Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

William Thomas Brande

In ancient authors a parenthetical form of writing is even more common than among moderns.

All the plays of Æschylus and the Henry VI. of Shakespeare are examples of a trilogy.

The records of history, both sacred and profane, abound in instances of dreams which it is impossible to account for on any other hypothesis than that of a supernatural interposition.

The practice of the duel, as a private mode, recognized only by custom, of deciding private differences, seems to be of comparatively recent date.

In England, the farce appears to have risen to the dignity of a regular theatrical entertainment about the beginning of the last century.

The games of the ancient Greeks were, in their original institutions, religious solemnities.

The imagination may be said, in its widest sense, to be synonymous with invention, denoting that faculty of the mind by which it either “bodies forth the form of things unknown,” or produces original thoughts or new combinations of ideas from materials stored up in the memory. The fancy may be considered that peculiar habit of association which presents to our choice all the different materials that are subservient to the efforts of the imagination.

Induction is the counter-process in scientific method to deduction. Induction implies the raising of individuals into generals, and these into still higher generalities. Deduction is the bringing down of universals to lower genera, or to individuals. Every deduction, therefore, to be valid, must rest on a prior induction, which, in order that we may obtain logical certainty, must be a complete induction,—that is to say, must include all the individuals which constitute the genus.

The earliest modern romances were collections of chivalrous adventures, chiefly founded on the lives and achievements of the warlike adherents of two sovereigns, one of whom, perhaps, had only a fabulous existence, while the annals of the other have given rise to a wonderful series of fables,—Arthur and Charlemagne.

The worst effect of party is its tendency to generate narrow, false, and illiberal prejudices, by teaching the adherents of one party to regard those that belong to an opposing party as unworthy of confidence.

In the old Northern literature, those mythological poems of which the writers are known are properly called songs of the Scalds, while those of unknown authors are termed Eddas.

Proverbs are, for the most part, rules of moral, or, still more properly, of prudential conduct.

In the language of English philosophy, the terms reason and understanding are nearly identical, and are so used by Stewart; but in the critical philosophy, of Kant a broad distinction has been drawn between them. Reason is the principle of principles;—[it] either speculatively verifies every special principle, or practically determines the proper ends of human action…. There are unquestionably in the human mind certain necessary and universal principles, which, shining with an intrinsic light of evidence, are themselves above proof, but the authority for all mediate and contingent principles. That which is thus above reasoning is the reason.

Reformed theologians altogether reject the distinction between venial and mortal sin.