested is entitled to absolute respect from every other individual, and can only be overcome or set aside by the universal will, that is, by the state, acting ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... cruelty, she cannot care For one to whom she's always kind! He says he's nought, but, oh, despair, If he's not Jove to her fond mind! He's jealous if she pets a dove, She must be his with all her soul; Yet 'tis a postulate in love That part is greater than the whole; And all his apprehension's stress, When he's with her, regards her hair, Her hand, a ribbon of her dress, As if his life were only there; Because she's constant, he will change, ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... of the world is an almost undiscussed postulate of most metaphysics. "Reality is not merely one and self-consistent, but is a system of reciprocally determinate parts"[19]—such a statement would pass almost unnoticed as a mere truism. Yet I believe that it embodies a failure to effect thoroughly the "Copernican revolution," and that the apparent ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... imagine, with vivacity enough to fear, that in this life, at all events, if not in another—there may be for you a Visitation of God, and a questioning—What hast thou done? The picture, if it is a good one, should have a deeper interest, surely on this postulate? Thrilling enough, as a mere imagination of what is never to be—now, as a conjecture of what is to be, held the best that in eighteen centuries of Christianity has for men's eyes been made;—Think of ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... sentence and prove his first postulate, Mr. King is obliged not only to dispose of Washington, but to introduce Columbus, who never was imagined in the wildest fantasy to be an American, and to omit Franklin. The omission of itself is fatal to Mr. King's case. Franklin has certainly a "preeminent ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... drilled—in her tradition, in her upbringing—to keep her mouth shut. But there were times, she said, when she was so near yielding to the temptation of speaking that afterwards she shuddered to think of those times. You must postulate that what she desired above all things was to keep a shut mouth to the world; to Edward and to the women that he loved. If she spoke she would ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... considerations on the scale of being, of which, yet, I am obliged to renew the mention, whenever a new argument is made to rest upon it; and I must, therefore, again remark, that consequences cannot have greater certainty than the postulate from which they are drawn, and that no system can be more hypothetical than this, and, perhaps, no ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... postulate which begins to assert itself in the book-market. Poor and bad copies are eschewed by many or most of those who are willing to pay handsomely for fine specimens; and the worst type of indifferent exemplars is the sophisticated volume, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... reviewed, complications analyzed into principles, and knowledge disentangled from opinion. It is not always possible, without a close inspection, to separate the genuine shoots of consequential reasoning, which grow out of some radical postulate, from the branches which art has ingrafted on it. The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... numbers. The table of the mediumistic seances contains much mathematics (in its physical assemblage), but in order to make it "tap" there must be somebody to move it: in fact, a "medium." In my view, as soon as the animal subject has been able to understand "numbers"—and this postulate of the new zoopsychology, I repeat, I believe to be indispensable to the whole edifice—the animal finds itself sufficiently in harmony with the master to become capable (in principle) of all ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... we may venture on a practical suggestion, Assuming that your postulate's indubitably true, And all should be examined—there must yet remain the question, Custodes quis ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... postulate the "perfectly natural" voice, i.e., one that is unconscious of its own art, either presuppose this condition of innate perfection or assume that the simple wish to speak—and its exercise—will ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... elevated, can easily be ascertained. Peter Purry, a native of Switzerland, who settled in Charleston in the eighteenth century, in a memorial to the Duke of Newcastle, then Secretary of State, sets out with this postulate, that "there is a certain latitude on our globe, so happily tempered between the extremes of heat and cold, as to be more particularly adapted than any other for certain rich productions of the earth; ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... We postulate that pain is one of the phenomena which result from a stimulation to motor action. When a barefoot boy steps on a sharp stone it is important that the injuring contact be released as quickly as possible; and therefore physical injury pain results and impels the required action. Anemia of ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... phrase, it must be admitted, involves a certain assumption, which may be regarded as the fundamental postulate of the organic view of society. It implies that such a fulfilment or full development of personality is practically possible not for one man only but for all members of a community. There must be ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... England would be just: but she must first be obeyed. England might forgive the debt, but must insist