A priori Sentence Examples

The method of the latter investigator was purely a priori.

Every time we survey a field, we go upon the principles, not of special experience, but of a priori necessity.

In other words; whenever philosophy g teaches a doctrine of the Absolute, and regards such doctrine as valid and certain, we have the essence of an ontological or a priori argument.

Then came the stress of war in Europe, a wretched neutrality at home, fierce outbreaks of human passions, and the fair structure of government by a priori theories based on the goodness of unoppressed humanity came to the ground.

It is true that in Roman Catholicism, in medieval as in modern times, the working of miracles has been ascribed to its saints; but the character of most of these miracles is such as to lack the a priori probability which has been claimed for the Scripture miracles.

He and Jefferson were both imbued with the idea that government could be carried on upon a priori principles resting on the assumed perfectness of human nature, and the chief burden of carrying out this theory fell upon Gallatin.

With some, of course - such as the god of fire - the connexion with the good deity was a priori indissoluble.

But, the assumption has certainly no a priori grounds in its favour.

Thus the current applications of mathematics to the analysis of phenomena can be justified by no a priori necessity.

Whilst simple evidence of the fact of the transmission of an acquired character is wanting, the a priori arguments in its favour break down one after another when discussed.

The extent to which his practice was influenced by this and other a priori conceptions prevents us from classing Sydenham as a pure empiric; but he had the rare merit of never permitting himself to be enslaved even by his own theories.

This knowledge, however, is by no means positivistic or empirical, but on the contrary it is dialectical and a priori synthetic, brought about by the spiritual categories; and from it there constantly arise new problems, an ever new position of the fundamental categories.

To the theory of knowledge Spencer contributes a "transfigured realism," to mediate between realism and idealism, and the doctrine that "necessary truths," acquired in experience and congenitally transmitted, are a priori to the individual, though a posteriori to the race, to mediate between empiricism and apriorism.

Hence we conclude that the grounds are lacking which would entitle our assuming a priori that the Apocalypse is pseudonymous.

Its polemic against the philosophy of experience has exposed it to general misunderstanding, as though it claimed some a priori path to truth.

But a priori we are hardly justified in assuming that waves can be propagated at all, and certainly not justified in assuming that they go on unchanged by the action of the internal forces alone.

He claims recognition as an independent a priori propounder of the "First Law of Thermodynamics," but more especially as having early and ably applied that law to the explanation of many remarkable phenomena, both cosmical and terrestrial.

Denying the existence of a deity, and refusing to admit as evidence all a priori arguments, Holbach saw in the universe nothing save matter in spontaneous movement.

Abandoning therefore all a priori theoretical assumption, Bashforth set to work to measure experimentally the velocity of shot and the resistance of the air by means of equidistant electric screens furnished with vertical threads or wire, and by a chronograph which measured the instants of time at which the screens were cut by a shot flying nearly horizontally.

In part it may fairly be attributed to the retarding influence of the school of Ewald, but in large part also Well- to the fact that Vatke, a pupil of Hegel, had developed his theory on a priori grounds in accordance with the principles of Hegel's philosophy of history.

But there is also a greater degree of similarity between them than can be explained by accidental coincidence, and there is thus an a priori case for the theory that one of the two is a revision of the other, or that there was an older version, now lost, which was the original of both.

It is not a priori improbable that the year of the central event from which the Christian Church dated her own existence should have been noted in the apostolic age and handed down to the memory of succeeding generations; and the evidence does go some way to suggest that we have in favour of A.D.

At the same time various details (as comparison with the Book of Kings shows) are relatively old and, on a priori grounds, it is extremely unlikely that the unhistorical elements are necessarily due to deliberate imagination or perversion rather than to the development of earlier traditions.

But there is another species of deduction which, as Cliffe Leslie has shown, seriously tainted the philosophy of Smith - in which the premises are not facts ascertained by observation, but the a priori assumptions which we found in the physiocrats.

And we find accordingly in his great work a combination of inductive inquiry with a priori speculation founded on the "Nature" hypothesis.

Regarded merely as a criticism of the notions with which scientific interpretation proceeds, these writings have still importance and might have achieved more had they been untainted by the tendency to hasty, ill-considered, a priori anticipations of nature.

In this theory there can strictly be no "causation"; one thing is observed to succeed another, but observations cannot assert that it is "caused" by that thing; it is post hoc, but not propter hoc. The idea of necessary connexion is a purely mental idea, an a priori conception, in which observation of empirical data takes no part; empiricism in ethics likewise does away with the idea of the absolute authority of the moral law as conceived by the intuitionalists.

He throws out the brilliant suggestion that the experience of the race is in a sense inherited by the individual; which is true in the sense that animal organisms become hereditarily better adapted to perform mental operations, though no proof that any elements of knowledge become a priori.

As to the origin of knowledge, Kant's position is that sense, outer and inner, affected by things in themselves, receives mere sensations or sensible ideas (Vorstellungen) as the matter which sense itself places in the a priori forms of space and time; that thereupon understanding, by means of the synthetic unity of apperception, " I think " - an act of spontaneity beyond sense, in all consciousness one and the same, and combining all my ideas as mine in one universal consciousness - and under a priori categories, or fundamental notions, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, &c., unites groups of sensations or sensible ideas into objects and events, e.g.

In order to prove this novel conclusion he started afresh from the Cartesian " I think " in the Kantian form of the synthetic unity of apperception acting by a priori categories; but instead of allowing, with all previous metaphysicians, that the Ego passively receives sensations from something different, and not contenting himself with Kant's view that the Ego, by synthetically combining the matter of sensations with a priori forms, partially constructs objects, and therefore Nature as we know it, he boldly asserted that the Ego, in its synthetic unity, entirely constructs things; that its act of spontaneity is not mere synthesis of passive sensations, but construction of sensations into an object within itself; and that therefore understanding makes as well as shapes Nature.

Kant's a priori synthesis of sensations into experience lies at the root of all German idealism.

This modification was the beginning of a gradual lessening of the antithesis of a priori to a posteriori, until at last the a priori forms of Kant have been transmuted into " auxiliary conceptions," or " postulates of experience."

Hence he deduced that whatever we know from sensations arranged in such a priori forms are objects of our own experience and mental phenomena.

He accepts the Kantian positions that unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori synthesis, and that therefore all that natural science knows about matter moving in space is merely phenomena of outer sense; and he agrees with Kant that from these data we could not infer things in themselves by reason.

For what does it matter to metaphysics whether by association sensations suggest ideas, and so give rise to ideas of substance and causation a posteriori, or synthetic unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori notions of substance and causation into objects which are merely mental phenomena of experience, when it is at once allowed by the followers of Hume and Kant alike that reason in any logical use has no power of inferring things beyond the experience of the reasoner?

But in reality his theory is neither Hume's theory of association nor Kant's of an a priori notion of understanding under which a given case is subsumed.

He allows, in fact, no a priori forms except categories of the understanding, and these he reduces, considering that the most important are identity with difference and causality, which in his view are necessary to the judgments that the various data which make up a total impression (Gesammteindruck, Totaleindruck) are each different from the others, together identical with the total impression, and causally connected in relations of necessary sequence and coexistence.

It is like " immanent philosophy," in opposing experience to the transcendent; but it also opposes experience to the transcendental, or a priori.

At the same time Schuppe's hypothesis of one common consciousness uniting the given by a priori categories could hardly be accepted by Avenarius as pure experience, or as a natural view of the world.

Between Hume's a posteriori and Kant's a priori hypothesis he proposes a logical theory of the origin of notions beyond experience.

Not, says Wundt, by association, as Hume said, but by thinking; not, however, by a priori thinking, as Kant said, but by logical thinking, by applying the logical principle of ground and consequent (which Leibnitz had called the principle of sufficient reason) as a causal law to empirical appearances.

In working out this process he supposes that reason throws into consciousness a priori categories, synthetic predicates a priori, or, as he also calls them, " dialectic percepts."

Of these the most important is cause, of which his theory, in short, is that by this a priori category and the process of reason we go on from sequence to consequence; first stating that an effect may be caused by several alternatives, then negating all but one, next concluding that this one as sufficient reason is cause, and finally attaining the necessity of the causal nexus by converting causality into identity, e.g.

Lastly, while he agrees with Kant about a priori categories, he differs about the knowledge to be got out of them.

Kant, taking it in the mistaken meaning of Locke, converted it into the a priori category of the permanent substrate beneath the changes of phenomena, and even went so far as to separate it from the thing in itself, as substantia phenomenon from noumenon.

We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes.

Renouvier (q.v.)has worked out an idealism which he calls "Neo-criticisme," rejecting the thing-in-itself, while limiting knowledge to phenomena constituted by a priori categories.

