"Theoretic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if it be the zeal of subscribers, presenters or drivers of cars, or both at once, stretcher-bearers, lifters, healers, consolers, handy Anglo-French interpreters, (these extremely precious,) smoothers of the way; in short, after whatever fashion. We ask of nobody any waste of moral or of theoretic energy, nor any conviction of any sort, but that the job is inspiring and the honest, educated ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... which these institutions can do amongst adults. This is a mistake. The thousands of young men who are now being trained for advanced farming too often have to restrict the practical application of their theoretic knowledge to the home circle, which is not always responsive, for a man is not usually a prophet in his own family. It is here that the educational value of cooperative societies comes in; they act as agencies through which ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... against the renewal of aristocratic tyranny, and in proportion as they became free became civilised. It was during this period that in France, the grand centre of the crusading madness, the communes began to acquire strength, and the monarch to possess a practical and not a merely theoretic authority. Order and comfort began to take root, and, when the second Crusade was preached, men were in consequence much less willing to abandon their homes than they had been during the first. Such pilgrims as had ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not; I believe this, on the contrary, the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... recently urged, that the acquisition and control of territories are necessary incidents of the sovereign and proprietary character of the government created by the Constitution.[B] But be this as it may, whatever the theoretic origin of the right to acquire territory,—whatever the origin of the right to govern it,—whether the former be derived from the war-making power, which implies conquest, or from the treaty-making power, which implies purchase,—and whether the latter be derived from an express grant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... realisable as they recognise the complex unity of the city as a social development of which all the departments of action and thought are in organic relation, be it of health or disease. The view of theoretic civics as concrete sociology, and of practical civics as applied sociology may be more simply expressed as the co-adjustment of social survey and social service, now becoming recognised as rational, indeed in many ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... its history, faculties, and predilections, endear or discommend it to his instinct. How hardly will poetry consent to employ such words as "congratulation" or "philanthropist,"—words of good origin, but tainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves. How eagerly will the poetic imagination seize on a word like "control," which gives scope by its very vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of association. All words, the weak and the strong, the definite ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... ask, is one of those laws? It is this: that when a country is invaded, and two hostile armies are set in martial array, the commanders of both armies have power to emancipate all the slaves in the invaded territory. Nor is this a mere theoretic statement. The history of South America shows that the doctrine has been carried into practical execution within the last thirty years. Slavery was abolished in Columbia, first, by the Spanish General Morillo, and, secondly, ...
— The Abolition Of Slavery The Right Of The Government Under The War Power • Various
... have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London; where he was quite ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... because they have neither time nor disposition for them, but because the friction set up between the individual and the community by the expression of unusual views of any sort is quite enough hindrance to the heretic without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus the theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life, whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other libertines, and excessively conventional in professions of ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... formed, rejected, took up again. Vast was the correspondence she held with all manner of representative people, seeking for information, accumulating reports, lectures, argumentative pamphlets, theoretic volumes, in mass altogether beyond her ability to cope with; nowadays, her secretary read and digested and summarised with tireless energy. Lady Ogram had never cared much for reading; she admired ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... already gone into the subject of Science and its attempted positiveness, and its resistances in that it must have relations of service. It is very easy to see that most of the theoretic science of the 19th century was only a relation of reaction against theologic dogma, and has no more to do with Truth than has a wave that bounds back from a shore. Or, if a shop girl, or you or I, should pull out a piece of chewing gum about ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... sign of her actual coldness; she lets off her feeling in theoretic grooves, and there is sure to be none left for practical ones. Whatever seems to be the most prominent vice, or the most prominent virtue in anybody's writing is the one thing you are safest from in personal dealings ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... assimilation and the assertion of difference. So long as we ignore difference, so long as we ignore individuality, and