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More "Abstract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... break out and say, "But what are we to do? There is modern commerce and its clerks; there is the modern family with its unmarried daughters; specialism is expected everywhere; female thrift and conscientiousness are demanded and supplied. What does it matter whether we should in the abstract prefer the old human and housekeeping woman; we might prefer the Garden of Eden. But since women have trades they ought to have trades unions. Since women work in factories, they ought to vote on factory-acts. If they are unmarried they must be commercial; if ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... abstract entity produces psychological phenomena by playing upon the brain as a musician upon his instrument be rejected, and these phenomena be held to be the result of cerebral actions, an objection is made that the latter view is "materialistic" and adverse to the notion of ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... had strange intuitions about things and was doomed to work out her own salvation as a metaphysician. When she asked her mother who made God, a slap in the face demonstrated to her the limits of human inquiry. The natural instinct of the child over-rode the long travail of the race to conceive an abstract Deity, and Esther pictured God as a mammoth cloud. In early years Esther imagined that the "body" that was buried when a person died was the corpse decapitated and she often puzzled herself to think what ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... captivating air, and straightway becomes the rage; it seems epidemical; it comes out simultaneously as a piece of political economy, a cookery-book, a tragedy, a farce, a novel, a religious experience, an abstract ism, or a concrete ology; till the poor worn-out, dissipated shadow of a thought looks so feeble, thin, fashionably affected and fashionably infected, that its honest, bluff old father, for very shame, disowns it. Thus has it ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of entering into the lives and feelings of children that is conspicuously wanting in most writers who address them; and to this cause, to the consciousness among her readers that they are hearing about people like themselves, instead of abstract qualities labelled with names, the popularity of her books is due.—MRS. ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... ought to be issued in a cheap (25c) edition in paper, and every man in American ought to read it. The third part is yet to come; but, if I mistake not, it will make us all say "Hurrah!" In this form the facts go home. They were too abstract before. Now they live and palpitate. ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... certain most general precepts, that are known to all; and secondly, certain secondary and more detailed precepts, which are, as it were, conclusions following closely from first principles. As to those general principles, the natural law, in the abstract, can nowise be blotted out from men's hearts. But it is blotted out in the case of a particular action, in so far as reason is hindered from applying the general principle to a particular point of practice, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... in the abstract doctrine of latent heat, the ingenuity of man has discovered a certain measure for the quantity of those commutable effects which are perceived; and though this be a progress of science far above the apprehension of the vulgar, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is certainly the staunch opinion of men of the world; but I call on honour, virtue, and worth, to give the stygian doctrine a loud negative! However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from man the idea of an existence beyond the grave, then the true measure of human conduct is, proper and improper: virtue and vice, as dispositions of the heart, are, in that case, of scarcely the same import and value to the world ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... fighting on the Western Front at that stage. In almost all of them, except "German East" and Kiao Chao, the object had been achieved within a few weeks of the outbreak of hostilities, and even the bitterest foes of the side-show in the abstract will admit that ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... wish to be convinced, my clear Raphael, look back. Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... brilliant, and everything as gay as gay could be. But to my surprise, our plain, simple republican Dr. Franklin was the central object, the 'cynosure of all beholders.' The king was quite secondary. Philosophy was then quite the rage, and republican simplicity—in the abstract—was adored by these potentates. One of the grand, gay ladies crowned Franklin with a wreath of flowers! And he was wonderfully pleased with all the attention he received, I assure you. It was a different scene from any in the Philadelphia ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... Indeed, I have known old sailors, whose rough and wrinkled visages, blunt and repulsive manners, coarse and unrefined language, were enough to banish gentle Cupid to an iceberg, exhibit the kindest and tenderest feelings when speaking of WOMAN, whom in the abstract they regarded as a being not merely to be protected, cherished, and loved, but also ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... was uttered with an animation and excitement, which the mere announcement of an abstract moral sentiment could ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... journey; and, as D'Avalos happened then to be absent from Milan on a visit to his country villa at Vigevano, he stayed for three days in Cardan's house. As a recorder of conversations Tartaglia seems to have had something of Boswell's gift. He gives an abstract of an eventful dialogue with his host on March 25, 1539, which Cardan begins by a gentle reproach anent his guest's reticence in the matter of the rule of the cosa and the cubus equal to the numerus. Tartaglia's reply to ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... him over from boots to bandless hat with the same evidence of curiosity as a person displays when turning some washed-up object with the foot on the sands. It was as if he had but an abstract interest in the youth, a feeling which the incident had obtruded upon him without penetrating the reserve ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... such a gentleman;—and, at the same time, the most abstract and the most concrete man that ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... For our support, the measures and the forms, Which an abstract Intelligence supplies, Whose kingdom is, where time and space ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in England," his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other things equal, my attitude would of course be one ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the apology; and, a few moments later, the apothecary and both ladies (the one as fond of the abstract as the other two were ignorant of the concrete) were engaged in an animated, running discussion on art, society, climate, education,—all those large, secondary desiderata which seem of first importance ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Bodies, may be produc'd in Precipitates, I may elsewhere have occasion to take further notice. I also told you not long since, that if you corrode Quick-silver with Oyl of Vitriol instead of Aqua-fortis, and abstract the Menstruum, there will remain a White Calx which by the Affusion of Fair Water presently turns into a Lemmon Colour. And ev'n the Succedaneum to a Menstruum may sometimes serve the turn ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... there was one of his stories on the way. But I must keep still to get it. A single ill-advised comment, a word that would raise a question of morals or social philosophy, might switch the narrative off the track into a swamp of abstract discourse in which Ferdinand would lose himself. Presently the ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... the language to take its place, it would be well to use it. But there is not. We must use the word 'spiritual,' despite its associations and its abuse. We shall endeavor, however, to attach a distinct and definite meaning to the word. Mere definition, however, is too abstract and nakedly intellectual. Perhaps a description of some types of character, combined with definition, will be the ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... and getting his figures, I made him an offer of four thousand dollars for everything, which offer he accepted, he reserving nothing but one span of horses, his bed and clothing. We then went to Santa Rosa, the county seat, to get an abstract of title and a deed to the property, and now I am once more an honest rancher. While in Santa Rosa I hired a man and his wife by the name of Benson, by the year. Mr. Benson proved to be a good man and his wife a splendid housekeeper. All went well for about five months, and having filed on the ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... from Barbara through her brother, one of the men-servants, that Mr. Roper hath of late lien on the ground and used a knotted cord. I have made him an abstract from the Fathers for his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... admit, did something for them which our religion does not do for us. It gave intelligible and beautiful form to those phenomena of nature which we can only describe as manifestations of energy; it expressed in a ritual of exquisite art those corporate relations which we can only enunciate in abstract terms; but did it perform what after all, it may be said, is the true function of religion? did it touch the conscience as well ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... disputed—that the "inheritance of the Crowns of England and France be, rest, remain and abide, in the person of our now Sovereign Lord, King Harry the Seventh, and in the heirs of his body". This was sufficiently decisive; but the endorsement of Henry's title in the abstract was confirmed by further enactments which assumed that he had been King of right, before the battle of Bosworth (thus repudiating title by conquest), since they attainted of treason those who had joined Richard in levying war ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Religion is not an abstract principle, or a mere speculation; it is operative: God is its source and end, but society its proper sphere of action. In circumstances of perplexity and trial its real nature is best developed, as conquering the irregularity of desire, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... sympathetic to spiritual aspiration can read these outpourings without catching fire at their flame and getting a sense of supernal things. Tagore, a kindred spirit, has done a service in making this old mystic, whose soul experiences did not make him abstract, whose high song was that of the ascetic, but of a weaver who trod the common ways of man, known to English ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... month's residence at Christiania in 1877, and furbished for a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at Copenhagen in 1884. All this time he was pursuing his Patristic and other historical studies with unflagging vigour, always writing new lectures, always maintaining his love of abstract knowledge and his eager desire to add to his already vast stores of learning. When, a year and a half before his death, a vacancy occurred in the Church History chair in the College, he stepped into the breach and delivered a course of lectures on the ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... the men. They are cordially hated, and sometimes fare badly at the hands of parties whose evil doings they have exposed. As all the money paid for fares is received by the conductor, he alone can abstract the "plunder." He is compelled to share it with the driver, however, in order to purchase his silence. In this way, the companies lose large ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... precipitation, some big principle in vogue, as if he were a discoverer, he invariably shrank from its subsequent application the moment that he found it might be unpopular and inconvenient. All his quandaries terminated in the same catastrophe; a compromise. Abstract principles with him ever ended in concrete expediency. The aggregate of circumstances outweighed the isolated cause. The primordial tenet, which had been advocated with uncompromising arrogance, gently subsided into some second-rate measure ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... to you than the knowledge of your name and address. I have drawn airy images of you, but they do not become incarnate, and I am not sure that I should recognize you in the brief moment of passing. Your nature is not of those which are instantly legible. As an abstract power, it has wrought in my life and it continually moves my heart with desires which are unsatisfactory because so vague and ignorant. Let me offer you, personally, my gratitude, my earnest friendship: you would laugh if I were now to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... and abstract ladies and gentlemen have as bodily feelings, and employ as gross language, as if they had been every-day characters. A specimen of his grotesque dulness ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... which would now-a-days be chiefly aided by the study of mathematics, was supplied by literary exegesis and deontological discussions. Very few abstract subjects troubled the mind of the young, the chief aim of their education being, as I have said, decision of character. People whose minds were simply stored with information found no great admirers. Of the three services of studies that Bacon gives,—for ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... the foot that abides; it is the name of a place. Here it is to be understood as meaning constancy. It is an instance in which the concrete stands for the abstract.] ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... It is the interpretation given to many of these myths that one is compelled to question. Bachofen's way of applying mythical tales has no scientific method; for one thing, abstract ideas are added to primitive legends which could only arise from the thought of civilised peoples. For instance, he accepts, without any doubt, the existence of the Amazons; and believes that the myths which refer to them record "a revolt ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... happier—perhaps because he knew nature on closer terms of intimacy; Nature, as he portrays things, is in nearer touch with the Heavenly Father than we should guess from Paul[10], and there is no hint in his recorded words that he held the ground to be under a curse. If we are to use abstract terms and philosophize his thought a little, we may agree that the four facts Jesus notes in Nature are its mystery, its regularity, its impartiality, and its peacefulness[11]. What he finds in Nature is not ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... Proceedings of the New York Academy of Sciences an abstract is given of a paper on the above, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... Treasury, in a communication to Congress, said: "The occupation of privateers is precisely of the same species as the lottery, with respect to hazard and to the chance of rich prizes."[504] Gallatin approached the subject from the standpoint of the financier and with the abstract ideas of the political economist. His temporary successor, the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Jones, had been a merchant in active business life, and he viewed privateering as a practical business undertaking. "The analogy between privateering ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... isolated position, or for some cause at present unknown, these people do not seem to have degenerated into a nation of sensualists. It is true they had departed a long distance from the early conditions of mankind under which altruism and the abstract principle of Light or Wisdom were worshipped under the form of a Virgin Mother and her child, but they never wholly rejected the female element in their god-idea, nor never, so far as known, attempted to degrade womanhood. Women were numbered among their legislators, at the same time that ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... in which Page now prepared to play his part in what was probably the greatest diplomatic drama in history. The materials with which this drama concerned itself were such apparently lifeless subjects as ships and cargoes, learned discourses on such abstract matters as the doctrine of continuous voyage, effective blockade, and conditional contraband; yet the struggle, which lasted for three years, involved the greatest issue of modern times—nothing less than the survival of those conceptions of liberty, government, and society ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... near a century and a half since Ant. Wood printed a notice of the reverend Thomas Powell, and more than a century since the inquisitive Oldys devoted eighteen pages to an abstract of his Human industry;—yet we search in vain for the name of Powell in the dictionaries of Aikin, Watkins, Chalmers, Gorton, &c.