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More "Generalization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Efforts at generalization, however, and the systematic arrangement of natural phenomena, are seldom wholly fruitless. If false, they tend to provoke discussion—to lead to active thought and useful research. A solitary truth, though new and useful, rarely obtains higher distinction than to be quietly ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... horses. The fame of Cairns had travelled before him to Rosanna, but none had been prepared for a figure so weird or for a countenance so forbidding and malign. His manners were equally uncouth. He shook his bent head to decline refreshment; he pointedly ignored a generalization of Hardcastle's about the crime; and when he spoke, it was in a gratuitously satirical style of ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... 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
... is based on certain facts which, taken in their collective capacity, mean the truth which is expressed in the formula. A higher generalization embraces those which are simpler, and unites by its expression the truths which they contain into the formula of one great truth. This process goes on, rising constantly higher and higher, the generalizations of the ascending series becoming more comprehensive, and the convergence ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 handling of a ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... 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 opinions of the ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... this pathetically false 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 ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... 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 ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... landing ladder and sipped a 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 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 his success ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... 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 knowledge in ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... 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 a repetition ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... to consider the stars from more general statistical points of view, it may therefore be of interest first to make ourselves familiar with these well-known stars, strongly emphasizing, however, the exceptional character of these stars, and carefully avoiding any generalization from the ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... of knowledge, and yet it insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization. It was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material whatever is received from without; it was idealistic in that final stress fell upon the formation of intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal in its assertion that the individual cannot possess or generate ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... field and 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 the experiences ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... 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 ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... faculties; but then, he 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 intent of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 to move—it is not as if the bird had intruded ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... of them, notably Cesalpinus, came within a very little of the discovery of the circulation; the achievements of Darwin are not to be belittled because Lamarck, Malthus or Monboddo had notions in accordance with the tenor of his great generalization of evolution among living beings. Certainly Jenner had precursors; but it was his genius and his genius alone which, putting together the various fragments of knowledge already possessed, gave us the grand but simple induction based on his own experiments that ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... judged by their effects; for this is the only means we have of knowing them to be such. And if a poison is in common use, we must embrace all the results of such use in a perfect generalization before we can decide impartially. We do not hesitate to eat peaches, though we know they owe much of their peculiar flavor to prussic acid. It is but fair to apply an equally large generalization to tobacco. Chemistry can concentrate the sapid and odorous elements ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... powers have, it is true, enabled me now and then to seize on some conspicuous group of unappropriated facts, and to search out some generalization which might bring them under the reign of known law; but they are not suited to that more scientific and more laborious process of elaborate induction, which in Mr. Darwin's hands has led ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class, just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,—so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generalization is done to the poet's hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's affections gives her privileges and rank in the household; and observe the mode of connection by accidents of time and place, and the childlike ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations—the dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... extravagant estimate of the value of this work. For the object of the work is to show, "that diversified colouration follows the chief lines of structure, and changes at points, such as the joints, where function changes." Now, in publishing this generalization, Mr. Tylor—who was not a naturalist—took only a very limited view of the facts. When applied to the animal kingdom as a whole, the theory is worthless; and even within the limits of mammals, birds, and insects—which are the classes to which Mr. Tylor mainly ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... in expression, 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 of this that led poetry into ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... 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
... McCarthy, Justin. Meaning of words. Memory. Metaphor: mixed. Methods of developing a composition: with reference to time-order, with reference to position in space, by use of comparison or contrast, by use of generalization and facts, by stating cause and effect, by a combination of methods. Metonymy. Metrical romance. Metrical tale. Mill. Mill, J. S. Miller, Mary Rogers. Milton. Mode. Montgomery. Morris, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... 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 our ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... philosophy was that powerfully presented in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief, that conservative ideals were bad, not because They were conservative, but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... comprehend such 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... problem from many viewpoints and there seemed to be no 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 ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... physicist who discovers a new law seldom succeeds in doing more than testing its general accuracy by experiments; it is reserved for his successors to note the divergence between his broad and sweeping generalization and particular instances which do not quite accord with it. So it was with Boyle's law that the volume of a gas varies in inverse ratio to the pressure to which it is exposed; so it is with the Darwinian theory, inasmuch as deterioration and degeneration play a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... could have taken the sharp, clear form of words; for to the poet practically developed and made manifest to the world, many other gifts besides the mere poetic sense are needed,—stern study, and logical generalization of scattered truths, and patient observation of the characters of men, and the wisdom that comes from sorrow and passion, and a sage's experience of things actual, embracing the dark secrets of human infirmity and crime. But despite all that has been said in disparagement ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... proceedings of its Committees, on 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 did not take a prominent part in the discussions ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... with the generalization: "I don't believe anybody can know too much to keep a hotel. It won't hurt Jeff if he's been to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Wolfe, and 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 many of our ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... 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