that I hold has been the common sin of all Utopias hitherto, we can make absolute statements, prescribe communisms or individualisms, and all sorts of hard theoretic arrangements. But in the world of reality, which—to modernise Heraclitus and Empedocles—is nothing more nor less than the world of individuality, there are no absolute rights and wrongs, there are no qualitative ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... religion, she as a matter of course would not endure. It is more surprising to find that she also called in question the rights which the nobility claimed as against the royal government, assigning a sort of theoretic ground for her view. The nobles base them, so she said, on the services of their ancestors; but if the children have renounced their virtue, neglect honour, care only for their families, despise the King and his laws and commit treason, must the sovereign even then still let his power be ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... heavy charges, Crato; I suppose you have been getting up this subject for some time. You are not content with attacking the whole pantomimic art, practical and theoretic; we too, the pleased spectators thereof, come in for our share: we have been lavishing our admiration, it seems, on effeminate triflers. And now let me show you how completely you have been mistaken; you will find that the art you have been maligning ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... sparingly, in another every field contains very many. The normoblastic type is found most frequently, but side by side with it, megaloblasts and forms transitional between the two are occasionally found. Mitoses within the red blood discs have been described by different authors, but possess no theoretic or clinical importance. The appearance of erythroblasts in leukaemia may be either a specific phenomenon, or merely the expression of an anaemia accompanying the leukaemia. We are inclined to the first supposition, since the occurrence in such numbers of nucleated red cells is hardly ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... build you must have freedom from actual war, and the provisions have been effective. They are not merely theoretic. I am not sure whether it is generally recognised, even in so instructed an assembly as this, how successful these provisions have actually been in practice. Let me give you briefly two illustrations: ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... "Well, maybe it is theoretic, also," said Eveley smiling faintly, and although the smile was faint, it was Eveley's own, which could not be resisted. "But duty isn't big enough, nor adaptable enough, nor winning enough. There must be some stronger force to set in action. Nobody could ever win me by doing his duty by me. It takes ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... Let's better ride to the girlies, that will be nearer the mark," said peremptorily Lichonin, an old student, a tall, stooping, morose and bearded fellow. By convictions he was an anarchist—theoretic, but by avocation a passionate gambler at billiards, races and cards—a gambler with a very broad, fatalistic sweep. Only the day before he had won a thousand roubles at macao in the Merchants' Club, and this money was still burning ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... the Telemachiad and the Ulyssiad link them together. Disturbed Ithaca, peaceful Phaeacia; the theoretic education of the son, the practical discipline of the father; Telemachus, the son of his father, Nausicaa, the daughter of her mother, the Ithacan boy and the Phaeacian girl—such are a few of these contrasts. Finally father and son, strongly contrasted, yet having their unity ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... of education is obviously not a mental process. When a mother talks to a baby, she is not encouraging its little mind to think. When she is coaxing her child to walk, she is not making a theoretic exposition of the science of equilibration. She crouches before the child, at a little distance, and spreads her hands. "Come, baby—come to mother. Come! Baby, walk! Yes, walk! Walk to mother! Come along. A little walk to its mother. Come! Come then! Why ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... complex article of food is in question, before considering it as a good nutriment, its centesimal composition, or its immediate composition, should be established; its theoretic calorific power should be known, and it should be measured if this has ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... that he felt compassion for the men around him. He pitied the rest of the world. It was, besides, his instinct to look about him, because no one is always consistent, and a man's nature is not always theoretic; he was delighted to live within an enclosure, but from time to time he lifted his head above the wall. Then he retreated again with more joy into his loneliness with Dea, having drawn his comparisons. What did ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... leave off judging, all benevolent bankers leave off lending money at high interest, and all rising politicians leave off having nothing to add to what their right honourable friend told the House about eight years ago. The quaint theoretic plea of the workers, that they were striking because they were ill paid, seems to receive a sort of wild and hazy confirmation from the fact that, throughout the hottest weather, judges and other persons who are particularly well ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and taught fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the nameless gods whose fear is on all flesh, and also to see ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... has been said and preached upon the subject by the friends of Italy, it