upon acknowledgment that the debt was due, and upon the right to collect it at pleasure. As for the plea that taxation should postulate representation, it would not bear examination. It might be true that Parliament was a theoretically representative body; but, in fact, it was a gathering of the men in England best qualified to govern, who were rather selected than elected. Many of the commons ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... many, but the changes taking place within our own souls are deeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it. However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not only a law-giver, but in himself ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... endeavoured to shell it. They seized a second position at Kamfers Dam, and placed a second gun there. We had good people in Kimberley who asserted that the gentle Boer knew not how to use a gun; that he considered it so much lumber, an incumbrance. These were apart from the school given to postulate that the farmers had no guns to use. No need to say that both theories were dispelled, by sight as well as by hearing. Much attention was devoted to Otto's Kopje—our most exposed position—and ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... It was because they turned nature into an unmanageable jungle, in which trees, bushes, and parasites of a thousand kinds wildly interlaced. There was nothing for it, if science was to proceed, but to clear the ground and replant with spruce in rows: to postulate a single uniform nature, of which there should be a single science. Now neither probatology nor cynology could hope to be [18] universal—the world is not all sheep nor all dog: it would have to be hylology; for the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... reconciling an isolated expression in S. Mark's Gospel with another in S. Matthew's: just as if on that depended the genuineness or spuriousness of the entire context: as if, in short, the major premiss in the discussion were some such postulate as the following:—"Whatever in one Gospel cannot be proved to be entirely consistent with something in another Gospel, is not to be regarded as genuine." Did then the learned Archbishop of Caesarea really suppose ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... postulate is, that God's work could not admit of any substantial change, which is above the reach of all infernal powers; but "Herein the divell plays the double sophister; the sorcerer with sorcerers. Hee both deludes the witch's conceit and the beholder's ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in the course of social evolution ground-rent and undertaker's profit must become obsolete and must be given up—this I perceived; but with respect to the interest of capital I adhered to the classical-orthodox view that this was a postulate of progress which would survive all the phases ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Banneker's head on a salver to be rid of these persecuting autocrats. They withdrew, leaving behind an atmosphere of threat and disaster, dark, inglorious clouds of which Haring trailed behind him when he entered the office of the owner with his countenance of woe. His postulate was that Mr. Marrineal should go to his marplot editor and duly to him lay down the law; no more offending of the valuable department-store advertisers. No; nor of any others. Or he, Haring (greatly daring), ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... you," cried Brett "I thought I recognised the source of your new-born philosophy in the first postulate. The second convinces me. You have been reading 'The ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... death; they issue out of the invisible within us; they are feelings actualized, thoughts embodied. The embodiment is perishable, the source of it imperishable. It is not a recondite, super-subtle, metaphysical or psychological postulate, it is a palpable, and may be and ought to be a familiar fact, that each one of us is ruled by the ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... pervading taint or corruption of the air. This is the view of Dr. Edward Westermarck[799] and apparently of Professor Eugen Mogk.[800] It may be called the purificatory theory. Obviously the two theories postulate two very different conceptions of the fire which plays the principal part in the rites. On the one view, the fire, like sunshine in our latitude, is a genial creative power which fosters the growth of plants and the development of all that makes for health ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... consider the remedy by which character, once it is perverted or destroyed, can be restored and transformed. Christian Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the question, By what power can a man achieve the right and do the good? It is not enough to postulate the inherent capacity of man. Experience of human nature shows that there are hostile elements which too often frustrate his natural development. Hence the practical problem which Christian Ethics has to face is, How can the spiritual ideal be made a reality? It ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... The world springs from Brahman by way of modification (pari/n/ama; Sutra 26).