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

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 Alexander Philip

Now the other primary qualities of matter are unaffected by circumstances.

From Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence by Thomas Bassnett

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

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