would be a serious matter indeed if the Pope, taking a practical advantage of his theoretic liberty, should be done to death in the streets of Rome by a self-styled Italian patriot. No one who thoroughly understands Rome at the present day is ignorant that such danger really exists, though it will no doubt be promptly denied by Italian ministers, newspaper correspondents or other intelligent ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... they were hurried and tried, was a Mr. Cumberland Vane, a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, honourably celebrated for the lightness of his sentences and the lightness of his conversation. He occasionally worked himself up into a sort of theoretic rage about certain particular offenders, such as the men who took pokers to their wives, talked in a loose, sentimental way about the desirability of flogging them, and was hopelessly bewildered by the fact ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... least suspicion that they were destined to be dished up with a sauce of penny-a-lining gossip; and myself, my person, and my works of art, butchered to make a holiday for the readers of a Sunday paper. Night had fallen over the Genius of Muskegon before the issue of my theoretic eloquence was stayed, nor did I separate from my new friend without ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at any rate that Mr. Ricardo's must be a most improper book as an elementary one. But, after all, you will admit that even amongst Mr. Ricardo's friends there is a prevailing opinion that he is too subtle (or, as it is usually expressed, too theoretic) a writer to be safely relied on for the practical ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the worst possibilities of her character came into prominence. Like a creature that is beset by unrelenting forces, she summoned and surveyed all the craft faculties lurking in the dark places of her nature; theoretic y she had now accepted every debasing compact by which a woman can spite herself on the world's injustice. Self-assertion; to be no longer an unregarded atom in the mass of those who are born only to labour for others; to find play for the strength and the passion ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... when in motion the disk was competent to drag after it, not only a light needle, but a heavy magnet. The question had been probed and investigated with admirable skill both by Arago and Ampere, and Poisson had published a theoretic memoir on the subject; but no cause could be assigned for so extraordinary an action. It had also been examined in this country by two celebrated men, Mr. Babbage and Sir John Herschel; but it still remained a mystery. Faraday always recommended the suspension of judgment in cases of doubt. 'I have ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... language of the school of English law, and offers an explanation of the fact. That which Acts of Parliament do not say, which is negatived in actual practice by contradictory and irreconcilable facts, is yet wanted by lawyers for the theoretic completeness of their idea and system of law. The fact is important as a reminder that what is one real aspect, or, perhaps, the most complete and consistent representation of a system on paper, may be inadequate and untrue as an exhibition of its real working ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... side, first of all etymologists and word-masters, and then especially of all "Indologues," and of the whole Indian past itself. There is an enormous difference between what can have been, nay, according to certain abstract theoretic views must have been, and what has been. That, however, is the distinctive problem for historical investigation. And here, above all, much depends on philological knowledge and sagacity; but still more on that historical tact which understands how inferences should be drawn. This demands much ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... His crew was by no means depressed. There had been a terrific lift in spirits when dummy-warheaded missiles made theoretic hits, though fifteen interceptors tried to stop them. The crewmen now tended elaborately to explain the process. A part of the trick was the curved path along which the re-set missiles flashed. Such courses alone could never be computed ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... known him untold, he has by no means the look to be expected from Bonaparte, but rather that of a profoundly studious and contemplative man, who "o'er books consumes" not only the "midnight oil" but his own daily strength, "and wastes the puny body to decay" by abstruse speculation and theoretic plans or rather visions, ingenious but not practicable. But the look of the commander who heads his own army, who fights his own battles, who conquers every difficulty by personal exertion, who executes all he plans, who performs even all he suggests; whose ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... the superior; and this is equally evident both in the works of art as well as in those of nature; but that is superior which has reason. Reason itself also is divided into two parts, in the manner we usually divide it; the theoretic and the practical; which division therefore seems necessary for this part also: the same analogy holds good with respect to actions; of which those which are of a superior nature ought always to be chosen by those who have it in their ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... give freedom to seventy men and women, fellow-beings and fellow-Christians. Had Tripoli, instead of Washington, been the scene of this undertaking, the unhappy leaders in it would have been as secure of the theoretic as they now are of the practical part of martyrdom. I question whether the Dey of Tripoli is blessed