This chapter will be concerned with broad tentative generalisations on quite simple lines.

An attempt of this kind to make a philosophy out of a scientific generalisation has in our own time been the obvious result of the theory of evolution, and has given new vogue to the philosophical system called Naturalism.

As a fact it is simply a false generalisation; but he is really trying to make it general.

But excepting Fielding and one or two other of those partial exceptions that always occur in the case of critical generalisations, there is a definable difference between the novel of the past and what I may call the modern novel.

* I have had, at one time and another, much gay and delightful intercourse both with Frenchmen and Italians, which has led me to certain speculative comparisons and to many dangerous generalisations, some of which I will venture tentatively to set down here.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, indeed, attempted to turn a single hasty generalisation from the history of biological evolution into a complete social philosophy of his own, and preached a 'beneficent private war' which he conceived as exactly equivalent to that degree of trade competition which prevailed among English provincial shopkeepers about the year 1884.

Perhaps the wilder critics of the present order have no reason to complain if their impatient generalisations are marshalled, however disingenuously, against them.

That which does resist the miraculous is the unscientific part of induction, or the instinctive generalisation upon this fact....

Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer offers the massive generalisation that savages do not possess a language enabling a man to say 'I dreamed that I saw,' instead of 'I saw' ('Principles of Sociology,' p. 150).

This chapter will be concerned with broad tentative generalisations on quite simple lines.

Is it possible to imagine a more extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself inaccurately conceived of?

In most of our own romances, and in the epics of antiquity, we have to be satisfied with vague and splendid generalisations.

There is, of course, no room here for any detailed treatment of a movement upon which a big book might be written, and I shall therefore have to limit myself to a few rather bald generalisations which I must ask the reader to accept not as the truth, but as what one man of limited experience and vision conceives to be the truth about the Russian revolution.

It is time some fundamental things were agreed upon, and although standardising must not be allowed to become stereotyping, at present constructive generalisation is needed, as well as the upsetting of out-grown traditions.