... of course, Kenelm could not at a glance comprehend in detail. But as the mind of a man accustomed to generalization is marvellously quick in forming a sound judgment, whereas a mind accustomed to dwell only on detail is wonderfully slow at arriving at any judgment at all, and when it does, the probability is that it will arrive at a wrong one, Kenelm judged correctly when ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cause, the final end, and the person meant to make use of the thing produced. It further is matter of experience that whatever consists of non-sentient matter is dependent on, or ruled by, a single intelligent principle. The former generalization is exemplified by the case of jars and similar things, and the latter by a living body in good health, which consists of non-intelligent matter dependent on an intelligent principle. And that the body is an effected thing follows from ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... to me there never was an age, since the dawn of time, when men ought to be less disposed to rest satisfied with the progress already made, than the age in which we live; for there never was an age more distinguished for ingenious research, for novel result, and bold generalization. ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... 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 ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... these mountains are so broad, and a short distance in the woods seems so far, that one is by no means master of the situation after reaching the summit. And then there are so many spurs and offshoots and changes of direction, added to the impossibility of making any generalization by the aid of the eye, that before one is aware of it he is very ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... have 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 far away ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... once more subjected to his deliberate observation and intuition; by this process the external and internal world are doubled in their intrinsic ideal, and give birth to analysis and abstraction, that is, to the specification and generalization ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... 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. Bronson Howard never ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... of Perception results in the formation of an internal picture or image of its ideas which intelligence can call up at any time without the sensuous, immediate presence of its object, and thus, through abstraction and generalization, arises the conception. The mental image may (1) be compared with the perception from which it sprang, or (2) it may be arbitrarily altered and combined with other images, or (3) it may be held fast in the form of ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... course,[37] I shall endeavor, therefore, to mass for you, in such rude and diagram-like outline as may be possible or intelligible, the main characteristics of the two schools, completing and correcting the details of comparison afterwards; and not answering, observe, at present, for any generalization I give you, except as a ground for subsequent closer and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Africa, Cambodia, India, North America (Eskimo), South America (Peru),[281] and there are survivals in modern Europe. In China this wholesale expulsion is still practiced in a very elaborate form.[282] Among the Ainu, it is said, on the occasion of any accident the "spirit of accidents" (a useful generalization) is driven away by the community.[283] In these cases the spirits are thought of as being in a sort corporeal, sensitive to blows, and also as afraid of noise. There is sometimes a combination of natural ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... 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
... my pen is running ahead, an imagination prone to realistic constructions is struggling to paint a picture altogether prematurely. There is very much to be weighed and decided before we can get from our present generalization to the style of architecture these houses will show, and to the power and nature of the public taste. We have laid down now the broad lines of road, railway, and sea transit in the coming century, and we have got this general prophecy of "urban regions" ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 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
... 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 numerous they may be. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... must show the features of the Mind which tabernacles in nature. There can be no contradiction. Unquestionably an essential characteristic of the Mind in nature is the method of its action. There is a reign of Law. The highest generalization of the methods of this law which man has reached reveals this Power as acting, through every sphere, in continuous progressive development. One word embodies this supreme generalization—evolution. Christianity must fit into this universal order. Otherwise ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... 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, ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... 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 of one of ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rightly when they knew what they were doing, or, in the language of the Gorgias, 'did what they would.' He seems to have been the first who maintained that the good was the useful (Mem.). In his eagerness for generalization, seeking, as Aristotle says, for the universal in Ethics (Metaph.), he took the most obvious intellectual aspect of human action which occurred to him. He meant to emphasize, not pleasure, but the calculation of pleasure; neither is he arguing that pleasure is the ...
— Philebus • Plato
... 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
... definite weight or in some multiple of this weight. He called this proportion the "atom," since it invariably enters compounds without division, and the weight of this atom is the atomic weight. This generalization was of great value inasmuch as it permitted the deduction of the atomic weight of a non-gasifiable element from a study of the densities of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... the earth, becomes flesh, manifests itself by institutions, and identifies itself with life. The daily act takes on a revolutionary value, and social transformation, if it comes some day, will only be the generalization of this act." It is true that Lagardelle's "direct action" tends towards revolution, but does it tend towards Socialism? His answer is that it does. But his answer itself indicates the tendency of syndicalism to drift back into conservative unionism and the mere demand for somewhat ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... distinguished. Shepherd, Mather, Troost, Torrey, and a few others, still pursue mineralogy for its own sake; but, generally, our mineralogists have turned geologists, studying rocks on a large scale, instead of their individual constituents, and vieing with their brethren in Europe in bold and successful generalization, and in the application of physical science to their subject. Maclure was one of the pioneers, and Eaton and Silliman contributed much to the stock of knowledge. This school has given rise to the great geological ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... also. In the 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 pageant," though it may happen, as Tennyson said ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... 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 and secretly wishing ...
— The American • Henry James
... explore; no heights of speculation which he has not scaled; no problem of the world over which he is not fruitfully toiling. Moreover, his thoroughness is the envy of the students of all other countries, and his hatred of sham scholarship and slipshod generalization is intense. ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... 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 reflection, Publius Vergilius ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... and fear and a perpetual state of animosity and warfare are induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... sufficient flavoring of truth to make the erroneous notion pass as true. At bottom, the human soul loves truth, nor willingly believes or receives a lie. Our intellectual sin is synecdoche, the putting a part truth for a whole truth. Generalization is dangerous intellectual exercise. Our premise is insufficient, and our conclusion is self-sufficient, like some strutting scion of a decayed house. Trace the origin of this idea of a poet's non-sanity. He was not ordinary, as other men, but was extraordinary, and as such belonged to the upper rather ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... 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
... implication seems to be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus, Echoes; Olive Dargan, Ye Who are ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Sefton, but the Secretary remained calm, composed and smiling, listening to Harley with the same air of interested curiosity shown by the others. Prescott saw it all with a flash of intuition; the Secretary had given Harley a hint, just a vague generalization, within the confines of truth, but without any names—enough to make those concerned uneasy, but not enough to put the power in any hands save those of the Secretary. Harley himself confirmed this by continuing the subject, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... is a charming book, with illuminating passages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the preciosity of dainty generalization, to reach the dark and arbitrary soul, either of Spain or ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... to rational generalization, which I illustrated from the law of larceny, are shown in the other branches of the law, as well as in that of crime. Take the law of tort or civil liability for damages apart from contract and the like. ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... little; but they show that they can think. But often they seem utterly stupid and lost, and one is perplexed to know what their difficulty can possibly be. One thing is clear, that they have little faculty of generalization. As you know, they seldom have a name for their island, but only names for each tiny headland, and bay, and village. The name for the island you must learn from the inhabitants of another island who view the one whose name you are seeking as one because, being distant, it must appear to them ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the community, and the larger world, and to cut across group life so as to see its characteristics, its interests, and its organization, is to study sociology in the most natural way and to obtain the necessary data for generalization. To attempt to study sociological principles without this preliminary investigation is to confuse the student and leave him in a sea ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... Heth, who held that any kind of generalization constituted good talk. She added: "Who are all these people? How would ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 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 of mine represent ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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
