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

Now by Locke's definition above given, only bulk, figure, situation, and motion or rest of solid parts, are primary qualities.

From Modern Painters Volume I (of V) by Ruskin, John

Berkeley was the first thinker clearly to perceive the unsubstantial nature of a world made up solely of primary qualities.

From International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume I Philosophy and Metaphysics by Various

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 Hardwick, John Charlton

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