with a District Attorney so benighted as ours at the seat of government. Very fitly is he named Key, who would allow himself to be made the instrument of locking ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... attitude of passive receptivity, undisturbed by doubts or questionings. Under such conditions, a belief in evil spirits ever ready and watching to tempt a man into heresy of belief or sinful act, and thus to destroy both body and soul, although it may exist as a theoretic portion of the accepted creed, cannot possibly become a vital doctrine to be believed by the general public. It may exist as a subject for learned dispute to while away the leisure hours of divines, but cannot by any possibility obtain an influence over the thoughts and ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... highest school can do for us is still but what the first school began doing—teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... been some progress in the general conduct of men. They are less greedy, less cruel, less selfish—greedy, cruel, and selfish though they still are. The progress which the best among us have made Cicero in fact achieved; but he had not acquired that theoretic aversion to a lie which is the first feeling in the bosom of a modern gentleman; therefore it was that he still busied himself with ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... use and reading, and boldly answers by suggesting five classes only: (1) science, (2) speculation, (3) art, (4) history, and (5) miscellaneous and periodical literature. But this seemingly simple division at once raises questions both of practical and of theoretic difficulty. As to the last, periodical literature is fast attaining to such magnitude, that it may require a classification of its own, and that the enumeration which indexes supply, useful as it is, will not suffice. And I fear it is the destiny of ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, "All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature's revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction in ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Young finds this the sub-stance of political conversation[4350]. The chaplain of a regiment, a curate in the vicinity, keeps fast hold of it; as to knowing what it means that is another matter. It is impossible to find anything out through explanations of it otherwise than "a theoretic perfection of government, questionable in its origin, hazardous in its progress, and visionary in its end." On the Englishman proposing to them the British constitution as a model they "hold it cheap in respect of liberty" and greet ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... phenomena of political economy have a suppleness, an elasticity, and, so to speak, a self-levelling power, which seems to escape the attention of the school of protectionists. They accuse us of being theoretic, but it is themselves who are so to a supreme degree, if the being theoretic consists in building up systems upon the experience of a single fact, instead of profiting by the experience of a series of facts. In the above ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... compelled to say—"the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophers has fallen upon evil days and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers . . . like the word 'cause' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap . . . it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy . . . let us leave out the soul, then, and confront ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... to an inverse experience. The theoretic reasons for certain limits to the rule of veracity appear to me unanswerable; nor can I condemn any one who acts in accordance with them. Yet when I place myself in a like position, at one of the crises demanding a deliberate lie, an unutterable repugnance ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... deepest of those confusions with which German metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waver between the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. To substitute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellect humility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a faculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... movements amongst us, or with national peculiarities of faith and discipline. It is impossible, however, to overlook entirely the fact of a gradual relaxation, which has gone on for some years, of the sterner features of the Calvinistic school of theology—at any rate, of keeping its theoretic peculiarities more in the background. What we have to notice in these pages are changes in the feelings with regard to religion and religious observances, which have appeared upon the exterior of society—the changes which belong to outward habits rather than to internal feelings. ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... mastery' from being incompatible with the exigencies of a struggle, that the varied, supple, and splendid powers of Lessing were exercised from first to last in an atmosphere of controversy. Instead of delicately nursing the theoretic life in the luxury of the academic cloister, he was forced to work like a slave upon the most uncongenial tasks for a very modest share of daily bread. 