Hegel only extended a priori forms to things by resolving things into thoughts.

Yet Martineau adopted, as his view of the limits of human intelligence, that Kant was right in making space and time a priori forms of sense, but wrong in limiting them to sensations.

He facilitated this awkward transition by adding to Kant's a priori forms of space and time an " a priori form of alternative causality," or, as he also called it, " an intuition of causality involved in the elementary exercise of perception," which is the key to his whole philosophy.

To pass over its confusion of a priori and intuitive, there are two fatal objections to this view.

It is based on Descartes' fundamental principle that knowledge must be clear, and seeks to give to philosophy the certainty and demonstrative character of mathematics, from the a priori principle of which all its claims are derived.

For it is to be expected a priori that, since albinoes were derived from pigmented progenitors and may at any time appear, side by side with pigmented brothers, in a litter from pigmented parents, they would be carrying the pattern determinants of some one or other of their pigmented ancestors.

Butler, however, retained, in spite of his destructive theory of knowledge, confidence in the rational proofs for the existence of God, and certainly maintains what may be vaguely described as an a priori view of conscience.

The first is the type of a certain a priori view, then regarded as the safest bulwark against infidelity, of which the main tenets were that the being of God was capable of a priori proof, and that, owing to the finitude of our faculties, the attributes and modes of operation of deity were absolutely incomprehensible.

Nor does the a priori argument in any of its forms fare better, for reason can never demonstrate a matter of fact, and, unless we know that the world had a beginning in time, we cannot insist that it must have had a cause.

The work as a whole is a striking example of the weakness of treating economic problems from a purely a priori standpoint by the deductive method.

Be- sides, it is a priori unlikely that a contemporary of Mahomet should have drawn up such a list; and if any one had made the attempt he would have found it almost impossible to obtain reliable information as to the order of the earlier Meccan suras.

Kant's analysis of knowledge had disclosed the a priori element as the necessary complement of the isolated a posteriori facts of experience.

But it did not seem to Fries that Kant had with sufficient accuracy examined the mode in which we arrive at knowledge of this a priori element.

According to him we only know these a priori principles through inner or psychical experience; they are not then to be regarded as transcendental factors of all experience, but as the necessary, constant elements discovered by us in our inner experience.

Apparently in August, when Hegel qualified, the news of the discovery had not yet reached him, but critics have made this luckless suggestion the ground of attack on a priori philosophy.

It carried out Kant's doctrine of the categories as a priori synthetic principles, but removed the limitation by which Kant denied them any constitutive value except in alliance with experience.

There is no a priori reason to expect the same result from the different classes of stars, such as the brighter or fainter, northern or southern, nearer or more distant, Solar type or Sirian stars.

The former is not a purely a priori argument, nor is it presented as such by its author.

Judgment is consciousness of the identity or difference and of the causal relations of the given; naming the actual combinations of the data, but also requiring a priori categories of the understanding, the notions of identity, difference and causality, as principles of thought or laws, to combine the plurality of the given into a unity (Schuppe).

Most inductions are made without any assumption of the uniformity of nature; for, whether it is itself induced, or a priori or postulated, this like every assumption is a judgment, and most men are incapable of judgment on so universal a scale, when they are quite capable of induction.

So long as the relation of the nominal to the real essence has no other background than Locke's doctrine of perception, the conclusion that what Kant afterwards calls analytical judgments a priori and synthetic judgments a posteriori exhaust the field follows inevitably, with its corollary, which Locke himself has the courage to draw, that the natural sciences are in strictness impossible.

Upon abstraction from all particular methods of thought these rules were to be discerned a priori or without dependence on experience by reflection solely upon the use of the understanding in general.

They passed easily from the acceptance of a priori forms of thinking to that of forms of a priori thinking, and could plead the example of Kant's logic.

Even so the inference to the a priori ground of its necessity is, it has been often pointed out, subject to the limitation inherent in any process of reduction, in any regress, that is, from conditionate to condition, viz.

If alleged Psycho- P g Logy.ic a priori constituents of knowledge - such rubrics as substance, property, relation - come to be explained psychologically, the formal logic that has perforce to ignore all that belongs to psychology is confined within too narrow a range to be able to maintain its place as an independent discipline, and tends to be merged in psychology.

They are a priori because no experience is sufficient to reveal or confirm them in unconditional universality; but they are a priori.

Hamilton, having gone thus far, proceeded to evolve these results from a characteristic train of a priori or metaphysical reasoning.

