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More "Generalization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and was delighted to hear in answer, "The sapsucker." I was delighted because I hoped to see for myself whether the bird merited the offensive name bestowed upon him, or was the victim of hasty generalization from careless observation or insufficient data, like others of his race. The close investigations of scientific men have reversed many popular decisions. They have proved the crow to be the farmer's friend, most of the hawks and owls to be laborers in ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... on multiplying examples; but these are enough to show the remoteness of the points to be brought together.— As a first step towards a generalization, it will be necessary to consider what is to be found in ancient and ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... is very properly argued, that our whole knowledge of the normal course of nature is derived from experience; that a law is a mere generalization from that experience, and is not any thing intrinsically or necessarily true. Thus, if the sun were to rise in the west to-morrow, instead of in the east, it would at first sight appear to be a deviation from natural laws; in other words, a miracle. If, however, the latter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a single theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and without rest, is "Sapho;" and "Sapho" is the novel of Daudet's in which there seems to be the least of this stencilling of actual fact, in which the generalization is the broadest, and in which the observation is least restricted to ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or positive barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea, and he is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact, it is simply a false generalization, but he is really trying to make it general. This does not apply to the negative barbarian; it does not apply to the Russian or the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does beat his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him; he is likely to beat less ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... this is his strongest side: he is preeminently a poet of form. In his mind and in his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his intellect is more specific than generic. His subject—chosen by the concurrence of his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual needs—admits of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... me. I have no skill in the flights of speculation. I take no pleasure in the enunciation of principles. To my restricted vision, placed as I am upon the earth, isolated facts obtrude themselves with a capricious particularity which defies my powers of generalization. And that, perhaps, is the reason why I attached myself to the party to which I have the honour to belong. For it is, I think, the party which sees things as they are; as they are, that is, to mere human vision. Remenham, in his haste, has called us the party of reaction. I would rather say, we ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... begin to act upon it. Individuality involves limitation, limitation in its turn involves ignorance, and ignorance is the source of sorrow. Union with the unpleasant, separation from the pleasant, unsatisfied craving, are each a result of individuality. This is a deeper generalization than that which says, "A man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." But it is put forward as a mere statement of fact. And the previous history of religious belief in India would tend to show that emphasis was laid on the fact, less as an explanation of the origin of evil, than as a protest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in Latin poetry, when the object is to generalize a remark—as not connected with one mode of time more than another. In reality, all three modes of time—past, present, future—are used (though not equally used) in all languages for this purpose of generalization. Thus,— ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... are heaped together in these works, such incredible dulness is shown in presenting them, such careful avoidance of any generalization or of any interesting particular, such a bald and conceited style, and such a cockneyish and self-opinionated view of human history, as our soul wearies even to think of. Mr. Latham disdains any link of philosophy, or any classification, among his "ten thousand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... scientific explanation of psychical facts? Can psychology really in this way reach an ideal similar to that of scientific astronomy or chemistry? Would the scientist of nature ever be satisfied with this kind of explanation, which is nothing but generalization of certain sequences? Does not the explanation of the naturalist contain an entirely different element? He does not merely want to say that this effect has sometimes been observed and that there is thus probability ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... theory by which everything they say from the beginning is false. According to your idea, there was never any hidden menace, or secret society, or Valley of Fear, or Boss MacSomebody, or anything else. Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to. They invent this theory to account for the crime. They then play up to the idea by leaving this bicycle in the park as proof of the existence of some outsider. The stain on the windowsill conveys the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the smaller waterways of the valley with like feeling, which, though it has led to no such comprehensive generalization, yet gave me a distinct consciousness of their "grieving," if not for the French, at any rate for the silences that preceded the French, and for their own riparian architecture. The busy towns along the streams I have known have turned their ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... good sense of its criticism. I shall give a resume of Westermark's results, as the subject is beyond the domain of my special studies. The author has collected a great number of observations in order to avoid erroneous conclusions. He warns the reader against a hasty generalization, which attributes without proof certain customs of living savage tribes to ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... each, and a second form of platinum, that we named Pt. B. Thus we have tabulated in all 65 chemical elements, or chemical atoms, completing three of Sir William Crookes' lemniscates, sufficient for some amount of generalization. ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... Lois? He had expected a letter from 'Nunks' or his mother, but there was no letter, and no news was good news, at any rate with 'Nunks' in charge of communications. Lois could not fail to be all right. He recalled the wise generalization of 'Nunks' on that point ... Breakfast was a paradisiacal meal. He had never 'fancied' a meal so much. And Resmith had greatly enheartened him by saying sternly: "You've got exactly the right tone with the men. Don't you go trying to alter it." ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... cause, noumenally considered, is not to be supposed. To do this would be to solve that ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence. But it still may be possible for us to reduce the law of all progress, above set forth, from the condition of an empirical generalization, to the condition of a rational generalization. Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of progress, in its multiform manifestations, as the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... it will only respect their subjective humanity in the same degree that it is ennobled to an objective existence. If the internal man is one with himself he will be able to rescue his peculiarity, even in the greatest generalization of his conduct, and the state will only become the exponent of his fine instinct, the clearer formula of his internal legislation. But if the subjective man is in conflict with the objective, and contradicts ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... times one should exercise caution, yet to assume that the party who is "fresh" is intent on high crimes and misdemeanors may be a rather hasty and unjust generalization. ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... sequence in time but that is best in the far higher and more mental associations of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical terminology, is connotative and not merely denotative, that has extension as well as intension, that requires abstraction and generalization. Without this latter element higher mental development is lacking because this means more ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... theoretical writers have ignored facts, or practical writers have relied upon empirical rules rather than upon any sound theory. In relation to this view, it may suffice to note that theoretical deductions have frequently been based upon a generalization that "streams of water must enter the buckets of a turbine without shock, and leave them without velocity." Both these assumed conditions are misleading, and it is now well known that in every good turbine both are carefully disobeyed. So-called practical writers, as a rule, fail to give ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... projected a work of very ambitious scope, no less than the whole history of England based on original documents. But though excelling as a collector of materials, and as a laborious, conscientious and accurate transcriber, he had little power of generalization or construction, and died without publishing anything except an uninteresting tract, The Primitive Practice for Preserving Truth (1645), and some speeches. His Journals of all the Parliaments during the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... powers of the mind, instinct, feeling, and thought, enter into action simultaneously, and condition each other? The very first act of perception, the first distinct cognition of an object, involves thought as much as the last generalization of science. We know nothing of mind except as the development of thought, and the first unfolding, even of the infant mind, reveals an intellectual act, a discrimination between a self and an object ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... circulatory, respiratory, digestive apparatus; their general and special sensibility; the modes of their memory and forms of association, their intellectual processes, etc. But up to this time no conclusion has been drawn from these individual descriptions that would allow any generalization. Besides, has an experiment, in the strict sense of the word, ever been made at the "psychological moment"? I know of none. Would it be possible? Let us admit that by some happy chance the experimenter, using all his means of investigation, can have the subject ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... matter of principle, it recognizes itself as impotent and even absurd a priori, it knows that once in possession of the principle, it borrows from its light and becomes identified with it—an incomparable power of generalization. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... L'Esprit des Lois (published in 1748). The discussion of this celebrated book falls outside the domain of literature, and belongs rather to the history of political thought. It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu's qualities—his power of generalization, his freedom from prejudice, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style—appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the book is that it is too brilliant. When Madame du Deffand said ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... housed, and well, though firmly, treated. Alas, what we have not is more to us than all we possess. I was thankful under protest; prohibitions outweighed privileges. I have not the experience necessary for any generalization, but my own childhood was ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... that trenchant generalization, this vigorous assailant proceeded to describe a coffee-house in detail. The room "stinks of tobacco worse than hell of brimstone;" the coffee itself had the appearance of "Pluto's diet-drink, that witches tipple out of dead men's skulls;" and the company included "a silly fop and a worshipful justice, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... perceived evidently that this generalization was not quite applicable to all the gods, and he goes on to say: "Or, it may be, these gods are all distinct beings, for the praises addressed to them are distinct, and their appellations also." This is quite right. It is the very object of most of these divine names to impart distinct individuality ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... And indeed it ought to be subjected to the severest ordeal of fact and reason. It is in this way alone that the golden grains of truth are separated from the dross of crude conjecture and hasty generalization. We are not prepared ourselves to say that the evidence itself is final and conclusive. We have sketched it for the purpose of giving the distinguished author a full hearing, and affording the reader an opportunity to judge for himself. We await ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... any philosophical discussion could give him. For this poetry is an attempt to express life, not to explain it. It offers pictures or reports rather than analyses of religious experience. It gives utterance to the real life of religion in the individual soul, and is not a generalization of ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... partake of a part of greatness, for that will not make them great, etc.; nor can each object monopolise the whole. The only answer to this is, that 'partaking' is a figure of speech, really corresponding to the processes which a later logic designates by the terms 'abstraction' and 'generalization.' When we have described accurately the methods or forms which the mind employs, we cannot further criticize them; at least we can only criticize them with reference to their fitness as instruments of thought ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... nothing at all of the services rendered to the State by the dozens of knights made every year, while he can see very well that the men of real distinction, whom he does know, never get any distinctions at all. These difficulties perplex and irritate him. Probably he goes home with a hasty generalization. ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... the literature of our theme, we are astounded by the apparently hopeless confusion in which the whole is involved. Everywhere attempts at ill-founded generalization are encountered. We are compelled to admit, after perusing long debates in regard to the relative merits of various therapeutic measures, that those who were foremost to disparage the treatment pursued by others were totally ignorant of the fact that those same symptomatic manifestations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... to him. Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not, in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: they pass for candors. ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... experience gives the human | mind the things as they are, with | their essential qualities, and that | philosophy can be satisfied with | taking empirical phenomena for the | true reality of nature, thanks to a | mere generalization that erases the | particular circumstances of | existence. Nevertheless, empirically | qualified existences are not to be | mistaken for the things themselves. | So far, Bacon is undoubtedly a | modern, since he claims that the | object of knowledge is reality and | that reality, ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... he fell into the spirit of its natural arrangement, and soon perceived how much finer it was as a piece of design than any conventional rearrangement would be. Harding had tried to show him how to generalize foliage; but in this example he saw that not generalization was needed to get its ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalization does not apply exactly to Mrs. Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity were engaged. That's why, may be, she ventured so far. For a woman she chose ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... principles of careful observation, hypothesis, and experiment—have men made discoveries that have been helpful to their fellow-men; while, on the other hand, the most elaborate theories of the most popular physicians, which have owed their birth to premature generalization and invention, have passed away, like the crackling of thorns under a pot. Belonging to the latter class of men, we have Stahl, Hoffman, Boerhaave, Cullen, and Brown; while to the former belong ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the subject was not present to his thoughts, it is nothing less than astonishing that this passage should be quoted as Hamlet's witness to his own "irresolution." He would willingly take his own life; conscience forbids it; therefore conscience makes us cowards: and then with a still further generalization he announces the opposition of thought and resolution, causing the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... another, it is that neither the pleasures nor the pains of life, in the merely animal world, are distributed according to desert; for it is admittedly impossible for the lower orders of sentient beings, to deserve either the one or the other. If there is a generalization from the facts of human life which has the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which he deserves; that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while, the righteous begs his bread; ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 79} generality, generalization; universality; catholicity, catholicism; miscellany, miscellaneousness^; dragnet; common run; worldwideness^. everyone, everybody; all hands, all the world and his wife; anybody, N or M, all sorts. prevalence, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of a generation of institute work are not easy to summarize. It is safe to make a broad generalization by asserting that this form of agricultural education has contributed in a remarkable degree to better farming. The best methods of farming have been advocated from the institute platform. Agricultural college professors, and ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... other considerations, such as water supply, condition of circulating water, style of pump, etc., which must all necessarily have an obvious bearing upon the settlement of this question; so that generalization is somewhat out of place, the final design in all cases depending solely upon general principles and ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... terms consecrated by fashion, we have the perseverance to explore the truth as far as lies in our power, the aspect of things will undergo a great change and we shall discover that they are far less simple than our overprecipitate views declared them to be. Generalization is certainly a most valuable instrument: science indeed exists only by virtue of it. Let us none the less beware of generalizations which are not based upon very firm and ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... will follow the order of procedure of a general when war is first declared, who commences with the points of the highest importance, as a plan of campaign, and afterward descends to the necessary details. Tactics, on the contrary, begins with details, and ascends to combinations and generalization necessary for the formation and ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... of Pope and of his period may well be considered. Professor Lewis E. Gates has said: 'The special task of the pseudo-classical period was to order, to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods were, analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. The abstract, the typical, the general—these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact.' Lowell declares that it 'ignored the imagination altogether and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... But those who have been eager to credit him with an anticipation of modern views on the strength of this definition, have overlooked the fact that it is incapable of explaining a single process, includes none of the ascertained laws of phenomena, and is itself an example of the illicit generalization which Bacon elsewhere condemns. It was with some justification, therefore, that Harvey, who knew what science was, and knew better than most men how discoveries were made, said of him that he wrote of science like a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... powers and longest labors to a great country far from their common home,—Jomini to Russia, Agassiz to the United States; and, dissimilar as were their objects and pursuits, their intellectual resemblance was fundamental. The pre-eminent quality of each was the power of rapid generalization, of mastering and subordinating details, of grasping and applying principles and laws. Agassiz differed as much from an animal-loving collector like Frank Buckland, whose father was one of his stanchest friends and co-workers, as Jomini differed from a fighting general like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... mesaticephalic and their indices cover the entire range of this class, 74 to 80. The most brachycephalic is "Belasco" and the next "Akop," the two of unusual stature. These men are less brachycephalic than the Igorot measured at Ambuklao and Kayapa, but the numbers in each case are too few to permit generalization. The group is platyrhinian for the greater part, four only being mesorhinian. On the whole this is a very homogeneous group of men. With two exceptions all are of about the same low stature, all mesaticephalic, ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... to leave off generalization, and to begin with a detailed account of the parishes which fall within the district; of these, St. Giles-in-the-Fields ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... stands outside other things—a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... of the former was to allow this movement of Jackson's to develop itself: if it was a retreat, to attack the column at the proper time; if a tactical flank movement, to allow it to be completed, and then thrust himself between the two wings of Lee's army, and beat them in detail. This admirable generalization lacked the necessary concomitant of intelligent and ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... extent of the subjects that may be comprehended in a single glance. Increased mental cultivation has given rise, in all classes of society, to an increased desire of embellishing life by augmenting the mass of ideas, and by multiplying means for their generalization; and this sentiment fully refutes the vague accusations advanced against the age in which we live, showing that other interests, besides the material wants of life, occupy the minds ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... questions connected with commerce and finance, had proved him to possess not only a clear practical acquaintance with the details of these subjects, but also principles of an enlarged and liberal character, and powers of generalization and a comprehensiveness of view rarely found combined in so young a man. The next three or four years were busy ones with him. It will be remembered that this was the era of the Reform Bill. Mr. Thomson ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... deals also with the generic, and evades embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... present," she said, "it is true. We live under man-made institutions, and that is what they amount to. Every girl in the world practically, except a few of us who teach or type-write, and then we're underpaid and sweated—it's dreadful to think how we are sweated!" She had lost her generalization, whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went on, conclusively, "Until we have the vote that ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... seem true and right, and arise into mores as the norm of welfare. Thence are produced faiths, ideas, doctrines, religions, and philosophies, according to the stage of civilization and the fashions of reflection and generalization. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... indeed, to ask forgiveness for turning Annie out of school, but to beg permission to transplant her one day to a home of his own. Whatever was said, we suspect Annie might have served as "an instance in point" for that rather broad generalization of Swift, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... other examples less extreme than those quoted, but the generalization was no doubt too broad and presented in some respects an erroneous conclusion. The only mode of getting at the number of voters was by the ballots cast at the general elections, and the relative ratio was varied ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... opinion made it impossible for her to realize that jealousy is just a form of self-love, nor could she enlarge upon Edith's naive generalization and say that, if a woman suffers because she is not the equal of the rival who gains her lover's love—that is not jealousy! It is the anguish of recognizing her own defects, and it may be very noble. If she suffers because the rival is her inferior, that is not jealousy; it is the ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... she had meant to happen. It was an inglorious declension from her contemplated pose of dignified assertion. She was impelled to do her utmost to get away from this lie she had uttered at once, to eliminate Agatha from the argument by an emphatic generalization. "I've a perfect right," she said, suddenly nearly breathless, "to go to Hampton Court with anyone I please, talk about anything I like and stay there as ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... here, (I thought) is something upon which to found a philosophy. If consciousness is the product of rhythm all things ARE conscious, for all have motion, and all motion is rhythmic. I wondered if Moxon knew the significance and breadth of his thought—the scope of this momentous generalization; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by the tortuous and uncertain ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... to a labourer of the crops he grows in his garden? It depends, obviously, on the man's skill, and the size of the garden, and the clemency of the seasons—matters, all of them, in which any attempt at generalization must be received with suspicion. All that can be said with certainty is that most of the cottages in the valley have gardens, and that most of the cottagers are diligent to cultivate them. But when the circumstances are considered, it will ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... found myself in the society of these petrified persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance. Or some deep generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions. And then there was the crushing sense, at the conclusion ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... laugh at himself. His fury was foolish, a mere generalization of discontent from very little data. Still, it was a relief to be out in the purring night sounds. He had passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... times greater than those which fall to the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight—the delight in fable and story—to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in human nature; it appears full grown in the child, and has small need of cultivation. But the faculty of generalization to which the critic appeals is indicative of a stage of intellectual development to which only a small minority even of our so-called cultivated public attains. It is therefore a minority of a minority which he addresses, the intellectual elite which does the world's thinking. To impress ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... p. 3. In the particular instance in the application of the sentiment, I found nothing to question or qualify. It was the rule or principle which a certain class of your readers might be inclined to deduce from it, it was the possible generalization of the particular instance that made me pause. I am jealous of the disposition to turn Christianity or Religion into a particular 'business' or line. 'Well, Miss, how does your pencil go on, I was delighted with your last landscape.' 'Oh, sir, I have quite given 'up' that, I have got ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... generalization: "I don't believe anybody can know too much to keep a hotel. It won't hurt Jeff if he's been to Harvard, or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... told that a man who writes pure Spencerian can never do anything else. This, however, is a hasty generalization, put forth by a party who wrote a Horace ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... recognizes, as the faculties specially active in children, those of 'sensation, perception, observation, and simple memory,' adding, for mature years, those of 'abstraction, the higher powers of reason, imagination, philosophical memory, generalization,' etc. But that any one of all these is in the true psychological sense, a faculty—save, it may be, in the single instance of imagination—we shall decidedly question; and Mr. Calkins will see by the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... History and the then prevailing tendencies of all the Sciences" was given on the 12th of November, 1832, at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon the listeners as recorded at the time, this introductory discourse must have been characterized by the same broad spirit of generalization which marked Agassiz's later teaching. Facts in his hands fell into their orderly relation as parts of a connected whole, and were never presented merely as special or isolated phenomena. From the beginning ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the generalization of his personal experience. The essay "On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority" is but a record of the trials to which he was exposed by his morbid sensitiveness and want of social tact, and amid much excellent advice "On the Conduct of Life," there are passages which merely ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... was the author of seven quartos on mathematics, showing very great power of generalization. He was also deep in the transcendental philosophy,[572] and had the Absolute at his fingers' ends. All this knowledge was rendered useless by a persuasion that he had greatly advanced beyond the whole world, with many hints that the Absolute would ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... law (Mark xii. 28-34). For the pharisaic scholars this was a favorite problem. For Jesus, however, the question contained no problem, since all the law is summed up in the two commandments of love. His contemporaries were not without power to see the truth of his generalization, and their champion in this last attack was moved with admiration for the fineness and ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... subjectivity;—in plain English, the impression of a thing as it exists in itself, and extrinsically, with the image which the mind abstracts from the impression. Thus, number, or the total of a series, is a generalization of the mind, an 'ens rationis' not an 'ens reale'. I have read many attempts at a definition of a 'Bull', and lately in the Edinburgh Review; but it then appeared to me that the definers had fallen into the same fault with Miss Edgeworth, in her delightful ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... she grouped her desire for information into this vague generalization; I could see my way as long as she was not too specific. But some further intimate knowledge respecting this pretty young lady was ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... diable! He would have picked out some quiet fleshy spot and just tapped it with a harmless ball. M. Stanislas Kapp had been deplorably heavy-handed; but really, when the world had come to that pass that one granted a meeting to a brewer's son!... This was M. de Grosjoyaux's nearest approach to a generalization. He kept looking through the window, over the shoulder of M. Ledoux, at a slender tree which stood at the end of a lane, opposite to the inn, and seemed to be measuring its distance from his extended arm ...
— The American • Henry James
... had stopped, the invaluable Briton addressed a genial generalization to us all: "I often think how truly awful your war would have been if the women had fought it, y'know, ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... that, allowing for local variation, this statement is the best generalization of the condition throughout the country. The rural population has been specialized. The country community is finding its own kind of people. It has not yet, through suitable institutions, learned to cultivate its problems and to train ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... those which, though they are more extensive and general in their nature, and, therefore, more suitable, in a strictly-scientific point of view, for the foundations of a system, are less apparent, and require higher powers of generalization and abstraction; and are, therefore, less in accordance with the genius and spirit of ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... more utter contempt than I do; but if, on the contrary, he means the power of analysis and combination—that power which reduces the most complex idea into its elements, which traces causes to their first principle, and, by the power of generalization and combination, unites the whole in one harmonious system—then, so far from deserving contempt, it is the highest attribute of the human mind. It is the power which raises man above the brute—which distinguishes his faculties ...
— Remarks of Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina on the bill to prevent the interference of certain federal officers in elections: delivered in the Senate of the United States February 22, 1839 • John C. Calhoun
... Mr. Mortimer's generalization does not apply to 'The Statue and the Bust', since Mr. Browning has made it perfectly clear that, in this case, the intended act is postponed without reference to its morality, and simply in consequence of a weakness of will, which would have been as paralyzing to a good purpose as it was to the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... just as they stand. The laws that we actually know empirically have the form of the traditional causal laws, except that they are not to be regarded as universal or necessary. "Taking arsenic is followed by death" is a good empirical generalization; it may have exceptions, but they will be rare. As against the professedly exact laws of physics, such empirical generalizations have the advantage that they deal with observable phenomena. We cannot observe infinitesimals, whether in time or space; we do not even know whether ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... timidly suggest how the phrases sounded in their simplest form. For example, Plato or other equally good authority deemed substance as that which stands underneath phenomena; the most universal of universals, the ultimate, the highest in order of generalization. The ultimate essence or substance is indivisible; God is substance; God is indivisible. The divine substance is incapable of alteration or accident; all other substance is liable to alteration or accident; therefore, the divine substance differs from all other substance. A substance ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... phenomena, were their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any rate, the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil of a great generalization or classification or explanation with no fanfare ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... For a broad general impression that is perhaps a fair enough statement to start with; but when I am tempted to let it go at that, there is one striking exception that always rises up to point the finger of denial at this easy and common generalization. It is that of a young German officer, a mere stripling of twenty or thereabouts, with the most frank, open, ingenuous expression. One would expect to find him presiding at a Christian Endeavor social, rather than right here ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... These catastrophes are seen more and more to be but steps in, this development. The crumbling away of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob—the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... is of first-rate importance. But nobody need be frightened of it on that account. Unlike most important works on the theory of art, it is thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end. Its main thesis is a generalization which, if true, is applicable to all schools and all epochs. The book is ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... pursued. Yet, when rightly prosecuted, its benefits are wide, deep, and continuous, more than can be easily set forth—and they range through the whole scale, rising with the gradual expansion of the mind. It comprises subtle distinctions, close analysis, broad generalization, and that balancing of evidence which is the basis of all moral reasoning; it tracks the countless shadings of human thought, and their incarnation in the growths of speech, and seizes, in Comparative Philology, the universal affinities of the race: it passes in incessant ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... it came about that, thanks to the corporations themselves, when it was proposed that the nation should assume their functions, the suggestion implied nothing which seemed impracticable even to the timid. To be sure it was a step beyond any yet taken, a broader generalization, but the very fact that the nation would be the sole corporation in the field would, it was seen, relieve the undertaking of many difficulties with which ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... unhealthy, and that alone did he describe. Still, his description is made with such art and nicety, and has so much charm about it, that it appears correct at first sight, and, indeed, so it is relatively; but, nevertheless, by dint of omission and generalization, it is false, since it would fain impose a part upon us for the whole. In his voyage of exploration through the windings of the human heart the author of the "Maxims" stops midway, and comes back over ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... seem, Samuel had never before heard the phrase, "the survival of the fittest." And so now he was living over the experience of the thinking world of fifty or sixty years ago. What a marvelous generalization it was! What a range of life it covered! And how obvious it seemed—one could think of a hundred things, perfectly well known, which fitted into it. And yet he had never thought of it himself! The struggle for existence! The ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... perceived, in the case of the two stars previously scrutinized, that the apparent difference of declination from the maximum positions was nearly proportional to the sun's distance from the equinoctial points; and he reallzed the necessity for more observations before any generalization could be attempted. For this purpose he repaired to the Rectory, Wanstead, then the residence of Mrs Pound, the widow of his uncle James Pound, with whom he had made many observations of the heavenly bodies. Here he had set up, on the 19th of August 1727, a more convenient telescope ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... reserve of the English, the spiritual pride of the Germans. Some of them have German blood, some French, some Dutch. Part of the race is gay and volatile, many are heavy and inarticulate; it is a mixed race of which any iron-clad generalization is false. But I have seen many thousands of them under crisis, seen them hungry, dying, men from every class and every region; and the mass impression is that they are affectionate, easy to blend ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... travelers are made to express their thoughts in view of the waterfall. Apoet cries, "Ye gods, what a hell of waters;" atradesman, "away with the rock;" aBriton complains of the "confounded noise," and so on. It is plain that the word suffered a generalization of meaning. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... story in every instance. There is always dramatic conflict between interesting characters, of course, but behind them is always the background of some considerable social tendency—some comprehensive generalization—that includes and explains them all. The commander from his eminence saw all the combatants: he knew what the fight was about, and it always was about something worth while. ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... morality, generalization is difficult. There is undoubtedly a much larger criminal element among the blacks than among the whites. There are proportionately more crimes against property, crimes of sensuality, crimes of violence. Materials are wanting for exact comparison, either with the whites, or among the blacks at different ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... preceded? The swarm of fallacies which arose in the infancy of mental science, and which was born and bred in the decay of the pre-Socratic philosophies, was not dispelled by Aristotle, but by Socrates and Plato. The summa genera of thought, the nature of the proposition, of definition, of generalization, of synthesis and analysis, of division and cross-division, are clearly described, and the processes of induction and deduction are constantly employed in the dialogues of Plato. The 'slippery' nature of comparison, the danger of putting words ...
— Sophist • Plato
... became slowly aware of something else. Divested of their distinguishing uniforms, he and his crew seemed puny and ill-fed beside the natives. If physique were any index to the sophistication of a culture—but that was a ridiculous generalization! ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... I am quite willing to believe that Holyoke is a pathless wilderness, in the English lady's sense. But when Mr. Burroughs makes the generalization that there are no foot-paths in this country, it seems to me he must be letting his boyhood get too ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... have carried their powers of generalization still farther, and arranged the other parts of the same great family of South Africans into three divisions: 1st. The Matebele, or Makonkobi—the Caffre family living on the eastern side of the country; 2d. The Bakoni, or Basuto; ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... leading to a degree, is one phase of modern educational practice which comes from mediaeval universities. The system of examinations grew up slowly. Generalization is difficult owing to the differences in practice in various universities, but broadly speaking the student who took a Master's or Doctor's degree in any Faculty passed through the three stages of Bachelor, Licentiate, ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... selection, tenacity of memory, power of dealing with facts, of illuminating them, of sinking them by ridicule or by diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, pathos, are keys which the orator holds; and yet these fine gifts are not eloquence, and do often hinder a man's attainment of it. And if we come to the heart of the mystery, perhaps we should say that the truly eloquent man is a sane man with power ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... can't do nothin' else but! Every word in their language is a high-order generalization. Hroosha, live-thing. Noosha, bad-thing. Dhishta, thing-to-eat. Want me to go on? There are only seventy-nine more ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... talk, saw and heard a duck on the water, and said quack. Thereafter the child called, on the one hand, all birds and insects, on the other hand, all liquids, quack. Finally, it called all coins also quack, after having seen an eagle on a French sou. Thus the child came, by gradual generalization, to the point of designating a fly, wine, and a piece of money by the same onomatopoetic word, although only the first perception contained the ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... siliceous and calcareous rocks are either directly, or indirectly, derived from material which has, at one time or other, formed part of the organized framework of living organisms. Whether the same generalization may be extended to aluminous rocks, depends upon the conclusion to be drawn from the facts respecting the red clay areas brought to light by the Challenger. If we accept the view taken by Wyville Thomson ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... element—in the obscurity of the early history of the continent, which may be here mentioned, but from the diversity of the sub-elements which enter into it, some hesitancy exists in giving it a name. In order to secure the purposes of generalization, and include every element of which it is composed, it may be called, provisionally, the MEDITERRANEAN PERIOD. It is the earliest and most obscure of the whole, relying, as it does, almost exclusively upon passages ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... private purpose, than arguing in earnest; and that, when he rose, and said, "Mr. Burley, you have convinced me," it was not with the modesty of a sincere reasoner, but the triumph of one who has gained his end. But so struck, meanwhile, was our unheeded and silent listener with Burley's power of generalization and the wide surface over which his information extended, that when Randal left the room the boy looked at the slovenly, purposeless man, and said aloud, "True; knowledge ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... compositions we recognize an exquisite delicacy of feeling, without any of the daintiness of mind commonly found in intellectual youths. He seems to have acquired much of his father's command of reading, and to have inherited those rarer faculties of selection and generalization which give to learning its coherence and significance. In contrast to the precise and somewhat hard literary style of the elder Hallam, the diction of the son glows with the sensitiveness of a highly artistic nature. Arthur's attainments in the modern languages appear ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... and sorrows of the day and secures the night's sleep, and through it increased efficiency the next morning. Systematic experiments with exact relation to the various technical demands must slowly bring real insight into this complex situation. The usual hasty generalization from a few experiments with alcohol for partisan interests is surely not justified in the present unsatisfactory ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... him and do not stand for the things he stands for. At the same time, the so-called "sports" might well reply that it is not with any of the really admirable qualities of the "unco guid" that they quarrel, but their too narrow interpretations of virtue and duty and their groundless generalization as to ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... thought, no handing down of knowledge. Although all that is mental has its origin, in the last analysis, in simple sensations, its development requires emancipation from the sensuous, and language is the means for freeing ourselves from the pressure of sensations by the generalization and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... wing in a surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the male bird after, though the female was regular as usual in her visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not think it ground enough for a generalization, but in the many times when I watched the old birds feeding their young, the mother always alighted, while the father as uniformly ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... same generalization expressed to the modern student under the term 'Balkan Peninsula,' extinguishing every ray and trace of past history ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... highly useful, if it comes in at the right stage of education, when the mind is sufficiently matured, and has acquired sufficient preliminary knowledge to understand and appreciate so condensed a generalization as a summary of the whole history of a nation contained in an ordinary volume must necessarily be. Without this degree of maturity of mind, and this preparation, the study of such a work will be, as it ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... and generalization, each Avataric movement centered around an individual Man, and this Man embodied the principle and undertook the special work of an evangel, or Christos, or "Avatar," ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... he returned; "and don't tempt me into your woman's snare of a generalization. It's possible, of course, to be one-ideaed and obstinate. But I have not yet seen your savage guilty of a deceit. Her heart has been stirred, and her heart, as you may judge, has force enough to be constant, though none can deny that it has ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for Generalization.—It is to be noted, however, that in any such lesson, although the pupil gains through his senses a knowledge of a particular individual only, yet he may at once accept this individual as a sign, or type, of a class of objects, and can readily apply the new ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... labored effort to weaken the force of what I have written, this expert in his opening generalization made several observations which may be classed under three different heads: first, if the white men referred to by me were of such a high character, why should the acts accredited to them have been of such a low character? ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... activities as to guarantee that all the processes necessary to survival will be carried on. Sex is a group problem. Considering the mutual interdependence and the diversity of activities in human society, to make the generalization that one sex is superior to the other is on a par with saying that roots and branches are superior to trunks and leaves. It is sheer foolishness. Yet oceans of ink have flowed in attempts to establish one or the other of two equally ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... knowing how—he is eternally seeking the why of the how. Mystery is a challenge to him. It excites him like a red rag does a bull. At once he is for ripping the husks and the heart from mystery, so that he will know the how and the why, when it will be no longer mystery but a generalization and a scientifically ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... felt at times overpowered by the mystery and solemnity of it all, and has been impelled by a force stronger than himself to study it, patiently, slowly, diligently; content if he could gather a few crumbs of the great harvest of knowledge, happy if he could grasp some great generalization or wide-embracing law, and so in some small measure enter into the mind and thought of the Designer of all this wondrous frame ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... thing may be said of the terms, "Individuation," "Grouping," and "Classification," which may perhaps be nothing more than "Abstraction," "Combination," and "Generalization." His misconception of those latter terms, and of what is included in them, may have led him to think that the mental operations which he has perceived in the young are different. If so, there can ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions; it will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war, nay, more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them." This convenient generalization covers the multitude of Belgian crimes. This interesting manual of conduct for officers further warns against "sentimentalism and flabby emotion," such as are embodied in the Hague Conventions, and after stating the generally accepted rule or custom of warfare warns that exceptions ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... catastrophes are seen more and more to be but steps in, this development. The crumbling away of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob—the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in, with ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... quickly to the central ideas or a book and, after reading these, cast the work aside. It should be remembered, however, that the minds of such men are so well stocked with information that most, and sometimes all, of the author's details may be unnecessary to them; they are already prepared for the generalization. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... they say from the beginning is false. According to your idea, there was never any hidden menace, or secret society, or Valley of Fear, or Boss MacSomebody, or anything else. Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to. They invent this theory to account for the crime. They then play up to the idea by leaving this bicycle in the park as proof of the existence of some outsider. The stain on the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... it in vain for details of the plots and characters, and specimens of the verse, of interludes and plays which time, opportunity, and publishers combine to withhold from him. Notable exceptions to this generalization exist. Such are Sir A.W. Ward's monumental English Dramatic Literature, and that delightful volume, J.A. Symonds' Shakespeare's Predecessors; but the former extends its survey far beyond the limits of early drama, while the latter too often ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... fit. But the fact remains that they are primarily concerned with different things: and that each is most to be trusted when he is upon his own ground. When, therefore, the economist indulges in a generalization about psychology, even when he gives it as a reason for an economic proposition, in nine cases out of ten the economics will not depend upon the psychology; the psychology will rather be an inference (and very possibly ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... something upon which to found a philosophy. If consciousness is the product of rhythm all things ARE conscious, for all have motion, and all motion is rhythmic. I wondered if Moxon knew the significance and breadth of his thought—the scope of this momentous generalization; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by the tortuous ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... adduced some other examples less extreme than those quoted, but the generalization was no doubt too broad and presented in some respects an erroneous conclusion. The only mode of getting at the number of voters was by the ballots cast at the general elections, and the relative ratio was varied by so many considerations that it did not correctly ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... value in the study of physical science. It trains the mind to habits of patient attention, of careful observation, teaches the danger of hasty generalization, and diminishes intellectual conceit; but these results may also be obtained by other means. The aim of education is not simply to develop this or the other faculty, however indispensable, nor yet to make one thoroughly conversant with a particular order of facts, but the aim is ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... intention of becoming a second Mrs. Earle. That is, she promised herself to follow, but not to follow blindly; to imitate judiciously, but to improve on a gradually diverging line of progress. This was mere generalization as yet. It was an agreeable seething brain consciousness for future development. For the moment, however, she counted on Mrs. Earle to obtain for her a start by personal influence at the office of the Benham Sentinel. This was provided forthwith ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... Portugal, and Spain. You may perhaps conclude, from this, that the tendency to self-destruction is much greater among the Slavs and Scandinavians of the north than it is among the Latin peoples of the south, and that the differences are due to latitude or race; but your specious generalization is shattered when you discover that the suicide rates of Norway and Russia, both northern countries inhabited by Scandinavians and Slavs, are almost as low as those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, all southern countries ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... is a correspondence between the succession of fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,—this is all." Though this is by no means the limit of his claim so modestly expressed, yet that was a grand generalization, and, like the great doctrine of gravitation, and the demonstration by Cuvier of the existence of races of animals and plants on the globe anterior to those now existing, it proves to be of almost indefinite application, and, like those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... certifies to the importance of the manufacture of honest inks as necessary to the future enlightenment of society. That it has not been fully understood or even appreciated goes without saying; a proper generalization becomes possible only in the light of corroborative data and ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... cake in my hand weighing half a pound, bright green on the surface, with minute crisp leaves; but an inch thick beneath in what looks at first like clay, but is indeed knitted fibre of exhausted moss. Also, I don't at all find the generalization I made from the botanical books likely to have occurred to me from the real things. No moss leaves that I can find here give me the idea of resemblance to pineapple leaves; nor do I see any, through ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... before remarked, I am quite willing to believe that Holyoke is a pathless wilderness, in the English lady's sense. But when Mr. Burroughs makes the generalization that there are no foot-paths in this country, it seems to me he must be letting his boyhood get too ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... greatest in the law (Mark xii. 28-34). For the pharisaic scholars this was a favorite problem. For Jesus, however, the question contained no problem, since all the law is summed up in the two commandments of love. His contemporaries were not without power to see the truth of his generalization, and their champion in this last attack was moved with admiration for the fineness and ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... about the feminine propensity for proving a generalization by a specific instance! Gurney is an old man reared in an old tradition. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... one frequently finds the generalization that it is the provincial who acquires the perspective requisite for a true estimate of a nation, and that it is the country-boy reared in lonely communion with himself who attains the deepest knowledge of human nature. If there be some degree of truth in this ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... satisfaction or happiness. To those of us who normally feel loyal to the nation, such a disloyal sentiment brings sharp indignation. As an index of our own sentiment and our own happy relations to the nation, this indignation has value. As a stimulus to a programme or ethical generalization, it is the cause of vast inaccuracy and sad injustice. American syndicalism is not a scheming group dominated by an unconventional and destructive social philosophy. It is merely a commonplace attitude—not such ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... considered as a last word of scientific explanation of psychical facts? Can psychology really in this way reach an ideal similar to that of scientific astronomy or chemistry? Would the scientist of nature ever be satisfied with this kind of explanation, which is nothing but generalization of certain sequences? Does not the explanation of the naturalist contain an entirely different element? He does not merely want to say that this effect has sometimes been observed and that there is thus ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... sundry notes on Shakespeare, and other pieces which have fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to observe; that discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now call discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus, Philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while Geometry ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of man, however, the operation of this theory of limitations has not as yet been so clearly observed. The laws governing our social life are not so clearly understood as to permit of a clear generalization. Still, the opinions, pleas, and judgments of society serve as boundaries which are none the less real for being intangible. When men or women err—that is, pass out from the sphere in which they are accustomed ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with the thing he describes before him but oftener, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... something more perfect than we have yet reached, but our ideas as to what it should be are very various, not to say discordant, for one person's idea of better is another person's idea of worse. Therefore what we want to get at is some broad generalization of principle which will be in advance of our past experiences. This means that we must look for this principle in something that we have not yet experienced, and the only place where we can possibly find principles which have not yet manifested themselves is in gremio Dei—that is, in ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... morals has been studied in the detail, it has, indeed, been found practicable to comprise the whole, by a kind of generalization, in one comprehensive recognition of regard to our fellows. But, in the first place, this is far from a primitive or an intuitive suggestion of the mind. It came at a late stage of human history, and is even regarded as a part of Revelation. In the second place, this high generality ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... Lashmar by saying that, when the army wanted them, the army could come and take them. Eric was informed that he would hardly know the dear old village now; he felt that he could support the privation with fortitude and hoped its annals might be closed with that felicitous generalization, but Mrs. Nares had recollected her husband's gallant attempt to be accepted as a chaplain and the Bishop's gracefully worded inability to spare him, with a postscript in his own writing to commend ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... statement is merely a generalization of many made in the preceding lectures, the tenor of which any readers acquainted with my recent writings may ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... above such trickery. Yet I read a few days ago, not as a single example, but only as the last I happen to remember, an article by a distinguished American professor, protesting with great moderation that an important scientific generalization which he published in 1902 had been annexed, without acknowledgment, by a versatile and adroit professor in the University of Berlin—an acquaintance of my own—in the year 1906; and it was not until 1910 that the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... remained distinct, and sometimes united with each other in various but regular proportions; and these capacities of coalescing with one class of bodies, and of remaining unaffected by another, are called chemical "affinities." This is a convenient generalization, and has properly received a specific name; though the common appellation throws no light on the cause of the phenomena, which remains an impenetrable secret. To say that certain action is caused by the operation of chemical affinities is only to arrange it with a large ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... but an inference from the observations of some comparatively insignificant period; and we have also to suppose that the very few rivers which have been observed form a sufficient basis for a conclusion as to all rivers. In fact, a more feebly supported generalization from more insufficient data it is hard to conceive. To speak of it as "an approximation based on our knowledge of the time in which similar results on a smaller scale have been produced by existing natural laws within the historical ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... individual liberty of the democratic states. We see that now we are clearly swinging over to some new form of social solidarity, of which tendency federalism and socialism are expressions, and doubtless from that we shall recoil toward individual liberty once more. It is a safe generalization that whenever human thought shows some decided trend, a corrective movement is not far away. However enthusiastic we may be, therefore, about the idea of progress and the positive contributions which it can make to our ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... then, deals also with the generic, and evades embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... were drawn from different social conditions, and in their homes they kept to their own set; but they seemed to leave this aside, and they mingled and submerged their natural differences under that one broad generalization, ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... the most general conclusion possible from the premises. Try to see if a general principle can be laid down. This is a most important faculty to acquire. At the same time, avoid the prevalent fault of hasty generalization, based on ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... which were destined to come back to Robert some day with extraordinary force, but for the present they were a mere generalization that did not stay long in ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... himself. The ground is too high for me. I have no skill in the flights of speculation. I take no pleasure in the enunciation of principles. To my restricted vision, placed as I am upon the earth, isolated facts obtrude themselves with a capricious particularity which defies my powers of generalization. And that, perhaps, is the reason why I attached myself to the party to which I have the honour to belong. For it is, I think, the party which sees things as they are; as they are, that is, to mere human vision. Remenham, in his haste, has called us the party of reaction. I ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... solution until it occurred to me to seek the explanation in certain of the postulates which make up the doctrine of evolution. I realize fully the difficulty and the danger in attempting to reach the generalization which I shall make later and in the hypothesis I shall propose, for there is, of course, no direct final proof of the truth of even the doctrine of evolution. It is idle to consider any experimental research into the cause of phenomena that have developed by natural selection during millions ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... it was a retreat, to attack the column at the proper time; if a tactical flank movement, to allow it to be completed, and then thrust himself between the two wings of Lee's army, and beat them in detail. This admirable generalization lacked the necessary concomitant of intelligent and ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... temperate and tolerant desire for human improvement and happiness, and almost unique in its entire freedom at once from doctrinairism, visionary enthusiasm, egotism, and an undue spirit of system. The genius of the author for generalization is so great, his instinct in political science so sure, that even the falsity of his premises frequently fails to vitiate his conclusions." (Saintsbury, George, in Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. XVIII, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, he beholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men's. The conscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, "Life is a walking shadow," and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when he exclaims, "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?" Through the shifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of the universe; his mimic play and "the great globe itself" are alike an "insubstantial ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Soames. If the fellow must make a generalization, he needn't suggest that the forms of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... think that all will agree in estimating this communication, with its adroit generalization, and in its general tone as superior to any thus far received. On another sheet of ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... Indeed, strictly considered, political philosophy is only applied history. That is why political treatises are so disappointing. The philosopher is content to generalize, and does not know the facts. On the other hand, the historian who knows the facts has not the capacity of generalization. Politics must be mainly empirical. The political thinker does not reason forward from the past to the present, but backwards from the present to the past. He studies the present results of the mature experience of many ages, and then explains ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... write dully; his histories are just as readable as Goldsmith's, and rather more veracious. But he plainly had not the scholar's training and methods which we now demand of the historian; nor had he the larger view of men and events in their perspective. Generalization was beyond him. Fortunately to generalize is only a part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim historic figure, and give it life and color,—this power he had. And it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... Thereafter the child called, on the one hand, all birds and insects, on the other hand, all liquids, quack. Finally, it called all coins also quack, after having seen an eagle on a French sou. Thus the child came, by gradual generalization, to the point of designating a fly, wine, and a piece of money by the same onomatopoetic word, although only the first perception contained the ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... facts are affirmed or denied at once. But a general proposition is not merely a compendious form for recording and preserving in the memory a number of particular facts, all of which have been observed. Generalization is not a process of mere naming, it is also a process of inference. From instances which we have observed, we feel warranted in concluding, that what we found true in those instances holds in all similar ones—past, present, and future, however ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that it was my business in life to bean artist and a poet, and that there could be no business comparable to that. I refused to read books, and even to meet people who excited me to generalization, but all to no purpose. I said my prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be rescued from abstraction, and become ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... multiplying examples; but these are enough to show the remoteness of the points to be brought together.— As a first step towards a generalization, it will be necessary to consider what is to be found in ancient and ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... stage, and to defend Shakespeare against the familiar accusations of barbaric crudity and formlessness. In surveying the field, it was likewise incumbent upon him to demonstrate in what respects the classic drama differed from the independently developed modern play, and his still useful generalization regards antique art as limited, clear, simple, and perfected—as typified by a work of sculpture; whereas romantic art delights in mingling its subjects—as a painting, which embraces many objects ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the medical profession during the century, however, should include mention of a man who, although not a full-time professional physician, proves to be the exception to Dr. Blanton's generalization about the prominence of individual medical men and the quality of medical practice during the late 1600's. This man, the Reverend John Clayton, is a noteworthy example of the intellectual level an individual ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... distinct light, their first meeting having occurred in the dusk of a railway-station. Swithin was not in the habit of noticing people's features; he scarcely ever observed any detail of physiognomy in his friends, a generalization from their whole aspect forming his idea of them; and he now only noted a young man of perhaps thirty, who lolled a good deal, and in whose small dark eyes seemed to be concentrated the activity that the rest of his frame decidedly lacked. This gentleman's eyes ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... think it goes very far to raise the variety-making hypothesis to the rank of a theory, as accounting for the manner in which new species enter the world.") I have not yet got the essay. The parts which I read in sheets seemed to me grand, especially the generalization about the Australian flora itself. How superior to Robert Brown's celebrated essay! I have not seen Naudin's paper ('Revue Horticole,' 1852. See historical Sketch in the later editions of the 'Origin of Species.'), and shall not be able till I hunt the libraries. I am very ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human—all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not, in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... mental associations of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical terminology, is connotative and not merely denotative, that has extension as well as intension, that requires abstraction and generalization. Without this latter element higher mental development is lacking because this means more than word-painting the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... apparatus; their general and special sensibility; the modes of their memory and forms of association, their intellectual processes, etc. But up to this time no conclusion has been drawn from these individual descriptions that would allow any generalization. Besides, has an experiment, in the strict sense of the word, ever been made at the "psychological moment"? I know of none. Would it be possible? Let us admit that by some happy chance the experimenter, using all his means of investigation, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... all metaphor and generalization, each Avataric movement centered around an individual Man, and this Man embodied the principle and undertook the special work of an evangel, or ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... grandest generalization of science that was ever conceived. It is the fundamental law of the relations of the two worlds, the psychic and the physical. The spiritual and material worlds unite in man, in whom the eternal spirit is combined with a transitory material body, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... from the English. Strange to say, they pleased him for the very qualities which he disliked in the man's talk. The Italian mind, when it has developed favourably, is inclined to specialism rather than to generalization, and Griggs wrote of many things as though he were a specialist. He had enormous industry and great ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... because some of the most distinguished writers of France have paraded their contempt for all religious dogmas, we were to say broadly that the French are a nation without religion, we should justly be called to order for abusing the legitimate privileges of generalization. The fact that Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah were firm believers in one God could not be considered sufficient to support the general proposition that the Jewish nation was monotheistic by instinct. And if we ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... invariably lie in the