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Empirical   Listen
adjective
Empirical, Empiric  adj.  
1.
Pertaining to, or founded upon, experiment or experience; depending upon the observation of phenomena; versed in experiments. "In philosophical language, the term empirical means simply what belongs to or is the product of experience or observation." "The village carpenter... lays out his work by empirical rules learnt in his apprenticeship."
2.
Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to science and theory; said especially of medical practice, remedies, etc.; wanting in science and deep insight; as, empiric skill, remedies.
Empirical formula. (Chem.) See under Formula.
Synonyms: See Transcendental.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Empirical" Quotes from Famous Books



... it is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, looked at in this way, I combatted it in my book on Socialismo e Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism were not ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... a long time the art of training children's voices has been well understood by choirmasters of vested choirs, and by many others, but its basis was purely empirical. ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard

... but its metallic form, therefore it had been deposited in its siliceous matrix while in a molten state, and many ingenious arguments were adduced in support of this contention. Of late, however, most scientific men, and indeed many purely empirical inquirers (using the word empirical in its strict sense) have come to the conclusion that though the mode in which they were composed was not always identical, all lodes, including auriferous formations, were primarily derived from mineral-impregnated waters which deposited their ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... facts of nature or of the external world. This usage is not universal, nor is it fixed. In Germany, especially, the word Wissenschaft is used of all kinds of ordered knowledge, whether transcendental or empirical. So we are accustomed to speak of mental, moral, social, as well as of natural science. Nevertheless, the more restricted use of the word is very common and very influential. It is important that this fact should be recognized. In common usage, a scientific man ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... philosopher and professor in Berlin of the so-called empirical school, that is, the Baconian; an opponent of the methods and systems of Kant and Hegel; confined his studies to psychology and the phenomena of consciousness; was more a British ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the King's market of Smithfield, which was a filthy marsh where the common gallows stood, there erected the priory, whose Norman arches as satisfactorily attest its date as Henry's charter. The piety of a court jester in the twelfth century, when the science of medicine was wholly empirical, founded one of the most valuable medical schools of the nineteenth century. The desire to raise up splendid churches in the place of the dilapidated Saxon buildings was a passion with Normans, whether clerics or laymen. Ralph Flambard, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... divided, although, through a defect in logic, he accepts mechanics as the final explanation of things. And last, it is impossible to pass over, in silence, the rare works of Lord Kelvin, so full, for French readers, of unexpected suggestions, for they show us the entirely practical and empirical value which the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... surely, sufficient evidence has already been produced to sustain the allegation that the old system of medicine is unworthy of our confidence; that, with no law upon which to base its principles of treatment, its practice rests upon a chaotic mass of empirical experiences, groundless theories, and ever-changing fancies; that those best acquainted with its principles, and the results of its practice, have the least faith in its usefulness; and that the interests ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller

... things, it is perfected naturally in two ways. First by knowledge received from sensible things; secondly, by knowledge imprinted or infused by the illumination of spiritual substances. Now in both these ways the soul of Christ was perfected; first by empirical knowledge of sensible things, for which there is no need of angelic light, since the light of the active intellect suffices; secondly, by the higher impression of infused knowledge, which He received ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics, and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly irrational, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... science, literature, and travel, bring the library up to date. He would devote his leisure to the study of various subjects—especially natural science—regarding which he was conscious of a knowledge, deficient, or merely empirical. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... alleged impossibility of miracles may be described as a very subtle turning the tables on Hume and the empirical philosophy. For when it is said that it is contrary to reason to believe in a suspension of the order of nature, he asks on what ground do we believe in the order of nature; and Hume himself supplies the answer. There is nothing of which we have ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... empirical way must be found in which to acquire the understanding of sound play. My system of teaching differs from the usual ones, in that it sets down at the outset definite elementary principles of chess strategy by which any move can be gauged at its true value, thus enabling the learner ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker

... less meagre. Almost every word which deals with man's mind reflects the moral and religious values and is thus removed from pure psychology into ethics. Or we find comparisons which suggestively illuminate the working of the mind without amplifying our psychological understanding. We approach empirical psychology most nearly in verses like these: "Foolishness is bound in the heart of the child, but the word of correction should drive it far from him"; or "He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least, is unjust also in much"; ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... and helper, with characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted the discovery as "a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical, and in no way connected with any laws of either force or beauty." "Many a hard and pleasant fight we had over it," wrote Jenkin, in later years; "and impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the arguments of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... generality are substituted for one another, and the results stand for one fact as well as for another, in disregard of the worth of the particular in the scheme of nature. For the same reason, deductive logic is not a good discipline for these students; empirical psychology, or political economy, is a better introduction to the moral sciences for them when they reach the high school. This explains what was meant above in the remark as to the method of teaching grammar. As to language study generally, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... correspondence at this period between abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the derivation of ethics from ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... as he watched her, in silence, the colour that flowed and ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her unflinching willingness to submit herself to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... control all that man can do. That science can be used by anyone, mind you. If you'll read between the lines you'll see what a hidden struggle is shaping up for control of it as soon as it reaches maturity and empirical useability." ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson

... the distinction between pure and empirical science. The propositions of geometry, being derived from our own pure activity, are of the former class; the inductive conclusions of physical experimental science, being gathered by observation and ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... gaseous, others are liquids. Some have peculiar odours, as may be recognised from the smell arising from a bit of decaying meat. Others have peculiar tastes, as may be realized in the gamy taste of meat which is in the incipient stages of putrefaction. By purely empirical means mankind has learned methods of encouraging the development of some of these products, and is to-day making practical use of this power, possessed by bacteria, of furnishing desired chemical compounds. Industries involving the investment of ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn

... planted close under the ham is, like the "cucumber shin" and "lark heel", a good sign in a slave. Shapely calves and well-made legs denote the idle and the ne'er-do-well. I have often found this true although the rule is utterly empirical. Possibly it was suggested by the contrast of the nervous ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... its roads and bridges. Taxes on locomotion are universally condemned, and the economic effects of a penny tram-fare are precisely the same as those of a tax on the trip. The County Council will, however, free its trams on the empirical grounds of economy and the development of its suburban estates of artisans' dwellings, built on land bought to retain the unearned increment for the public benefit. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... partially admitted consciences, with a practical application of the principle of "that which works best". The majority are not philosophers, and care little for a logical basis. They are unconscious empirics, and their morality is empirical. ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant

... function quickly again, a broken arm slowly, an amputated arm never, each brain cell too may suffer lesions which are reparable in different degrees. But it is evident that it remains then an entirely empirical question whether the invisible damage allows repair or not. We have no right to say that where the destruction cannot be seen under the microscope there is no organic change and the disturbance is therefore only ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... any and all charges against their moral natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all scandals regarding ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... to London Philip began his dressing in the surgical wards. He was not so much interested in surgery as in medicine, which, a more empirical science, offered greater scope to the imagination. The work was a little harder than the corresponding work on the medical side. There was a lecture from nine till ten, when he went into the wards; there wounds had to be dressed, stitches ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... recollected that the more medicines I took the better for him if not for me, converted me into a human receptacle for his empirical abominations, but another surgeon, who was rather tardily called in, packed ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... of considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... Fawkes. Even in the nineteenth century, amid all the sordid materialism bred of commercial ascendancy, this country has produced a richer crop of imaginative literature than any other; and it is significant that, while in Germany philosophy is falling more and more into the hands of the empirical school, our own thinkers are nearly all ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... a misconception in imagining that if they can find a law of uniformity in the succession of events they can infer the future from the past terms of the series. For such a law would only be an "empirical law"; it would not be a causal law or an ultimate law. However rigidly uniform, there is no guarantee that it would apply to phenomena outside those from which it was derived. It must itself depend on laws of mind and character ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... summary of all present knowledge of the voice. First, the insight into the singer's vocal operations is considered, which the hearer obtains by attentive listening to the tones produced. This empirical knowledge, as it is generally called, indicates a state of unnecessary throat tension as the cause, or at any rate the accompaniment, of every faulty tone. Further, an outline is given of all scientific knowledge of the voice. The anatomy of the vocal organs, and the acoustic and mechanical principles ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor

... manganese for the violets and browns, iron for the yellows, and lead or tin for the whites. One variety of red contains 30 per cent of bronze, and becomes coated with verdegris if exposed to damp. All this chemistry was empirical, and acquired by instinct. Finding the necessary elements at hand, or being supplied with them from a distance, they made use of them at hazard, and without being too certain of obtaining the effects they sought. Many of their most harmonious ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero

... are assumed to be so small that u and [Delta] may be considered constant. As regards the quantity f(u), or the friction per unit of length, the natural law which regulates it is not known, audit can only be expressed by some empirical formula, which, while according sufficiently nearly with the facts, is suited for calculation. For this purpose the binomial formula, au bu, or the simple formula, b1 u, is generally adopted; a b and b1 being coefficients deduced from experiment. The values, however, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... distinguishing feature of the Indian character, as I have here tried to sketch it, I should say it was transcendent, using that word, not in its strict technical sense, as fixed by Kant, but in its more general acceptation, as denoting a mind bent on transcending the limits of empirical knowledge. There are minds perfectly satisfied with empirical knowledge, a knowledge of facts, well ascertained, well classified, and well labelled. Such knowledge may assume very vast proportions, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical and psychical maltreatment, still called by ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key

... conclusion may be arrived at, provided, too—and herein lies the difficulty—provided that the premises are also true. These premises may be in themselves general statements—how is their truth established? They may be, and often are, the generalisations of the empirical sciences, and must then possess the same degree of uncertainty that these generalisations possess. Some philosophers have contended that certain general ideas are innate, but few would be found nowadays to accept such a contention. ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones

... the materials might be collected. Of the devil's origin, and the first rise of his family, we have sufficient authority on record; and, as regards his dealings, he has certainly always acted in the dark; though many of his doings both moral, political, ecclesiastical, and empirical, have left such strong impressions behind them, as to mark their importance in some transactions, even at the present period of the christian world. These discussions, however, we shall leave in the hands of their respective champions, in order to take, as we proceed, a cursory ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... as an attribute of those things, and as something different from consciousness; nor can the assumption of an attribute of things called 'light,' or 'shining forth,' be proved in any way, since the entire empirical world itself can be proved only through consciousness, the existence of which we both admit. Consciousness, therefore, is not something which is inferred or proved through some other act of knowledge; ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... of Language one of the Physical Sciences; The Growth of Language in Contradistinction to the History of Language; The Empirical Stage in the Science of Language; The Classificatory Stage in the Science of Language; The Genealogical Classification of Languages; Comparative Grammar; The Constituent Elements of Language; The Morphological Classification of Languages; ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... positions, to any natural signs of whirlwinds, tempests, plagues, famine, or earthquakes, try long to discover some hidden symbolism in it, and confess finally that no man unregenerate to letters, by any a priori or empirical knowledge, could have at all suspected that a bit of dirty parchment, with an ecclesiastical scrawl upon it, would have power to drive the currents of history, inspire great national passions, and impel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... normal child that does not yet speak perfectly, resembles the diseased adult who, for any cause, no longer has command of language. And to compare these two with each other is the more important, as at present no other empirical way is open to us for investigating the nature of the process of learning to speak; but this way conducts us, fortunately, through pathology, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... Her beauty was still in its first radiance, and her smile was angelic. She was short of stature, but it was impossible to imagine more beautiful features or hands. Her education had been very desultory; she had learned more from lovers than from teachers. She had a strong taste for empirical medicine and for alchemy, and was always compounding elixirs, tinctures and balms, some of which she regarded as valuable secrets. So it was that charlatans, trading on her weakness, made her consume, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... softened, improved, if it is to satisfy an enlightened generation. It must be stereotyped as the patron of arts, or the pupil of speculation, or the protege of science; it must play the literary academician, or the empirical philanthropist, or the political partisan; it must keep up with the age; some or other expedient it must devise, in order to explain away, or to hide, tenets under which the intellect labours and of which it is ashamed—its doctrine, for ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... Stockmar's tutelage he was constantly engaged in enlarging his outlook and in endeavouring to envisage vital problems both theoretically and practically—both with precision and with depth. To one whose mind was thus habitually occupied, the empirical activities of Palmerston, who had no notion what a principle meant, resembled the incoherent vagaries of a tiresome child. What did Palmerston know of economics, of science, of history? What did he care for morality and education? How much consideration ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... no empirical rules of a reliable nature upon which the tester can base his deductions. The only way calculated to give satisfaction is to conduct a series of preliminary tests upon the turbine undergoing observation, and from these to deduce all information of the nature required, which ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... affection. They can tell you of all sorts of queer, unknown customs and facts, and can show you all sorts of strange and unusual things. Yet at the last analysis these are also discursions and anecdotes. We gather empirical knowledge: only rarely do we think we get a glimpse of how the delicate machinery moves behind those ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... we are thrown back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... world was before her, for she was twenty-three and singularly free from ties. Her mother had died when she was a child. Her father, the physician of the surrounding country, a man of engaging energy with an empirical education and a speculative habit of mind, had been the companion of her girlhood. During the last few years since his return from the war an invalid from a wound, her care for him had left her time for ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... transformation of the present system, which is to be rendered as little injurious and as beneficial as possible. Such has been the course pursued by the modern science of medicine, which from the original absurd remedies and equally absurd empirical operations, has now succeeded in placing the cure of diseases on the ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... reflected to him from all sides. This is supportable, or may be disguised in poetry; it becomes intolerable in prose. Add to all which, that the writer of a novel should have had some experience in the realities of life, a certain empirical knowledge of the manner in which the passions develop themselves in men and women. The high ideal forms of good and evil he may learn from his own heart; but there is in actual life, so to speak, a vulgar monstrosity which must be seen to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... of the Verugas by the Indians is quite empirical. They administer to the patient the infusion of a plant which they call Huajra-Huajra; that is, Horn-Horn.[56] I never witnessed any convincing proof of its efficacy. Its operation appears to be merely sudorific. A preparation ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... parallel with those it is brought to illustrate, you have only to suppose that, although the boomerang thrown by me went forward to a definite place, and at least appeared to subserve a purpose, and the bystanders, after a while, could get traces of the mode or the empirical law of its flight, yet they could not themselves do anything with it. It was quite beyond their power to use it. Would they doubt, or deny my intention, on that account? No: they would insist that design on my part must be presumed from the nature of the results; that, though design ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... everything clear, and furnish the best description of proof in the empirical sciences. This applies with more force to the Art of War than to any other. General Scharnhorst, whose handbook is the best ever written on actual War, pronounces historical examples to be of the first importance, and makes an admirable use of them himself. Had he survived the War in which he fell,(*) ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... "God-given," or absolute in any sense. The morality of a group at a time is the sum of the taboos and prescriptions in the folkways by which right conduct is defined. Therefore morals can never be intuitive. They are historical, institutional, and empirical. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... the denotation of a term, and vice versa; the process of knowledge involves the two methods, analysis being the corrective of synthetic empiricism. In a wider sense the whole of formal logic is precisely the analysis of the laws of thought. Analytical psychology is distinguished from genetic and empirical psychology inasmuch as it proceeds by the method of introspective investigation of mental phenomena instead of by physiological or psycho-physical experiment. For the relation between analysis and synthesis on the one hand, and deduction and induction ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... further meaning of reality is revealed when concepts search for a depth beyond themselves. This is the clue to Eucken's teaching in regard to spiritual life. It is a further development of the nature of man—a development beyond the empirical and the mental. And the object of the following chapters will be to show this ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... depends. The analysis of organic compounds is probably best taught in connection with the course in organic chemistry. It is here that the student is introduced to the use of the combustion furnace and the method of working out the empirical formulae of the compounds which he has carefully prepared and purified. The laboratory practice in organic chemistry generally requires the use of larger pieces of apparatus. Some of the experiments also are connected with peculiar dangers ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... presentation, how one arrangement of words carries with it more power than another, how familiar and concrete expressions are demanded in one place, and in another place abstract expressions unclogged with disturbing suggestions. Every author thus silently amasses a store of empirical rules, furnished by his own practice, and confirmed by the practice of others. A true Philosophy of Criticism would reduce these empirical rules to science by ranging them under psychological laws, thus demonstrating the validity of the rules, not ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... are innate, due to brain and nerve structure, and acquired by each generation through biological heredity. If closely examined, however, this is seen to be no explanation at all. Accepting the characteristics as empirical inexplicable facts, the real problem is evaded, pushed into prehistoric times, that convenient dumping ground of biological, anthropological, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... don't think it. About fifteen deaths a day don't incite a man to shoot anything but himself. And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them. Lord knows, I've tried everything. My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; but ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam, by turns, court and are accepted by the compilable mutton hash—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... juncture appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay's famous attack on my father's Essay on Government. This gave me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognised Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... empirical knowledge; but when you explain causes, you give a man a new pleasure. It clinches his knowledge. Then, again, supposing I were to tell those men something accurate about the movement of the stars? Don't you think that would be ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... any of the phenomena of the universe, than there is doubt that if I leave go of my pen it will fall upon the table. Nay, the doubt is even less than this, because while the knowledge that my pen will fall if I allow it to do so is founded chiefly upon empirical knowledge (I could not predict with a priori certainty that it would so fall, for the pen might be in an electrical state, or subject to some set of unknown natural laws antagonistic to gravity), the knowledge that a Deity is superfluous as an explanation of anything, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... and best modality of training. Indeed no method of doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see later, one of the best norms here is phyletic emphasis, and what ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... earth. It is not our fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. What all good men desire, here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected gradually and peaceably. We do not find fault with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... of way in which the philosopher is tempted to give an air of absoluteness and necessity to empirical generalisations, of which only the approximate truth in the regions hitherto investigated can be guaranteed by the unaided methods of science. It is very often said that the persistence of something or other is a necessary presupposition ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... numbers are obtained by adding 1 to the following series (irregular, it will be observed, in its first member, which should be 1/2 instead of 0); 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, etc. The formula is a purely empirical one, and is, moreover, completely at fault as regards the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... Such being the case, we fall to wrangling over it, and your appetite is like to go unappeased. I now have evidence to show you that your act of violent appropriation does not conduce to your interest. This is simply an experimental and empirical fact. I am in a position to show you that the character of your action is other than you supposed, that you were under a misapprehension as to its goodness. It leads not to the enjoyable activity which interests ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... Now two ways present themselves to the thought, in which the man of time can agree with the man of idea, and there are also two ways in which the state can maintain itself in individuals. One of these ways is when the pure ideal man subdues the empirical man, and the state suppresses the individual, or again when the individual BECOMES the state, and the man of time is ENNOBLED ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... sub-classified as artiodactyls and perissodactyls, i. e. even-toed and odd-toed. Now, whether an animal has an even or an odd number of toes may seem a curiously artificial distinction on which to found so important a classification of the mammalian group. But if we look at the matter from a less empirical and more intelligent point of view, we shall see that the alternative of having an even or an odd number of toes carries with it alternative consequences of a practically important kind to any animal of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... Society; but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new habits of mind that spread outward from that centre played their part. The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this development invented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's engine was running along its rails and Evan's boat was walloping up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to application as occur in the story of electricity to justify our attribution ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... earth which are known to geographers as the Old World; that is to say, you might meet with horses in Europe, Asia, or Africa; but there were none in Australia, and there were none whatsoever in the whole continent of America, from Labrador down to Cape Horn. This is an empirical fact, and it is what is called, stated in the way I have given it you, the 'Geographical Distribution' ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... Philebus of the rank and order of the sciences or arts, which agrees generally with the scheme of knowledge in the Sixth Book of the Republic. The chief difference is, that the position of the arts is more exactly defined. They are divided into an empirical part and a scientific part, of which the first is mere guess-work, the second is determined by rule and measure. Of the more empirical arts, music is given as an example; this, although affirmed ...
— Philebus • Plato

