essential nature

These gentlemen, said Clausewitz in brief, had the misfortune of mistaking the accoutrements of war for its essential nature.

In its essential nature socialism is nothing but a proposal for certain kinds of economic reform.

The claims of its glorious Object, its own essential nature, and its design, all conspire in this.

These, however, we may here neglect, inasmuch as they do not affect the essential nature of cult itself.

Such an instance shows how little the essential nature of speech is concerned with the mere imitation of things.

There is perhaps no better way to learn the essential nature of speech than to realize what it is not and what it does not do.