'I only wished to have things like other men,' he ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... separated the different sciences and erected them into distinct systems, each resting upon its own proper principles. He distributed philosophy into three branches:—(i.) Theoretic; (ii.) Efficient; (iii.) Practical. The Theoretic he divided into—1. Physics; 2. Mathematics; 3. Theology, or the Prime Philosophy—the science known in modern times as Metaphysics. The Efficient embraces what we now term the arts,—1. Logic; 2. Rhetoric; 3. Poetics. The Practical comprises—1. Ethics; ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... a naval academy, furnishing the means of theoretic instruction to the youths who devote their lives to the service of their country upon the ocean, still solicits the sanction of the Legislature. Practical seamanship and the art of navigation may be acquired on the cruises of the squadrons which from time to time are dispatched to distant seas, but ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... position. It still remained quiescent. Then the current was further altered, and the time and space co-ordinates set into new combinations. This change of the current was a progressive change. Controlled and carefully calculated by what intricate theoretic principles and practical mechanisms no scientist of our world can ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... to eschew all theory, and yet they only oppose theory to theory. The assertion that reality for the human mind is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible order, is purely theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact. Principles are as really objects of science as facts, and it is only in the light of principles that facts themselves are intelligible. If the human mind had no science of reality that transcends the sensible order, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... consideration of the order of precedence and capability, but also as admitting the temporal relations to a share in the nomenclature. As far as our knowledge goes there is no psychic apparatus possessing only the primary process, and in so far it is a theoretic fiction; but so much is based on fact that the primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes develop gradually in the course of life, inhibiting and covering the primary ones, and gaining complete mastery over them ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... he never shook them off without an appropriate cause and after due reflection. In virtue of his principles he always progressed, but without being led into exaggeration or lured by compromise; he willingly relinquished theoretic formulas to pursue their results. Less occupied with the disputes of the schools and their terms, than in producing himself the best argument, a finished work, he was fortunate enough to avoid ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... have cleared up the whole matter," Moll remarks, "I regard his deductions concerning the connection of foot-and-shoe fetichism to masochism as the most important progress that has been made in the theoretic study of sexual perversions.... In any case, the connection is very frequent." (Kontraere Sexualempfindung, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... should be enabled to examine the parts separately, explore their action upon one another, or their operation, whether simultaneous or successive, upon the material which is presented to them? He may long to do this to satisfy his curiosity; he may desire to do it to improve his theoretic knowledge; ... but for the purpose of ascertaining the existence of counsel and design in the formation of the machine, he wants no such intromission or privity. The effect upon the material, the change produced in it, the utility of the change for future applications, abundantly testify, be ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... justice to say, that the present volume is a successful realization of the purpose thus announced. It presents as full a collection of facts on the subject as is probably to be found in any work in the English language, furnishing materials for the formation of theoretic views, and illustrating an obscure but most interesting chapter in the marvelous history of human nature. It is written with perfect modesty, and freedom from pretense, doing credit to the ability of the author as a narrator, as ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... fancy is a mental image or picture founded upon slight or whimsical association or resemblance; a conceit has less of the picturesque and more of the theoretic than a fancy; a conceit is somewhat aside from the common laws of reasoning, as a fancy is lighter and more airy than the common mode of thought. A conceit or fancy may be wholly unfounded, while a conception ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... exciting the very faculty which had begotten them. When will the clergy learn that their strength is in action, and not in argument? If they are to reconvert the masses, it must be by noble deeds, as Carlyle says; "not by noisy theoretic laudation of a Church, but by silent ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that the Irish Episcopal Church had fallen out of harmony with the spirit and use of the time, and must be judged by a practical rather than a theoretic test. In concluding the author puts antithetically the case for and against the maintenance of the Church of Ireland: "An establishment that does its work in much and has the hope and likelihood of doing it in more; that has a broad and living way open to it into the hearts of the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... of volcanic action; from which we may infer that the originating cause, whatever it may be, has been in operation throughout all past geological time represented by living forms. The question of the condition of our globe in Archaean times, and earlier, is one which only can be discussed on theoretic ground, and is beyond the scope ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... and visible stream of politics there was, as there ever is, a latent tide of more theoretic and speculative opinions. While the practical politicians were playing their momentary parts, schemers, and