| 释义 |
‖ principium|prɪnˈsɪpɪəm|
Pl. prinˈcipia.
[L. principium beginning, origin, source, first place; in pl. front (of an army), staff, general's quarters, also foundations, elements; f. princeps, princip-em first in time or order: see prince.]
1. a. Beginning, commencement; origin, source; first principle, element; fundamental truth, etc.: = principle n. in various senses.
1600W. Watson Decacordon (1602) 138 The doctrine of the Catholike Church, consists of three speciall principia or causes. 1628T. Spencer Logick 43 The matter is the principium of individuation, saith Thomas. [See individuation 1.] Ibid. 281 The principium of a demonstration is an immediate proposition, viz. that hath none before it. a1635Naunton Fragm. Reg. (Arb.) 34, I have noted the causes or principia of the Warres following. a1679T. Goodwin Christ Mediator ii. vi, God is the principium of subsistence to all. 1693tr. Blancard's Phys. Dict. (ed. 2), Elementa, or Principia, are the Simplest Bodies that can be... There are Five Elements, Spirit, Salt, Sulphur, Water and Earth. 1796Z. Macaulay in Life & Lett. vi. (1900) 173 Useful productions, containing the principia of religious knowledge. a1871Grote Eth. Fragm. v. (1876) 130 Not able to imbibe even the principia of ethical reasoning.
b. pl. Principia: The common abbreviation of the title of a famous work of Sir Isaac Newton, setting forth the principles of natural philosophy or physics.
[1687Newton (title) Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.] 1727Chambers Cycl. s.v. Projectile, Sir Isaac Newton, shews, in his principia, that [etc.]. 1878Hare Walks in Lond. II. ii. 76 The ‘Principia’, which occupies the same position to philosophy as the Bible does to religion.
c. principium individuationis: the principle through which an entity is differentiated from matter, or being from non-being. (Cf. individuation 1 note.)
1694Locke Essay Hum. Und. (ed. 2) ii. xxvii. 179 'Tis easie to discover, what is so much enquired after, the principium Individuationis, and that 'tis plain is Existence it self, which determines any sort of Being to a particular time and place incommunicable to two Beings of the same kind. 1739Hume Treat. Hum. Nature I. iv. 349 In order to justify this system, there are four things requisite. First, To explain the principium individuationis. 1883F. H. Bradley Princ. Logic 265 It was shown above..that space and time-relations are no principium individuationis; for they fall within the what, and do not make the this. 1947Horizon Feb. 150 But above this layer of all-embracing ‘identification’ Sorge reappears as principium individuationis, isolating a person and stimulating his intellect into the frightful awareness of his nakedness and his fate. 1965Listener 2 Sept. 344/1 Something..must divide us from other people, there must be some kind of principium individuationis.
2. In the mediæval University,
a. A public lecture or disputation by which a Bachelor in any faculty, who had received the Chancellor's licence, entered upon his functions, and became an actual Master or Doctor, with certain ceremonies.
b. Also applied at Paris and elsewhere, in the Theological Faculty, to the disputation by which a student became a Bachelor of Divinity, and to the discourse upon some theological problem which the B.D. at a later stage, as a Sententiarius, was required to deliver before beginning his course of lectures on each of the four books of the Sententiæ of Peter the Lombard.
In sense a, also called Inception; the day on which this took place is still called at Cambridge and in some American universities ‘the Commencement’ (at Oxford ‘the Act’).
1895Rashdall Univers. Europe Middle Ages I. 150, 229, 465, 466.
3. Rom. Antiq. (pl.) The general's quarters in a camp.
1581Savile Tacitus, Hist. iii. xiii. (1591) 121 They only of the conspiracie might assemble themselues in the Principia. 1600Holland Livy vii. 257 In the verie Principia, yea and within the quarter of the L. Generall his pavilion, were heard confused speeches. |