... among savage tribes all over the world," interpreted by his remarks in another connection, is understood as referring to their common use of signs, and of signs formed on the same principles, but not of precisely the same signs to express the same ideas. In this sense of the generalization the result of the writer's study not only sustains it, but shows a surprising number of signs for the same idea which are substantially identical, not only among savage tribes, but among all peoples that use gesture ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... the case in all my travels. What is, or seems to be, accurate to-day of any given thing in a given place is wrong tomorrow under seemingly the same conditions; and although no theme could be more tempting, and no subject offer wider scope for ingenious hypothesis and profound generalization, one has to forego much temptation to "color" if he would be accurate of anything he writes of the Chinese. Eminent sinologues agree as to the impossibility of the conception of the Chinese mind and character as a whole, so glaring are the inconsistencies of the Chinese nature. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... searches through 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 passes ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... far-reaching principles which govern the world, which are alone worthy of your attention. A fact which is not an illustration of a law, in the opinion of these persons appears to lose all its value. Incidents which do not fit into some great generalization, events which are merely picturesque, details which are merely curious, they dismiss as unworthy the interest of a reasoning being. Now, even in science this doctrine in its extreme form does not hold good. The most scientific ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... her shuddering shoulders to the grave. Probably, as she is good 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... possibly true of imaginary cases, but are not true of man as he really acts. They therefore assert that economic laws can only be truly discovered by induction, or a study of phenomena first, as the means of reaching a generalization. To them Bagehot(80) answers that scientific bookkeeping, or collections of facts, in themselves give no results ending in scientific laws; for instance, since the facts of banking change and vary every day, no one can by induction alone reach any laws of banking; ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... 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, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... the time they reached the Jura and the plain of Northern Italy, when compared with what they are now, they seem directly connected with the Alps, and the mountains appear as their birthplace; so much so that the first attempts at a generalization concerning their origin started from the assumption that they must have been formed between the high ridges from which they seem to flow down. These facts, then the only ones known concerning a greater ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... women in any country a real tragedy. It is impossible to generalize with any degree of confidence about the sexual nature of either man or woman in our present state of crude and barbarous ignorance; but I am inclined—very tentatively—to agree that this generalization is correct, and that the creative impulse is an even stronger factor in the sexual life of women than of men. I realize the cruelty of a civilization in which war and its accessories create an artificial ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... farther 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
... 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 which ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... 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 Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... saying, I've seen more living beauty, ripe and real, than all the nonsense of their stone ideal. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has induced him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of Art. Having, I say, felt its truth here. For the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations, than the sentiment of his Art yields ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the worship of a Universal Soul, to have been the instinctive creed of any savage people or rude race of men. To imagine all nature with all its apparently independent parts, as forming one consistent whole, and as itself a unit, required an amount of experience and a faculty of generalization not possessed by the rude uncivilized mind, and is but a step below the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... facts and phenomena presented any such import, that was an affair for men of letters to deal with; but, as men of science, it was their duty to avoid the seductive temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, in the form of speculation, deduction, and generalization. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... fulness that more than compensate for their lack of dry legal detail. Bacon seems indeed to have been a lawyer of the first order, with a keen scientific insight into the bearings of isolated facts and a power of generalization which admirably fitted him for the self-imposed task, unfortunately never completed, of digesting or codifying the chaotic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... 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 him in the character ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 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 ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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 ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... vivid interest of the narrative and the comprehensive generalization which springs naturally from the author's plan of a large work on American history, of which the two volumes now published are no more than a third or a fourth part, make it a book of ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... 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
... scientific generalization is based on certain facts which, taken in their collective capacity, mean the truth which is expressed in the formula. A higher generalization embraces those which are simpler, and unites by its expression the truths ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with Balzac, that the surplus of general hypotheses overflows at times, and that the novels are too prone to digressions. Be that as it may, it seems incontestible that this was his master faculty, the virtue and vice of his thought. Let us see, however, by what singular detour this power of generalization—the antithesis, one might say, of the creative power—increased in him the faculty of the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... and to know than did the same mind before entering school, but even a stronger, more self-directed, purposive and efficient zeal in such direction. Intellectual vivacity and point, clearness of conception, and truthfulness of generalization and of inference,—all these should appear in more marked degree, along with the increased sobriety and judgment, and the improved facility of practical adaptation, which properly characterize maturity of mind and habit. Now, we suggest the careful observation of any number of children, not ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to kick him if he wasn't such a duffer," was Nick's reluctant thought, for he had wanted to be favourably impressed by the Dook. If this were really anything like an English duke, give him a crossing-sweeper! But he must not be too hasty in his generalization. He was unhappily sure that Mrs. May's position in her far-off world (world for which he was deemed unworthy) associated her with dukes, earls, barons, counts, and all sorts of titled anachronisms of every nation. Repulsive as this draggled specimen ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 same idea. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... perfectly sure, because in Paris streets it was my happy lot four months after the Armistice to talk with many American soldiers, among whom some felt sore about the French. Not one of these but saw with his good American sense, directly I pointed certain facts out to him, that his hostile generalization had been unjust. But, to quote the oft-quoted Mr. Kipling, that ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... embrace these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creative reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is the parent of all true knowledge, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... sentinel, as he was termed by our ancestors)—viz. miles gregarius, or miles manipularis—there was none for an officer; that is to say, each several rank of officers had a name; but there was no generalization to express the idea of an officer abstracted from its several species or classes.] It cannot much surprise us that this department of the public service should gradually have gone to ruin or decay. Under the senate and people, under the auspices of those awful ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... vacillation, obscurity, uncertainty, are as foreign to his style as to his mind. He is almost rigid in his precision. Every word has its meaning, and every idea its stern, sure, decisive statement. His masterly powers of analysis, of reasoning, of generalization, are always adequately exhibited by a corresponding mastery of expression. The study of such a volume as the present is itself an education in statement and logic; and that it will be studied by thousands, in the colleges and out of the colleges of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... doubt: the teachers, for being more anxious to expound systems than to listen to difficulties, to make their theories plain than to analyse the theories of their—I will not say adversaries—but opponents; the would-be learners, for hasty generalization; for bringing to the conflict a deliberate prejudice against all traditional authority, a want of patience in translating dogmas into life, a tendency to flatly deny that such a transmutation ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... house with us. A real lady seldom appears in these comedies, and—to approach a paradox—when she does she usually comes perilously close to being no lady; the same is usually true of the real gentleman. The generalization in the Epilogue of The Captives may well be made particular: "Plautus finds few plays such as this which make good men better." Yet there is little in his plays which makes men—to say nothing of good ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... since we have no real equivalent for the term. It was applicable not merely to human conduct, but also to the acting of the lower animals, and even to the growth of plants. Now, apart from a craze of generalization we should hardly think of the "stern daughter of the voice of God" in connection with an amoeba corresponding successfully to stimulus, yet the creature in its inchoate way is exhibiting a dim analogy to duty. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... to make any generalization on the amount that should be devoted to publicity. Taking the $1.50 novel as a standard, it might be said that figuring in all kinds of publicity—newspaper, magazine, circular, literary notices, etc.—from ten to twelve per cent of the wholesale price on the first edition of 10,000 would be a ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... 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 characteristic ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... particularly 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
... cottage by Gainsborough, very fine. Jackson's and Robinson's miniatures, and sketches in water-colors,—charming. Leslie's designs, with Stothard's on the same subject, are delightfully contrasted: Leslie's, neatly finished and full of individuality; Stothard's, a beautiful, free generalization, without finish. (But the engraver understands him, and finishes for him, adding the hands and feet in his own way.) It is a representation of Jeanie Deans's interview with the Queen. Leslie's figure is standing; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... impression on his imagination; and his leap from these remote theories to his interpretation of the plasmodia seemed an achievement of "genius." It may be said that this "feat of genius," this visionary generalization, prevented Laveran from seeing the truth. A form of arrogance and levity ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... devoted to duty. 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 ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... place, generalization about any species of animal is an exceedingly dangerous thing. I believe that, in the case of the higher animals at least, the differences in individual temperament are quite likely to be more numerous than the specific likenesses. Just as individual ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or what not, it was 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 woman threw ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... the attitude of the public and of the courts was more friendly to the accused witch. This explanation is at best, however, nothing more than a suggestion. We have not the material for confident generalization. ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... high authority in such a case, tells us that "we have every reason to believe, at least in the generality of cases, that a nebula is nothing more than a cluster of stars."[33] Sir David Brewster is equally explicit: "It was certainly a rash generalization to maintain that nebulae differed essentially from clusters of stars, because existing telescopes could not resolve them. The very first application of Lord Rosse's telescopes to the heavens overturned the hypothesis; and with such unequivocal facts as that instrument ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... is the 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... a comprehensive accusation of selfishness against the sex. But it seems to be a generalization founded on a local and restricted observation. It is true of the woman of many artists and critics. The women of Du Maurier, for instance, belong to "a set," but they are not representatives of a sex. Becky Sharp ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... the top of a steeple, he could take it upon him to assure me, that the 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 his comparison might have ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... unrestrained talk to find that the delicious non sequitur, which is the charm of the grave-diggers' conversation in "Hamlet," is by no means obsolete. But who can write such a colloquy? It would be easier, we fancy, for a clever man to give a sketch of Lord Bacon, with all his rapid and profound generalization, than to follow the slow and tortuous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... all other kinds of things;" and, he continues, "the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living." Now let us carefully remember that the great doctrine of Charles Darwin has furnished biology with a magnificent generalization; one indeed which stands upon so broad a basis that great masses of detail and many needful interlocking facts are, of necessity, relegated to the quiet workers of the present and the earnest laborers of the years to come. But it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... to apply this generalization too early. And this brings me to an important factor in the case: the factor ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... the same species has thus an entirely different meaning, an entirely different origin, to that of the likeness between complex effects obtained by the same composition of the same causes. But in the one case as in the other, there is likeness, and consequently possible generalization. And as that is all that interests us in practice, since our daily life is and must be an expectation of the same things and the same situations, it is natural that this common character, essential from the point of view of our action, should bring the two orders together, in ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... generalization we may collect the following important results concerning our monuments: 1. They are scattered all over Amer. from lat. 45d. N. to 45d. S. of the Equator, thus occupying 90d. of latitude, which is no where else the case.—2. They chiefly occupy a flexuose belt from our great ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque
... 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
... idealized rather than imitated, is in error. No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has led him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of art. Having, I say, felt its truth here; for the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... 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 of mine represent a hundred ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents of our national life and explains the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... unfilled by Substance. That is to say, it is the Analogue of Space, not in the sense in which we formerly regarded Space as the negation of Matter; but in the sense of Infinite Dimensionality, or of Dimensionality in all directions, as a vague generalization from the three special dimensions Length, Breadth, and Thickness. It is, therefore, round or ball-like, and huge, and, in respect to the nature of the tone, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... logic of actual inquiry and classification, drop out. The really thought-provoking character is obscured, and the organizing function disappears. Or, as we commonly say, the child's reasoning powers, the faculty of abstraction and generalization, are not adequately developed. So the subject-matter is evacuated of its logical value, and, though it is what it is only from the logical standpoint, is presented as stuff only for "memory." This is the contradiction: the child gets the advantage ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... driven to the school After waiting at the school till the young lady was ready, he had conveyed them back again to the station, and they took the up-train. That was all he knew. The gentleman, if his opinion were asked, was "a scaly varmint." On inquiry, Maitland found that this wide moral generalization was based on the limited pour-boire which Mr. Lithgow had presented to his charioteer. Had the gentleman any luggage? Yes, he had a portmanteau, which he left in the cloak-room, and took away ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... unsculptured epispore of the spores of reticularias, tubiferas, etc., suggest the same thing and more recently we find it in Dianema and in the Stemoniteae; even Stemonitis arrives with clustered spores in groups of four, and we are in sight of a generalization wide. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... a realization of the vital needs of increased ways of applying the experience we present to students. As the laws of physics, mathematics, biology, composition, economics, etc., are applied to a number of specific instances, the generalization grows in meaning and in force. Specific cases vary, and, varying, give new color and new meaning to the laws that are applied to explain them. How much a law in chemistry means after it is applied to specific instances in industry, human and animal physiology, plant life, or engineering! The ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... multiplied so extensively not only the number of geological periods, but also the successive creations that have characterized them, yet the first general division into three great eras was nevertheless founded upon a broad and true generalization. In the first stratified rocks in which any organic remains are found, the highest animals are fishes, and the highest plants are cryptogams; in the middle periods reptiles come in, accompanied by fern and moss forests; in later times quadrupeds are introduced, with ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... of the farmer, the difficulty is to find the typical farmer's mind that north, south, east, and west will be accepted as standard. In our science there is perhaps at present no place where generalization needs to move with greater caution than in the statement of the farmer's psychic characteristics. It is human to crave simplicity, and we are never free from the danger of forcing concrete facts into general statements that do violence to ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... is running ahead, an imagination prone to realistic constructions is struggling to paint a picture altogether prematurely. There is very much to be weighed and decided before we can get from our present generalization to the style of architecture these houses will show, and to the power and nature of the public taste. We have laid down now the broad lines of road, railway, and sea transit in the coming century, and we have got this general prophecy ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... each of these qualities they were supreme. Marx possessed a colossal mind; no thinker upon social subjects, not even Herbert Spencer, has been his superior, for the lonely socialist could claim a comprehensiveness, a grasp of relations and a power of generalization, together with a boldness of conception, which place him in a class by himself. Engels was the able co-adjutor and co-worker with Marx. He was a deep and acute thinker, a most patient investigator, a careful writer. More practical than his friend, ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... "orders;" at the end of a week perhaps the job that should have consumed two hours of honest work is done; then, if you pay the boss no more than the work actually cost him, you know that the sum is twice as much as it should have cost him. As a generalization this is a true picture ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... must be conceded that Mr. Mill lived at an unfortunate time. While his vigor and independence of thought led him to break loose from the trammels of the traditional philosophy, modern scientific generalization had not yet reached a stage favorable to his becoming a leader in developing the new philosophy. Still, whatever may be the merits of his philosophic theories, I believe that up to a quite recent time no work on scientific method appeared worthy to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations—the dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... matter of memory, that is worth little; but they show that they can think. But often they seem utterly stupid and lost, and one is perplexed to know what their difficulty can possibly be. One thing is clear, that they have little faculty of generalization. As you know, they seldom have a name for their island, but only names for each tiny headland, and bay, and village. The name for the island you must learn from the inhabitants of another island who view the one whose ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 of nature, I refer to ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... monotheism beyond the pale of the Abrahamic church. In the records of the kings of Assyria and Babylonia there is a conspicuous polytheism, yet it is significant that each king worshipped one God only. And this fact suggests, as a wide generalization, that political and dynastic jealousies had their influence in multiplying the names and differentiating the attributes of ancient deities. This was notably the case in ancient Egypt, where each invasion and each change of dynasty led to a new ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... 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 characteristic that ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... presented any such import, that was an affair for men of letters to deal with; but, as men of science, it was their duty to avoid the seductive temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, in the form of speculation, deduction, and generalization. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... 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 ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... upon a | metaphysics 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 reality, ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... the production of men." These statements of the relation of population to food supply, however, are incidental to Smith's general theories of economics; the contribution of Malthus lay in taking this principle out of its limited context, giving it the character of scientific generalization, and applying it to current theories and programs ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... programme of a school too young as yet to have matured its shape, but full of vigor and confidence, and a very promising outgrowth from the elder and more stately academy of abstract historical inquiry and generalization. The latter has redeveloped and freshened up for us the pictures of the ancient story-tellers, and has furthermore had them, so to speak, engraved and scattered among the people, until we have come to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... non-ego—the person and the thing; he reduces man to a thing, instead of a person,—to one among the many phenomena of the universe, determined by the same laws of invariable antecedence and consequence, included under the same formulae of empirical generalization. He thus makes man the slave, and not the master of nature; passively carried along in the current of successive phenomena; unable, by any act of free will, to arrest a single wave in its course, or to divert it from ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... prominent critics on the poetry 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 sent Nature about her business as an impertinent ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... journalistic cleverness. Selma had no 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 ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... American universities, represent simply the condensed judgment of centuries of experience and induction as to the means by which the human intellect may be most surely strengthened and developed. They are the results of long generalization, and are founded deep on a knowledge of the human mind. Shall we venture to depart from the old ways, and to decry the customs handed down to us from the ages gone by? Do we not know that the wisdom of twenty centuries, as ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... shaping the land as we know it. That bold man was Agassiz, who, however, was not bold enough to accept the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin. The idea of the great glacier did not conflict with Agassiz's religious predilections, and the theory of evolution did. It was a bold generalization, this of the continental ice-sheet, one of the master-strokes of the scientific imagination. It was about the year 1840 that Agassiz, fresh from the glaciers of the Alps, went to Scotland looking for the tracks of the old glaciers, and he found ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... 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 religious thoughts ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... indicate that even in those days of intense suffering Lanier impressed her favorably. "It was refreshing," she says, "to listen to a professor of literature who was something more than a 'raconteur' and something different from a bibliophile, who had, indeed, risen to the level of generalization and employed the method of a philosopher. . . . [His] face [was] very pale and delicate, with finely chiseled features, dark, clustering hair, parted in the middle, and beard after the manner of the Italian school of art. . . . He sits not very reposefully in his professorial ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... The last and most pretentious form of this dogma is, that the sense of the miraculous fades away in the progress of what arrogates to itself the name of Rationalism. This is one of the delusive results of introducing generalization into historical disquisitions. History deals with man. Man is always the same. The race consists, not of an aggregation, but of individuals, in all ages, never moulded or melted into classes. Each individual has ever retained his distinctness from every ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... have inspired him). Although only a playful composition, it will be found to embody two principles: first, that of synthesis or the comprehension of parts in a whole; secondly, analysis, or the resolution of the whole into parts. These are the processes of division and generalization which are so dear to the dialectician, that king of men. They are effected by dialectic, and not by rhetoric, of which the remains are but scanty after order and arrangement have been subtracted. There is nothing left ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... 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 long as ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... travelled down 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
