ab extra
Americanadverb
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"It seems to me," he said, "that there is a guiding and directing principle ab extra which interacts with the material of the physical universe but is not of it."
From Time Magazine Archive
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Discoursing upon the hypothesis of "a fortuitous concourse of atoms" Dr. Priestley asks, "what reason we have to think that small masses of matter can have power without communication ab extra?"
From Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever by Matthew Turner
For he could see himself, and laugh at himself, ab extra, better than most men.
From Delia Blanchflower by Mrs. Humphry Ward
As long as there was any thing ab extra to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.
From Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Henry Nelson Coleridge
Its quality of being a brute fact ab extra says nothing whatever as to its inwardness.
From Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.