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More "A priori" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appear to be good evidence of the great antiquity of the legends recorded by Hesiod. In the first place, arguing merely a priori, it is extremely improbable that in the brief interval between the date of the comparatively pure and noble mythology of the Iliad and the much ruder Theogony of Hesiod men INVENTED stories like the mutilation of Uranus, and the swallowing of his offspring by Cronus. The ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... that we have quoted is, in fact, so preposterous, so utterly incompatible with anything but absolute ignorance of some of the best established facts, that we should have passed it over in silence had it not appeared to afford some clue to M. Flourens' unhesitating, 'a priori', repudiation of all forms of the doctrine of progressive modification of living beings. He whose mind remains uninfluenced by an acquaintance with the phenomena of development, must indeed lack one of the chief ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... modern writer says, "We should not now, h priori, expect that the Incarnate Logos would be born without a human father," we may reply that we are hardly in a position to expect anything a priori in the matter; but when once we have learnt that this Incarnate Logos was to be the Second Head of the human race—the sinless Son of Man—and that in Him humanity was to make a fresh start, it is indeed difficult to see how this could be without ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... theory, is the equal, politically and socially, of the white man; in practice, he is excluded from the vote, from the professions, from the amenities of social intercourse, and even, as we have recently learnt, from the most elementary forms of justice. The general and a priori doctrine of equality is shattering itself against the actual facts; and the old Greek conception, "the slave by nature", may be detected behind the mask of the Christian ideal. And while thus, even in spite of itself, the modern ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... that Henry James has still no rival, nor anything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of European Society. None, even among our most cynical and disillusioned younger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "a priori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in passionate colourless curiosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along the common road of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Socratic sense, as the name of that intellectual process whereby the inadequacy of popular conceptions is exposed. Throughout its history, therefore, "dialectic" has been connected with that which is remote from, or alien to, unsystematic thought, with the a priori, or transcendental, rather than with the facts of common experience ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... who are given to the making of sonnets, Norman Douglas wrote: "I have a sneaking fondness for some of the worst of these bards.... And it is by no means a despicable class of folks who perpetrate such stuff; the third rate sonneteer, a priori, is a gentleman, and this is more than can be said of some of our crude fiction writers who have never yielded themselves to the chastening discipline of verse composition, nor warmed their hearts, for a single instant, at the altar of ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... of patronising him, as a Representative Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. That hapless philosophaster's a priori method, even his very verbiage, is dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through sense and nonsense. But as for Plato-when I find them using Plato's weapons, I shall believe in their understanding ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... Lieutenant Carlo di Ferara over into a ditch. The matter was entirely accidental, and I regretted it very much. I, of course, apologized. But what did the lieutenant do but take it into his head that I, being an assaulter of superior officers, was, by a priori reasoning, this Angelo Fresi in disguise. Accordingly'—he waved his hand around the room—'you ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... opened when he became a student of biology, under Huxley, and the liquid of his suppressed thought began to bubble. He prefaced his romances by a sketch in the old Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Man of the Year Million, an a priori study that made one thankful for one's prematurity. After that physiological piece of logic, however, he tried another essay in evolution, published in 1895 in book form under the title of The Time Machine—the first of ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... reputation, then official science will give more time and study to the topic than it is at present inclined to bestow. Mr. Wallace has asserted that, 'whenever the scientific men of any age have denied, on a priori grounds, the facts of investigation, they have always been wrong'. {12} He adds that Galileo, Harvey, Jenner, Franklin, Young, and Arago, when he 'wanted even to discuss the subject of the electric telegraph,' were 'vehemently opposed by their scientific contemporaries,' ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... that a priori judging and uncandid class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the food there is in the market. "On all discoveries there are persons who, without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by intuition, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... understanding, which Sir Wm. Hamilton has called "the faculty of relations and comparisons," is distinguished by many philosophers from reason in that "reason is the faculty of the higher cognitions or a priori truth." ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... on this curious fact would probably take the form of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, beginning with 'the tendency of the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,' and ending—who can tell where? But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any skill in the scientia scientiarum, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... problems of living matter, chemists and physiologists are employing the most precise standards, units, and measures of the physical sciences. Blood chemistry of our time is a marvel, undreamed of a generation ago. Also, these achievements are a perfect example of the accomplished fact contradicting a priori prediction and criticism. For it was one of the accepted dogmas of the nineteenth century that the phenomena of the living could never be subjected to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... up for no judge, Mr. Sutherland, I assure you; and perhaps I shall do my opinions more justice by remaining silent, seeing I am conscious of utter inability to answer the a priori arguments which you in particular have brought against them. All I would venture to say is, that an a priori argument may owe its force to a mistaken hypothesis with regard to the matter in question; and that the true Baconian method, which is the glory of your English ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... in real friendship together. The whole sum of their pleasure is much increased by mutual sympathy. This happy moral truth, upon which so many of our virtues depend, should be impressed upon the mind; it should be clearly demonstrated to the reason; it should not be repeated as an a priori, sentimental assertion. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... indirectly, to join the Triple Entente in the event of a Franco-German war. By their words and by their acts they have always shown such a firm attitude that any supposition that they could have departed from the strictest neutrality is eliminated a priori. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... it would have mattered little, A PRIORI, whether the relic was a femur or a tibia, a cow or man. In this case, he liked to think it was the thigh-bone of a saint. He possessed an unusually strong dose of that Latin PIETAS, that reverence which consists in leaving things as they ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 3.05 A priori knowledge that a thought was true would be possible only it its truth were recognizable from the thought itself (without anything ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... realizing power; the speculative reason, 'vis theoretica et scientifica', or the power, by which we produce, or aim to produce, unity, necessity, and a universality in all our knowledge by means of principles, [2]'a priori'; the will or practical reason; the faculty of choice, ('Willkuehr'), and (distinct both from the moral will, and the choice), the sensation of volition which I have found reason to include under the head of single ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 4 we find that the distribution of these stars on the sky is tolerably uniform, as might have been predicted. All these stars have a large proper motion, this being in the mean 3".42 per year. This was a priori to be expected from their great proximity. The radial velocity is, numerically, greater than could have been supposed. This fact is probably associated with the generally ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... theoretical, without any accurate distribution of political powers. In living, energetic communities, where the blood of the body politic circulates swiftly, there is an inevitable tendency of the different organs to sympathize and commingle more closely than a priori philosophy would allow. It is usually more desirable than practicable to keep the executive, legislative, and judicial departments entirely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thou pair; a priori this is a likely way of forming a dual. As to the reasons a posteriori they are not to be drawn wholly from the Kowrarega tongue itself. Here the word for two is not pel but quassur. But let us look further. The root p-l, or a modification of it, two in the following dialects; ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... the strong 'a priori' probability that flows in from 1 and 3, on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect to make the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... stile and manner of it, with those my father constantly had heard preached in his parish-church, was the ground of his conjecture,—proving it as strongly, as an argument a priori could prove such a thing to a philosophic mind, That it was Yorick's and no one's else:—It was proved to be so, a posteriori, the day after, when Yorick sent a servant to my uncle Toby's house ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... sharply into an animal and a rational part. WE cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. WE have merely to collect things together without any special a priori theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience—judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides—decide that ON THE WHOLE one type of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... collect the facts which abound in history and ethnology respecting the general teaching of myths, but we must also observe introspectively, and by pursuing the experimental method, the primitive and fundamental psychical facts, so as to discover the a priori conditions of the myth itself. We must ascertain, from a careful psychological examination, the absolutely primitive origin of all mythical representations, and how these are in their turn the actual historical result of the same ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... and of their owners. Such a road towards truth is highly unromantic. The student of particular phenomena is unable to pose as the champion of the race. But the method has the modest advantage of resting not on a priori definitions, but on inductions from actual experience; hence of being ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... demonstrations, suggested to me that all things which come within human knowledge must follow each other in a similar chain." (Descartes, "Discours de la Methode," I. 142).—In the seventeenth century In the 17th century constructions a priori were based on ideas, in the 18th century on sensations, but always following the same mathematical method fully displayed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the gulf—to create a common standing-ground for both teacher and parent—and on that basis to carry on an educational campaign that it is hoped will result in the many desirable conditions which, a priori, might be expected from such a union. At present the movement is confined practically to the rural schools. It consists in the organization of a county Teachers and Patrons' Association, with a membership of teachers and school patrons, ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... pair; a priori this is a likely way of forming a dual. As to the reasons a posteriori they are not to be drawn wholly from the Kowrarega tongue itself. Here the word for two is not pel but quassur. But let us look further. The ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... village is the best way to win the hearts of the younger generation; for the parents a little knowledge of American conditions is desirable, to prove that you are a man of the world and worthy, a