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Every thing addressed to human minds at all must be more or less of a compromise; thus, to take a very old illustration, even the definitions of a point and a line the fundamental things in the most exact of the sciences are mere compromises.

We are all interested in Art; yet few of us have taken pains to justify the delight we feel in it. No philosophy can win us away from Shakspeare, Plato, Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, Phidias, from the masters of sculpture, painting, music, and metaphor. Their truth is larger than any other, too large to be stated directly and lodged in systems, theories, definitions, or formulas.

And he's rather impident," he concluded, with memories of "Dogson.".... He was very clear that he never wanted to see him again; that was the reason of his early breakfast. Having clarified his mind by definitions, Dickson felt comforted. He paid his bill, took an affectionate farewell of the landlord, and at 7.30 precisely stepped out into the gleaming morning.

In legislation and morals, as well as in geometry, axioms are absolute, definitions are certain; and all the results of a principle are to be accepted, provided they are logically deduced. Deplorable pride! We know nothing of our nature, and we charge our blunders to it; and, in a fit of unaffected ignorance, cry out, "The truth is in doubt, the best definition defines nothing!"

In the first place these treatises gave only the dry husks of rhetoric, the conventional analyses, the stock definitions. In the second place rhetoric was little applied. The political life of western Europe centered in the camp, not in the forum. The classical tradition of trial by a large jury, as the Areopagus or the Centumviri, had given place to trial before the regal or manorial court.

Legal studies were pursued during the hours of the night only at the commencement of my stay in Gottingen, for I rarely attended the lectures for which I had entered my name, though the brevity of the Roman definitions of law, with which Ribbentropp's lectures had made me familiar, afforded me much pleasure.

Religion is always dependent upon changing tempers and very greatly upon varying personalities; it is always in flux, impatient of definitions and refusing the rigid boundary lines within which we attempt to confine it.

From these definitions emerges a conception of the properties of man's cognitional powers which agrees exactly with those on which, as we have seen, Hume built up his whole philosophy.

"Why do you say 'what we call inanimate matter'?" inquired Paul. "Because it has been very well said that names are labels, not definitions. As a definition, inanimate matter means generally the earth, the water, the air; but the name would be a very poor definition, as poor as the word 'man' used to define the human animal." "You do not think that inanimate matter is really lifeless?" I asked.

How, being so contained and implied, it could be new truth, and how the theorems of geometry, so different in appearance from the definitions and axioms, could be all contained in these, was a difficulty which no, one, I thought, had sufficiently felt, and which, at all events, no one had succeeded in clearing up.