primary qualities

British  

plural noun

1. (in empiricist philosophy) those properties of objects that are directly known by experience, such as size, shape, and number

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

primary qualities

This bus has primary qualities of solidity and space occupancy that exist independently of our perceptual machinery and that can do us injury.

From Scientific American ● Aug. 27, 2019

It would require a most able metaphysician to explain how many primary qualities of the mind must be changed to cause these diversities of complex dispositions.

From The Foundations of the Origin of Species Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 by Sir Francis Darwin

These few primary qualities, like extension which we persist in treating as independently real and as the quality of a substance, are those which suffice to explain the order of our experiences.

From The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory by George Santayana

In this philosophy of nature each element or simple body is a combination of a pair of the four primary qualities that informs inchoate matter.

From The Natural Philosophy of William Gilbert and His Predecessors by W. James King

The "primary qualities," i.e. density, extension, etc., continued to be regarded as subsisting in the objects themselves, and independently of any perceiving consciousness.

From Religion and Science From Galileo to Bergson by John Charlton Hardwick

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