priori, of some respect. But if there exists a man-cook, he is generally an importation and should be periodically and liberally bribed, without knowledge of the family, from the earliest moment. Wonderful, what a ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... reminding one of the "Tristrapaedia." Whimsicality of manner distinctly reminiscent of Sterne is found in his mock-scientific catalogues or lists of things, as in Chapter III, "Deduktionen, Dissertationen, Argumentationen a priori und a posteriori," and so on; plainly adapted from Sterne's idiosyncrasy of form is the advertisement which in large red letters occupies the middle of a page in the twenty-first chapter of the second volume, which reads as follows: ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... give an elaborate theory of the complex causes which produce revolutions of the moral effects of various forms of government and education, of the rise of the criminal classes and their connection with pauperism, and, in a word, to create history by the deductive method and to proceed from a priori psychological principles to discover the governing laws of the apparent chaos of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... (9th ed.) of the "Eclipse." he implies, without absolutely asserting, that I hold the Bible to be an impertinence. He repeats this in p. 85 of the "Defence." Such is his mode. I wrote: "Without a priori belief, the Bible is an impertinence," but I say, man has this a priori belief, on which account the Bible is not an impertinence. My last sentence in the very passage before us, expressly asserts the value of (good) external teaching. This ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... any value for practice can be arrived at by direct experience. All true political science is, in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced from the tendencies of things, tendencies known either through our general experience of human nature, or as the result of an analysis of the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.—MILL, Inaugural ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... theology, to confess with such charming simplicity the whole history of his mental revolutions, and expose himself to the charge of unimaginable caprice,—of theological coquetry? I protest to you that, a priori, I should have thought it impossible that any man could have made so many and such violent turns in so short a time without a dislocation of all the joints of his soul.—without incurring the danger of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... find that the distribution of these stars on the sky is tolerably uniform, as might have been predicted. All these stars have a large proper motion, this being in the mean 3".42 per year. This was a priori to be expected from their great proximity. The radial velocity is, numerically, greater than could have been supposed. This fact is probably associated with the generally ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... reasoning which will not do in natural history, which will not do in natural religion, which cannot therefore be applied with safety to revelation. It may have same foundation in certain speculative a priori ideas of the divine attributes, but it has none in experience or in analogy. The general character of the works of nature is, on the one hand, goodness both in design and effect; and, on the other hand, a liability to difficulty and to objections, if such objections be allowed, by ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... it. Who can resist an idea which is presented to him in a general form in every moment of his life and of which he finds no instance to the contrary? The greater part of what is sometimes regarded as the a priori intuition of space is really the conception of the various geometrical figures of which the properties have been revealed by mathematical analysis. And the certainty of these properties is immeasurably increased to us by our finding that they hold ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... a compact made by men, it followed that the partners could at any time remake it, their sovereignty being inalienable. And this the French socialists, misled by a priori notions, attempted to do, on the theory of the Contrat-Social, as if they had a tabula rasa, without regarding the existing constituents of society, or traditions, or ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... become almost a social position? To be fed, to be paid, admired, exhibited in public, run after, and all the rest of it—all this is enough to make the most impartial looker-on skeptical. But is it enough to enable us to produce an a priori negation? Certainly not; but it is sufficient to justify legitimate doubt. And when we come to moral phenomena, where we have to put faith in the subject, the difficulty becomes still greater. Supposing suggestion and hallucination to be granted, can they be demonstrated? ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... experience is concerned, it is empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything which can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To regard known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... may sometimes have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are always liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and while prose is ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... River commission has been constituted, as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... only another way of stating the simplest axioms from which they started. For the propositions of which necessary truth is composed are so linked together that, given one, the rest can always follow. But necessary truth, which is arrived at 'a priori,' that is, by the mind's own working, is quite as real as contingent truth, which is arrived at 'a posteriori,' or by the teachings of experience, in other words, through our own senses or ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... strong 'a priori' probability that flows in from 1 and 3, on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... almost as consummate and artistic a rascal as his great-great-great-grandson and namesake, Philip II. of Spain. His duplicity was so unfathomable and his policy so obscure, that it would be hardly safe to affirm a priori that he might not, for reasons best known to himself, have played a double game with his friend the Duke of Bedford. On this hypothesis, he would of course keep Jeanne in close custody so long as there was any reason for keeping his treachery secret. But in 1436, after the death of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... altogether, or the action will halt. It must, in fact, become