“According to the technical language of old writers, a thing and its qualities are described as subject and attributes; and thus a man’s faculties and acts are attributes of which he is the subject. The mind is the subject in which ideas inhere. Moreover, the man’s faculties and acts are employed upon external objects; and from objects all his sensations arise. Hence the part of a man’s knowledge which belongs to his own mind, is subjective: that which flows in upon him from the world external to him, is objective.”

Part 1, Book 1, ch. 2, sect. 7.
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "According to the technical language of old writers, a thing and its qualities are described as subject and attributes; …" by William Whewell?
William Whewell photo
William Whewell 12
English philosopher & historian of science 1794–1866

Related quotes

Adolphe Quetelet photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Michael Polanyi photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Catharine A. MacKinnon photo

“Poincaré's mind was not subject to hysteresis or hibernation. He had the unique faculty of dismissing an idea from his mind, the instant the stimulus was gone, and to supplant it immediately with another creative idea.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 1. The Iconoclast

Robert M. Pirsig photo
Gregory of Nyssa photo
Anthony Giddens photo

“Human consciousness is conditioned in a dialectical interplay between subject and object, in which man actively shapes the world he lives in at the same time as it shapes him.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

(describing Marx’s view), p. 21.
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971)

Related topics