Word Finder - antecedent

definition

Any thing that precedes another thing, especially the cause of the second thing.

definition

An ancestor.

definition

(grammar) A word, phrase or clause referred to by a pronoun.

definition

The conditional part of a hypothetical proposition, i.e. p \rightarrow q, where p is the antecedent, and q is the consequent.

definition

The first of two subsets of a sequent, consisting of all the sequent's formulae which are valuated as true.

definition

The first term of a ratio, i.e. the term a in the ratio a:b, the other being the consequent.

definition

(chiefly in the plural) Previous principles, conduct, history, etc.

definition

Earlier, either in time or in order.

example

an antecedent cause

definition

Presumptive.

example

an antecedent improbability

We should expect the albuminous state of the seed to be an antecedent one to the exalbuminous condition, and the recent discoveries in fertilization tend to confirm this view.

It was of course antecedent to the discovery of auscultation.

The most obvious antecedent for "this" is Jesus Christ.

It needs not distillation, but expansion and illustration from contemporary and antecedent thought and literature.

Much depends upon its antecedent magnetic condition, and indeed upon its whole magnetic history.

The lower forms of life prefigure man in unequal degrees of imperfection; they exist for his sake, but they are not regarded as representing necessary antecedent conditions of human existence.

The structure of the region previous to faulting was dependent on long antecedent processes of accumulation and deformation and the surface of the region then was dependent on the amount of erosion suffered in the prefaulting cycle.

Maybe places retain all of the past, every antecedent happening, not just the bad but the good too.

Record the antecedent (A) or situation that occurs prior to the behavior.

Kiamath river, draining several lakes in the north-west part of the Basin Range province and traversing the Cascade Range to the Pacific, is apparently also an antecedent river.

Once applied to the facts at all, it would drive us beyond the first antecedent or term of antecedents of volition to a still further cause or ground - in fact, land us in an infinite regress of causes.

And there is much that is anticipatory of modern libertarian views in the psychological argument by which Carneades attempted at once to avoid the Epicurean identification of will with chance, and to prove the rationality of choice, undetermined by any external or antecedent necessity, as an explanation of human actions Xxviii.

Evidence of remote denervation consistent with antecedent poliomyelitis was demonstrated in all patients by electromyography or muscle biopsy or both.

The passage from Numbers xi., which is here included, is obviously out of place in its present context (the story of the quails), and supplies in part the necessary antecedent to Ex.

This close connexion invests the antecedent.

Funeral Customs. - Icelandic writers of the 12th and 13th centuries distinguished between an earlier " age of burning " and a later " age of barrows," and the investigations of modern archaeologists have tended in general to confirm the distinction, though they have revealed also the burial-places of times antecedent to the age of burning.

As an authority for times antecedent to his own, Severus is of little moment.

From the judgment viewed as hypothetical we pass by affirmation of the antecedent or denial of the consequent to inference.

Taking as a starting-point the wide archenteric cavity which the medusa inherits primitively from the antecedent actinula-stage (see article Medusa), we find, in such a form as Tessera, four interradial areas of concrescence between the exumbral and subumbral layers of endoderm, four so-called septal nodes or " cathammata," subdividing the stomach into four wide, radially situated pouches which communicate with each other beyond the septal nodes by wide apertures constituting what is termed by courtesy a ring-canal.

Lord Rayleigh has recorded that he was himself convinced by Fraunhofer's reasoning at a date antecedent to the writings of Helmholtz and Abbe.

It is not necessary to seek the germ of gilds in any antecedent age or institution.

A system more elaborate than anything antecedent was then introduced under the name of flying transport.

The generally transverse course of these rivers has given rise to the suggestion that they are of antecedent origin; but there are many objections to this over-simple, Gordian explanation.

The organization of society, therefore, produces successive states, in each of which the principle of freedom is better established than in the antecedent.

Out of this grew her Indian Story and Song from North America (1900), illustrating "a stage of development antecedent to that in which culture music appeared."

The reason assigned for these extraordinary diversions of the drainage right across the general strike of the ridges is that it is antecedent - i.e.

Here the " antecedent " theory will not is typical.

He thus emphasizes in apperception the connexion with the self as resulting from the sum of antecedent experience.

Possibly mammalian remains also occur in the antecedent Triassic epoch, some palaeontologists regarding the South African Tritylodon as a mammal, while others consider that it was probably a reptile.