automatic before we are safe with it. While we are fumbling for the grounds of our conviction, our conviction is prone to fall, as Peter for lack of faith sinking into the waves of Galilee; so that the very power to prove at all is an a priori argument against the truth—or at any rate the practical importance to the vast majority of mankind—of all that is supported by demonstration. For the power to prove implies a sense of the need of proof, and things which the majority of mankind find practically important are in ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... the streets, crying, King James the Third! The true king! No Usurper. In the evening they pulled a good part of the Quakers' and Anabaptists' meeting-houses down. The heads of houses have represented that it was begun by the Whiggs." Probably the heads of houses reasoned on a priori principles when they arrived at ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... that even Sanscrit imported its alphabet from a foreign tongue. The number of primitive alphabets is so few, the diversity of languages so great, that nearly all tongues must have adopted foreign alphabets. I cannot therefore understand the almost a priori objections raised by the learned.... Do you attend to Indian affairs? The disbanding of our Native Indian armies, the prospect of a sure surplus in the Indian treasury, with the necessity of a conciliatory policy to all the Indian princes ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... proved to be idle words; yet the old-fashioned minds opposed to us shut their eyes and went on reasoning 'a priori, and proving that the evils which they saw did not arise must arise should the experiment of mixed classes, which was then succeeding, ever ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... &c., 1865-1870; Final Report, &c., 1878-1880; The Bashforth Chronograph, Cambridge, 1890). According to these experiments, the resistance of the air can be represented by no simple algebraical law over a large range of velocity. Abandoning therefore all a priori theoretical assumption, Bashforth set to work to measure experimentally the velocity of shot and the resistance of the air by means of equidistant electric screens furnished with vertical threads or wire, and by a chronograph which measured ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Papers," which did not wholly cease until 1866, and were the most incisive and aggressive anti-slavery literature of that period. Soon afterwards he wrote "The Vision of Sir Launfal," which has become the most widely known of all his poems, and which contains passages of the purest a priori verse. Goethe, who exercised so powerful an influence on Emerson, does not appear to have interested Lowell ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... existing there. It must, however, be admitted that the comparison between the wild and domesticated animal has been made but in few cases with sufficient exactness. Before entering on details, it will be well to show that there is no a priori difficulty in the belief that several canine species have been domesticated; for there is much difficulty in this respect with some other domestic quadrupeds and birds. Members of the dog family inhabit nearly the whole world; and several species ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... estimate of the child's character could not conceive that she had ever possessed a doll. But the master, like many other professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori than a priori reasoning. Mliss had a doll, but then it was emphatically Mliss's doll—a smaller copy of herself. Its unhappy existence had been a secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morpher. It had been the old-time ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience of contemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representative assemblies of the world are not really representative at all. I will go farther and say that were ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the condemnations are brought forward by investigators who judge a priori, without acquaintance with the facts, upon uncertain theoretical grounds and with ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... detection and analysis. An adequate realization of their nature will be a large factor in preventing cynical apprehensions from becoming actual. This chapter is an attempt at a preliminary listing, inadequate, of course, as any preliminary examination must be. While an a priori argument based on a fatalistic formula as to how a "capitalistic nation" must conduct itself does not appeal to me, there are nevertheless concrete facts which are suggested by that formula. Part of our comparatively better course in China in the past is due to the fact that we have not ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... obviously need it in order to perform the same ceremony for others—as a bishop needs consecration for the same reason. As regards the pontifices, Dionysius (ii. 73. 3) clearly thought it was needed for them, and we might a priori assume that one who might become a pontifex maximus would need it; but Wissowa discounts Dionysius' opinion, and I am unwilling to differ from him on a point of the ius divinum, of which he is our best exponent. If he is right, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... together. The whole sum of their pleasure is much increased by mutual sympathy. This happy moral truth, upon which so many of our virtues depend, should be impressed upon the mind; it should be clearly demonstrated to the reason; it should not be repeated as an a priori, sentimental assertion. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... says, "We should not now, h priori, expect that the Incarnate Logos would be born without a human father," we may reply that we are hardly in a position to expect anything a priori in the matter; but when once we have learnt that this Incarnate Logos was to be the Second Head of the human race—the sinless Son of Man—and that in Him humanity was to make a fresh start, it is indeed difficult to see how this could ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... would not have put this knowledge in permanent written form; (3) wandering scholars would have known many and strange things about the peoples they met, but they too were not, as a class, writers; (4) there is every reason a priori for believing that the [.g]ob[a]r numerals would have been known to merchants, and probably to some of the wandering scholars, long before the Arabs conquered northern Africa; (5) the wonder is not that the Hindu-Arabic numerals were known about ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
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