—It is even omitted in the Cambrian biography of his ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... reading her opponent's cards and of not showing her own. When she succeeded she tasted the sweets of victory. It mattered little whether she could turn it to any account. It was purely for her pleasure. She had a passion for intelligence: not abstract intelligence, although she had brains enough, if she had liked, to have succeeded in any, branch of knowledge and would have made a much better successor to Lothair Mannheim, the banker, than her brother. But she preferred intelligence ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... development of freedom of thought. The proposition was regarded by some with horror and by others with contempt. One of the most enlightened statesmen in Spain once said to me, "The provision for freedom of worship in the constitution is a mere abstract proposition,—it can never have any practical value except for foreigners. I cannot conceive of a Spaniard being anything but a Catholic." And so powerful was this impression in the minds of the deputies that the article only accords freedom of worship to foreigners in Spain, and adds, hypothetically, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... merely in the abstract, this conception might be treated as a harmless eccentricity or speculative aberration, and is likely to be so treated by the ordinary "practical" man, with his contempt for "theories," and his pathetic conviction that speculation does not matter; ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Towards such an abstract, alien humanity, a man cannot feel any real attachment. With all his outward ardour, Rudin is cold as ice at the bottom of his heart. His is an enthusiasm which glows without warmth, like the aurora borealis of the Polar ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... therefore claim justly more support from the public. They gave a substantial proof of their gratitude to Park, by permitting him to publish his travels for his own benefit; and a complete narrative of his journey from his own pen was speedily announced to be in preparation. An abstract, drawn up by Mr. Bryan Edwards, from Park's Notes, was printed for private circulation among the members of the Association in the meantime; it was also enriched by a valuable Memoir by Major Rennel, on African Geography. This publication ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... doctrine of the Unity did not reach Judaism as an abstract philosophical truth. Hence, though the belief in the Unity of God, associated as it was with the belief in the Spirituality of God, might have been expected to lead to the conception of an Absolute, ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... judges who have declared them, are more likely to be right than he is. Perfection, even in the law, he does not consider attainable by human beings, and the greatest approximation to it is all he expects or desires. Besides, there are very few cases of positive and abstract rule, where it is of any consequence which, of any two or more modifications of it, should be adopted. The great point is, that there should be a rule by which conduct may be regulated. Thus, whether in mercantile ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... stage, but for the sake of exemplifying, in representations of life, the fundamental irreconcilability of the expansive and repressive forces which struggle in every individual. His characters are certainly persons, not abstract constructions; the action in his plays moves relentlessly forward, with no lack of inventiveness on his part or of sensuous impressiveness on the part of his inventions; he seldom fails to convince our understanding that in his dramatic debate each side is adequately represented, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... however, the real work of man just beginning. The abstract work of the intellect, the proper organization of society as expressed in human passions, the study of the wonderful and beautiful universe outside of our own little planet, will then begin with the conquest of our ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... not being troubled by shyness, just because his own heart was so thoroughly in what he was about he did perceive the want of heart in Mr. Somers. And, in the abstract, it did not suit his notions that even a man who had married five hundred other people should put such questions to Mignonette, or to him, in a commonplace way. So far his senses perceived, but Mr. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... more curious than useful to trace back the more perfect art through its stages—the "Polychrom," the "Monochrom," the "Monogram," and "Skiagram"—nor from the pencil to the "cestrum." Polygnotus is said to be the first who introduced the "essential style;" which consisted in ascertaining the abstract, the general form, as it is technically termed the central form. Art under Polygnotus was, however, in a state of formal "parallelism;" certainly it could boast no variety of composition. Apollodorus "applied the essential principles of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... not a compliment, that I desire you to make what alterations you think fit. One thing particularly you will oblige me and the world in, and that is, in paring off some of the superfluous repetitions, which I left in for the sake of illiterate men, and the softer sex, not used to abstract notions and reasonings. But much of this reasoning will be out of doors in a latin translation. I refer all to your judgement, and so am secure it will be done as ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... laws;' and connected with this the frequent use of paramuthion and paramutheisthai in the general sense of 'address,' 'addressing'; aimulos eros; ataphoi praxeis; muthos akephalos; ethos euthuporon. He remarks also on the frequent employment of the abstract for the concrete; e.g. uperesia for uperetai, phugai for phugades, mechanai in the sense of 'contrivers,' douleia for douloi, basileiai for basileis, mainomena kedeumata for ganaika mainomenen; e chreia ...
— Laws • Plato
... according to which Brahma-hood (brahmatva) constitutes a genus inhering in Brahman as well as in non-sentient matter, just as fire constitutes the common genus for light and luminous bodies. But on this view Brahman becomes a mere abstract generic character inhering in the Lord (isvara), sentient souls and non-sentient matter, just as the generic character of horses (asvatva) inheres in concrete individual horses; and this contradicts all the teaching of Sruti and Smriti (according to which Brahman is the highest concrete entity). ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... derived the only notions of morality she ever possessed; otherwise, it would have been love's labor lost to talk to her of virtue or of duty. These words would have conveyed no meaning to her imagination; she knew no more about them than about the abstract ideas ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... probably, been overrated both for his eloquence and his skill in the battle field. He is no doubt a man of courage, and seems, from early life, to have had a strong predisposition for war. Many of his measures as a leader, have been more influenced by a sense of what was right in the abstract, than expedient in practice. This circumstance has often placed him in situations, inimical to the permanent ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... down at a hotel near Whitehall, to secure apartments, while the Major went on to demand his daughter from Lady Belamour, taking with him Betty, whom he allowed to be a much better match for my Lady than he could be. Very little faith in his cousin Urania remained to him in the abstract, yet even now he could not be sure that she would not talk him over and hoodwink him in any actual encounter. Sir Amyas likewise accompanied him, both to gratify his own anxiety and to secure admission. The young man still looked ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the things he had done that day he saw that much of it had fitted an abstract pattern of justice, as if he had been thinking of himself as an INC man. ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... of her artistic single-mindedness, to find out more about her, to guess at the meanings behind her eyes. If any privileged cynic had taken the chance to ask him whether he found her eyes expressive of purely abstract significance, Kendal would have answered affirmatively in all honesty. And he would have added a confession of his curiosity to discover what she was capable of, if she was capable of anything—which he considered legitimate enough. ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... three Divine Persons agree in one Nature, and are distinguished in suppositum; and hence they are not predicated one of another. But in the mystery of the Incarnation the natures, being distinct, are not predicated one of the other, in the abstract. For the Divine Nature is not the human nature. But because they agree in suppositum, they are predicated of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of abstract right, but mitigated in the forms of its practical enforcement, slavery endured in Ceylon till extinguished by the fiat of the British Government in 1845.[1] In the northern and Tamil districts of the island, its characteristics ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... made up of many elements. Certain of them are essentially abstract. They must be thought out by a sort of mental vision without words. This is the most subtle and intimate part of the picture. These are the means by which the ideal ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... for February devoted five columns to an "Abstract of Mr Fielding's Enquiry"; and in the following month the Magazine again noticed the book, by printing a long anonymous letter in which Fielding is attacked as a 'trading author' and a 'trading justice,' ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... National Women's Trade Union League in June, 1913, the subject of industrial education received very close attention. The importance of continuation schools after wage-earning days have commenced was not overlooked. An abstract of the discussion and the chief resolutions can be found in the issue of Life and ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... little of the element thus removed, it may again produce an abundant crop. On this principle also, attempts have been made to explain the rotation of crops, which has been supposed to depend on the cultivation in successive years of plants which abstract from the soil preponderating quantities of different mineral matters. But though this has unquestionably a certain influence, we shall afterwards see reason to doubt whether it affords a sufficient explanation of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... told the exact number of the little creatures that inhabit the sea, we could not, by any simple effort of the mind, however powerful, form a conception of what that number implied. We might shut ourselves up like the hermits of old, abstract our thoughts from all other things, and ponder the subject for weeks or months together, and at the termination of our effort we should be as wise as we were at its commencement, but no wiser. But by searching round the subject, and comparing lesser things with greater, ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Abstract, or brief Declaration of his Majesty's Revenue, with the Assignations and Defalcations upon ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... of human tongues. These three parts are: first, nouns—the names of things; second, verbs—the names of events; and, third, the partitives—or the words which express the relations of things to events. Thus the most abstract of verbs, "to be," refers to an event; for when a man says, "I am," he is mentioning an event in the history of the universe which did not occur ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... eagerly, but he could tell me nothing. He had left the Pottawatamies the day after the wedding, and had heard no rumors of any Englishman. I did not take him into my confidence. He had outlived the time when the abstract terms "ambition" and "patriotism" had meaning to him. The story of my hopes would have tinkled in his ears like the blarings of a child's trumpet. But in ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... instrumental writing is symphonic, there is none of the contrapuntal intricacy of Tristan: the pictorial requirement warranted a freer use of chords in the accompanying parts, both—if a paradoxical phrase may be pardoned—for the abstract colour of the chords and for the instrumental tone colour which the use of chords permitted. Wagner never ceases to make us feel that the drama passes amidst the wild mountains and woods: the drama is poignant enough in all conscience, and the scenery ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... caller. It was his ambition to be first with every piece of intelligence, and he enjoyed telling news, even of a harassing description. Mr. Lawrence believed that Miss Abingdon's niece was already engaged to Peter Ogilvie, and he began by a series of deft questions to try to abstract the definite information ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... one of the later writings of Plato, in which the style has begun to alter, and the dramatic and poetical element has become subordinate to the speculative and philosophical. In the development of abstract thought great advances have been made on the Protagoras or the Phaedrus, and even on the Republic. But there is a corresponding diminution of artistic skill, a want of character in the persons, a laboured march in the dialogue, ...
— Philebus • Plato
