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

The primary qualities, the hot and the cold and the wet and the dry, as the forms of the elements, enable this matter to receive other higher forms.

From A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy by Husik, Isaac

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 King, W. James

Return We have not noticed his iterativeness, his reiterativeness, because it flowed naturally from his primary qualities.

From Spare Hours by Brown, John

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