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

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

Some primary qualities of his genius are pretty evenly balanced by some primary faults. 

From Views and Reviews Essays in appreciation by Henley, William Ernest

The primary qualities, being the general laws or forms of organic Energy-transmutation, are in a higher sense ideal, for they are the necessary conditions under which both sense-presentation and ideative representation proceed.

From Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge by Philip, Alexander

In examining the phenomena which fall under the senses, we find between them grave differences upon which it is useless here to insist, and which establish the distinction of primary qualities and of secondary qualities.

From Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good by Cousin, Victor

But, in the first place, those most close to the tradition of materialism maintain that the most significant appearances, the primary qualities, are those which compose a purely quantitative and corporeal world.

From The Approach to Philosophy by Perry, Ralph Barton