... Indian culture that they should properly understand the history of Indian philosophical thought which is the nucleus round which all that is best and highest in India has grown. Much harm has already been done by the circulation of opinions that the culture and philosophy of India was dreamy and abstract. It is therefore very necessary that Indians as well as other peoples should become more and more acquainted with the true characteristics of the past history of Indian thought and form a correct ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... In this world we are the things of a moment, and are made to pursue momentary things, with here and there a thought that stretches mistily towards eternity, and perhaps may endure as long. All philosophy that would abstract mankind from the present is ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his profession have prevented him from keeping up that extensive and indiscriminate acquaintance with it, that belles-lettres scholars frequently possess. Of consequence, the favourites of his boyish years remain his only favourites. Homer is with Mr. Fuseli the abstract and deposit of every human perfection. Milton, Shakespear, and Richardson, have also engaged much of his attention. The nearest rival of Homer, I believe, if Homer can have a rival, is Jean Jacques Rousseau. A young man embraces entire the opinions of a favourite writer, and Mr. ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... tropical showers succeeded bursts of sweltering sunshine. The green pathway of the road wound steeply upward. As we went, our little schoolboy guide a little ahead of us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hand, and named the trees for me, and read aloud from his notes the abstract of their virtues. Presently the road, mounting, showed us the vale of Hatiheu on a larger scale; and the priest, with occasional reference to our guide, pointed out the boundaries and told me the names of the larger tribes that lived at perpetual war in the old days: one on the north-east, one ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with this of Louis. Why smite the fallen? asks Magnanimity, out of danger now. He is fallen so low this once-high man; no criminal nor traitor, how far from it; but the unhappiest of Human Solecisms: whom if abstract Justice had to pronounce upon, she might well become concrete Pity, and pronounce only ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... injudicious, and transferred him. He did not much mind; all that troubled him, was the nuisance involved in packing up and moving his books and furniture. His conscience was quite clear; he had done what he thought: to be his duty. Yet he was honest enough to admit that however right the abstract principle was, its application in the particular circumstances involved may have been injudicious. His ideal of official responsibility was a very high one, and during the whole twenty-seven years of his service he had never done a shady thing; neither had he ever ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... who had taken the chief part in the first publication, made an able abstract and a comparison with the Grebo and Mandenga tongues ("Western Africa," part iv. chap. iv.). M. du Chaillu further abridged this abridgement in his Appendix without owning his authority, and in changing the examples he did all possible damage. In the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... in Colorado, I supported and voted for the proposition as a matter of abstract right; as every fair man must admit, when the question comes to him, that a woman has the same right of suffrage as a man. In advocating suffrage you need no platform but right and justice; those who will not accept it upon that ground ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... are wafted like winged seed by the wind, and strike root in regions where they could never have originated. Few classes of ideas bear so plainly the geographic stamp of their origin as religious ones, yet none have spread more widely. The abstract monotheism sprung from the bare grasslands of western Asia made slow but final headway against the exuberant forest gods of the early Germans. Religious ideas travel far from their seedbeds along established lines of communication. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... quantity abstract from matter seems to be mathematical quantity, which is not the subject of sensible qualities. Since, then, the remaining accidents in this sacrament are sensible, it seems that in this sacrament they cannot be subjected in the dimensive quantity of the bread ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... lightly disposed of, the powers of argument that had been thought fairly able to compete with Norman, and which had taxed him so severely. She did not know how differently abstract questions appear to a mature mind, confirmed in principle by practice; and to one young, struggling in self- formation, and more used to theories than ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... once accepted by those who know, by painful experience, how doubtful all things are till they are proven, and how difficult it is to get satisfactory evidence of the most simple event in physiology or pathology. No one doubts the abstract possibility of a human being living without food, for, bearing in mind the discoveries that are constantly being made, nothing can be regarded as absolutely impossible outside the domain of mathematics. Two and two cannot ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... enunciation of these dry definitions, I should ill exemplify that method of teaching this branch of physical science, which it is my chief business to-night to recommend. Let us turn away then from abstract definitions. Let us take some concrete living thing, some animal, the commoner the better, and let us see how the application of common sense and common logic to the obvious facts it presents, inevitably leads us into all these ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of nationality," he said—and I have a note of his words—"is stronger than abstract ideals. Let England make no mistake. If war were declared to-morrow the Social Democrats would march as one man in defence of the Fatherland. . . . And you must admit that England, or rather the English Foreign Office, has put rather a severe strain ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... remarking that soda-water, though a good thing in the abstract, was apt to lie cold upon the stomach unless qualified with ginger, or a small infusion of brandy, which latter article he held to be preferable in all cases, saving for the one consideration of expense. Nobody venturing to dispute these positions, he proceeded ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... attract each other, exercised an influence over living bodies, and particularly over the nervous system, by means of a subtle fluid with which the air is impregnated. But this first theory was too abstract: one must, to understand it, be initiated into all the sciences of Galileo or Newton; and it would have been necessary, for this to have become popular, that the nobility should have been transformed ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... not consider it the best remedy for the lawlessness of the South but felt that it was a salutary one. He did not expect the United States to give the oppressed blacks in the South the protection they needed, as there is no abstract limit to the right of a State to do anything. He would not encourage the Negro to lead a wandering life but in that instance such advice was gratuitous. Greener failed to find any analogy between African colonization and migration to the West as the former was promoted by slaveholders ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... road. You reject abstract theories, and have little consideration for cheapness and plenty. Your chief care is the interest of the producer. You desire to emancipate him from external competition, and reserve the national ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... difficult ever entirely to shatter the faith of such men, and however they may be wronged by individuals of the opposite sex their subjective attitude toward woman in the abstract is one of chivalrous respects. As far as outward appearances were concerned Little Eva might have passed readily as a paragon of all the virtues. As yet, there was no sign nor line of dissipation marked ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Some economists will at once argue that if prices are unprofitable to the farmer the situation will correct itself by diminished production and, consequently, a general rise in the world level of prices. In the abstract, this is true, but as a matter of fact the surplus which our farmers contribute for export is only a small portion of their total production or of the world pool, yet the total of the world pool operating through this minor segment makes the prices for a large part of the farmers' ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... perceptions and justice to our generalizations, is starved by lazy disuse instead of being cultivated judiciously in such a way as will, on the whole, bring best return. I believe that a serious study of the best way of developing and utilizing this faculty, without prejudice to the practice of abstract thought in symbols, is one of the pressing desirata in the ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... well if the king made himself the irresistible instrument of philosophy and justice, and wrought the reform. But his king was Lewis XV. D'Argenson saw so little that was worthy to be preserved that he did not shrink from sweeping judgments and abstract propositions. By his rationalism, and his indifference to the prejudice of custom and the claim of possession; by his maxim that every man may be presumed to understand the things in which his own interest and responsibility are ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... statements of popular historiographers, we receive with great satisfaction the addition to our present list of translations of such chronicles, which Mr. Lower has given us in The Chronicle of Battel Abbey from 1066 to 1176, now first translated, with Notes, and an Abstract of the subsequent History of the Establishment. The original Chronicle, which is preserved among the Cottonian MSS., though known to antiquaries and historians, was never committed to the press until the year 1846, when it was printed by the Anglia Christiana Society ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... interest Lady Ogram in certain views which I hold and am trying to get accepted by people of influence. It happened that this affair of the mill gave me a good illustration of the theory I generally have to put in an abstract way. Your word 'improvisation' seems to hint that I shaped my views to the purpose of pleasing Lady Ogram—a plain injustice, as you will see if you remember the ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... certain rising abstract ideas of pugnacity, and conceived myself bound to indulge them on the first head and shoulders I should meet. This spirit brought me at once into the thick of the fight, and, before I was well aware of my proximity, I found ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... arts to expose that fanatical spirit by which it appears the reformers were frequently actuated. Perhaps the people were not disposed to relish a jest on that side: perhaps the greater simplicity and the more spiritual abstract worship of the Protestants gave less hold to ridicule, which is commonly founded on sensible representations. It was, therefore, a very agreeable concession which the king made to the Catholic party, to suppress entirely these ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... brief span of life and far, far more power than that which was given to those who wrote of him in a hurry during his lifetime.... Do you wonder, then, that I should rather elect to regard Irving in the abstract, when called upon to suggest a fitting monument, than to promise a faithful portrait?... Let us be grateful, however, that a great artist is to be commemorated at all, side by side with the effigies of great Butchers of mankind, and ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is of ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... advantageous to the rude multitude, and tend more to mollify that fierce and gloomy spirit of devotion to which they are subject. Even the English church, though it had retained a share of Popish ceremonies, may justly be thought too naked and unadorned, and still to approach too near the abstract and spiritual religion of the Puritans. Laud and his associates, by reviving a few primitive institutions of this nature, corrected the error of the first reformers, and presented to the affrightened and astonished mind ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... colours in a solid or insoluble state, prepared for the artists' use. Hitherto, we have treated of colours in the abstract sense, as appealing to the eye only: we have now to consider them ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... told, suh, in three," said the Southerner. His smile had returned. His voice was the cool voice of one who discussed abstract things. "I'm a failyuh. This wold 'ain't no use foh failyuhs. I've given myself all the time and chances I dese'ved, but I cayn't win out, so I've got to git out. The's no one to ca'e. I've no kin, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... concerned at present with the personal philosophy of the two kings, but with the way it affected their people. This people, as far as the Netherlands were concerned, were the last in Europe to tolerate such hard and abstract methods of government, and nothing perhaps is more enlightening, if we try to form an adequate opinion of Belgian temperament, than the upheaval caused by the reforms proclaimed by the "benighted" and by the "enlightened" monarch. It was not so much that the Belgians ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations from ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... seriously; "Did I not tell you so?" said he. "Was not this man an abstract virtue? I give you my word I stand in awe before him, and I feel ashamed to pry into these details of his life. What is it to us how he thought proper to apply his principles to nightcaps and feather dusters? We are not his ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... Palestinian canon. Like most wisdom books, it describes at length the beauty and value of wisdom. The figure of Proverbs 8 and 9 is still further developed under the influence of the Greek tendency to personify abstract qualities. In the mind of the author, however, wisdom is simply an attribute of the Deity which he shares in common with men. The book is unique in two respects: (1) it contains the earliest references ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Hydraulic Powers) in the state which verges upon practical application, and especially including that part in which the abstract ideas of power ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is unequalled by any other English poet. Heine alone is his peer in this; but even Heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. In older women, also, these latter qualities were the spells for Browning; and, with him, a girl sets forth early on her brave career. That is the just adjective. His girls are as brave as the young knights of other ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... from time to time been constructed by means of different combinations of Iceland spar. The literature of this subject is scattered and somewhat difficult of access, and moreover only a small part of it has hitherto been translated into English; and it would appear therefore that a brief abstract of the paper may not be without service to those among the readers of Nature who may be unacquainted with the original memoirs, or who may not have the necessary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... animal-like rebellion against his fellows, war in the abstract, and fate grew within him. He shambled along with bowed head, his brain in a tumult of agony and despair. When he looked loweringly up, quivering at each sound, his eyes had the expression of those of a criminal who ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... certain excited bitterness that characterized the delivery of this abstract truth, Bill did not see that the young man's face flushed slightly as he ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a small percentage of water will cause better germination than in a clay soil. While different seeds vary in their power to abstract water from soils, yet it seems that for the majority of plants, the best percentage of soil-water for germination purposes is that which is in the neighborhood of the maximum field capacity of soils for water, as explained in Chapter VII. Bogdanoff has estimated that the best ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... his overcoat.] Surely I am too obnoxious in the abstract for your uncle to entertain such a detail ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... prosperity.' Napoleon added that he thought the evil might be remedied by divided property and abolishing hurtful privileges, as was done in France. Afterwards Napoleon asked many questions about the Cortes, and when Lord John told him that many of the members made good speeches on abstract questions, but they failed when any practical debate on finance or war took place, Napoleon drily remarked: 'Oui, faute de l'habitude de gouverner.' Presently the talk drifted to Wellington, or rather Napoleon adroitly led it thither. He described the man who had driven the French out of Spain as ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an abstract of the proceedings in the coroner's court, of which a verbatim report was made at my request by other representatives of the Record; and it will be remembered that the police evidence showed that two revolvers, with either of which the crime might have been committed, ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... In the Word "little children" signify innocence (n. 5608); likewise "sucklings" (n. 3183). An "old man" signifies one who is wise, and in an abstract sense wisdom (n. 3183, 6524). Man is so created that in proportion as he verges towards old age he may become like a little child, and that innocence may then be in his wisdom, and in that state he may pass into heaven and become an angel (n. ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... always one who has unmixed evil instincts, and nearly every contingency of human conduct becomes, as we contemplate it, many-sided enough to be very confusing. And it was beginning to dawn upon Rendel that, although it may fulfil the ends of abstract justice that the guilty should be exposed and the innocent acquitted, such an act takes an ugly aspect when the eager pursuer is himself the innocent man who is to be vindicated, and the guilty one a weaker and defenceless ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... side of the cross and the sepulchre. We would have looked for those three miserable men somewhere in the City of Destruction or in the Town of Stupidity, or, at best, somewhere still outside of the wicket-gate. But John Bunyan did not lay down his Pilgrim's Progress on any abstract theory, or on any easy and pleasant presupposition, of the Christian life. He constructed his so lifelike book out of his own experiences as a Christian man, as well as out of all he had learned as a Christian minister. And in nothing ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... one nook and pillows from another. Blankets are added, and the bed is ready. Any over- particular individual—an islander, for instance, who hugs his chains—will generally prefer to pay the dollar for the double accommodation. Looking at the bed in the light of a bed—taking, as it were, an abstract view of it—or comparing it with some other bed or beds with which the occupant may have acquaintance, I cannot say that it is in all respects perfect. But distances are long in America; and he who declines to travel by night will lose very much time. He who ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... most noble and royal extract by her father will not fall into question, for on that side was disembogued into her veins, by a confluency of blood, the very abstract of all the greatest houses in Christendom: and remarkable it is, considering that violent desertion of the Royal House of the Britons by the intrusion of the Saxons, and afterwards by the conquest of the Normans, that, through vicissitude of times, and after a discontinuance almost of a thousand ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... talented imitator, she next tried her hand at an essay on an abstract subject. This was a failure: you could not SEE things, when you wrote about, say, "Beneficence"; and Laura's thinking was done mainly in pictures. Matters were still worse when she tinkered at Cupid's especial genre: her worthless little incident stared at her, naked and ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... by the League for Social Service of New York. They deal with such subjects as The Duties of American Citizenship, The Value of a Vote, The Duty of Public Spirit, The Co-operative City, &c. They include an admirable abstract in twenty-four pages, of Laws Concerning the Welfare of Every Citizen of New York, and the same Society issues similar abstracts of the laws of other States. They have a large and well-equipped lecture organisation, and they issue excellent practical ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... I don't know exactly; a sort of abstract summing up of either our qualities or God's qualities. The only doctrine I even half understand is that of 'total depravity,' and I sometimes fear ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... plenty of time. One indulges in regrets about the home one may never see again. One is rather sorry for oneself; but such self-pity is not wholly unpleasant. One feels mildly heroic, which is not wholly disagreeable either. Very few men are afraid of death in the abstract. Very few men believe in hell, or are tortured by their consciences. They are doubtful about after-death, hesitating between a belief in eternal oblivion and a belief in a new life under the same management as the present; and neither prospect fills them with terror. If only one's "people" would ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... Mr. Bucket. Like man in the abstract, he is here to-day and gone to-morrow—but, very unlike man indeed, he is here again the next day. This evening he will be casually looking into the iron extinguishers at the door of Sir Leicester Dedlock's house in town; and to-morrow morning he will ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... he answered, "can be determined on mathematical lines. Bravery is a delightful quality in the abstract, but brave men are killed as easily as cowards. Tell me, have ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... and the history and considering religious writings, the second large group of medieval productions, one finds the most significant translator's comment associated with the saint's legend, though occasionally the short pious tale or the more abstract theological treatise makes some contribution. These religious works differ from the romances in that they are more frequently based on Latin than on French originals, and in that they contain more deliberate and more repeated references to the audiences to which they have been adapted. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know, that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early Hellenic[125] world, that I would know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest criticism. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... gone, the woman's worst enemy would have pitied her distress. She believed more than ever that Clamp had used Lucy to abstract her papers, and that he now would hold his power over her to bring about the hated marriage. Her firmness gave way; she sank on the sofa and wept like a child. Would that she might yet retreat! But no, the way is closed up behind her. She must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the most pathetic tragedies in the whole history of aviation, that of Alphonse Penaud, who, in his thirty years of life, condensed the experience of his predecessors and combined it with his own genius to state in a published patent what the aeroplane of to-day should be. Consider the following abstract of Penaud's design as published in his patent of 1876, and comparison of this with the aeroplane that now exists will show very few divergences except for those forced on the inventor by the fact that the internal combustion engine had not then developed. The double ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... experience, a world inexpressibly vaster and grander than the poor little affair that I had only known a small obscure corner of, and yet of one quality with it, so that I could be as much at home and citizen in it as where I actually lived. There I found joy and sorrow mixed, and nothing abstract or typical, but everything standing for itself, and not for some other thing. Then, I suppose it was the interfusion of humor through so much of it, that made it all precious and friendly. I think I had a native love of laughing, which was fostered in me by my father's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are holy mendicants, who devote themselves to the expected joys of the next world, and abstract themselves from those of this silly transitory scene; they are generally fanatics and enthusiasts—sometimes mad, and often hypocrites. They are much venerated by the superstitious Asiatics, and are allowed uncommon privileges, which they naturally ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... or minutes—had passed, abstract, uneventful time. He was lying with his head in a heap of ashes, and something wet and warm ran swiftly into his neck. The first shock broke up into discrete sensations. All his head throbbed; his eye and his chin throbbed exceedingly, and the taste of blood ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... our brother Kierkegaard has to say. "The danger of abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it, afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it. It explains immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by identifying it with eternity—with the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... illusions; from Mabel Connemora, from what she herself had heard and seen—and experienced—she knew the street woman's life, and she could not live that life for herself alone. She could talk about it to Redmond tranquilly. She could think about it in the abstract, could see how other women did it, and how those who had intelligence might well survive and lift themselves up in it. But do it she could not. So she resolved upon suicide, firmly believing in her own resolve. And she was not one to deceive herself or to shrink from anything whatsoever. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... for a glimpse of this truth seemed to open before you when you observed, "that to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all participation of government, was a political phenomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain." If so, on what does your constitution rest? If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of woman, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test: though a different opinion prevails in this country, built on the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... for, in opposition to the above, it may be said that the claim of the Southern whites that they love the Negro better than the Northern whites do is in a manner true. Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation. A number of them have heroically spent their lives in this effort (and just here I wish to say that when the colored people reach ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... women know not what presses darkest and most bitterly on the minds of men. You know not what it is to form out of immaterial things some abstract but glorious object,—to worship, to serve it, to sacrifice to it, as on an altar, youth, health, hope, life,—and suddenly in old age to see that the idol was a phantom, a mockery, a shadow laughing us to scorn, because we ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... now done in political science is that going on in the field of applied politics. Avoiding abstract principles and a priori speculation, it addresses itself to examination of the actual organization of public authority and of the way in which governmental function is carried out. In 'The Government of European Cities' (Macmillan), Prof. William Bennett Munro of Harvard has made a valuable ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... this-above-that, the-yellowness-of-this. Among universals I include all objects of which no particular is a constituent. Thus the disjunction "universal-particular" includes all objects. We might also call it the disjunction "abstract-concrete." It is not quite parallel with the opposition "concept-percept," because things remembered or imagined belong with particulars, but can hardly be called percepts. (On the other hand, universals ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... congratulation, and then visited the villages around, and listened to the bells chiming all about the vale, say whether 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' would be promoted by the destruction of all the feudality which belongs inseparably to this scene, and by the substitution of some abstract political rights for all the beef and ale and music and dancing with which they are made merry and glad even for so brief a space. The Duke of Rutland is as selfish a man as any of his class—that is, he never does what he does not like, and spends his whole life in a round ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... evidences in favour of it, and we marvel that it so often proves a failure. For while we remember the evidence in favour of it, we forget the evidence against it, and we overlook the important fact that our favourable evidence is largely based on the vision of an abstract or idealised monogamy which fails to correspond to the detailed and ever varying system which in practice we cherish. We point to the fact that monogamic marriage has probably flourished throughout the history of the world, that it exists among savages, even among ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... artistic theory," replied the Professor pensively. "Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed, to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... What a difference it is when we say, 'Do that thing because it is right,' and when we say, 'Do that thing because you will be happier if you do,' or when we say, 'Do it because He would like you to do it.' The one is all cold and abstract. To stand before a man and simply say: 'Now go and do your duty,' is a poor way of setting his feet upon a rock and establishing his goings. Duty is not a word that stirs men's hearts, however it may awe their consciences. It rises up before us like some goddess statuesque ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... citizenship for all Germany and of equal protection for all citizens as against foreign powers, the constitution contains little that relates to the status or privileges of the individual. There is in it no bill of rights, and it makes no mention of abstract principles. Among instruments of its kind, none is of ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Fusileers at the Merchants' Club, in Boston, in 1792. As eighty dinners were paid for I infer there were eighty diners. They drank one hundred and thirty-six bowls of punch, besides twenty-one bottles of sherry and a large quantity of cider and brandy. An abstract of an election dinner to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1769, showed two hundred diners, and seventy-two bottles of Madeira, twenty-eight bottles of Lisbon wine, ten of claret, seventeen of port, eighteen of porter, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... this view of the process of evolution is in some respects at variance with that generally held during the past half century. There we were given the conception of an abstract type representing the species, and from it most of the individuals diverged in various directions, though, generally speaking, only to a very small extent. It was assumed that any variation, however small, might have a selection ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... the Lark anchored here from England, on board of which came the Master and the company of this Schooner. Went on board and took possession of Her. Read over to the crew the Master's Warrant, Articles of War, and Abstract of ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... hands, she sat for a moment, endeavoring to abstract her thoughts from all outward objects, so as the more readily to determine what course to adopt. But for a while it seemed as though it was impossible for her to fix her mind aright. Each instant some intruding trifle interfered to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... his Preface, if ever anything was, is that "something better:" for it is so extraordinary, that we cannot say, it is too long or too short, or deny but that it is both. I think I abstract myself from all manner of prejudice when I aver that no man, though without any obligation to Mr. ADDISON, would have represented him in his family and in his friendships, or his personal character, so disadvantageously as his Secretary (in preference of whom, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... particular localities were appointed to superintend these public works; and as these commissioners were generally destitute of practical knowledge, these Parliamentary grants were usually expended without producing equivalent results. Nothing in the abstract is more reasonable than that any number of individuals should be allowed to associate themselves for the purpose of effecting some local improvement, which would be beneficial to others as well as to themselves; but nothing of this could ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... viz., the Rishi Vyasa, the son of Gandhavati, has himself recited this discourse unto us on the glory of Narayana, that glory which is the highest and which is immutable. I heard it from him and have recited it to thee exactly as I heard it, O sinless one. This cult, with its mysteries and its abstract of details, was obtained by Narada, O king, from that Lord of the universe, viz., Narayana himself. Even such are the particulars of this great cult. I have, before this, O foremost of kings, explained it to thee in the Hari-Gita, with a brief reference to its ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of attention and interest give us the psychology of advertising. The study of suggestion and abnormal states make psychology of use in medicine. It may be said, therefore, that psychology, once abstract and unrelated to any practical interests, will become the most useful of all sciences, as it works out its problems and finds the laws ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... will seek there, on my word. Neither 50 press, coffer, chest, trunk, well, vault, but he hath an abstract for the remembrance of such places, and goes to them by his note: there is no hiding ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... too late to present any labored analysis of the writings of Emerson,—too late to set down any eulogy. Whoever loves to deal with first principles, and is not deterred from grappling with abstract truths, will find in these essays a rare pleasure in the exercise of his powers. These volumes are universally admitted to be among the most valuable contributions to the world's stock of ideas which our age has furnished. Every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... execution by a precept under the hands and seals of three or more commissioners, of whom one, at least, should be of the quorum; but this custom had become obsolete at the time of this trial, and only a calendar, or abstract of the record, subscribed by the judge, was put into the hands of the sheriff for this purpose; and such is the practice in England, I presume, to ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... was not made so plain, so palpable to the audience, as it should have been, and as it might have been, if I had had a wiser, a warier, and an abler opponent, and one who had no false theory of Bible inspiration or abstract perfection to defend. A man thoroughly furnished for the work, and free from foolish and unauthorized theories, would have been able to give proof of the substantial truth and divinity of the Scriptures, and of their transcendent ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... out a shade of meaning) not because we object to it, but because by doing so we would run the risk of identifying The Absolute with some idea of a personal god with certain theological attributes. Nor does the word "Principle" appeal to us, for it seems to imply a cold, unfeeling, abstract thing, while we conceive the Absolute Spirit or Being to be a warm, vital, living, acting, feeling Reality. We do not use the word Nature, which many prefer, because of its materialistic meaning to the minds of many, although the word is very dear to us when referring to the outward manifestation ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... from this," pursued Lionel, and at the same time cursed the foul fiend that prompted him such specious words to cloak his villainy. "I would abstract him from it, and yet 'tis against my conscience that he should go unpunished for I swear to you, Master Leigh, that I abhor the ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... finding fit subjects for these poetic competitions. But the papers lying here before me remind me at least of one which excited great interest and keen rivalry. Complaints had been made that the club had hitherto devoted itself almost altogether to abstract rhapsodies, and had omitted the cultivation of itself in the epic or heroic side of its genius. On the other hand, the abstract rhapsodists protested that any one could write ballads, and that the subject to be chosen should ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... as limiting the sphere of the will, and, consequently, of moral accountability, opens a very wide range of speculation. I can give you only a brief abstract of my own opinions on this delicate and difficult subject. Crime and sin, being the preserves of two great organized interests, have been guarded against all reforming poachers with as great jealousy as the Royal Forests. It is so easy ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Whatever gratification of pride there is in the possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but common to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its supporters, a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends usually contended for by factious, of little private importance to any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every male head of a family, and of every one who looks forward to being so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... privation of vision, must be exempt from those phantasms or Ideas, that are connected with, or are the residuary contingents on visual perception: yet the blind acquire speech, when young, with equal facility, as the children who enjoy sight; but visible objects must, to them, be abstract or complex terms, as all such necessarily are, that cannot be the objects of perception. The other sensitive organs, and especially the touch, to a limited extent, become the substitutes for visual defect, although they are no actual compensations for ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... ruled by ideas, by abstract thought. Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them. We recognize this clearly in studying any past period. We see, for instance, how all the currents of human life changed upon the adoption of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... story with the proverbial grain of salt. It seemed to her to be incredible and impossible that in this nineteenth century such a thing as deliberate and carefully planned murder should occur in Christian England. That these things occur in the abstract we are ready to admit, but we find it very difficult to realize that they may come within the horizon of our own experience. Hence Mrs. Scully set no importance upon Kate's fears for her life, and put them down to the excited state of the ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... doing. They juggled with figures, made precis of the reports of money markets, dissected and analysed the balance sheets of railway companies, decoded messages from London or from Paris, transcribed formulae as abstract, as remote from tangible things as the x and y of algebraic equations. These men all worked—the apologue of the quadratic equation held my mind—moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots, dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... at this point, as if his mind were running on the abstract idea of self-delusion. Indeed he said as much. Rooney admitted that ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... the great majority among them it signified nothing by whom the reins of the supreme government were held. A third consequence of the village system has been one which men will naturally regard as advantageous or the reverse, according to the opinions which they hold, touching certain abstract points into which it is not necessary to enter here. Perhaps there are not to be found on the face of the earth, a race of human beings whose attachment to their native place will bear a comparison with that ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... before Scott set off a fortnight later for his long-planned tour with the Commissioners of Northern Lights—the Scottish Trinity House—in their yacht, round the northern half of the island and to Orkney and Shetland. To abstract his own admirable account of the tour[27] would be a task grateful neither to writer nor to reader, the latter of whom, if he does not know it already, had better lose no time in making its acquaintance. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... actions of a popular contest? Our hopes, fears, exultations, but as the cross readings of diurnal events? And although grief is felt at the perusal of accidents, offences, and crimes, which are necessarily and judiciously given, there is in every good Newspaper an impartial record, an abstract of the times, a vast fund of useful knowledge; and, finally, no person has reason, after perusing it, to rise without being thankful that so useful a medium is offered to his understanding; at least, this ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... in 1909 by William Boone Douglass, Examiner of Surveys in the General Land Office, Santa Fe. Following is an abstract of the government report ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... Corrected Abstract of a Communication to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 20th January 1868, with Notes and an Appendix. Proc. of the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... reading on an abstract subject which was a theme worthy of a logician and Hester was ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... done, one essential part of such reparation being adequate security against repetition of the wrong. So far as may be necessary for this purpose, punishment may equitably go, but no further. Genuine justice does not permit penal laws of human enactment to take into account the abstract turpitude of crime. That she reserves for divine cognisance, recollecting that 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' saith the Lord. Nor does she permit the smallest aggravation of punishment for the ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... link after link; from earth to heaven. The sunny motes, that in a glancing column came through the lattice, called Warner from the real day,—the day of strife and blood, with thousands hard by driving each other to the Hades,—and led his scheming fancy into the ideal and abstract day,—the theory of light itself; and the theory suggested mechanism, and mechanism called up the memory of his oracle, old Roger Bacon; and that memory revived the great friar's hints in the Opus magnus,—hints which outlined the grand invention of the telescope; and ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that deeply interesting volume of Christian experience, James' Abstract of the Gracious Dealings of God with several Eminent Christians. The persecutions that Mrs. Beaumont went through were like a dreadful tempest, yet was she joyfully delivered out of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... alike as suppliants at the bar of God. I know all this, I can imagine what the office of the judge costs in this execution of it; but I say that in these strong sensations he is lost, and is unable to abstract the penalty as a preventive or example, from an experience of it, and from associations surrounding it, which are and can be, only his, and ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... tour of this country in 1881 to stir up interest in the cause. It was soon apparent that the growth of the Socialist party organization was hindered by the fact that its methods were too studious and its discussions too abstract to suit the energetic temper of the times. Many Socialists broke away to join revolutionary clubs which were now organized in a number of cities without any clearly defined principle save to fight ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... of red (hoist side), blue, and red, centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and the ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... nobility of man, and the necessity of man worship. Women have turned from men and are occupied now with their own aspirations, losing sight thereby of the ideal that God gave them. My poem is a sort of abstract, an epitome, a compendium of ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... around her. Of course, genius and enthusiasm are, for both sexes, elements unforeseen and incalculable; but, as a general rule, great achievements imply great preparations and favorable conditions. To disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract, and cruel in its consequences. If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of ten feet with the aid of a springboard, it would be considered slightly absurd to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is precisely what society and the critics have always done. Training ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... round naves of a few churches the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. Other instances of devout imitation might be found, if we looked for them. But the imitation of a concrete model is a different thing from translating abstract mysteries into the plan and elevation of a building. And, although the ground plan with nave, transepts, and chancel, certainly forms a cross; and, although, as time went on, the resemblance to the chief symbol of the Christian ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... have been very impertinent if I had ventured to give you advice. I can hardly be taxed with that presumption. We were merely discussing an abstract question,—the use of faculties accorded us, and the best mode of obtaining happiness through their employment; and you chose to apply my general remarks ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... phase of the question, less difficult of solution than the preceding, perhaps, but by no means less important. It is the case of the free negro, and especially the free negro of the North. Here again we need not stop to discuss abstract questions of equality, nor declare our adherence to the philosophy of Miscegenation. We need not stop to consider the nature, or justice, of the prejudice which prevails against the negro at the North. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... poverty of reason and argument, which could otherwise be presented against the principle of the address. But such an obligation led to a novel difficulty and bitterer conflict. A discussion involving principles of the greatest moment narrowed into a technical disquisition of abstract law. Mr. O'Hea was driven from his position by the unanimous and unqualified opinion of every barrister present, and even by his own silence, when dared to allow the address to pass in the negative, and assume the responsibility of its rejection on the avowed ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... Anglican authorities, writing in his grave and abstract way, seems to assert a similar doctrine in the ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... to find. It seems as if her soul was flooded with light and filled with music that had found entrance to it through avenues closed to other mortals. It is hard to understand how she has learned to deal with abstract ideas, and so far to supplement the blanks left by the senses of sight and hearing that one would hardly think of her as wanting in any human faculty. Remember Milton's pathetic picture of himself, suffering from only one ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... by showing that men were not born for the mere abstract study of philosophy, but that the study of philosophic truth should always be made as practical as possible, and applicable to the great interests of philanthropy and patriotism. Cicero endeavors to show the benefit ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... which it attacks was 'A Dissertation on Debt and Debtors', where the subject was, I imagine, treated in the orthodox way: and he expends all his paradox in showing that indebtedness is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there is something so comical in a defence of debt, however transparent, proceeding from a man to whom never in his life a bill can have been sent in twice, and who ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... inclusive one, still holds the highest rank, and is the only one which now claims the attention of the general Thinker. It is very restricted in its application, professing to include only the domain which Comte calls abstract or general Science, which has for its object the discovery of the laws which regulate Phenomena in all conceivable cases within their domain, and excluding the sphere of what he denominates concrete, particular, or descriptive Science, whose function it is to apply these laws to the history of existing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... was done with it now, utterly. Its breath was only poisoned, with coming death. So the homely live charity of these women, their work, which, no other hands were ready to take, jarred against his abstract theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart of a matter. Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle of a world, in spite of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... received without such estimate), and shall keep a separate record thereof; and shall countersign all permits, clearances, certificates, debentures, and other documents granted by the Collector. He shall also examine the Collector's abstract of duties, his accounts, receipts, bonds, and expenditures, and, if found correct, shall ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... a name, which any advantageous distinction has made eminent, but some latent animosity will burst out. The wealthy trader, however he may abstract himself from public affairs, will never want those who hint with Shylock, that ships are but boards, and that no man can properly be termed rich whose fortune is at the mercy of the winds. The beauty adorned only with the unambitious graces of innocence and modesty, provokes, whenever ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... stern, ignorant men, who had an intense hatred for the mere accomplishments of life. Each had two daughters, who, with the natural tastes of the sex, were not averse to the graces of education, in the abstract, but could not bear to see them displayed by their "stuck-up, pauper cousin," as they often termed that hapless young lady in private conversation. A kind offer, which she was imprudent enough, to make, to teach them ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... He ever made—that He utterly, absolutely, realizes that ideal. He says, "I do always the things that please him." And then, thirdly, we have the revelation of the secret by which He has been able to realize the ideal, to make the abstract concrete, to bring down the fair vision of divine purpose to the level of actual human life and experience, and the secret is declared in the opening words: "He that sent me is with me; my Father ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... stood condemned, and with teaching lawless disrespect for every check and restraint except such as they chose to acknowledge. They were powerful advocates for right and justice, democracy and publicity, but their definitions of these abstract nouns made plain-speaking people gasp. Self-interest and material power were the idols which they set themselves to pull down, but the deities which they put in their places wore the same familiar looks as the idols, only they were ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... was her ladyship's former husband, acknowledged as such! What further fall of the planet into broken fragments could terrify or drive her from her course more thoroughly than this? Truth! yes, truth in the abstract, might be very good. But such a truth as this! how could any one ever say that that was good? Such was the working of her mind; but she took no trouble ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... tribute to the quite curious greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we do not feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read. Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work. Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he wanted to write twenty ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... think it can be said that these people have in their minds any real abstract idea of number, at all events beyond twenty. Each finger turned down and toe pointed to, in succession, seems to represent to their minds the article (e.g., a pig) which is counted, rather than a step in a process of mental ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... act until it is very late. Our gifts enable us to move with energy, if not always with precision. To predict what we will do in a given case is not easy for a foreigner. It is not easy even for ourselves. We have few abstract principles, and reliable induction from our past is not easy. We are often guided by what Mr. Justice Wendell Holmes has called "the intuition more subtle than any particular major premise." Nor is help to be derived from any study ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... some idea of this remarkable paper. It commences in an abstract, aphoristic manner not ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... others, will be glad to have Mr. HAROLD SPENDER'S sparkling abstract of the more romantic passages in the life of The Prime Minister (HODDER AND STOUGHTON). The first half of the book describes the upbringing and early battles of this man of peace, Rose Cottage at Llanystumdwy with "Uncle Lloyd"—there is a touching ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... all. What history testifies to is, first the partial, and then the total eclipse of virtue that always follows the abandonment of belief in a personal God. It is not, as has been pointed out a hundred times, that morality in the abstract disappears, but the motive and sanction are gone. There is nothing to raise it from the dead. Man's attitude to it is left to himself. Grant that morals have their own base in human life; grant that Nature has a Religion ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... necessity but she conscientiously set about to do them good, if they would be done good to. Mrs. Francis's heart was kind, when you could get to it; but it was so deeply crusted over with theories and reflections and abstract truths that not very many people knew ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... no longer understood. (3) The needs of worship and organisation. (4) The effort to adjust the doctrine of religion to the prevailing doctrinal opinions. (5) Political and social circumstances. (6) The changing moral ideals of life. (7) The so-called logical consistency, that is the abstract analogical treatment of one dogma according to the form of another. (8) The effort to adjust different tendencies and contradictions in the church. (9) The endeavour to reject once for all a doctrine regarded as erroneous. (10) ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... and look upon its execution as a charter of enfranchisement from the ambition of Princes; granted by the wisdom of the Empress to the trade of the world. The sense of Congress on this subject, I enclose you in an abstract from their ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never existed, and some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal background, formulated and put in harmless critical periods the principles of art which he illustrates, and which are the inevitable logic of his poems,— said essayist would have won ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Besides, the soldiers liked her; and there was little trouble in her wards. The war moved her in simple ways; for she was patriotic in the direct fashion of her class. Her father had been a sailor, her husbands an official and a soldier; the issue for her was uncomplicated by any abstract meditation. The Country before everything! And though she had tended during those two years so many young wrecked bodies, she had taken it as all in the a day's work, lavishing her sympathy on the individual, without much general sense ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "ah! in the abstract they are wonderful, but in the concrete they do not interest me. Maxendorf has come here, doubtless, with great schemes in ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... distinctness of outline which was most needed in his work; it gave body to his creations, but in his most characteristic and original tales this body was not to be one of external fact, but of moral thought. His genius contained a primary element of reflection, of meditation on life, of the abstract; and while his imagination might take its start and find an initial impulse, an occasion, in some concrete object on which it fastened, its course in working itself out was governed by this abstract ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... their own minds, were very important personages. Their good qualities were few, and consisted of being a sure shot, and expert at lariat and whip-throwing. They would bet a tenderfoot a small sum that they could at a distance of twelve feet, abstract a small piece from his trousers without disturbing the flesh. They could do this trick nine times out of ten. The whips consisted of a hickory stalk two feet long, a lash twelve feet in length with buck or antelope skin snapper nine inches in length. The stalk was held in the left hand, the lash ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... externally in an hallucinatory form. It is this remembrance, and not the words themselves, that the observer has seen. It is thus demonstrated that rapid reading is in great part a work of divination, but not of abstract divination. It is an externalization of memories which take advantage, to a certain extent, of the partial realization that they find here and there in order ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... Miss Catherine Ann Williams. In Parliament Cobden was instantly successful. His early speeches produced that singular and profound effect which is perceived in English deliberative assemblies when a speaker leaves party recriminations, abstract argument, and commonplaces of sentiment, in order to inform his hearers of telling facts in the condition of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... mine, which is large paper, and therefore most commodious for illustrating, cost me sixteen guineas. I see you suppose me to carry my objections to the apologetic language of the Courier to a greater extent than is in my contemplation. Undoubtedly, the abstract right of Parliament to call upon Ministers as responsible for their advice in the exercise of the Royal prerogative, cannot be denied; but the more or less apologetic tone taken by them upon such questions is often of the highest importance. Their wretched ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... belief in the reality of a central spiritual life is always accompanied, whether definitely expressed or not, with a belief in the value of particulars, of the individual, as opposed to general statements and abstract philosophy. The mystic, who believes in an inward moulding spirit, necessarily believes that all reforms must come from within, and that, as Burke points out in the Present Discontents, good government depends not upon laws but upon individuals. Blake, in a characteristic phrase, says: "He ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... which Bacon sought to propitiate his regard, he took all occasions to represent him to the queen, and with some degree of justice though more of malice, as a man of too speculative a turn to apply in earnest to the practical details of business; one moreover whose head was so filled with abstract and philosophical notions, that he would not fail to perplex any public affairs in which he might be permitted to take a lead. The effect of these suggestions on the mind of Elizabeth was greatly aggravated by the conduct of Bacon in the parliament of 1593, in consequence ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... prejudice against his own beneficent calling. No money-lender would ever get justice in a British court of law; easier for the camel to thread the needle's eye. That flagrant forgery would be accepted at sight by our vaunted British jury. The only chance was to abstract it before the ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... setting the most ruinous of precedents, but whether any man could be so sure of himself as to go on dealing justly with gifts in his hands. But Bacon, who never dared to face the question, what James was, what Buckingham was, let himself be spellbound by custom. He knew in the abstract that judges ought to have nothing to do with gifts, and had said so impressively in his charges to them. Yet he went on self-complacent, secure, almost innocent, building up a great tradition of corruption in the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... she is my mother, and your mother; not because her hills were the first which my childhood saw, that has never since beheld any half so dear; nor from any sordid ambition, that she should be great in this world's greatness; nor from any profane wish to abstract from the rightful place and influence of any State, or any section of our whole country. But I think that God sent New-England to these shores as his own messenger of mercy to days and ages, that have yet far to come ere they are born! She has not yet told this ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... of the world," he said softly, "are concerned with these things in the abstract, but mostly, we the people are willing to leave this to ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... expressible in iron only, and in iron would be majestic and impressive in the highest degree; and that every piece of metal work you use might be, rightly treated, not only a superb decoration, but a most valuable abstract of portions of natural forms, holding in dignity precisely the same relation to the painted representation of plants, that a statue does to the painted form of man. It is difficult to give you an idea of the grace and interest ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... The saint, foreseeing the annoyances to which a continuance of this dependence must give rise, advised that it should be henceforth respected as an independent state. The second question was one of less importance in the abstract, but far more difficult to settle satisfactorily. The bards, or more probably persons who wished to enjoy their immunities and privileges without submitting to the ancient laws which obliged them to undergo a long and severe course of study before becoming licentiates, if we ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... all known by their native evidence; are wholly independent; receive no light, nor are capable of any proof one from another; much less the more particular from the more general, or the more simple from the more compounded; the more simple and less abstract being the most familiar, and the easier and earlier apprehended. But whichever be the clearest ideas, the evidence and certainty of all such propositions is in this, That a man sees the same idea to be the same idea, and infallibly perceives two different ideas to be different ideas. For when ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... out. He still admired Claire intensely and experienced disturbing emotions when he beheld her perfect tonneau and wonderful headlights; but he regarded her with a cautious fear. Although he sometimes dreamed sentimentally of marriage in the abstract, of actual marriage, of marriage with a flesh-and-blood individual, of marriage that involved clergymen and 'Voices that Breathe o'er Eden,' and giggling bridesmaids and cake, Dudley Pickering was afraid with a terror ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... justified by reason. In so far as these worlds are in the limits of rational imagination, they are derived from humanity, partial interpretations of some of its moods, portions of itself; and the beings who inhabit them are impaired for the purposes of art in the degree to which their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of complete humanity. For this reason in dealing with such simple types, being natures all of one strain, it has been found best in practice to import into them individually some quality widely common to men in addition to that limited quality they possess ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... "My friend, it was because I wished to be gentle in the breaking to you, for I know you have loved that so sweet lady. But even yet I do not expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the 'no' of it. It is more hard still to accept so sad a concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. Tonight I go to prove it. ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... seized upon him in Sunset, it had been an abstract rebellion against the futility of life as he was living it. This was different: This was a definite, concrete sense of failure to keep faith with himself and with Mason; the sickening consciousness of a swinish return to the wallow; a distrust of himself that was beyond ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... sufficient to show that he gives no quarter to the delusion he undertakes to expose, and though he does not deny that there may be witches in the abstract, (to have done so would have left him a preacher without an audience,) yet he guards so cautiously against any practical application of that principle, and battles so vigorously against the error which assimilated the witches of modern times to the witches ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... proprietors, no desire to live like country squires, as in Virginia. They were more restless and enterprising than their Dutch neighbors, and with greater public spirit in dangers. They loved the discussion of abstract questions which it was difficult to settle. They produced a greater number of orators and speculative divines in proportion to their wealth and number than the Dutch, who were phlegmatic and fond of ease and comfort, and did not like to be disturbed by the discussion of novelties. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... done," cried Bob. "I will give my life to it. Everybody hates war in the abstract, but no one seems to throw himself heart and soul into a great peace crusade. Even the Peace Society is half-hearted. The cause of Peace hasn't been voiced of late years. That's it," and Bob rose to his feet excitedly; "I see my work, Nancy. Neither your father nor any one else shall say ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... as that animal. These may be called their superstitions, but religion they have none; and though they know a name for God, and entertain some faint notion of a future state, yet it is only in the abstract, for practically the belief seems to be a dead letter. At their marriage they kill fowls, as I have narrated; but this is a ceremony, not a sacrifice. They have no priests or idols, say no prayers, make no ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... reader in Mr. Wilson's well-executed epitome is the gradual character of this anti-slavery legislation, and the general subordination of philanthropic to military considerations in its conduct. The questions were not taken up in the order of their abstract importance, but as they pressed on the practical judgment for settlement in exigencies of the Government. When Slavery became an obstruction to the progress of the national arms, opposition to it was the dictate of prudence as well as of conscience, and its defenders at once placed themselves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... growing sense of reassurance, struggling to separate the abstract sense of his words from the persuasion in which his eyes ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... original method of distributing the funds that he obtained. To male sheep he gave nothing, to ugly female sheep a very little, to pretty female sheep the rest. Ferrand hazarded an inference, but he was a foreigner. The Englishman preferred to look upon the preacher as guided by a purely abstract love of beauty. His eloquence, at any rate, was unquestionable, and Shelton came ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... name of luminous was at first so explained as to make the light wherewith souls were clothed, into a portion of the divine light. In my opinion the idea is a less abstract one, and shows that, as among many other nations, so with the Egyptians the soul was supposed to appear as a kind of pale flame, or as emitting a glow analogous to the phosphorescent halo which ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... would furnish light-draught steamboats for my use. [Footnote: What purports to be McClellan's letter to me is found in the Records (Official Records, vol. ii. pt. i. p. 197), but it seems to be only an abstract of it, made to accompany his dispatch to Washington (Id., p. 198), and by a clerical error given the form of the complete letter. It does not contain the quotation given above, which was reiterated before the letter was closed, in these words: "Remember that my present ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... no preaching against the absent wrong-doer, no haranguing evil in the abstract, but there was never lacking a definite and personal denouncement of present and personal sin. One tremendous word loomed large before his hearers, nor could any misunderstand when he talked about SIN, and the arousing thought was pressed ever closer to them by ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... my God! That religious principle, that for the sake of an abstract right whose very exercise were disastrous to the unprepared bondmen who inherit it, would tear this blest confederacy in pieces, and deluge these smiling plains in fraternal blood, and barter the loftiest freedom that the world ever saw, for the armed despotism of a great civil warfare! That religious ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... easily, if your Majesty would assume the risk of the transportation of the money and the return of the gold. As a result, your royal treasury could in a short time be free from obligations, and could aid in the maintenance of this kingdom. [Marginal note: "Abstract this clause, and send it to the viceroy ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... detected in both bright rings, and as frequently relapsing into imperceptibility, were due, in his opinion, to the real nobility of their particles, and indicated a fluid formation. Professor Benjamin Peirce of Harvard University immediately followed with a demonstration, on abstract grounds, of their non-solidity.[1098] Streams of some fluid denser than water were, he maintained, the physical reality giving rise to the anomalous appearance first ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... history of Livy, and the war chronicles of Caesar. They did him good,—in the same way that the making of many shoes would have done him good had he been a shoemaker. In catching fishes and riding after foxes he could not give his mind to the occupation, so as to abstract his thoughts. But Cicero's de Natura Deorum was more effectual. Gradually he returned to a gentle cheerfulness of life, but he never burst out again into the violent exercise of shooting a pheasant. ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... respecting those points. Since our return we have had, these last three evenings, meetings with the saints, before whom we stated the result to which we had been led, after prayer and examination of the Scriptures. The following is an abstract of what was stated at those meetings, which I give here, as this matter forms an important period in my experience about church matters; but the abstract will be of little use, except the reader consider carefully the passages to which reference ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller
... Sketch 31 where the bodies enclosed under the title A were the operative corner; various garrisons and armies in the field, enclosed under the title B, were the manoeuvring mass. But it is only by putting the matter quite clearly in the abstract diagrammatic form that its principle can ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... cabbages through the winter, three general facts should be borne in mind, viz.: that repeated freezing and thawing will cause them to rot; that excessive moisture or warmth will also cause rot; while a dry air, such as is found in most cellars, will abstract moisture from the leaves, injure the flavor of the cabbage, and cause some of the heads to wilt, and the harder heads to waste. In the Middle States we have mostly to fear the wet of winter, and the plan for keeping for that section should, therefore, have ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical—to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted moralities—"tail foremost moralities" as later he himself named them—that a strong Celtic strain in him had been detected and dwelt on by acute critics long before any attention had been given to his genealogy on both sides of the house. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... possessing a few hundred acres of land, with every comfort about him, paying no taxes but those for the improvement of his property, feeling the government rein only as a salutary check to lawlessness, and looking stedfastly abroad, is not very likely, for abstract notions of right and equality, to sacrifice reality, or to suppose that Mr. Baldwin, amiable as he is, is infallible: whilst Mr. Baldwin himself, the ostensible, but not the real leader of the out-and-out reformers, will pause before ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... as it is to classify human beings into "good" and "bad." All we can say is that some foods are better than others, remembering that it is usually more important to be satisfied, even if the foods are not "ideal," than to be unsatisfied with what in the abstract seem ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... and the Roman accounts of the eastern world. See, on the Shah Nameh, Translation by Goerres, with Von Hammer's Review, Vienna Jahrbuch von Lit. 17, 75, 77. Malcolm's Persia, 8vo. ed. i. 503. Macan's Preface to his Critical Edition of the Shah Nameh. On the early Persian History, a very sensible abstract of various opinions ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... of the resistance of paper have been made by F. Uppenborn (Centralblatt fuer Electrotechnik, Vol. xi. p. 215, 1889). There is an abstract of the paper also in Wiedemann's Beiblaetter (1889, vol. xiii. P. 711). Uppenborn examined the samples of paper under normal conditions as to moisture ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... may admit, did something for them which our religion does not do for us. It gave intelligible and beautiful form to those phenomena of nature which we can only describe as manifestations of energy; it expressed in a ritual of exquisite art those corporate relations which we can only enunciate in abstract terms; but did it perform what after all, it may be said, is the true function of religion? did it touch the conscience as well as ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... a state of great perturbation of mind by this revelation. An acquaintance of his had recently told him of a rumour that was spread about that Hunus had contrived to abstract all the remains of SS. Marcellinus and Petrus while Eginhard's agents were in a drunken sleep; and that, while the real relics were in Abbot Hildoin's hands at St. Medardus, the shrine at Seligenstadt contained nothing but a little dust. Though greatly annoyed by this "execrable rumour, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... made an effort to get away from abstract Philosophy. "I'm afraid it can't be helped now, anyhow," said she. "Dave is growing, and means to be a man. Oh dear—he'll be a man before we know it. He'll be able to read and ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... little impatiently. He had forgotten the concrete, for the moment, in the abstract, and was donning his armor for a battle with Kenny upon the "fundamentals." Hence he was not too well pleased with Yankee's interruption. But Donald Ross gladly welcomed the diversion. The subject was ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... of Historical Politics this word has a different connotation. Consider, for example, the political literature that appears under such headlines as "Constitutional History" or the "History of Constitutional Government." Here Constitution means not abstract philosophic principles of Government, but concrete political phenomena, that is, political facts. Our constitutional historians do not as a rule deal directly with the ultimate principles of government; but they are concerned rather with their progressive phenomenal manifestations ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... of a colossal Weymouth or white pine, the trunk and top of which were almost as disproportionate as a pillar supporting a paint-brush, but which the Scottish foreman admired enthusiastically, considering it in the abstract as 'a stick,' and with reference to its future career in the shape of a mast. All due preparation had been made for its reception upon level earth; a road twenty feet wide cut through the forest, that it and half-a-dozen brother pines of like calibre ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Louisiana all deep-lying causes of Western discontent had vanished. The West was prosperous, and was attached to the National Government. Its leaders might still enjoy a discussion with Burr or among themselves concerning separatist principles in the abstract, but such a discussion was at this time purely academic. Nobody of any weight in the community would allow such plans as those of Burr to be put into effect. There was, it is true, a strong buccaneering spirit, and there were plenty of men ready to enlist in an invasion of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... not an indifferent problem of abstract philosophy, but an urgent question of every-day life, and it is not as a pendant, but as a practical man, that Mr. Black deals with it, anxious not to spin plausible theories, but to give facts their exact weight. ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... told us, and from what I was told by others personally concerned, and from a paper of information which Rasay was so good as to send me, at my desire, I have compiled the following abstract, which, as it contains some curious anecdotes, will, I imagine not be uninteresting to my readers, and even, perhaps, be of some use to ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... It might even be a virtue, and Madison be applauded for his courage in avowing a change of opinion, if he saw in the practical application of Hamilton's principles dangers that had not occurred to him when looking at them only as abstract theories. But the Federalists believed that Madison, governed by these purely selfish motives, sacrificed his convictions of what was best for the country that he might secure for himself a position on what he foresaw was the winning side. It is ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... Hermes, embodied in books the occult and hermetic sciences, with their own discoveries and the revelations of the Sibyls. They studied particularly the most abstract sciences, discovered the famous geometrical theorems which Pythagoras afterward learned from them, calculated eclipses, and regulated, nineteen centuries before Cæsar, the Julian year. They descended to practical investigations as to the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and the meadows down the stream were empty of human beings; and as for the wood, there would be no one but his own keeper in the wood. Doubtless that keeper would, from the abstract point of view, regard poaching with abhorrence. But he would perceive that his master was doing a real kindness to the Glazebrook trout by giving them that chance of making a sportsman-like end. At any rate the keeper would hold ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... a typical March night, this one upon which the extraordinary incident about to be related took place. It was the kind of night that novelists use when they are handling a mystery that in the abstract would amount to nothing, but which in the concrete of a bit of wild, weird, and windy nocturnalism sends the reader into hysterics. It may be—I shall not attempt to deny it—that had it happened upon another kind of an evening—a ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... in an indefinite way for France and Belgium; but my sympathies were not strong enough in any direction to get me into uniform with a chance of being killed. Nor, at first, was I able to work up any compelling hate for Germany. The abstract idea of democracy did not figure ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... and uttered upon the relations of the Church and State. "I am sensible how fallible my judgment is," said Mr. Gladstone, "and how easily I might have erred; but still it has been my conviction that although I was not to fetter my judgment as a member of Parliament by a reference to abstract theories, yet, on the other hand, it was absolutely due to the public and due to myself that I should, so far as in me lay, place myself in a position to form an opinion upon a matter of so great importance, that should ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY, (published in Boston by Gould and Lincoln), is an excellent abstract of all the chief movements and discoveries in the scientific world for the year 1850. We advise all our readers interested in any of the sciences to procure it, and its companion volume for the previous year. The