hysteron-proteron

Updated: May 24, 2025

But here is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron. For the communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Biographia Literaria

But it is a mode so prevalent that Trendelenberg speaks of it, justly enough, as 'the ancient Hysteron-Proteron of Abstraction. The doctrine of these philosophers appears to us unfounded, but we cannot call it unmeaning. To this doctrine we cannot subscribe.

George Grote - Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.'

The title may sound a little misleading, Ruskinian, Horne-Tookian: probably the word "preposterous" would not have been used but for an accidental remembrance of De Quincey, who was so fond of using and explaining it, of pointing out that it signified the behind-before, the cart before the horse, the hysteron-proteron. By-the-by, why has De Quincey gone out of fashion?

Edward Fordham Spence - Our Stage and Its Critics : By "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

I noticed that a little while ago you suggested that it might be a good idea to begin a play with the last act; the idea is a mere hysteron-proteron, absolutely preposterous, prae-post-erous." This sounds as if the writer were the ghost of De Quincey.

Edward Fordham Spence - Our Stage and Its Critics : By "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"