present. The names of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Mrs Humphry Ward are sufficient to show how entirely successful a woman may be in delineating the life around her. If there is any truth in this generalization, it was no mere coincidence that the first English romance dealing with contemporary life was written expressly for the ladies of Elizabeth's Court. The alteration in the face of social life, brought ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... his ideas often left him no time to test the validity of his principles. He enunciates one brilliant generalization after another. Sometimes he reveals the mind of a seer or poet, throwing out conclusions which are highly suggestive, on the face of them convincing, but which on examination prove untenable, or at best must be ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... which believes that | sensible experience gives the human | mind the things as they are, with | their essential qualities, and that | philosophy can be satisfied with | taking empirical phenomena for the | true reality of nature, thanks to a | mere generalization that erases the | particular circumstances of | existence. Nevertheless, empirically | qualified existences are not to be | mistaken for the things themselves. | So far, Bacon is undoubtedly a | modern, since he claims that the | object of knowledge is reality and | that ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... contain in them a confusion of what the schoolmen would have called—objectivity with subjectivity;—in plain English, the impression of a thing as it exists in itself, and extrinsically, with the image which the mind abstracts from the impression. Thus, number, or the total of a series, is a generalization of the mind, an 'ens rationis' not an 'ens reale'. I have read many attempts at a definition of a 'Bull', and lately in the Edinburgh Review; but it then appeared to me that the definers had fallen into the same fault with Miss Edgeworth, in ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... atmospheric valve and condenser. There are still other considerations, such as water supply, condition of circulating water, style of pump, etc., which must all necessarily have an obvious bearing upon the settlement of this question; so that generalization is somewhat out of place, the final design in all cases depending solely upon general principles and ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... past lived in her memory as a bright, changeful dream, varying from one pleasure to another, with an ever-shifting background of fair, foreign towns and cities, Kursaals, palaces, salons, gardens, mountains, and lakes, and quiet green nooks of country—all, as it seemed to her, with the power of generalization that seizes on the most salient points, and takes them as types of the whole, shining in sunlight that never clouded, under clear blue skies that never darkened. Madelon knew that that time had gone by for ever; and yet, in all her dreams for the future, her imagination never went beyond ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... imponderable forces, vegetable and animal life, the mesmeric influences, galvanism, magnetism, electricity, light and heat; and the body the sum of all the ponderable substances; in one word, "God is everything, and everything is God." This system is called "Monotheistic Pantheism." It is a vast generalization of everything into a higher unity, which exalts men and paving stones, and cats, dogs and reptiles, and monkeys, to the same level of God-head, or divinity. Man, the soul of men, as the system would term it, is the greatest manifestation of the divine essence. Yes! DIVINE ESSENCE! for, with Pantheists, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... larger commentary upon this text. It is, at present, a perfectly tenable hypothesis that all siliceous and calcareous rocks are either directly, or indirectly, derived from material which has, at one time or other, formed part of the organized framework of living organisms. Whether the same generalization may be extended to aluminous rocks, depends upon the conclusion to be drawn from the facts respecting the red clay areas brought to light by the Challenger. If we accept the view taken by Wyville Thomson and his colleagues—that ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... second mug of the white liquor, Lord became slowly aware of something else. Divested of their distinguishing uniforms, he and his crew seemed puny and ill-fed beside the natives. If physique were any index to the sophistication of a culture—but that was a ridiculous generalization! ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... and, so to speak, prophesied—the growing stress of the struggle for life in domains political, social, financial, industrial, the coming of uncrowned kings greater in puissance than monarchs of yore, the reign of not one despot but many, the generalization of intrigue, the replacement of ancient disorders by others of equal or increased virulence and harder to remedy, hundred-headed hydras to combat, most difficult of herculean tasks. The reflection of all this in the ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... which was always his protection against precipitate conclusions, too clearly comprehends the limits of science and the necessity of accumulating facts "upon the thorny path of observation and experiment" to indulge in generalization. He feels that life has secrets which our minds are powerless to probe, and that "human knowledge will be erased from the archives of the world before we know the last ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... concluding sentimental generalization,—which is much more Byronic than Dantesque,—one hardly knows which version to call more truly poetical; but for a faithful rendering of the original conception one can hardly hesitate to give the palm to ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... and wise, you will never find it out. A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of your muddy, stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference. "Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a muck-puddle; and all the while ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... justified by the necessity for generalization! The word PROPERTY has two meanings: 1. It designates the quality which makes a thing what it is; the attribute which is peculiar to it, and especially distinguishes it. We use it in this sense when we say THE PROPERTIES OF THE TRIANGLE or of NUMBERS; ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange and mysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popular nomenclature. Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the ideal embodiment of canine greatness—a generalization from what was common to all. Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form. Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power, and even the suffering ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... of natural gifts and conditions. There was the teeming wealth of constructive imagination united with the sleepless critical spirit which shrank from no test of audacity; there was the most powerful impulse to generalization coupled with the sharpest faculty for descrying and distinguishing the finest shades of phenomenal peculiarity; there was the religion of Hellas, which afforded complete satisfaction to the requirements of sentiment, and yet left the intelligence free to ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... here, but merely to give an individual case of the various developments of talents and acquirements in the several departments of respectability, discarding generalization, and name none but the Africo-American of unmixed extraction, who rose into note subsequent to the American Revolution. In the persons of note and distinction hereafter to be given, we shall not confine ourselves to any such narrow selections, but shall name persons, male ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... considered, is not to be supposed. To do this would be to solve that ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence. But it still may be possible for us to reduce the law of all progress, above set forth, from the condition of an empirical generalization, to the condition of a rational generalization. Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of progress, in its multiform manifestations, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... simplest form. For example, Plato or other equally good authority deemed substance as that which stands underneath phenomena; the most universal of universals, the ultimate, the highest in order of generalization. The ultimate essence or substance is indivisible; God is substance; God is indivisible. The divine substance is incapable of alteration or accident; all other substance is liable to alteration or accident; therefore, the divine substance differs from all other substance. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of the natural ones. Physics, chemistry, geology, and the like are matters that have never entered his head. Even in studies more immediately connected with obvious everyday life, such as language, history, customs, it is truly remarkable how little he possesses the power of generalization and inference. His elaborate lists of facts are imposing typographically, but are not even formally important, while his reasoning about them is as exquisite a bit of scientific satire as ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... that a lady will nod pleasantly upon some windy generalization of a companion, and will wear the most agreeable expression of accepting it as the law, and then—days afterward, when the thing is a mummy to its promulgator—she will inquire out of a clear sky: "WHY did you say that the people down-town have nothing ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... is correct, and the exact use of words is a marvel. It is rare, I think, that any substitution or change of words will improve upon the precision of the text. His compression and selection of salient points are remarkable. Amid some commonplace philosophy he frequently rises to a generalization as brilliant as it is truthful. Then, too, one is impressed with the dignity of history; one feels that Gibbon looked upon his work as very serious, and thought with Thucydides, "My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... provides," when they meant "Chance;" "God acts," when they meant "Instinct" or "Sense;" and "God is every where," when they meant "the Soul of Nature." The Almighty is something infinitely different from a principle, or a centre of action, or a quality, or a generalization of phenomena. If, then, by the word, you do but mean a Being who keeps the world in order, who acts in it, but only in the way of general Providence, who acts towards us but only through what are called laws of Nature, who is more certain not to act ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Clive, we fill the forefront of our picture with clubs and coffee-houses, with the graces of Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, the beauties of Gainsborough and Romney, or the masterpieces of Sheraton and Adam. But each generalization, as we make it, seems more imperfect and unfair; and partly because Carlyle abused it so unmercifully, this century has in the last fifty years received ample justice from ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... outline forms of leaves is a schooling in itself, so much may be learned from it. It teaches the relation between form and growth in a way which makes it possible to use the greatest freedom of generalization without violating structural laws. The same causes which govern the shaping of a tree are present in the leaf, settling its final outline, so that, however wandering and fantastic it may appear, there is not the smallest curve or serration which does not bear witness ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Lois (published in 1748). The discussion of this celebrated book falls outside the domain of literature, and belongs rather to the history of political thought. It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu's qualities—his power of generalization, his freedom from prejudice, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style—appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... vertebrates derived from the work of his contemporaries and his observations in the Museum and menagerie, gave him a broad grasp of the entire animal kingdom, such as no one before him had. As the result, his comprehensive mind, with its powers of rapid generalization, enabled him to appreciate the series from monad (his ebauche) to man, the range of forms from the simple to the complex. Even though not a comparative anatomist