—Ramanuja views this adhikara/n/a as specially directed against the Se/s/vara-sa@nkhyas who indeed admit the existence of a highest Lord, but postulate in addition an independent pradhana on which the Lord acts as an ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... only writer we have who gives us anything of himself. Quite unconsciously, every sentence he writes is saturated with his own identity; he is, then, a man of courage, and—the postulate assumed that we are not speaking of fools—courage in such case springs only from two sources, carelessness of opinion and possession of power. Now no one, of course, can be entirely indifferent to the audience he strives ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of communion with God, like that which in the seventy-third Psalm marks the very high-water mark of Old Testament faith in regard to a future life, where the Psalmist finds himself so completely blessed and well in present fellowship with God, that he must needs postulate its eternal continuance, and just because he has made God the portion of his heart, and is holding fellowship with Him, is sure that nothing can intervene to break that sweet communion. They did not get it from any clear definite revelation, such as we have in the resurrection of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... upon a certain subordination of individual actions to social requirements.... From the oldest and rudest idea of allegiance, down to the most advanced political theory of our own day, there is on this point complete unanimity." He speaks of this subordination as a postulate "which is, indeed, of self-evident validity," as ranking "next in certainty to the postulates of exact science." As the result of his search for "a generalization which may habitually guide us when seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous," he concludes: ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... boys the minister will appeal frankly to manly and heroic qualities. He will advance no dark premise of their natural estrangement from God, but will postulate for all a sonship which is at once a divine challenge to the best that is in them and the guaranty that the best is the normal and the God-intended life. They must qualify for a great campaign under the greatest soul that ever lived. They ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... church-yards of London, and even more violently to the river Thames. As a tidal river, even: beyond the metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters. And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the Times starts in all its arguments, namely, this, that supposing the Thames to be even a vast sewer, in short, the cloaca maxima of London, there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach applying to our mighty English capital. On the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... more for unavoidable waste—death in infancy or childhood, sterility, obvious unfitness for reproduction, etc., i.e., three in all. If one woman has less than her three children, then another must have more than three, or the group number will decrease. Group survival is the fundamental postulate in a problem of ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... narrative of the fall is seen in view of the condition of man after he had sinned with his condition when he left the hand of the Creator. Compare Gen. 1:26 with 6:5, and Psa. 14. If the fall of man were not narrated in Genesis we should have to postulate some such event to account for the present condition in which we find man. In no part of the Scripture, save in the creation account as found in the first two chapters of Genesis, does man appear perfect and upright. His attitude is that of ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... actually present. This may indeed be produced by other causes, but I am satisfied with having here shown one cause through which I could explain it, just as if I had explained it through the true cause. I do not think, however, that I am far from the truth, since no postulate which I have assumed contains anything which is not confirmed by an experience that we cannot mistrust, after we have proved the existence of the human ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... and beside the blessed Manes. A word here regarding the priority of monotheism or of polytheism. The tradition is in favor of the latter, while on a priori grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the Hindus only another illustration of one universal ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... tendency, no apes found in nature to-day with a structure so strikingly similar to that of man, and no fossil records telling of the divergence of forms from primitive groups in past time, we should be forced to postulate the evolution of man in order to explain his actual features. The vestigial structures must be interpreted as we interpret the buttons on the back of a man's coat. They are useless reminiscences of an age in which they were useful. When their witness to the past is supported by so ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... logic. process of reasoning, train of reasoning, chain of reasoning; deduction, induction, abduction; synthesis, analysis. argument; case, plaidoyer^, opening; lemma, proposition, terms, premises, postulate, data, starting point, principle; inference &c (judgment) 480. prosyllogism^, syllogism; enthymeme^, sorites^, dilemma, perilepsis^, a priori reasoning, reductio ad absurdum, horns of a dilemma, argumentum ad hominem [Lat.], comprehensive argument; empirema^, epagoge^. [person who reasons] reasoner, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... adopted the weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts when every one else produces a cigar—he puffed the spasmodic, defensive cigarette. He accepted as to what he had done the postulate of the obscurely tortuous, abounding so in that sense that his critics were themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase is, little out of him—he rose in his good humour so much higher than the "rise" they ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... He writes:[1] "The postulate with which metaphysical reasoning sets out is that we are primarily conscious only of our sensations—that we certainly know we have these, and that if there be anything beyond these serving as cause for them, it can be known ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... of social evolution is admirably expressed in the fine phrase of Leibnitz, "The present is the child of the past, but it is the parent of the future."