Thus to Aristotle the a priori argument is from law or cause to effect, as opposed to what we call a posteriori (posterior, subsequent, derived), from effect to cause.

Hence the problem becomes a dialectical a priori speculation wherein the laws of thought transcend the sense-given data of experience.

His a priori theories should be compared with Maine's historical inquiries (Ancient Law, c. V.).

To the second problem there are two main answers, that of Associationism which denies to the mind any a priori existence and asserts that sensation is the only source of knowledge, and that which admits the existence of both transcendental and empirical knowledge.

It need hardly be said that such an a priori conviction is not a sufficient basis on which to found a sweeping condemnation of Bacon's integrity as an administrator of justice.

There is no a priori reason why other legal enactments should not have been current when the compilation was first made; the Pentateuchal legislation is incomplete, and covers only a small part of the affairs of life in which legal decisions 1 For the sake of convenience Ben (" son ") and Rabbi are, as usual, abbreviated to b.

This fundamental homogeneity of primitive culture, however, must not be made the excuse for a treatment at the hands of psychology and sociology that dispenses with the study of details and trusts to an a priori method.

The belief that the Powers controlling man's life are willing upon occasion to disclose something of their purpose, has led to widespread rites of divination, which Plato described as the " art of fellowship between gods and men," and the Stoics defended on grounds of a priori religious expectation as well as of universal experience.

But, besides removing the psychological slag which clung to Kant's ideas from their matrix and presenting reason as the active principle in the formation of a universe, his successors carried out with far more detail, and far more enthusiasm and historical scope, his principle that in reason lay the a priori or the anticipation of the world, moral and physical.

It was only natural, considering the evils produced by usury in ancient Greece and Rome, that philosophers should have tried to give an a priori explanation of these abuses.

Without altogether eschewing Samuel Clarke's a priori system, Butler relies mainly on the inductive method, not professing to give an absolute demonstration so much as a probable proof.

He will permit no anticipations of nature, no a priori construction of experience.

He first introduced into economics on a great scale the method of deduction from a priori assumptions.

The Magnitude Of A Drop Delivered From A Tube, Even When The Formation Up To The Phase Of Instability Is Infinitely Slow, Cannot Be Calculated A Priori.

Varro's etymologies could be only a priori guesses, but he was well aware of their character, and very clearly states at the outset of the fifth book the hindrances that barred the way to sound knowledge.

With regard to the proportioning of effort between the two theatres of war, contemporary military opinion, impressed by a sort of primacy which Bulgaria assumed in the league, by the more regular character of her army and her civil administration, and by the nearness of Constantinople to her eastern frontier, argued a priori that Thrace was not only the" principal "theatre, but the single important theatre in which practically all military effort should have been concentrated by both sides - a judgment which ignored the relation of strategy to war policy, and one for which in the sequel Bulgaria was destined to pay heavil y.

The term is specially applied to Kant's philosophy and its successors which hold that knowledge of the a priori is possible.

Mill the a priori nature of necessary truth, and by his rules for the construction of conceptions he dispensed with the inductive methods of Mill.

However biassed, this a priori study had its merits.

I have no a priori objections to the doctrine.

No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties.

Hasty judgment, bias, absence of an a priori " indifference " to what the evidence may in the end require us to conclude, undue regard for authority, excessive love for custom and antiquity, indolence and sceptical despair are among the states of mind marked by him as most apt to interfere with the formation of beliefs in harmony with the Universal Reason that is active in the universe.

Anything, as far as " constant observation " tells us, might a priori have been the natural cause of anything; and no finite number of " observed " sequences, per se, can guarantee universality and necessity.

Finally, side by side with a theory of the nature of moral obligation thus fundamentally empirical and a posteriori in its outlook, he maintains in his account of justice the existence of the idea of justice as distinct from a mere sentiment, carrying with it an a priori belief in its existence and identical in its a priori and intuitive character with the ultimate criterion of Utilitarianism itself.

The argument, for instance, that intuitive and a priori beliefs gain their absolute character from the fact that they are the result of continued transmission and accumulation of past nervous modifications in the history of the race would, if taken seriously, lead us to the belief that ultimate ethical sanctions are to be sought, not by an appeal to the moral consciousness, but by the investigation of brain tissue and the relation of man's bodily organism to its environment.

The discovery of the so-called evolution of morality out of non-moral conditions is very frequently an unconscious subterfuge by which the evolutionist hides the fact that he is making a priori judgments upon the value of the moral concepts held to be evolved.

The reformers shook off the yoke of systems in order boldly to renovate both knowledge and faith; and, instead of resting on the abstract a priori principles within which man and nature had been imprisoned, they returned to the ancient methods of observation and analysis.

He struck out for himself the happy middle path between the a priori and the empirical systems, and exemplified with brilliant success the method by which experimental science has wrested from nature so many of her secrets.

On the whole, the occurrence of Bacteria in Palaeozoic times - so probable a priori - may be taken as established, though the attempt to discriminate species among them is probably futile.

Necessity for thought, as Kant had been willing to admit and as Hume also held, involves or implies something more than is given in experience - for that which is given is contingent - and rests upon an a priori or pure notion.

But a priori notions, did they exist, could have no claim to regulate experience.

Thus neither the formal nor the material aspect of conscious experience, when regarded from the individualist point of view, supplied any foundation for real knowledge, whether a priori or empirical.

To inquire how synthetic a priori j udgments are possible, or how far cognition extends, or what worth attaches to metaphysical propositions, is simply to ask, in a specific form, what elements are necessarily involved in experience of which the subject is conscious.

Knowledge is regarded as a mechanical product, part furnished by the subject, part given to the subject, and is thus viewed as mechanically divisible into a priori and a posteriori, into pure and empirical, necessary and contingent.

The modes under which it is possible for such given difference to become portion of the conscious experience of the ego, the modes under which the isolated data can be synthetically combined so as to form a cognizable whole, make up the form of cognition, and upon this form rests the possibility of any a priori or rational knowledge.

It is important to observe that it is only through the a priori character of these perceptive forms that rational science of nature is at all possible.

Productive imagination is thus the concrete element'of knowledge, and its general modes are the abstract expression of the a priori laws of all possible experience.

But this, since it arises from the moral order as a unity grounded in the very essence of freedom and not accidentally instituted by external commands, establishes the teleology of nature on grounds which a priori must be inseparably connected with the inner possibility of things.

The a priori assumption is that it is worse equipped.

We cannot dismiss a priori biblical chronology simply by assuming genealogical gaps.

This a priori sense does not imply egoism and is not trivial.

An anarchist epistemology does not declare scientific sources invalid a priori.

The trick of course is to find an alternative a priori hypothesis.

No increased incidence was found for acute myeloid leukemia or brain cancer which were of interest a priori based on earlier studies.

But such a priori slicing up of European Orientalism needs to be given a better and more convincing reason.

We consider networks with heterogeneous a-priori conditional and unconditional failure probability.

Apart from the a priori improbability of a whole legion being martyred, the difficulties are that in 286 Christians everywhere throughout the empire were not molested, that at no later date have we evidence of the presence of Maximinian in the Valais, and that none of the writers nearest to the event (Eusebius, Lactantius, Orosius, Sulpicius Severus) know anything of it.

The fundamental principle of his philosophy was that truth must be sought not in metaphysical or a priori abstractions but in psychological investigation, and further that this investigation cannot confine itself successfully to the individual consciousness, but must be devoted primarily to society as a whole.

Not demonstrable as a theoretical proposition, the immortality of the soul " is an inseparable result of an unconditional a priori practical law."

The probability of the conclusion of a new Franco-Italian treaty was small, both on account of the protectionist spirit of France and of French resentment at the renewal of the triple alliance, but even such slight probability vanished after a visit paid to Bismarck by Crispi (October 1887) within three months of his appointment to the premiership. Crispi entertained no a priori animosity towards France, but was strongly convinced that Italy must emancipate herself from the position of political dependence on her powerful neighbor which had vitiated the foreign policy of the Left.

Clarke's Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God is really a priori.

No a priori difficulty can be said to stand in the way of evolution, when it can be shown that all animals and all plants proceed by modes of development, which are similar in principle, from a fundamental protoplasmic material.

But, unwilling to relinquish the a priori method of his youth, he tries to establish a distinction of two sorts of economic inquiry, one of which, though not the other, can be handled by that method.

The use of the historical method has, in fact, raised more reputations than it has destroyed, because by keeping carefully in view the conditions in which economic works have been written, it has shown that many theories hastily condemned as unsound by a priori critics had much to be said for them atthe time when they were propounded.

Most philosophers refer in their works to mathematics more or less cursorily, either in the treatment of the ideas of number and magnitude, or in their consideration of the alleged a priori and necessary truths.

