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
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
We are conscious that he is a cold-blooded spectator ab extra striving to describe what he has never felt for himself.
From The Tale of Terror A Study of the Gothic Romance by Edith Birkhead
God was self-existent, or he was self-created, or he was created ab extra.
From Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors by James Freeman Clarke
I solicit from the friend who accompanied Mr. Edgerton the thoroughest statement which he can give me of the case, ab extra.
From The Opium Habit by Horace B. Day
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.