[60] The great seventeenth-century philosopher was not the first to postulate and apply to society that doctrine of flux, of continuity and unity, which we call evolution. In all ages of which record has been preserved to us, it has been sporadically, and more or less vaguely, expressed. Even savages seem to have dimly perceived it. The saying of the Bechuana chief, recorded ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... explicitly, the principles of Christian morality governing the subject, leaving the application of them in individual cases to the individual church or church-member. This was the course exemplified with admirable wisdom and fidelity in the Presbyterian "deliverance" of 1818. (6) To meet the postulate, laid down with so much assurance, as if an axiom, that "slave-holding is always and everywhere a sin, to be immediately repented of and forsaken," with a flat and square contradiction, as being irreconcilable with facts and with the judgment of the Christian Scriptures; ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... as a postulate of the Christian's belief that Hinduism is of the devil; and that, coming from below, it must be shunned as a study and denounced root and branch as a thing purely satanic. This theory has entirely given way to a more rational belief. The question ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... the mental plane is again totally different, for in this case we can no longer speak of separate senses such as sight and hearing, but rather have to postulate one general sense which responds so fully to the vibrations reaching it that when any object comes within its cognition it at once comprehends it fully, and as it were sees it, hears it, feels it, and knows all there is to know about it by the one instantaneous operation. ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... received by all the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific assurance of self in the past is uttered in no materialistic sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven matter incomprehensible; and it confesses the mystery of mind insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of sensation. Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by millions of years, have undoubtedly been built up all the emotions and faculties of man. Here Science, in accord with Buddhism, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... should have spread the rails equally. That's the probable thing. But instead it did the improbable thing; it spread one. I hold the improbable thing always in question. Human knowledge is built up on that postulate. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... as an alien being distinguished from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the present, and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... ill humour, made upon God's noblest work, man; and don't hope, on the other hand, as many great saints and sages have done, by prayer and fasting, or by study and meditation, to work yourself up to a god, and jump bodily out of your human skin. Assume as the first postulate, and lay it down as the last proposition of your "philosophy of life," that a man is neither a brute, nor a god nor an angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN. Furthermore, as man is not only a very comprehensive and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... see any application in this homily," said the Easy Chair, "or only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that Christmas is a beneficent and consolatory ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one, and certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. 'I have never doubted,' a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, one and whole and complete.[6] Advance in thinking, in the hegelian universe, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... different amounts of heat by the same amount of work, it would follow that the oxidation of the same amount of material would sometimes yield a less, sometimes a greater, quantity of heat. 'Hence,' says Mayer, 'that a fixed relation subsists between heat and work, is a postulate of the physiological theory ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... will postulate as the cause of X Y Z a transcendent X Y Z—that is, a cause lying external to the sphere; and by referring the former to the latter, he will obtain for X Y X, not certainly a real externality, which is the thing wanted, but a quasi-externality, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Post-office posxta oficejo. Poster (placard) afisxo, kartego. Poste-restante posxtrestante. Posterior posta, malantaux. Posterity idaro, posteularo. Postillion kondukisto. Postscript postskribajxo. Postulate petado. Posture tenigxo. Pot poto. Potash potaso. Potato terpomo. Potency potenco. Potent potenca. Potential potencebla, poviga. Potter potisto. Pottery (art) potfarado. Pottery, a potfarejo. Pouch saketo. Poultice kataplasmo. Poultry kortbirdaro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... another Nemesis—the postulate that Aryans and Semites, or rather their ancestors, must have passed through the savage state. Dr. Tylor writes:—'So far as history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation secondary. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... speculators on this question we know to have been seriously perplexed by this assertion of Mr Cobden's; and others, we have heard, not generally disposed to view that gentleman's doctrines with favour, who insist upon it, that, in mere candour, we must grant this particular postulate. "Really," say they, "that cannot be refused him; the law was for the purpose he assigns; its final cause was, as he tells us, to keep up artificially the price of our domestic corn-markets. So far he is right. But his error commences ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... earth ought not to be peaceful and pure, and the acknowledgment of the Divine protection, as universal as its reality? That in a mysterious way the presence of Deity is vouchsafed where it is sought, and withdrawn where it is forgotten, must of course be granted as the first postulate in the enquiry: but the point for our decision is just this, whether it ought always to be sought in one place only, and ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... sanguinary satire on royalty as an institution "The King" is most interesting—that is, royalty logically and speculatively considered, without reference to its historical basis and development. To me the postulate that it had its origin in a kind of conspiracy (for mutual benefit) of the priest and the king seems shallow and unphilosophical. Bjoernson's fanatical partisanship has evidently carried him a little too far. For surely he would ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... we do not know does not exist qua us, and therefore it does not exist. When I say "we," I mean mankind generally, for things may exist qua one man and not qua another. And when I say "nothing" I postulate something of which we have ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... "map," "line," and "place." Consequently, granted the underlying premise, it is a perfectly logical and eminently scientific process from the forms "relapse" (pronounced, of course, "relaps") and "species" to postulate a corresponding singular, and speak of "a relap" and "a specie," as a negro of my acquaintance regularly does. "Scrope" and "lept," as preterites of "scrape" and "leap," are correctly formed on the analogy of "broke" and "crept," but are not ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... of an infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous reincarnations that discarnate existence and reincarnation were proven to ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... irrespective of party. The outcome was a resolution in the House of Commons, proposed by Mr. John Redmond, and seconded by Mr. Lecky. The rejoinder of the Government to the demands made was to the effect that the postulate of the Commissioners that Ireland and Great Britain must, for the purposes of the inquiry, be considered as separate ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... indicators points in the same direction. The City was not—could not have been—self-supporting. There is no source of organic material on the planet great enough to support such a city; therefore, foodstuffs must have been imported. On the other hand, it is necessary to postulate some reason for establishing a city on an otherwise barren planet and populating it with an estimated six hundred ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... taken away without loss or harm, all other things continuing the same. Should you suppose various things in the system changed at once, you can neither judge of the possibility nor the consequences of the changes, having no degree of experience to direct you." Now assuredly this postulate makes the whole question as easy a one as ever metaphysician or naturalist had to solve. For it is no longer—Why did a powerful and benevolent Being create a world in which there is evil—but only—The ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... fail on reflection to perceive, they offer no shadow of argument in support of that 'greatest happiness principle' on which their whole system rests. Commencing with the undeniable postulate that happiness is the sole object of existence, and perceiving that individual happiness alone would be a very misleading object, they proceed to take quietly for granted that the only happiness at which life ought to aim ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... oppose its growth. The voice of James Otis the younger, a ripe scholar of six-and-thirty, and then the Advocate General of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, first denounced the scheme and declared the great political postulate which became the basis of all subsequent resistance to kingly domination, that "TAXATION, WITHOUT REPRESENTATION, IS TYRANNY." Like the deep and startling tones of an alarm-bell, echoing from hill to hill, his bold eloquence aroused the hearts ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... gentlemen all run into the same fallacy. We fancy ourselves the fixed and necessary element in society, to which all others are to accommodate themselves. "Given the rights of the few rich, to find the condition of the many poor." It seems to me that other postulate is quite as fair: "Given the rights of the many poor, to find the condition of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... made good use of the direct primary it does not follow that it will benefit the Filipino. It always seems curious to watch the satisfaction of some reform magazines when China or Turkey or Persia imitates the constitutional forms of Western democracies. Such enthusiasts postulate a uniformity of human ability which every ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann |
