All 24 Uses of
phenomenon
in
War and Peace
- Prince Bagration and Prince Dolgorukov with their adjutants had come to witness the curious phenomenon of the lights and shouts in the enemy's camp.†
Chpt 3
- What is going on in the world?" he would ask himself in perplexity several times a day, involuntarily beginning to reflect anew on the meaning of the phenomena of life; but knowing by experience that there were no answers to these questions he made haste to turn away from them, and took up a book, or hurried of to the Club or to Apollon Nikolaevich's, to exchange the gossip of the town.†
Chpt 8
- Among the innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of human life one may discriminate between those in which substance prevails and those in which form prevails.†
Chpt 10
- But however small the units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in itself false.†
Chpt 11
- But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, but plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, because in it a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger.†
Chpt 11
- I see only a coincidence of occurrences such as happens with all the phenomena of life, and I see that however much and however carefully I observe the hands of the watch, and the valves and wheels of the engine, and the oak, I shall not discover the cause of the bells ringing, the engine moving, or of the winds of spring.†
Chpt 11
- The Battle of Borodino, with the occupation of Moscow that followed it and the flight of the French without further conflicts, is one of the most instructive phenomena in history.†
Chpt 14
- If it were an example taken from the history of China, we might say that it was not an historic phenomenon (which is the historians' usual expedient when anything does not fit their standards); if the matter concerned some brief conflict in which only a small number of troops took part, we might treat it as an exception; but this event occurred before our fathers' eyes, and for them it was a question of the life or death of their fatherland, and it happened in the greatest of all known…†
Chpt 14
- And Pierre, without trying to change the other's views and without condemning him, but with the quiet, joyful, and amused smile now habitual to him, was interested in this strange though very familiar phenomenon.†
Chpt 15
- Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena.†
Chpt 15 *
- The historian evidently decomposes Alexander's power into the components: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, and the rest—but the sum of the components, that is, the interactions of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Stael, and the others, evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons.†
Chpt 15
- Of the immense number of indications accompanying every vital phenomenon, these historians select the indication of intellectual activity and say that this indication is the cause.†
Chpt 15
- But for history, the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern physics fire is not an element but a phenomenon.†
Chpt 15
- But for history, the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern physics fire is not an element but a phenomenon.†
Chpt 15
- But to understand phenomena man has, besides abstract reasoning, experience by which he verifies his reflections.†
Chpt 15
- And experience tells us that power is not merely a word but an actually existing phenomenon.†
Chpt 15
- Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the phenomena we are examining.†
Chpt 15
- If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of this simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our argument.†
Chpt 15
- Instead of first defining the conceptions of freedom and inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the phenomena of life under those definitions, history should deduce a definition of the conception of freedom and inevitability themselves from the immense quantity of phenomena of which it is cognizant and that always appear dependent on these two elements.†
Chpt 15
- Instead of first defining the conceptions of freedom and inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the phenomena of life under those definitions, history should deduce a definition of the conception of freedom and inevitability themselves from the immense quantity of phenomena of which it is cognizant and that always appear dependent on these two elements.†
Chpt 15
- The third consideration is the degree to which we apprehend that endless chain of causation inevitably demanded by reason, in which each phenomenon comprehended, and therefore man's every action, must have its definite place as a result of what has gone before and as a cause of what will follow.†
Chpt 15
- However inaccessible to us may be the cause of the expression of will in any action, our own or another's, the first demand of reason is the assumption of and search for a cause, for without a cause no phenomenon is conceivable.†
Chpt 15
- The search for these laws has long been begun and the new methods of thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously with the self-destruction toward which—ever dissecting and dissecting the causes of phenomena—the old method of history is moving.†
Chpt 15
- As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question of history now, the whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition or nonrecognition of something absolute, serving as the measure of visible phenomena.†
Chpt 15
Definition:
-
(phenomenon) something that exists or happened -- especially something of special interest -- sometimes someone or something that is extraordinaryeditor's notes: "Phenomenons" and "phenomena" are both appropriate plural forms of this noun. "Phenomena" is generally used in scientific or philosophical contexts.