And although he never called himself a mystic, he showed that in his judgment spiritual truth is apprehended by direct intuition, as an antecedent necessity to the professedly purely rational basis of the Roman Catholic creed.

Hence the entocodon represents a precocious formation of the sub-umbral surface, equivalent to the peristome of the polyp, differentiated in the bud prior to other portions of the organism which must be regarded as antecedent to it in phylogeny.

Accordingly, in 1655, he printed everything that had passed between them (under the title of A Defence of the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent or Extrinsic Necessity), with loud complaint against the treatment he had received, and the promise added that, in default of others, he himself would stand forward to expose the deadly principles of Leviathan.

At the same time, in his later view, Plato avoids the exaggeration of denying all positive quality of pleasure even to the coarser sensual gratifications; they are undoubtedly cases of that " replenishment " or " restoration " to its " natural state " of a bodily organ, in which he defines pleasure to consist (see Timaeus, pp. 64, 65); he merely maintains that the common estimate of them is to a large extent illusory, or a false appearance of pleasure is produced by contrast with the antecedent or concomitant painful condition of the organ.

If the antecedent is the subject of the verb in the relative clause then qui is used.

Both Darwin and Wallace lay great stress on the close relation which obtains between the existing fauna of any region and that of the immediately antecedent geological epoch in the same region; and rightly, for it is in truth inconceivable that there should be no genetic connexion between the two.

This state of affairs has no antecedent improbability about it, since in the Vertebrata the coelom is unquestionably confluent with the haemal system through the lymphatic vessels.

Insect metamorphosis may be briefly described as phenomena of development characterized by abrupt changes of appearance and of structure, occurring during the period subsequent to embryonic development and antecedent to the reproductive state.

The Hindu Kush is, in fact, but the face of a great upheaved mass of plateau-land lying beyond it northwards, just as the Himalaya forms the southern face of the great central tableland of Tibet, and its general physiography, exhibiting long, narrow, lateral valleys and transverse lines of "antecedent" drainage, is XIII.

It is usually maintained that this work was written before the Old Testament poems. The arguments for this view are that the Heliand contains no allusion to any foregoing poetical treatment of the antecedent history, and that the Genesis fragments exhibit a higher degree of poetic skill.

The tilting of the mountain mass was presumably not a simple or a single movement; it was probably slow, for Pitt river (headwaters of the Sacramento) traverses the northern part of the range in antecedent fashion; the tilting involved the subdivision of the great block into smaller ones, in the northern half of the range at least; Lake Tahoe (altitude 6225 ft.) near the range crest is explained as occupyilig a depression between two block fragments; and farther north similar depressions now appear as aggraded highland meadows.

On the continent of Europe, France was the first to recognize the merits of its bygone designers and craftsmen, and even antecedent to the Exhibition of 1851, when art in Great Britain was dormant, it was possible to obtain in Paris faithful reproductions of the finest ormolu work of the 18th century.

Finally, a universal judgment is often existential; but whether it is so or not it remains categorical, so long as it introduces no hypothetical antecedent about the existence of the thing signified by the subject.

So too, if the canon of the Method of Agreement is never more than approximately satisfied, intermixture of effects will in practice mean that we at least often do not know the cause or antecedent equivalent of a given effect, without the possibility of an alternative.

Hobbes's conception of the state of nature antecedent to civil organization as a state of war and moral anarchy was obviously very offensive to churchmen.

The physics and psychology of Descartes were much studied in England, and his metaphysical system was certainly the most important antecedent of Locke's; but Descartes hardly touched ethics proper.

The most instructive classification of the " variations " exhibited by fully formed organisms consists in the separation in the first place of those which arise from antecedent congenital, innate, constitutional or germinal variations from those which arise merely from the operation of variation of the environment or the food-supply upon normally constituted individuals.

This involves that its activity cannot be truly conceived of as included in an antecedent, as an effect in a cause or one term of an equation in the other.

Hence the hypothetical element is not a hypothetical antecedent " If anything is a' man," but an uncertain conclusion that " All existing men are mortal."

Considering the great importance of arresting the spread of infection at the outset, and the implicit reliance placed upon bacteriological criteria, the aetiology of such antecedent ailments deserves more attention than has hitherto been paid to it.

Instead of making the motive to choice a factor within the concrete process of volition, he regards it as a cause antecedent to the exercise of a special mental faculty.