like Cuvier, he made use of the latter's discoveries, and could understand and ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Generality. — N. {opp. 79} generality, generalization; universality; catholicity, catholicism; miscellany, miscellaneousness[obs3]; dragnet; common run; worldwideness[obs3]. everyone, everybody; all hands, all the world and his wife; anybody, N or M, all sorts. prevalence, run. V. be general ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground is that any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of beauty must conform to the requirements of beauty and of expensiveness both. But this is not all. Beyond this the canon of expensiveness ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... feeling of vastness and sublimity induced by an aerial ascent, was almost in direct contrast to the sensations of the diver—the one being comparable to the effects produced by the enlarged views of generalization, indulged in by speculative ontologists—the other, to those that result from the inductive process of searching into the physical arcana of nature. He was not aware of the bent of my mind, or ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... on the nature of passive illusions of sense (pp. 44, 68, 70, etc.) The logical character of illusion might be brought out by saying that it resembles the fallacy which is due to reasoning from an approximate generalization as though it were a universal truth. In thus identifying illusion and fallacy, I must not be understood to say that there is, strictly speaking, any such thing as an unconscious reasoning process. On the contrary, I hold that it is a contradiction to talk of any mental ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... be a genus to another species until no further subdivisions can be made. This last indivisible species is termed the infima species. Every genus may be a species to another genus until a point is reached where no further generalization may be made or the summum genus is attained. In the Patent Office classification of the useful arts, the summum genus is useful arts. The summum genus of the plastic arts would be plastics. The infima species in the useful arts evidently ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... guarantee that all the processes necessary to survival will be carried on. Sex is a group problem. Considering the mutual interdependence and the diversity of activities in human society, to make the generalization that one sex is superior to the other is on a par with saying that roots and branches are superior to trunks and leaves. It is sheer foolishness. Yet oceans of ink have flowed in attempts to establish one or the other of two equally ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... although every corporeal sense be fully satisfied. The excitement from the novelty of objects, and the chance of success, stimulate him to increased activity. Moreover, as a number of isolated facts soon become uninteresting, the habit of comparison leads to generalization. On the other hand, as the traveler stays but a short time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches instead of detailed observations. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no "facts" at this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... home work as was necessary to determine the names and affinities of the species, Mr. Mill never penetrated deeply into the philosophy of botany, so as to take rank among those who have, like Herbert Spencer, advanced that science by original work either of experiment or generalization, or have entered into the battle-field where the great biological questions of the day are being fought over. The writer of this notice well remembers meeting, a few years since, the (at that time) parliamentary logician, with his trousers ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... induce a new form of competition between these big societies; but no one can study the history of the movement without becoming persuaded that there is a moral development carried on which will, in some way as yet not seen to us, lead up the organization of those societies into some higher generalization, securing harmony. It is constantly and rightly said that business can never dispense with that which makes the secret of capital's success in large industry and trade, namely, generalship. Co-operation can, it is admitted, capitalize labor for the small industries, in which it is capable of ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... than the rest, yet the lower classes long preceded the higher; that there has been on the whole a steady progression within each class and order; and that the highest plants and animals have appeared only in relatively modern times. It is only, however, in a broad sense that this generalization is now thought to hold good. It encounters many apparent exceptions, and sundry real ones. So far as the rule holds, all is as it should be upon an hypothesis ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... which fall to the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight—the delight in fable and story—to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in human nature; it appears full grown in the child, and has small need of cultivation. But the faculty of generalization to which the critic appeals is indicative of a stage of intellectual development to which only a small minority even of our so-called cultivated public attains. It is therefore a minority of a minority which he addresses, the intellectual elite which does the world's thinking. To impress ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... obstinate people, who feel that they have gone too far, and yet are ashamed to go back, took refuge in an obstinate generalization, and only asserted that she had heard him say things, as if he did not ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... repose, order, are distinguishing marks of cultivated social life everywhere, and to people who are habituated to these conditions of life it is painful to have incongruous or inappropriate acts or sounds thrust upon their attention. Here is a generalization that explains the reason why many things, harmless in themselves are unpleasant to and offend the taste of cultivated people. No really cultivated young girl will, for instance, open and play upon a piano in a hotel parlor or any other parlor ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... current coin the terms consecrated by fashion, we have the perseverance to explore the truth as far as lies in our power, the aspect of things will undergo a great change and we shall discover that they are far less simple than our overprecipitate views declared them to be. Generalization is certainly a most valuable instrument: science indeed exists only by virtue of it. Let us none the less beware of generalizations which are not based upon very firm ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... in the other all those of the second class, we should make this discovery, that government-forming animals are those which by nature live together in companies, while the other class as a rule live apart. The generalization reached is, that only gregarious animals form governments. We would discover upon further investigation that the greater the interdependence of the individuals, the more ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... teaching, reflection, failure, furtherance, opposition, and renewed reflection the organs of man unconsciously unite, in a free activity, the acquired and the innate, so that this process creates a unity which sets the world in amaze. This generalization may serve as a speedy reply to your query and as an explanation of the note that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the nature of siliceous substance, as a compound thing; no person reasons more distinctly in general, or sees more clearly the importance of his principles; yet, with regard to mineral concretions, how often has he been drawn thus inadvertently into improper generalization! I appeal to the analogy which, in this treatise, he has formed, between the stalactical concretions upon the surface of the earth, and the mineral concretions of siliceous substance. As an example of the great lights, and penetrating genius, of this assiduous studier ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... were calculated to prevent the Jews from any chance of adopting the manners and customs of the peoples around them; and the Indians, having had similar views, naturally adopted similar means. Such then is a brief generalization of the causes which led to caste laws, which were, no doubt, carried in some instances to a ridiculous length, but which were founded in common sense, and were admirably adapted to carry into effect the ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... The principles will have little value unless translated into practical methods; direct your teaching to their actual use in families. Your generalization is for guidance into application. Urge that the plans described be actually tried. Expect this and call for reports on plans tested in the daily experience of families. If a number of students would try, for example, the plan ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... seem to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great subjects of ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... communicated to the entire nation—the ministers of the altar, the magistracy, the members of every profession, fathers, mothers of families, without distinction of rank, means, or duties.... Let this short generalization be well pondered, and the conclusion must be reached that this Scotch adventurer, John Law, was guilty of the crime of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... thought out, admirably written, and always stimulating in its generalization and in the perspectives ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... very properly argued, that our whole knowledge of the normal course of nature is derived from experience; that a law is a mere generalization from that experience, and is not any thing intrinsically or necessarily true. Thus, if the sun were to rise in the west to-morrow, instead of in the east, it would at first sight appear to be a deviation from natural laws; in other words, a miracle. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... smallest forms, in Albert Duerer and others. But this attention to minutiae was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future grounds for color, they were necessarily restricted to the natural shadow of every object, white being left for high lights of whatever hue. In consequence, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the tree tops, and he made occasion of this to say, "This is a cold wynd a-blowin', Mister." "It is, rather," I assented. "I was think-in'," he observed from an apparent generalization, "that I wished I was at home." Then he suddenly added, "Help a poor man!" I was not wholly surprised at the climax, and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. "Will that do?" He hesitated perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle reluctance, "Yes, that'll do," and so ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... perusal, and many will seize upon it as a thing longed for. For, to those advanced students who have kept well abreast of the chemical tide, it offers a calm philosophy. To those others, youngest of the class, who have emerged from the schools since new methods have prevailed, it presents a generalization, drawing to its use all the data, the relations of which the newly-fledged fact-seeker may but dimly perceive without its aid.... To the old chemists, Prof. Cooke's treatise is like a message from beyond the mountain. They have heard of changes in the ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... was a pioneer; Raphael is a consummation. The two centuries between were a period of development and change, a development in all that regards technique, a change in national ideals and in the artist's attitude toward life and toward his art. A quick survey of the period, if so hasty a generalization permits correctness of statement, will help us in the understanding of the ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... pleasures nor the pains of life, in the merely animal world, are distributed according to desert; for it is admittedly impossible for the lower orders of sentient beings, to deserve either the one or the other. If there is a generalization from the facts of human life which has the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which he deserves; that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while, the righteous ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
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