What is "speculative"

Usage examples of "speculative".

Borges, in his recent bestiary of mythical creatures, notes that the idea of round beasts was unimagined by many speculative minds, and Johannes Kepler once argued that the earth itself is such a being.

Joe Mansell looked at him resentfully, thinking that it was easy for an old bachelor with no one dependent on him to sit tight on his moneybags and say that it was not the time to be launching out into speculative ventures.

A similar false note is struck by any speaker or writer who misapprehends his position or forgets his disqualifications, by newspaper writers using language that is seemly only in one who stakes his life on his words, by preachers exceeding the license of fallibility, by moralists condemning frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank ways of hazard, by Satan rebuking sin.

Directly you have identified creation and the creative power so intimately as Pantheism does, then you are under bonds, if you have any curiosity at all or any speculative force, to try to explain the ways in which a God, who is just to begin with all that there is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minute and sometimes ungodlike ways.

The myth of the illogical or prelogical savage may safely be relegated to that museum of learned absurdities and abortions which speculative anthropology is constantly enriching with fresh specimens of misapplied ingenuity and wasted industry.

From where I stood I could see through the quartzite side of the promenade deck above and beyond the airlock, while I was able at the same time to run a speculative eye over the passengers leaving and arriving.

Setting the list aside, he quirked a speculative brow at her and said nothing.

Craft decided to schuss around to the north side of the building, poking the snow in a speculative manner.

Turning hastily round Theos confronted the speaker,--a tall, spare man with a pale, clean-shaven, intellectual face, small, shrewd, speculative eyes, and very straight, neatly parted locks,--a man on whose every lineament was expressed a profound belief in himself, and an equally profound scorn for the opinions of any one who might possibly presume to disagree with him.

For many generations the theology of America was distinctly unhistorical, speculative, and provincial.

The opinions of Arianism might satisfy a cold and speculative mind: but the doctrine of the Nicene creed, most powerfully recommended by the merits of faith and devotion, was much better adapted to become popular and successful in a believing age.

Meanwhile people learned to handle their frustrations and to work around the balkily philosophical, suddenly speculative machines on which their lives depended.

From this Broca - and after him many others - developed an entire speculative apparatus about how functional brain asymmetry was a uniquely human characteristic, and how adults, males and whites showed much greater such asymmetry than children, females and blacks.

On the subject of his pretended solution of this problem in speculative mathematics, Casanova engaged with M.

It was published by his friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the speculative instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright.