primary qualities

British  

plural noun

1. (in empiricist philosophy) those properties of objects that are directly known by experience, such as size, shape, and number

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Example Sentences

This bus has primary qualities of solidity and space occupancy that exist independently of our perceptual machinery and that can do us injury.

From Scientific American • Aug. 27, 2019

These are social or conventional virtues; he represents mainly primary qualities and forces.

From Whitman A Study by Burroughs, John

Strictly speaking, however, Hamilton held that the primary qualities are immediately perceived only in our organism as extended, and inferred to exist in extra-organic bodies.

From The Philosophy of the Conditioned by Mansel, Henry Longueville

These games are all exactly the same in their primary qualities: the first of them that was invented had all the faults of all its successors.

From Wings and the Child or, the Building of Magic Cities by Nesbit, E. (Edith)

The primary qualities, being the general laws or forms of organic Energy-transmutation, are in a higher sense ideal, for they are the necessary conditions under which both sense-presentation and ideative representation proceed.

From Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge by Philip, Alexander