Here we enter upon one of the most interesting chapters of disorders and modes of disorder of this and of other systems. It has come out more and more clearly of late years that poisons do not betray even an approximately indifferent affinity for all tissues, which indeed a little reflection would tell us to be a priori improbable, but that each tends to fix itself to this cell group or to that, picking out parts for which they severally have affinities.

As to the use of reason beyond knowledge, Kant's position is that, in spite of its logical inability to transcend phenomena, reason in its pure, or a priori use, contains necessary a priori " ideals " (Ideen), and practical reason, in order to account for moral responsibility, frames postulates of the existence of things in themselves, or noumena, corresponding to these " ideals "; postulates of a real free-will to practise morality, of a real immortality of soul to perfect it, and of a real God to crown it with happiness.

Hence Schelling objected to the Hegelian dialectic on the ground that, although reason by itself can apprehend notions or essences, and even that of God, it cannot deduce a priori the existence either of God or of Nature, for the apprehension of which experience is required.

He differs, however, from Kant, not only because he will not allow that the given data are received from things in themselves, but also because, like Mach, he agrees with the nativists that the data already contain a spatial determinacy and a temporal determinacy, which he regards as a posteriori elements of the given, not like Kant, as a priori forms of sense.

Hence, although a priori it would be reasonable to conjecture that objects with Etruscan characteristics came from Etruria, the evidence, positive and negative, points decisively to an Etruscan factory in or near Praeneste itself" (Conway, ibid.).

Here Schiller applied his aesthetic theories to that branch of art which was most peculiarly his own, the art of poetry; it is an attempt to classify literature in accordance with an a priori philosophic theory of "ancient" and "modern," "classic" and "romantic," "naive" and "sentimental"; and it sprang from the need Schiller himself felt of justifying his own "sentimental" and "modern" genius with the "naive" and "classic" tranquillity of Goethe's.

In some cases of induction concerned with objects capable of abstraction and simplification, we have a power of identification, by which, not a priori but in the act of inducing a conclusion, we apprehend that the things signified ..SisP.

But the fry drift with the currents as helplessly as the eggs, and the a priori objections to the utility of the operations have in no case been met by evidence of tangible results.

The relation in which they stand to the categories or pure notions is ambiguous; and, when Kant has to consider the fashion in which category and data of sense are to be brought together, he merely places side by side as a priori elements the pure connective notions and the pure forms of perception, and finds it, apparently, only a matter of contingent convenience that they should harmonize with one another and so render cognition possible.

Teachers of the deaf proved a priori that what Miss Sullivan had done could not be, and some discredit was reflected on her statements, because they were surrounded by the vague eloquence of Mr. Anagnos.

First, our faith in the rationality of science may be more an a posteriori matter than an a priori.

In both these doctrines of a priori science Descartes has not been subverted, but, if anything, corroborated by the results of experimental physics; for the so-called atoms of chemical theory already presuppose, from the Cartesian point of view, certain aggregations of the primitive particles of matter.

Again, these contrasted philosophies throw light upon the meaning of a posteriori and a priori in Kant and subsequent writers.

To in- «A tuitionalism, half is a posteriori and half a priori.

Again, in the scheme of mechanism, everything is determined by everything else - in 5 Aristotle and the schoolmen meant by a proof a priori reasoning from cause to effect.

On the other hand, in discussing the ontological argument, Lotze commits himself to a moral a priori (below, ad fin.).

Gillespie's able Argument a priori for the Being and Attributes of the Godhead, published part by part 1833-1872.

So large a part of the railway charge is of the nature of a tax, that there seem to be a priori reasons for leaving the taxing powers in the hands of the agents of the government.

Those in Israel who remembered the previous war between 1 Careful examination shows that no a priori distinction can be drawn between " trustworthy " books of Kings and " untrustworthy books " of Chronicles.

He thus takes substantially the same ground as Descartes, but he rejected the a priori method.

In the fifth of his early essays he asserted that the method a priori is the only mode of investigation in the social sciences, and that the method a posteriori "is altogether inefficacious in those sciences as a means of arriving at any considerable body of valuable truth."

The application of the a priori method in economics was an accident, due to its association with other subjects and the general backwardness of other sciences rather than any exceptional and peculiar character in the subject-matter of the science itself.

Similarly, the continuity of space apparently rests upon sheer assumption unsupported by any a priori or experimental grounds.

Moreover, Haller's views did not rest on a priori speculation, but on numerous experiments.