The Collaborative International Dictionary
Belief \Be*lief"\, n. [OE. bileafe, bileve; cf. AS. gele['a]fa. See Believe.]
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Assent to a proposition or affirmation, or the acceptance of a fact, opinion, or assertion as real or true, without immediate personal knowledge; reliance upon word or testimony; partial or full assurance without positive knowledge or absolute certainty; persuasion; conviction; confidence; as, belief of a witness; the belief of our senses.
Belief admits of all degrees, from the slightest suspicion to the fullest assurance.
--Reid. -
(Theol.) A persuasion of the truths of religion; faith.
No man can attain [to] belief by the bare contemplation of heaven and earth.
--Hooker. -
The thing believed; the object of belief.
Superstitious prophecies are not only the belief of fools, but the talk sometimes of wise men.
--Bacon. -
A tenet, or the body of tenets, held by the advocates of any class of views; doctrine; creed.
In the heat of persecution to which Christian belief was subject upon its first promulgation.
--Hooker.Ultimate belief, a first principle incapable of proof; an intuitive truth; an intuition.
--Sir W. Hamilton.Syn: Credence; trust; reliance; assurance; opinion.
Ultimate \Ul"ti*mate\, a. [LL. ultimatus last, extreme, fr. L. ultimare to come to an end, fr. ultimus the farthest, last, superl. from the same source as ulterior. See Ulterior, and cf. Ultimatum.]
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Farthest; most remote in space or time; extreme; last; final.
My harbor, and my ultimate repose.
--Milton.Many actions apt to procure fame are not conductive to this our ultimate happiness.
--Addison. -
Last in a train of progression or consequences; tended toward by all that precedes; arrived at, as the last result; final.
Those ultimate truths and those universal laws of thought which we can not rationally contradict.
--Coleridge. -
Incapable of further analysis; incapable of further division or separation; constituent; elemental; as, an ultimate constituent of matter.
Ultimate analysis (Chem.), organic analysis. See under Organic.
Ultimate belief. See under Belief.
Ultimate ratio (Math.), the limiting value of a ratio, or that toward which a series tends, and which it does not pass.
Syn: Final; conclusive. See Final.
Usage examples of "ultimate belief".
Standing unafraid in the center of his own line, Bruno reflected that only ultimate belief and a religion which exalted suicide would have driven men on through the storm they faced.
Yet, as Michener notes in chapter 69, even with this proof, the ultimate belief still comes down to faith.