... placed to it; and 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 him in the character of a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... delivered by Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster, after his death had been announced by his colleague, Judge Butler. Mr. Clay spoke of his "transcendent talents," of his "clear, concise, compact logic," of his "felicity in generalization surpassed by no one." He intimated that he would have been glad to see Mr. Calhoun succeed Mr. Monroe in the Presidency in 1820. Mr. Webster, who always measured his words, spoke of him as "a man of undoubted genius and commanding talent, of unspotted integrity, of unimpeached ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the more personal part of the psalm. A more didactic portion follows, the generalization of that. Possibly the voice which now speaks is a higher than David's. "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go. I will guide thee with mine eye," scarcely sounds like ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... carelessly taken. The tops of these mountains are so broad, and a short distance in the woods seems so far, that one is by no means master of the situation after reaching the summit. And then there are so many spurs and offshoots and changes of direction, added to the impossibility of making any generalization by the aid of the eye, that before one is aware of it he is ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of sights which tired the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final; they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded, sharp-witted, kind-hearted, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to generalize from them. The advantage of this inductive method of explanation grows out of the fact that, after a general idea has been illustrated by an example or two, most persons can grasp it with much less effort and with much greater interest than when such exemplification follows the generalization. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... 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 ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... more risk, and 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 ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... in contact. Many of those rules may seem to us ridiculous and fanciful, but they 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 opinions ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... sense, that although there was a name for a common soldier (or sentinel, as he was termed by our ancestors)—viz. miles gregarius, or miles manipularis—there was none for an officer; that is to say, each several rank of officers had a name; but there was no generalization to express the idea of an officer abstracted from its several species or classes.] It cannot much surprise us that this department of the public service should gradually have gone to ruin or decay. Under the senate and people, under the auspices of those awful symbols—letters more ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... paragraph Berkeley maintains that it is essential to things, or at any rate to their qualities, that they be perceived. This principle when expressed as an epistemological or metaphysical generalization, is called phenomenalism. But in another phase of his thought Berkeley emphasizes the perceiver, or spirit. The theory which maintains that the only real substances are these active selves, with their powers and their states, has been called somewhat vaguely by the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... beginning was other than natural; it was inevitable from the constitution of matter itself. Moreover, since the law of evolution seems of universal application, and affords the key to more great problems than any other generalization of the human mind, one would say on a priori grounds that life is an evolution, that its genesis is to be sought in the inherent capacities and potentialities of matter itself. How else could it come? ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... 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, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... as 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 and ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... that point. I've got the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and toes. I am the same. I have not developed any new strength nor virtue. My brain is the same old brain. I haven't made even one new generalization on literature or philosophy. I am personally of the same value that I was when nobody wanted me. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don't want me for myself, for myself is the same old self they did not want. Then they must want me for something ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... failed. His fundamental conceptions, upon which reposes the whole edifice of his labor, are sciolistic assumptions caught up in his youth from Auguste Comte and other one-eyed seers of modern France; his generalization, multitudinous and imposing, is often of the card-castle description, and tumbles at the touch of an inquisitive finger; and his cobweb logic, spun chiefly out of his wishes rather than his understanding, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it absolutely from all other kinds of things;" and, he continues, "the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living." Now let us carefully remember that the great doctrine of Charles Darwin has furnished biology with a magnificent generalization; one indeed which stands upon so broad a basis that great masses of detail and many needful interlocking facts are, of necessity, relegated to the quiet workers of the present and the earnest laborers of the years to come. But it is a doctrine which cannot be shaken. The constant and universal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... the development of every exact science, its substance having grown sufficiently to make generalization possible, there is a time when a series of changes bring it into clearness. This time has most certainly arrived for the science of kinematics. The number of mechanisms has grown almost out of measure, and the number of ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... 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 to communicate his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... discourse without being prompted, after the most vexatious interruptions. His judgment was as sound as his memory was retentive; it was almost infallible,—no one was ever known to have been misled by it. He had a remarkable analytical power, and also the power of generalization. He was a very learned man, and his Commentaries are among the most useful and valued of his writings, showing both learning and judgment; his exegetical works have scarcely been improved. He had no sceptical or rationalistic tendencies, and therefore his Commentaries may not be admired by ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... benefit forgot is about to merge in the meditation of general injustice—when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend, whose not seeing of us in the morning, (for we will now confess the case our own), an accidental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generalization! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had brought in his hand the identical S——, in whose favour we had suspected him of the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... shoulders to the grave. Probably, as she is good 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... expression, 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. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... of Europe through, and so far as I know, or as it is possible to make with safety any so wide generalization, you will not find in them a childish or feeble drawing, by these, or by any ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Synesius. So in later years he reflects from Schelling the flitting tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination between the ideas of the mind and the laws of the natural world. Science is to be attained, not by observation, analysis, generalization, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideas from within, by a sort of [Greek: anamnesis], every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 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 ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... has been observed from the dawn of recorded time up to, say, midnight, August 4, 1919, will continue to be observed on August 5, 1919. How, except by relying on the truth of some principle which does not depend itself on the validity of 'generalization', can we tell that it is even slightly probable that the nature of things will not change suddenly at the moment of midnight between August 4 and August 5, 1919? What is called 'inductive' science certainly has 'pulled off' ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... fire, and so on. But, in the first place, it cannot be said that the conflict of statements concerning the world affects the statements concerning the cause, i.e. Brahman, in which all the Vedanta-texts are seen to agree—for that would be an altogether unfounded generalization;—and, in the second place, the teacher will reconcile later on (II, 3) those conflicting passages also which refer to the world. And, to consider the matter more thoroughly, a conflict of statements regarding the world would not even matter greatly, since the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... and factories, both in England and on the Continent, for the purpose of endeavouring to make himself acquainted with the various resources of mechanical art, he was insensibly led to apply to them those principles of generalization to which his other pursuits had naturally given rise. It should be observed, that he has not attempted to offer a complete enumeration of all the mechanical principles which regulate the application of machinery to arts and manufactures, but he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... merely because powerful men and powerful bodies of men have not chosen to learn the meaning of the word "liberty." "How miserable you make the world for one another, O feeble race of men!" So said our own melancholy English cynic; and he had singularly good reason for his plaint. Rapid generalization is nearly always mischievous; unless we learn to form correct and swift judgments on every faculty of life as it comes before us, we merely stumble from error to error. No cut-and-dried maxim ever yet ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... moods of anger and fear and a perpetual state of animosity and warfare are induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the formation ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... they cannot 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 to ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... They did not have the 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 with, ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... watched her father. A new light shone upon him, a new emotion disturbed him; perhaps that old hardness within was giving way. Ledwith had the poetic temperament, and the philosopher's power of generalization. A hint could open a grand horizon before him, and the cathedral in its solemn beauty was the hint. Of course, he could see it all, blind as he had been before. The Irish revolution worked fitfully, and exploded in a night, its achievement measured by the period ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Basis 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 ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... between Emerson and the other moralists is that all these stimulating pictures and suggestions are not given by him in illustration of a general proposition. They have never been through the mill of generalization in his own mind. He himself could not have told you their logical bearing on one another. They have all the vividness of disconnected fragments of life, and yet they all throw light on one another, like the facets of a jewel. But whatever cause it was that led him to adopt his ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... are sketching out a 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 same idea. So does the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression, with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation, as well as the permanent irresponsiveness associated with death. Filled with awe at this stupendous generalization, it was with great hope that I announced my results before the Royal Society—results demonstrated by experiments. But the physiologists present advised me to confine myself to physical investigations, in ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of 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 of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... done: "I have shown that there 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 doctrines, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... de metaphysique et de morale, 1911, p. 821.] It is distinct from these data, as the motor impulse is distinct from the path traversed by the moving body, as the tension of the spring is distinct from the visible movements of the pendulum. In this sense Metaphysics has nothing in common with a generalization of facts. It might, however, be defined as "integral experience." Nevertheless Intuition, once attained, must find a mode of expression in well-defined concepts, for in itself it is incommunicable. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. There is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which have shattered their happiness. ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... must not begin to apply this generalization too early. And this brings me to an important factor in the case: the ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... few scherzos that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. Kelley and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization. ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... modern history without correct views on that subject, is like playing Hamlet without the character of the Prince of Denmark. He was too indolent to acquire the vast store of facts indispensable for correct generalization on the varied theatre of human affairs, and often drew hasty and incorrect conclusions from the events which particularly came under his observation. Thus the repeated indecisive battles between ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... to be studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and abandon the other sciences which are all members of wisdom."[104] "Many love better to be held masters than to be so." With him wisdom is the generalization from many several knowledges of small account by themselves; it results therefore from breadth of culture, and would be impossible without it. Philosophy is a noble lady (donna gentil),[105] partaking of the divine essence by a kind of eternal marriage, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... exhaust valve, which is always placed between the 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
... speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and 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 to be as open as the day with me. There was not only the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... comparative method; but the same process is equally applicable to the most intricate problems in animal structures, and will give us the clue to all true affinities between animals. The education of a naturalist, now, consists chiefly in learning how to compare. If he have any power of generalization, when he has collected his facts, this habit of mental comparison will lead him up to principles, to the great laws of combination. It must not discourage us, that the process is a slow and laborious one, and the results of one lifetime ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... entitled "Different Forms of Insanity in relation to Jurisprudence," published in 1842. We may well be dissatisfied with some of the illustrations of the doctrine it supports. We may express in different terms the generalization he has made as to the relation of intellect and emotion; but I am greatly mistaken if we shall not from time to time be confronted by facts which instantly raise the question which presented itself with so much force to his acute mind, and which does not appear to ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... 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 in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... understand in a human, matter-of-fact sort of way what he really did in definite sets of circumstances, and what practical objects he had in view. The average European reader, not having specific facts and places under his eye, can only conceive from this rough generalization, and from the usual anecdotal tit-bits told about him, that Confucius was an exceedingly timid, prudent, benevolent, and obsequious old gentleman who, as indeed his rival Lao-tsz hinted to him, was something like a superior ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... of omnibuses and in Chelsea drawing-rooms, at the music-hall, at the opera, at classical concerts, and in Bond Street galleries. We take them for granted and are perfectly civil to them. So why, because he happened to have an astonishing gift of statement and rapid generalization, should Zola be treated as though he were a monster? Though Diggle, the billiards champion, care little or nothing for poetry, he may have an excellent heart, as well as a hand far surpassing in dexterity that of our most accomplished portrait-painters. No one ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... again into the 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 understanding and mastery of life, we may be certain ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... an empty generalization to say that any kind of change is a process of evolution? At most it means little more than that you want to intimate that miraculous intervention is not necessary to account for ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... found the Indians about the present sites of Portland, Boston, and Plymouth in considerable agricultural prosperity, with fields of corn and tobacco, gardens rich in melons, squashes, pumpkins, and beans, the culture of none of which had they apparently learned from white men. Mr. Payne's generalization, that superior food-supply occasioned the Old World's primacy in civilization, and also that of the Mexicans and Peruvians here, seems too sweeping, yet ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... unity was disrupted with rude hands, and the old conflict hinging on the issues of Diaspora and Nationalism broke out with new fury. Again we see Diaspora Judaism pitched against Palestinian Judaism, and Religion against Nationalism. Reason has given way to passion, and discrimination to generalization. The Jews of the new Palestine, who have given of their life-blood to the rejuvenation of our homeland, are sweepingly declared to be "anarchists," while, on the other hand, American Jews who, with single-hearted devotion, have been the builders of the great Jewish center in ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... commercial man; science is supposed to be 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 latter was made to confess ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Composition by Use of Generalization and Facts.— Using the fourth method of development, we may give an entire composition to the explanation of the meaning of a general proposition or to the demonstration of the truth of such a proposition. To accomplish this purpose we state facts or instances ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... 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 and secretly wishing that, since the subject had been introduced, ...
— The American • Henry James
... and art, their history and characteristics should be recorded in the periodicals of the day; by which means we shall eventually possess an accumulated mass of facts that will be all-important to future generalization. I grant that this course has been ably pursued by many intelligent writers, and the American Journal of Science is a fruitful depository of such observations.[4-*] With every acknowledgment to these praiseworthy efforts, let us urge their active continuance. ...
— Some Observations on the Ethnography and Archaeology of the American Aborigines • Samuel George Morton
... 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 ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... knowledge of the fossil animals which dwelt on the earth in past ages. Now, though Owens researches were intimately connected with the great labours of Darwin, and afforded the latter material for his epoch-making generalization, yet Owen deliberately refused to accept the new doctrines. Like Tycho, he kept on rigidly accumulating his facts under the influence of a set of ideas as to the origin of living forms which are now universally admitted to be erroneous. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... assail me. Of course I was well fed, well 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 ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... examine 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... women disgusted him. Of mere animalism, he had none. Here in this widest essential, his nature marked its contrast with Traill. To admit the beast in every man would have been beyond him; simply because the admission of a generalization such as that, would most directly have implied himself. In Traill's concession of it, such an admission may easily be read. And this is the type of man, such as ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... officers and gendarmes? For the rest, characters vary quite as much as they do elsewhere. It is a question of individuals, in character and morals, and it is dangerous to indulge in generalizations. My one generalization is that they are, as a nation, too long-suffering and lenient in certain directions, that they allow too much ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... however, 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
... energy and movement and matter is pure heaviness and resistance. Out of the necessity of this conflict emerge all those rigid logical concepts and mathematical formulae, of which space and time, in the ordinary sense of those words, are the ultimate generalization. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... answer for 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 ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... with a richness and ethical fulness that more than compensate for their lack of dry legal detail. Bacon seems indeed to have been a lawyer of the first order, with a keen scientific insight into the bearings of isolated facts and a power of generalization which admirably fitted him for the self-imposed task, unfortunately never completed, of digesting or codifying the chaotic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... is frequently used as a text-book, is 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 too frequently is, a mere mechanical committing ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... but merely by way of illustration one may 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 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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 ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to 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 ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... "We'd best let modern times alone. For here you've all facts and no generalization; and in the case of the Greeks you've ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... 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
... "No biological generalization rests on a wider series of observations, or has been subjected to a more critical scrutiny, than that every living organism has come into existence from a living portion or portions of ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... perspective, or light-and-shade. His colors were local tones, but probably more like nature and more varied than anything in Egyptian painting. Landscapes, buildings, and the like, were given in a symbolic manner. Portraiture was a generalization, and in figure compositions the names of the principal characters were written near them for purposes of identification. The most important works of Polygnotus were the wall paintings for the Assembly Room of the Knidians at Delphi. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... ceramic art, having acquired the various elements of ornament, carries them by methods of its own through many strange mutations of form. The effect upon life forms is of paramount importance, as is indicated by the following broad and striking generalization: The agencies of modification inherent in the art in its practice are such that any particular animal form extensively employed in decoration is capable of changing into or giving rise to any or to all of the highly conventional decorative devices upon ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... 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 handling of ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... the appearances of things as they have been ascertained and registered by his fellow-men. For no day passes but some visible fact is pointed out to us by others, which, without their help, we should not have noticed; and the accumulation and generalization of visible facts have formed, in the succession of ages, the sciences of light and shade, and perspective, linear and aerial: so that the artist is now at once put in possession of certain truths respecting the appearances of things, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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
... science enabled me to establish certain mathematical or GEOMETRIC laws of cerebral action, concerning the direction and mode in which all faculties act upon the mind and body, which laws constitute the BASIC PHILOSOPHY of Anthropology, the highest generalization of science. These laws constitute a compact system of science, lying at the basis of all psychology, as the bony skeleton is the basis of the human form. These laws being easily demonstrated, and giving great clearness ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... this made him silent; while his essays recall events, on which one feels that he pronounces no judgment even in the depth of his own mind, because the labour of Life itself had not yet brought the philosophic generalization, which was almost as much his object as the emotional generalization of beauty. A mind that generalizes rapidly, continually prevents the experience that would have made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character is too complete in youth seldom grows into any energy of moral beauty. ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... that I could not resist asking Buckle if he had read Dumas's historical novels, and he said he had not, although he had felt an inclination to do so. He asked one or two questions about them, and gave a rapid generalization of the history ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... me just as teleologic and divinatory as those I have previously named. It assumes Evolution as a law of the universe, whereas in natural science it is only a limited generalization, inapplicable to most series of natural events, and therefore of uncertain continuance in any series. The optimism which it inculcates is insecure and belongs to deductive, not inductive, reasoning. The mechanical theory on which it is based ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... from the hoopaa alone, who, it will be remembered, maintained the kneeling position, while, according to another authority, the olapa also took part in it. There is no reason for doubting the sincerity of both these witnesses. The disagreement probably arose from hasty generalization. One is reminded of the wise Hawaiian saw, already noted, "Do not think that your halau ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... democratic spirit still prevailed. The young men 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, "the Yale man." ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... with a faint smile on her thin lips, was a creditable creation of modern art. A thoroughly unpromising specimen of female clay had been moulded into something agreeable and almost pretty, with a faint, anemonelike bloom and fragrance. Mr. Ashly Crane, who was rather given to generalization about the might and majesty of American achievements, felt that the girl was a triumphant example of modern power,—"what we do when we try to do something,"—like converting the waste land of Clark's Field into a city of brick and mortar, or making a hydrangea ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel and behold his whilom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... permeated by the spirit of 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. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... or female, whom we should care to have long in the same house with us. A real lady seldom appears in these comedies, and—to approach a paradox—when she does she usually comes perilously close to being no lady; the same is usually true of the real gentleman. The generalization in the Epilogue of The Captives may well be made particular: "Plautus finds few plays such as this which make good men better." Yet there is little in his plays which makes men—to say nothing of good men—worse. A bluff ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... lists, including in one all the animals of the first class and 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 ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... 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
... 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 Harvey, Sydenham, Jenner, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... "It has already been implied that the Aborigines of Tasmania had acquired very limited powers of abstraction or generalization. They possessed no words representing abstract ideas; for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, etc., etc., they had a name, but they had no equivalent for the expression, 'a tree;' neither could they express abstract ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... visit to the good minister's study, not, 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
... 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 appreciate ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the generalization about the eyes ... how they used to look out, but now look in? Well, ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... 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 the downfall of feudalism, the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... by the extent of its generalization, has learned to indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals, by tracing growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... searches which seek to penetrate the inmost recesses of nature by an ultimate analysis of an infinite variety of parts. As the reader will obtain a fuller comprehension of this idea, and of Edison's methods, by concrete illustration rather than by generalization, the authors have thought it well to select at random two typical instances of specific investigations out of the thousands that are scattered through the notebooks. These will be found in the following extracts from one of the note-books, and consist ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... English literature during the first quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been 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."[14] Classical tragedy, e.g., ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 than ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... ladder and sipped a 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
... seen, offers a most suggestive field and 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 the experiences ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... 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 word concerning the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
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