levellers, were propagating in all quarters doctrines which they fondly imagined were addressed to immortal ends. And Constance began to turn ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... souls, living on this practical Earth, should think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy theoretic demonstrations and laudations of the Church, instead of some unnoisy, unconscious, but practical, total, heart-and-soul demonstration of a Church: this, in the circle of revolving ages, this also was a thing we were to see. A kind of penultimate thing, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... things did not go so far. The hard conditions of existence there were not propitious to the rise of a purely scholarly school or to theoretic discussion. Scientific centres were entirely wanting, and the censor permitted no trifling with the subject of religion. A new movement, realistic and utilitarian in the main, began to take shape, first in the form of a protest against the unsubstantial ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... greater part of the so-called civilised world is spreading a deep distrust, a deep irreverence of every man towards his neighbour, and a practical unbelief in every man whom you do see, atones for itself by a theoretic belief in an ideal human nature which you do not see. Such a temper of mind, unless it be checked by that which alone can check it, namely, the grace of God, must tend towards sheer anarchy. There is a deeper and uglier anarchy than any mere political anarchy,—which the abuse of the critical ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... of the himation and without cravat, would hardly have made a sensation among the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in adjusting their own drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by being another sort of person in the present age I might have given it some needful theoretic clue; or I might have poured forth poetic strains which would have anticipated theory and seemed a voice from "the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming of things to come;" or I might have been one of those benignant lovely souls who, without astonishing the public ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... others, it took refuge in Syria, where it flourished for many years in the schools of Edessa and Nisibis, the foremost of the time. From these it found its way among the Arabs, and even to the illiterate Muhammad, who gave it (1) theoretic theological expression in the cxii. surah of the Koran: "He is One God, God the Eternal; He neither begets nor is begotten; and to Him there is no peer," in which both the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are denied, and that too on the ground of revelation; (2) practical expression, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... us both; she is very thoughtful. She is not merely a theoretic philanthropist—she goes into details," said Miss Birdseye, presenting her large person, in her chair, as if she herself were only an item. "It seems as if we were not so much wanted in Boston, just ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... nobleness of heart striving towards all nobleness; here was ardent recognition of the worth of Christianity, for one thing; but no belief in it at all, in my sense of the word belief,—no belief but one definable as mere theoretic moonshine, which would never stand the wind and weather of fact. Nay it struck me farther that Sterling's was not intrinsically, nor had ever been in the highest or chief degree, a devotional mind. Of course all excellence in man, and worship as the supreme excellence, was part of the inheritance ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... different. Although he was more of a thinker than any of them, his boldness was not of the merely theoretic kind. He wished to interfere and re-model. None of those Frenchmen lacked firmness; if, from any consideration, they modified their utterances somewhat, their fundamental views, at any rate, were formed independently; ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... was somewhat severe and changeable. Under these conditions, with the water at 39 and room 60, the coal which gives 14.74 lb. of water per lb. of coal, will give as high as 15.88 lb. of water per lb. of coal. This result multiplied by 5378,496 calories, approaching much more nearly to the theoretic value. This method of working is still practiced abroad, but experience has shown that very widely differing results follow when working in this manner, especially if the temperature of the room is changeable, as it naturally is where ash determinations and other chemical work is proceeding simultaneously. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... bear the minute word-by-word dissection which only brings into clearer view the delicate touches of Keats or Tennyson; his pictures with a big brush were never meant for the microscope. Here the contrast between his theoretic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax. If, as he professed to believe, "the best poet is he who best executes his work," then he is hardly a poet at all. He is habitually rapid and slovenly; an improvisatore ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... too long to send to you, so you must see it, if you care to do so, on your return. By-the-way, you say in your letter that you care more for my species work than for the Barnacles; now this is too bad of you, for I declare your decided approval of my plain Barnacle work over theoretic species work, had very great influence in deciding me to go on with the former, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... There may be onesidedness here. There may be, for example, an excessive or ill-directed pressing of utilities, as in the speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer; or there may be an undue exaltation of what he calls 'the decorative element.' The theoretic maybe too exclusively pursued; or there may be a practicalness which has too little of theory, like a cone required to stand firm on its apex. There should be completeness, also, as touching the subjective aim. It should ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... his learning and his skill were very evenly balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was nothing abstract in his remedies—he always ordered you to take something. Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was not uncomfortably theoretic, and if he sometimes explained matters rather more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far (like some practitioners one has heard of) as to trust to the explanation alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There were some ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... possible, and that with perfect certainty. But the former postulates the possibility of an object itself (God and the immortality of the soul) from apodeictic practical laws, and therefore only for the purposes of a practical reason. This certainty of the postulated possibility then is not at all theoretic, and consequently not apodeictic; that is to say, it is not a known necessity as regards the object, but a necessary supposition as regards the subject, necessary for the obedience to its objective but practical laws. It is, therefore, merely a necessary hypothesis. ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... fighting in Italy, they were singing in France: the operas of Rameau began to make a noise there, and once more raise the credit of his theoretic works, which, from their obscurity, were within the compass of very few understandings. By chance I heard of his 'Treatise on Harmony', and had no rest till I purchased it. By another chance I fell sick; my illness ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint." He had too much imagination to feel safe in giving free rein to it, in a special direction of theoretic conduct; he also remembered that, as the old system of things was full of error, it was possible that a new one might become so in new ways, unless watched. The second observation touches the real ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... to hold up under the burden, that it is little wonder if, at times, we forget that our strenuous struggle is in fulfilment of a great plan to eventuate in the accomplishment of an eternal purpose. If we do hold the thought it is too often only in a theoretic way. It does not dominate us as it should, and as it would if once it seized us by the heart. Perhaps, more than in the case of most things to be realised, it requires great grace to make the soul able to grasp it. Perhaps, again, the purpose of God seems to ask more from us than we care ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... arguments in support of his opinion are theoretic; the examples by which he endeavors to sustain it tell, with one exception, against him. That exception is his quoting from one of Shakspeare's sonnets the rhyme doting and nothing. But this proves nothing (noting?); for we have already shown that Shakspeare, like all his contemporaries, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... could. They held the notion that learning, as they called it, always carried with it nautical ignorance and general deterioration; and in some instances the old salts' opinions seemed amply borne out by palpable blunders in practical seamanship which were not uncommonly made when the theoretic seaman or navigator was at work. These shortcomings of the "learned" were never forgotten or forgiven by the ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... observed. And yet the argument is full of fallacies: and the very position that he assumes appears to me to be unsound. It is well enough to record a dialect, nor will any one grudge him credit for his observation and diligence, but to reduce a dialect to theoretic laws and then impose those laws upon the speakers of it is surely a monstrous step. And in this particular instance the matter is complicated by the fact that Southern English is not truly a natural dialect; Mr. Jones himself denotes it as P.S.P.Public School Pronunciation, and that we know ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... probable that the factors which make for peace may one day gain the upper hand of those which (for perfectly definite and tangible reasons) have hitherto made for war. The fact remains, however, that he shouldered his knapsack without any theoretic distaste for the soldier's calling. In so far he was more happily situated than thousands who have made all the better soldiers for their intense detestation of the stupidity of war. But this in no way detracts from his loyalty to his personal ideal, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... anarchistic god would be simply a misplaced gearing or a broken wire, and that it would be easy for him to seek and find this disturbing god. The practice of the modern factory teaches scientific determinism to the wage-worker, without it being necessary for him to pass through the theoretic study of the sciences. ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... divisions, and with them No. 3 Squadron, should operate against a skeleton army. The squadron had next to nothing to observe; the other side had plenty to observe, but could not get full value out of their skeleton force. The tactics of the air had hardly reached the point at which a theoretic trial of this kind might have been of value. Yet a good deal was learnt by the Flying Corps from these manoeuvres. Major Brooke-Popham drew up a very full report on them, and in the following winter Lieutenant Barrington-Kennett, under the title 'What I learnt on Manoeuvres, 1913', brought together ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... the poets of whom modern Germany is justly proud. His was not the mere theoretic heroism which contents itself with celebrating the deeds of others. His own conduct embodied the most noble conceptions of his imagination, and his life and death exhibited a splendid example of the patriotism which breathed throughout his verse. He was born at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... finding what (under certain limitations) they would have welcomed in the form of a general observation, proclaimed to them as a law—a scientific law—which from its nature admits of no exception; at finding it stated that every branch of human knowledge must of necessity pass through these three theoretic stages. In the case of some branches of knowledge, it is impossible to point out what can be understood as its several theologic and metaphysic stages; and even in cases where M. Comte has himself applied these terms, it is extremely difficult to assign to them a meaning in accordance with that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... some observations, on this subject, which may properly claim regard, if the concurrent opinion of Cook be any commendation. It is rare with him to venture on theoretic conjectures; but his truly excellent remarks, so indicative of candid and unbiassed enquiry, may justly serve as the basis of very extensive reasoning. His professional career, in short, may be considered as a course of experimental ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... serious offence ministered to the weak or to the sceptical by differences irreconcilable in the acts or the opinions of those whom they are bound to regard as spiritual authorities. Now here, in Scotland, is a feud past all arbitration: here is a schism no longer theoretic, neither beginning nor ending in mere speculation; here is a change of doctrine, on one side or the other, which throws a sad umbrage of doubt and perplexity over the pastoral relation of the church to every parish in Scotland. Less confidence there must always be henceforward ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... ended more satisfactorily. We have no doubt that he would conduct a siege or a defence with all the science and all the proprieties of warfare, but we think he has proved himself singularly wanting in the qualities which distinguish the natural leaders of men. He had every theoretic qualification, but no ardor, no leap, no inspiration. A defensive general is an earthen redoubt, not an ensign to rally enthusiasm and inspire devotion. Caution will never make an army, though it may sometimes save one. ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the vocation of Plato to set up a standard of unchangeable reality, which in its highest theoretic development becomes the world of "eternal and immutable ideas," indefectible outlines of thought, yet also the veritable things of experience: the perfect Justice, for instance, which if even the gods mistake it for perfect Injustice is not moved out of its place; the ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... honest in its innocence of the things of the flesh.—The woman had been inconceivably foolish, from every point of view. If she had known, good heavens, if she had only known! But he inclined now to the more merciful view that, veritably, she didn't know; that her practical, even her theoretic, knowledge was insufficient for her to have had any clear design. It was just a blind push of starved animal instinct. Of course she must go. Her remaining in the house was in every way unpermissible; still he need not, perhaps, have been so cold-bloodedly precipitate ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... centuries, growing with the ages, claimed in chief part the intellectual activity of Jewry. The schools and the academies worked out a system of laws at once religious and practical in character, which constituted, in turn, the object of further theoretic study in the same schools and academies. In the course of time, however, the means became the end. Theoretic investigation of the law, extending and developing to the furthest limits, in itself, without reference to its practical value, afforded satisfaction ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... historian of England, but his chief prose work was his Defence of Rhyme. He had companions in the critical task; but it is curious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creative production of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered the theoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actual performance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe and Puttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting and Englishing travels and voyages was followed ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... general theories concerning the "rights of men" as any of the discoursers in our pulpits or on your tribune: full as well as Dr. Price, or as the Abbe Sieyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen to that vague, speculative right which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Parisian, and so comfortable in my theoretic pursuit of Progressive Geography, my leisure hours are unconsciously given to knitting myself again to past associations, and some of my deepest pleasures come from tearing open the ancient wounds. Shall memory ever lose that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... warriors, legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not. Then instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a scroll. The ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb |
