"A priori" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first wine would be deprived of those fixed and fragrant principles produced by the fermentation of which we have just spoken, when the grapes are immersed in carbonic acid gas, by such a comparison as that which we suggest we should be able to form a priori judgment on the merits of the new system, which had not been carefully studied, although already widely adopted, of milled, cylindrical crushers, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... appear to be good evidence of the great antiquity of the legends recorded by Hesiod. In the first place, arguing merely a priori, it is extremely improbable that in the brief interval between the date of the comparatively pure and noble mythology of the Iliad and the much ruder Theogony of Hesiod men INVENTED stories like the mutilation of Uranus, and the swallowing of his offspring by Cronus. The ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... that we have quoted is, in fact, so preposterous, so utterly incompatible with anything but absolute ignorance of some of the best established facts, that we should have passed it over in silence had it not appeared to afford some clue to M. Flourens' unhesitating, 'a priori', repudiation of all forms of the doctrine of progressive modification of living beings. He whose mind remains uninfluenced by an acquaintance with the phenomena of development, must indeed lack one of the chief ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... modern writer says, "We should not now, h priori, expect that the Incarnate Logos would be born without a human father," we may reply that we are hardly in a position to expect anything a priori in the matter; but when once we have learnt that this Incarnate Logos was to be the Second Head of the human race—the sinless Son of Man—and that in Him humanity was to make a fresh start, it is indeed difficult to see how this could be without ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... theory, is the equal, politically and socially, of the white man; in practice, he is excluded from the vote, from the professions, from the amenities of social intercourse, and even, as we have recently learnt, from the most elementary forms of justice. The general and a priori doctrine of equality is shattering itself against the actual facts; and the old Greek conception, "the slave by nature", may be detected behind the mask of the Christian ideal. And while thus, even in spite of itself, the modern ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... that Henry James has still no rival, nor anything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of European Society. None, even among our most cynical and disillusioned younger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "a priori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in passionate colourless curiosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along the common road of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Socratic sense, as the name of that intellectual process whereby the inadequacy of popular conceptions is exposed. Throughout its history, therefore, "dialectic" has been connected with that which is remote from, or alien to, unsystematic thought, with the a priori, or transcendental, rather than with the facts of common experience ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... who are given to the making of sonnets, Norman Douglas wrote: "I have a sneaking fondness for some of the worst of these bards.... And it is by no means a despicable class of folks who perpetrate such stuff; the third rate sonneteer, a priori, is a gentleman, and this is more than can be said of some of our crude fiction writers who have never yielded themselves to the chastening discipline of verse composition, nor warmed their hearts, for a single instant, at the altar of ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... of patronising him, as a Representative Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. That hapless philosophaster's a priori method, even his very verbiage, is dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through sense and nonsense. But as for Plato-when I find them using Plato's weapons, I shall believe in their understanding ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... Lieutenant Carlo di Ferara over into a ditch. The matter was entirely accidental, and I regretted it very much. I, of course, apologized. But what did the lieutenant do but take it into his head that I, being an assaulter of superior officers, was, by a priori reasoning, this Angelo Fresi in disguise. Accordingly'—he waved his hand around the room—'you ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... opened when he became a student of biology, under Huxley, and the liquid of his suppressed thought began to bubble. He prefaced his romances by a sketch in the old Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Man of the Year Million, an a priori study that made one thankful for one's prematurity. After that physiological piece of logic, however, he tried another essay in evolution, published in 1895 in book form under the title of The Time Machine—the first of ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... reputation, then official science will give more time and study to the topic than it is at present inclined to bestow. Mr. Wallace has asserted that, 'whenever the scientific men of any age have denied, on a priori grounds, the facts of investigation, they have always been wrong'. {12} He adds that Galileo, Harvey, Jenner, Franklin, Young, and Arago, when he 'wanted even to discuss the subject of the electric telegraph,' were 'vehemently opposed by their scientific contemporaries,' ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... that a priori judging and uncandid class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the food there is in the market. "On all discoveries there are persons who, without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by intuition, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... understanding, which Sir Wm. Hamilton has called "the faculty of relations and comparisons," is distinguished by many philosophers from reason in that "reason is the faculty of the higher cognitions or a priori truth." ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... on this curious fact would probably take the form of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, beginning with 'the tendency of the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,' and ending—who can tell where? But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any skill in the scientia scientiarum, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... problems of living matter, chemists and physiologists are employing the most precise standards, units, and measures of the physical sciences. Blood chemistry of our time is a marvel, undreamed of a generation ago. Also, these achievements are a perfect example of the accomplished fact contradicting a priori prediction and criticism. For it was one of the accepted dogmas of the nineteenth century that the phenomena of the living could never be subjected to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... up for no judge, Mr. Sutherland, I assure you; and perhaps I shall do my opinions more justice by remaining silent, seeing I am conscious of utter inability to answer the a priori arguments which you in particular have brought against them. All I would venture to say is, that an a priori argument may owe its force to a mistaken hypothesis with regard to the matter in question; and that the true Baconian method, which is the glory of your English ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... in real friendship together. The whole sum of their pleasure is much increased by mutual sympathy. This happy moral truth, upon which so many of our virtues depend, should be impressed upon the mind; it should be clearly demonstrated to the reason; it should not be repeated as an a priori, sentimental assertion. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... indirectly, to join the Triple Entente in the event of a Franco-German war. By their words and by their acts they have always shown such a firm attitude that any supposition that they could have departed from the strictest neutrality is eliminated a priori. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... it would have mattered little, A PRIORI, whether the relic was a femur or a tibia, a cow or man. In this case, he liked to think it was the thigh-bone of a saint. He possessed an unusually strong dose of that Latin PIETAS, that reverence which consists in leaving things as they ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 3.05 A priori knowledge that a thought was true would be possible only it its truth were recognizable from the thought itself (without anything ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... realizing power; the speculative reason, 'vis theoretica et scientifica', or the power, by which we produce, or aim to produce, unity, necessity, and a universality in all our knowledge by means of principles, [2]'a priori'; the will or practical reason; the faculty of choice, ('Willkuehr'), and (distinct both from the moral will, and the choice), the sensation of volition which I have found reason to include under the head of single ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 4 we find that the distribution of these stars on the sky is tolerably uniform, as might have been predicted. All these stars have a large proper motion, this being in the mean 3".42 per year. This was a priori to be expected from their great proximity. The radial velocity is, numerically, greater than could have been supposed. This fact is probably associated with the generally ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... theoretical, without any accurate distribution of political powers. In living, energetic communities, where the blood of the body politic circulates swiftly, there is an inevitable tendency of the different organs to sympathize and commingle more closely than a priori philosophy would allow. It is usually more desirable than practicable to keep the executive, legislative, and judicial departments entirely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thou pair; a priori this is a likely way of forming a dual. As to the reasons a posteriori they are not to be drawn wholly from the Kowrarega tongue itself. Here the word for two is not pel but quassur. But let us look further. The root p-l, or a modification of it, two in the following dialects; ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... the strong 'a priori' probability that flows in from 1 and 3, on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect to make the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... stile and manner of it, with those my father constantly had heard preached in his parish-church, was the ground of his conjecture,—proving it as strongly, as an argument a priori could prove such a thing to a philosophic mind, That it was Yorick's and no one's else:—It was proved to be so, a posteriori, the day after, when Yorick sent a servant to my uncle Toby's house ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... sharply into an animal and a rational part. WE cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. WE have merely to collect things together without any special a priori theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience—judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides—decide that ON THE WHOLE one type of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... collect the facts which abound in history and ethnology respecting the general teaching of myths, but we must also observe introspectively, and by pursuing the experimental method, the primitive and fundamental psychical facts, so as to discover the a priori conditions of the myth itself. We must ascertain, from a careful psychological examination, the absolutely primitive origin of all mythical representations, and how these are in their turn the actual historical result of the same ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli |
