An image-proposition is necessarily positive: we can image the window to the left of the door, or to the right of the door, but we can form no image of the bare negative "the window not to the left of the door." We can DISBELIEVE the image-proposition expressed by "the window to the left of the door," and our disbelief will be true if the window is not to the left of the door.

I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.

You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging about into places it has no right to be.

It was quite some moments ere either moved, for both were positive that any such attempt would reveal so many breaks and fractures as to make further progress impossible.

But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold, is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost certainly find a Church.

No one of these terms, in and by itself, involves an affirmation; it is by the combination of such terms that positive or negative statements arise.

'I said, "I give you better than proof, gentlemen; I give you my positive opinion."'

I had read too much positive science and lived too much positive life.

They might have copied the second article of the existing Confederation, which would have prohibited the exercise of any power not EXPRESSLY delegated; they might have attempted a positive enumeration of the powers comprehended under the general terms "necessary and proper"; they might have attempted a negative enumeration of them, by specifying the powers excepted from the general definition; they might have been altogether silent on the subject, leaving these necessary and proper powers to construction and inference.

"Tess, why did you say 'no' in such a positive way?" he asked her in the course of a few days.

Once within its hated walls I was positive that I could overcome the guards of Issus and bear away my Princess, for at my back I would have a force ample for the occasion.

Of this she was positive, as she saw the lithe, sinewy form of a panther glide noiselessly from the jungle at the point at which the apes had emerged but a moment before.