... where the little victorious martyr was fed from the best stores of the house, until there was as much danger from repletion as there had been from famine. How the experiment might have ended but for this empirical and most unphilosophical interference, there is no saying; but it settled the point that the rebellious nature was not to be subjugated in a ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... philosophers start their study of the world. They can never perceive the world in its entire reality. Yet their imagination, with its magnificent allowance for error, its power of treating uncertainty as negligible, has pointed the way for empirical knowledge. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... is a science, or only an empirical method of getting a living out of the ignorance of the human race, Ruth found before her first term was over at the medical school that there were other things she needed to know quite as much as that which is taught in medical books, and that she could never satisfy her aspirations ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... higher wages, and cuts off the principal source of misery—the wants and sufferings of infancy, sickness, and old age. Laborers too will be less skillful, and perform less work—enhancing the price of that sort of labor. The poor laws of England are an attempt—but an awkward and empirical attempt—to supply the place of that which we should suppose the feelings of every human heart would declare to be a natural obligation—that he who has received the benefit of the laborer's services during his health and vigor, should maintain ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... film of graduated density upon the plate to be tested. Each degree on the film has a number, and, after a given exposure, the last number photographed on the plate represents the sensitiveness on an empirical scale. There are two or three objections to this instrument. In the first place, the light-giving power of the luminous tablet is liable to variations, and, if left in a warm, moist place, it rapidly deteriorates. Again, it has been shown by Captain Abney that plates sensitized by iodides, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various

... gross feeders;* [Dr. Campbell's definition of the Lepcha's Flora cibaria, is, that he eats, or must have eaten, everything soft enough to chew; for, as he knows whatever is poisonous, he must have tried all; his knowledge being wholly empirical.] rice, however, forming their chief sustenance; it is grown without irrigation, and produces a large, flat, coarse grain, which becomes gelatinous, and often pink, when cooked. Pork is a staple dish: and they also eat elephant, and all kinds of animal food. When travelling, they live on whatever ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... is nothing but an art. We learn to play on a foreign language as we learn to play on a musical instrument, and we may arrive at the highest perfection in performing on any instrument, without having a notion of thorough bass or the laws of harmony. For practical purposes this purely empirical knowledge is all that is required. But though it would be a mistake to attempt in our elementary schools to replace an empirical by a scientific knowledge of grammar, that empirical knowledge of grammar ought in time to be raised to a real, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... Henderson's Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England, Mr. Baring-Gould has made an ingenious and praiseworthy attempt to reduce the entire existing mass of household legends to about fifty story-roots; and his list, though both redundant and defective, is nevertheless, as an empirical ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... upon the public good, prepared for present exigencies, and provident of the future; such is the director himself in his private capacity: If it be rapacious, insolent, partial, palliating long and deep diseases of the public with empirical remedies, false, disguised, impudent, malicious, revengeful; you shall infallibly find the private life of the conductor to answer in every point; nay, what is more, every twinge of the gout or gravel will be felt in their consequences by the community. As the thief-catcher, upon ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... problems of abstract theology were passing out of sight, and that speculation was turning to the historical and scientific problems. Hartley was expounding the association principle which became the main doctrine of the empirical school, and Hume was teaching ethics upon the same basis, and turning from speculation to political history. The main reason of this intellectual indifference was the social condition under which the philosophical theory found no strong current ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... liberality departs from our own professional education and the etiquette is relaxed, we shall presumably revert to the same state of things. A surgeon was commonly a "sawbones," and a physician a compounder and prescriber of more or less empirical drugs. Their knowledge and skill were by no means contemptible, and their instruments and pharmacopoeia were surprisingly modern. Among the Greeks and Orientals their social standing was high, but at Rome, where they were chiefly foreigners, for the most part Greeks, the old aristocratic exclusiveness ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... it is true, have received my initiation in a school built up on more modern foundations; it is true that I should have saved much time, been spared many detours, and have reached my goal more directly had I been introduced to an empirical philosophy, or if Fate had placed me in a school in which historical sources were examined more critically, but not less intelligently, and in which respect for individuality was greater. But such as the ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... even Pestalozzi himself not excepted, seemed to me too bare, too empirical,[105] and arbitrary, and therefore not sufficiently scientific in their principles—that is, not sufficiently led by the laws of our being; they seemed to me in no wise to recognise the Divine element in science, to feel its worth, and ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel

... said, looking at Editha's lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. "But how dreadful of ...
— Different Girls • Various

... of its rules. They have not an idea of the laws of nature; if they want to cure a man, they have no conception at all of true scientific remedies. If they try anything they must try it upon bare chance. The most useful modern remedies were often discovered in this bare, empirical way. What could be more improbable—at least, for what could a pre-historic man have less given a good reason—than that some mineral springs should stop rheumatic pains, or mineral springs make wounds heal quickly? And yet the chance knowledge ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot

... how constitutional to thee, and incommunicable.' Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, it is great; if they say it is small, it is small; you see it, and you see it not, by turns; it borrows all its size from the momentary estimation ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... 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

... as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... fills? He avowed himself a man of moderate political opinions; recognized the existence of manufacturing and commercial distress, but referred it to causes of only a temporary nature, unconnected with the corn-laws; repudiated the empirical expedients proposed by the late ministry; and pledged himself to maintain the principle of protection to our agricultural interests; declaring his deliberate preference of a sliding scale of duties, to a fixed duty, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... more special truths, but we do not find it beautiful. Equally removed from the sphere of the beautiful are representations or descriptions of mere things, whether inaccurate or haphazard, as we make them in daily life, or accurate and careful as they are elaborated in the empirical sciences. No matter how exact and complete, the botanist's or zoologist's descriptions of plant and animal life are not works of art. They may be satisfactory as knowledge, but they are not beautiful. There is ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... in his vague but glorious destiny was the dynamic force of his young life. Its essential mystery kept him alert and buoyant. His keen, self-centred mind realized that his search on the stage for the true expression of his genius was only empirical. If he failed there, it was for him to try a hundred other spheres until he found the right one. But just as in his childish days he could not understand why he was not supreme in everything, so now he could not appreciate the charge of wooden ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... this theory that it should be stated frankly, at the start, that the words Sulphite and Bromide, and their derivatives, sulphitic and bromidic, are themselves so sulphitic that they are not susceptible of explanation. In a word, they are empirical, although, accidentally it might seem, they do appeal and convince the most skeptical. I myself balked, at first, at these inconsequent names. I would have suggested the terms "Gothic" and "Classic" to describe the fundamental ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess

... requirements of unit construction, clearance, staging, etc., which supersede the matter of economical adaptation of material to loading. The designing of form work is at best, therefore, a compromise between rules of thumb and scientific calculation. In wall work empirical methods are nearly always followed. In girder and floor slab work, on the other hand, design ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... kind in any portion of the United Kingdom is alike "Common" or "Imperial." The details of the division were never disclosed, when the proportions were originally fixed. The segregation of the services classified as "Imperial" is open to serious objections. The method of computation is empirical and unconstitutional, and if carried to its logical conclusion would now result in depriving Ireland of any share whatever in future Equivalent grants, as her contribution to the services thus classified as "Imperial" ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... my errors can be marked and set aside before the mass of knowledge be further infected by them; and it will be easy also for others to continue and carry on my labours. And by these means I suppose that I have established for ever a true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty, the unkind and ill-starred divorce and separation of which has thrown into confusion all the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... Brown, ex-clergyman and quack-doctor, harangued the people of Chaudiere from his gaily-painted wagon. He had the perfect gift of the charlatan, and he had discovered his metier. Inclined to the picturesque by nature, melodramatic and empirical, his earlier career had been the due fruit of habit and education. As a dabbler in mines he had been out of his element. He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic had not availed him, though it had tempted Billy Wantage to forgery; and because ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... advances the science has made since Adam Smith published his "Wealth of Nations." They are text-books in the colleges even of Sweden and Norway, while at the University in the street next to that in which the author has his residence, books are adopted composed of ideas from empirical and nearly obsolete systems: Say and Ricardo are regarded as expositors of the last and ultimate discoveries. Let us see if this law respecting prophets cannot be changed; or if not changed, confirmed, by an exception in the case ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... authorities and from experimenting scientists to draw upon, the practicing physicians could deduce therapeutic techniques or justify curative measures, but the emphasis on theory brought with it the danger of ignoring experience and abandoning empirical solutions. Aware that many of his fellow physicians tended to overemphasize theory Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), who received his doctorate of medicine from Cambridge University, recommended personal experience drawn from close observation. ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes

... social compact.[2126] According to this process, by virtue of political geometry alone, they shall have the perfect vessel and since it perfect it follows that it will sail, and that much better than any empirical craft.—They legislate according to this principle, and one may imagine the nature of their discussions. There are no convincing facts, no pointed arguments; nobody would ever imagine that the speakers were gathered together to conduct real business. Through speech after speech, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... goat-glands upon human beings, and not more than two or three of simian glands upon human beings. His statement, therefore, that successful transplantation of the glands of the goat into a human being is "impossible, and cannot succeed," is empirical, and entirely unsupported by any experience of his own in the matter. Against it, and completely confuting it, we set the clear conclusions of Dr. Brinkley, backed by his unequalled record of over 600 successful transplants of ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower

... my lords, is, as it has been termed, only an experiment; an experiment, my lords, of a very daring kind, which none would hazard but empirical politicians. It is an experiment to discover how far the vices of the populace may be made useful to the government, what taxes may be raised upon poison, and how much the court may be enriched by the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson

... relations between the four moments) any fifth moment either contains the whole of their common intersection or none of it. No further subdivision of the common intersection is possible by means of moments. The 'all or none' principle holds. This is not an a priori truth but an empirical fact ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... "The world did very well without us for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even—not one! In practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course—frightfully clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like sheep—but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there were none." ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... crime. Some say: "it is better to repress than to prevent." Others say: "It is better to prevent than to repress." In order to solve this conflict we must remember that there are two widely different kinds of repression. There is the immediate, direct empirical repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but waits until the crime is about to be committed. That is police prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an indirect and more remote function, which ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri

... certain intoxications, epilepsies, hysterias, and recurrent insanities, afford examples of the development of what I have called secondary mnemonic chains; fresh personalities, more or less complete, alongside the normal state. And I would add that hypnotism is only the name given to a group of empirical methods of inducing ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead

... that Byron had too much empeiria (an excess of mondanite—a this-worldliness), found it hard to read Beppo after Macbeth. "I felt," he says, "the predominance of a nefarious, empirical world, with which the mind which introduced it to us has in a certain measure associated itself" (Conversations of Goethe, etc., 1874, p. 175). But Beppo must be taken at its own valuation. It is A Venetian Story, and the action takes place behind the scenes of "a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... What the ideas are, which in this view are essential to the different departments of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the understanding out of the observations it has ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... self-love, our lust, not greatly caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts, and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and practical and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... abroad while the living man's corpse lies inanimate at home. But even this, Dr. August Moehrlein could not do, for the yogis do not initiate men of Western nations into their mysteries. Dr. Moehrlein's knowledge of the occult of India was wholly empirical. He knew that certain things were done and could recount them, but as to how they were done, he could tell nothing. It must not be thought that of all the marvelous and awe-compelling things the yogis of India are accustomed ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... geological notions and nomenclature as very empirical here, as they are considered in France and England, and his ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... on as though nothing had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long lists of symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which were, so hopefully, to cure. Not that Dick himself believed greatly in those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief was half the battle. But that was the mind of him, which went about clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put up a very fair imitation of Doctor Richard Livingstone. But hidden away was a heart that ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... way most men get faith now. The empirical method is the very best way to get it firmly rooted. Experientia docet. "Now we believe, not because of what you say, but because we have seen for ourselves." Did not Judas work with Jesus? Yet it is absurd to contend that Jesus was "unequally yoked with unbelievers" on that account. ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell

... be observed that these are empirical, not logical, classes. Omissions are found in many of ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... made more decisively rational than his predecessor and therefore more insightful in his knowledge of rhetorical method. As a disciple of certain Protestant polemicists and particularly of Grotius, whose "integrity," "honor," and biblical criticism he supports, he is the empirical-minded Christian who knows exactly why the literalists have failed to persuade the free-thinkers or even to have damaged their arguments. "For if you begin with Infidels by denying to them, what is evident and agreeable to common sense, I think there can be no reasonable hopes ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins

... fortnight, and sending me out every day with his doctor, the famous Styrneus, the sworn foe of Van Swieten, a still more famous physician. Although Styrneus was undoubtedly a learned man, I thought him somewhat extravagant and empirical. His system was that of Asclepiades, considered as exploded since the time of the great Boerhaave; ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... practitioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not. How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would have skinned a hare or rabbit without hesitation, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... no less effective than most of the modern drugs recommended for the same purpose. Concerning a function over which so many fond superstitions still linger in the public mind we may, perhaps, charitably forgive Gilbert for the introduction of an empirical remedy for sterility, which, he assures us, he has often tried and with invariable success, and which enjoys the double advantage of applicability to ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... however, that the treatments of poulticing and blistering are only expectant—we might almost say empirical. At any rate, we admit to ourselves that what we have advised and carried out is not in itself curative, but only a means of assisting Nature to satisfactorily work her own ends. Empirical or not, however, we believe that in ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... souls, however, would recover themselves, and find some way of making the best of a changed world. Art: the passions, above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely empirical knowledge of nature and man: these still remained, at least for pastime, in a world of which it was no longer proposed to calculate the remoter issues:—art, passion, science, however, in a somewhat novel attitude ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... repugnant to any of the phenomena, yet natural philosophy may correct. So we see also that the science of medicine if it be destituted and forsaken by natural philosophy, it is not much better than an empirical practice. With this reservation, therefore, we proceed to human philosophy or humanity, which hath two parts: the one considereth man segregate or distributively, the other congregate or in society; ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... Its oneness and manyness are co- ordinate. Question of one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One story. One knower. Value of pragmatic method. Absolute monism. Vivekananda. Various types of union discussed. Conclusion: We must oppose monistic dogmatism and follow empirical findings. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... we hear from Mr. Spencer that conscience, so far from being the voice of God, is but "the capitalised instinct of the tribe," an empirical fact established by heredity, just like fan-tails in pigeons; when Mr. Clifford popularises this teaching in St. George's Hall by announcing that conscience is the voice "of man bidding us to live for man," and Mr. Leslie Stephen tells us that ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... knowledge of the human mind which he is trying to stimulate; and third, knowledge of the way to bring these two together in a helpful manner. Of the three, I am afraid that university instructors have, in the main, but the first. At any rate, all they know of the other two is of an empirical character and what they have picked up incidentally. There are exceptions, to be sure. Every worthy institution has them, striking exceptions, too, some of them are. A few of our older men have become good teachers thru practise and experiment, and an occasional young man now ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... having some contrivance of his own'. Also, Evelyn's Diary, February 4, 1685: 'a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping; not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines, and the easier mechanical mathematics.' Also, Buckingham, ed. 1705, p. 155: 'the great and almost only pleasure of Mind he seem'd addicted to, was Shipping and Sea-Affairs; which seem'd to be so much his Talent for Knowledge, as well as Inclination, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... life forgotten in the waking state; this destroyed any claim of the primary memory to be the sole memory. The self below the threshold of ordinary consciousness Myers termed the "subliminal consciousness," and the empirical self of common experience the "supraliminal." He held that to the subliminal consciousness and memory a far wider range, both of physiological and psychical activity, was open than to the supraliminal. The latter was inevitably limited by the need of concentration upon recollections useful ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... may call the empirical view of the League. There are those of us in this country, and indeed all over the world, who, profoundly impressed with the horrors of war, hating war from the bottom of their hearts as an evil thing—a company which must include, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... white insoluble precipitate of chloride of silver is formed. Any tyro in chemistry could have predicted the result with absolute certainty. But the prediction would have been based purely upon previous empirical knowledge—solely upon the fact that the thing had been done before over and over, always with the same result. Why the silver forsook the nitrogen atom and grappled the atom of oxygen no one knows. Nor can any one as yet explain just why it is that the new compound is an insoluble, colored, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... unreliable, but the author's proposed method is equally so. We can determine by experiment limiting percentages of steel which a concrete of given quality can safely carry as reinforcement, and then use empirical formulas based on the stress in the steel and an assumed percentage of its depth in the concrete as a lever arm with more ease and just as much accuracy. The common methods result in designs which are safe enough, but they pretend to determine the stress ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That empirical procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts of my crescograph {FN8-2} ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... beginnings, and medicine and surgery were in the same condition. People who wear watches know nothing about watchmaking. A watch goes wrong and it stops; you see the owner giving it a shake, or, if he is very bold, he opens the case, and gives the balance-wheel a push. Gentlemen, that is empirical practice, and you know what are the results upon the watch. I should think you can divine what are the results of analogous operations upon the human body. And because men of sense very soon found that such were the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... or nomolis, as they are called in the vernacular, are by no means the empirical efforts of some crude artists, but are the products of finished workmanship wrought in steatite or soapstone, which abounds in the Protectorate. They present purely Egyptian and Ethiopian features, and are apparently of great ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... ideal; yet the conduct of the play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a part. Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of time and place in the most common and empirical sense; as though there were any place but the bare ideal one, or any other time than the mere sequence ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... astronomy The Greek astronomers Thales Anaximenes Aristarchus Archimedes Hipparchus Ptolemy The Roman astronomers Geometry Euclid Empirical science Hippocrates Galen Physical ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has been the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion. It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... how often the painter over the choice of colors! Then is the time to test a principle, then will it he easier to decide whether it is bringing us closer to the great models and to everything that we value and love in them, or whether it leaves us entangled in the empirical confusion of an experience that has not ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... from the marine engineers, and then, by applying our tables of air-pressures to their formulas, of designing air-propellers suitable for our purpose. But so far as we could learn, the marine engineers possessed only empirical formulas, and the exact action of the screw-propeller, after a century of use, was still very obscure. As we were not in a position to undertake a long series of practical experiments to discover a propeller suitable for our machine, it seemed necessary ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright

... advantages to the utmost, of the physical perfection developed thereby, is a sign that essential mastery has been achieved by the artist—the power, that is to say, of a full and free realisation. For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when art is dealing with religious objects, with what in the fulness of its own nature ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... efficient secrets of manipulation, or perceive the true limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened on these matters, there will be found, as I have already stated in my lectures on ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... evolution, the physicist being able to establish solid theories only on the laws of movement." The same idea is again met with in the words of Cornu in 1896: "The general tendency should be to show how the facts observed and the phenomena measured, though first brought together by empirical laws, end, by the impulse of successive progressions, in coming under the general laws of rational mechanics;" and the same physicist showed clearly that in his mind this connexion of phenomena with mechanics had a deep and philosophical reason, when, in ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... state of the instruments of research which are at their disposal, and be regularly apprised of any improvements that from time to time may be made in them. Experience and accident have been for a long time trusted to supply this information; but empirical knowledge, besides being costly, as we have already pointed out, is almost always imperfect. Recently the task has been undertaken of constructing catalogues of catalogues—critical and systematic lists of all the catalogues in existence. There can be no doubt ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... of life. The double form of consciousness is then due to the double form of the real, and theory of knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics. In fact, each of these two lines of thought leads to the other; they form a circle, and there can be no other centre to the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition of the two terms, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... an empirical confirmation of the relation which exists in the insane between the state of their hair and minds, that the wife of a medical man, who has charge of a lady suffering from acute melancholia, with a strong fear of death, for herself, her husband and ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... infinitely small currents, its resistance when acted on by an electromotive force of one volt (provided its temperature is kept the same) is not altered by so much as the millionth of a millionth part. This fine result is the more gratifying since Ohm's law is entirely empirical and does not rest at ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... engineers of standing and experience who have been thrown out of employment by the general stoppage of public works, and who are better qualified to take care of that costly and delicate machine, a Railway, than men whose knowledge is entirely empirical, yet few railways employ a resident engineer. Those that follow this practice are generally supposed to do so because he is a relative of some Director, and wants a place, and not because such an officer is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... views of any topic or event as the ingenious rival journals are certain to discover. It is impossible, in their nature, for them to combine. I should as soon expect agreement among doctors in their empirical profession. And there is scarcely ever a cause, or an opinion, or a man, that does not get somewhere in the press a hearer and a defender. We will drop the subject with one remark for the benefit of whom ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... of language: thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed: thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms: thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution: thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice: thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory: thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity: thou butcher, imbruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography: thou ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham



Words linked to "Empirical" :   empiricism, falsifiable, empiric, verifiable, a posteriori, existential, quackery, trial-and-error, archaicism, empirical formula, theoretical, through empirical observation, observational, confirmable, data-based, semiempirical



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