work will be continued, and it will be invaluable as ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... relative to this—the balance of a bird standing, not gripping—is to be thought of. Taking a typical profile of bird-form in its abstract, with beak, belly, and foot, horizontal (Fig. 12), the security of the standing, (supposing atomic weight equal through the bird's body, and the will, in the ankle, of iron,) is the same as of an inverted cone, between the dotted lines from ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... of mind whereby women in general subordinate principle to the practical welfare of the individual. If Wilfrid found a sphere for the display of his talents, Beatrice eared nothing to dwell upon abstract points. Politics were a recognised profession for gentlemen, and offered brilliant prizes; that was enough. She was pleased, on the whole, that his line should be one of moderation; it was socially advantageous; it made things pleasant ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... in this part of his doctrine—and it is an important part—the brilliant French writer, in his endeavours to make philosophizing more concrete and practical, makes it too abstract. Intuition is not a process over against and quite distinct from conceptual thought. Both are moments in the total process of man's attempt to come to terms with the universe, and too great emphasis on either distorts and falsifies the situation ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... had in anything I wrote or designed: and in 1876, feeling unable for Oxford duty, I obtained a year's leave of rest, and, by the kind and wise counsel of Prince Leopold, went to Venice, to reconsider the form into which I had cast her history in the abstract of it given ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... who are ignorant of the whole subject to which those improbabilities advert. Now it is certain, that persons who are acquainted with Popery, are generally convinced, and readily agree, that Maria Monk's narrative, is very much assimilated to the abstract view which a sound judgment, enlightened by the Holy Scriptures, would form of that antichristian system, as predicted by the prophet Daniel, and the apostles, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." And so literature becomes a store of inexhaustible vials, filled with the most generous elixir decanted from the world's master-spirits. Listen again to Vauvenargues: "Good literature is the essence of the best minds, the abstract of their knowledge, the fruit of their long vigils." Or let us drop metaphor, and accept, as entirely satisfying and luminous, the account given by Mr. John Morley, that "literature consists of all books ... where moral truth and human passion ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I didn't believe them at first—the thing seemed so impossible. The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?—the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... of the latter work known to me is in the Carter-Brown Library at Providence, R.I., and the passage has been transcribed for me through the kindness of A. E. Winship, Esq., librarian, who has also sent me a photograph of a woodcut representing the lonely woman shooting at a bear. A briefer abstract of the story is in Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History" (IV. p. 66, note), but it states, perhaps erroneously, that Thevet knew Marguerite only through the Princess of Navarre, whereas that author claims—though ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... as an abstract principle—being, perhaps the conscientious reader will think, more of a professor than a practicer herein. But the truth is, in the present mendicant state of the word 'Professor,' I conceived I had a perfect right and title to it, by virtue of my poverty, and so appropriated it for the behoof ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... rising abstract ideas of pugnacity, and conceived myself bound to indulge them on the first head and shoulders I should meet. This spirit brought me at once into the thick of the fight, and, before I was well aware ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... the Author of Waverley is first presented to us is, as a delineator of human character. When we regard him in this light, we are struck at once by the fertility of his invention, and the force, novelty, and fidelity of his pictures. He brings to our minds, not abstract beings, but breathing, acting, speaking individuals. Then what variety! What originality! What numbers! What a gallery has he set before us! No writer but Shakspeare ever equalled him in this respect. Others may have equalled, perhaps surpassed him, in the elaborate finishing of some single ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... to me until one day too late. Here it is, as they render it, compiled from Little and Brown's statement and their own. I have never yet heard whether you have received their Analysis or explanation of the last abstract they drew up of the mutual claims between the great houses of T.C. and R.W.E., and I am impatient to know whether you have caused it to be examined, and whether it was satisfactory. This new one is based on that, and if that was incorrect, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... really remarkable development of freedom of thought. The proposition was regarded by some with horror and by others with contempt. One of the most enlightened statesmen in Spain once said to me, "The provision for freedom of worship in the constitution is a mere abstract proposition,—it can never have any practical value except for foreigners. I cannot conceive of a Spaniard being anything but a Catholic." And so powerful was this impression in the minds of the deputies that ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... and second, of the decimal group; and we have continued its use so quietly, that its propriety has rarely been questioned; indeed, most persons are both surprised and offended, when they hear it declared to be a purely artificial base, proper only to abstract numbers. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... concealed were difficult of acceptance, with one whose mind was yet untainted with practice; and the young senator rather shut his eyes on their tendency, or, as he felt their influence in every interest which environed him, but that of poor, neglected, abstract virtue, whose rewards were so remote, he was fain to seek out some palliative, or some specious and indirect good as the excuse for ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... under discussion—because the main ideas apply to humanity in general and not to any particular country. The paper on Divorce is of course written from an English point of view, but its suggestions may be of some use to those who are interested in the question of divorce in the abstract, and are on the alert as to the results of its facilities in America. I do not presume to offer an opinion as to its action there; and in this paper am not making the slightest criticism of the American ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... Yet the lion's mode of battle is the braver of the two, and the cannons, torpedoes and other implements of modern warfare are proofs of man's cowardice and cruelty as much as they are of his diabolical ingenuity. Calmly comparing the ordinary lives of men and beasts—judging them by their abstract virtues merely—I am inclined to think the beasts the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... opinion, though they cannot prevent their introduction, and many methods are employed with the real, though not avowed and ostensible object of preventing a vote or even a ministerial declaration upon them. Sometimes Parliament is quite ready to acknowledge the abstract justice of a proposal, but does not think it ripe for legislation. In such cases the second reading of the bill will probably be accepted, but, to the indignation and astonishment of its supporters outside the House, it will be obstructed, delayed or defeated ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Asquith, in the House of Commons, gives the whole case away, and from the voluntarist point of view perpetrates the great apostasy, by admitting that our voluntary system of recruiting is "haphazard, capricious, and unjust," and by protesting that he has "no abstract or a priori objection of any sort or kind to compulsion in time of war," adding that he has no intention whatever to go to the stake "in defence of what is called the voluntary principle."[41] Poor "voluntary principle"! Already abandoned in practice, and ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... with a gigantic difficulty. Yet all these qualifications recede before Burke's amazing power of expanding particulars into universals, and of associating the accidents of a transient discussion with the essential properties of some permanent Law in policy, or abstract Truth in morals. His genius looked through the local to the universal; in the temporal perceived the eternal; and while facing the features of the Individual, was enabled to contemplate the attributes of a Race. (Cicero, in many respects a counterpart ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... whom are you to cultivate goodwill? Naturally, one would answer: Towards the whole of humanity. But the whole of humanity, as far as you are concerned, amounts to naught but a magnificent abstract conception. And it is very difficult to cultivate goodwill towards a magnificent abstract conception. The object of goodwill ought to be clearly defined, and very visible to the physical eye, especially ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... that a disciple of nature, who, transported all at once into the regions of space, should find himself in the presence of his God, would be able to speak, although he should not have been in a condition to lend himself to all the abstract systems of theology which appear to have been invented for no other purpose than to overturn in his mind all natural ideas. This illusory science seems bent an forming its systems in a manner the most contradictory to human reason; notwithstanding we are obliged to judge in this world according ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... would be the last one in the world to decry facts as such. In the abstract I have the highest opinion of them. But facts, as someone has said, are stubborn things; and stubborn things, like stubborn people, are frequently tiresome. So it occurred to me that possibly there might be room for a guidebook on foreign ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... perplexing is Southern character; for, in opposition to the above, it may be said that the claim of the Southern whites that they love the Negro better than the Northern whites do is in a manner true. Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation. A number of them have heroically spent their lives in this effort (and just here I wish to say that when the colored people reach the monument-building ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... He loved to idealize reality; and this is a taste shared by few. We are willing to have our passing whims exalted into passions, for this gratifies our vanity; but few of us understand or sympathize with the endeavour to ally the love of abstract beauty, and adoration of abstract good, the to agathon kai to kalon of the Socratic philosophers, with our sympathies with our kind. In this, Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the special ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... by finding, that our 'stout piece of cheese' had vanished! A sturdy "rat" of a beggar, whom we had relieved on the road, with his olfactories all alive, no doubt, "smelt" our cheese, and while we were gazing at the magnificent clouds, contrived to abstract our treasure! Cruel tramp! An ill return for our pence! We both wished the rind might not choke him! The mournful fact was ascertained a little before we drove into the courtyard of the house. ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... longer safe to abstract articles from the store, Jasper felt that he had no more use for his late confederate. When they met he treated ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... problems of character presented in society. But he who simply studies the elements of character or organic faculties, and does not become acquainted with the organs and their measurement, soon finds his knowledge too abstract and remote from his daily life; and, instead of increasing his stock of knowledge on this subject, he continually loses more and more of what he has gained. It was for this reason, mainly, that the medical profession gradually dropped the discoveries of Gall, which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... in the United States, the last general census, compiled in 1910, shows that 25.7 per cent was German, 14 per cent was Irish, 8.5 per cent was Russian or Finnish, 7.2 was English, 6.5 per cent Italian and 6.2 per cent Austrian. The Abstract of the same census points out several significant facts. The Western European strains in this country are represented by a majority of native-born children of foreign-born or mixed parentage. This is because the immigration from those ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... a third way—the path of bhakti or devotion to God. If a man loved God not as an abstract spirit but as a loving Person, if he loved with intensity and singleness of heart, adoration itself might obtain for him the same reward as a succession of good lives. Vishnu as protector might reward love ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... doctor, "that Edith is getting very impatient with these dry disquisitions, and thinks it high time we passed from wealth in the abstract to wealth in the concrete, as illustrated by the contents of your safe. I will delay the company only while I say a very few words more; but really this question of the restoration of your million, raised half in jest as it ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... sure of that, Mary; but I've played him one trick this morning for his own good, and if you won't help me to play another, e'en let it alone—all have their weak side,—that abstract idea of truth you worship, ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... taste we have in great measure failed to grasp certain laws of beauty which obtain whether appreciated or not. Abstract beauty is but a concept, a thought form for purposes of discussion. The beauty perceived pertains to something, and in that something lie its definitions and limitations. This we practically recognize in certain marked and simple forms. The points which ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... acknowledge the existence of Deity and must therefore have an abstract idea of spirit, you must have some notions on the subject, and should be able to tell me how it ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... money making. Within its gates we pass into a new element; and this element is antipathetic to the one-sided development imposed by city life. Instead of resting us, it presents a problem, and the last thing for which we now have time is abstract thought. And so we prefer the dazzling, twinkling, clashing, clamoring, death-dealing, sinking, eruptive, insistent Broadway, where every blink of the eye catches a new impression, where the brain becomes a passive, palpitating receptacle for ideas which ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... it is very easy to talk about definition, arguments, or genus and the like, but to devise these same things within the limits of a single art for the purpose of performing fully the functions of the art, is far more difficult [i.e. to discuss logic in the abstract is easy, but to reason logically in any specific field of knowledge is difficult]. Therefore he who is hampered by a dearth of the disciplines will not have the power ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... true, and my debts, amounting to nearly 10,000 pounds, are to be paid, then I shall go on making sublime and philosophical discoveries, and employing myself in deep, abstract studies. In that case I shall want a mason, carpenter, etc., income made out 4000 pounds a year, and 1000 pounds more for people like you, and 500 pounds ready money that I may stand clear. In the event ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... up of many elements. Certain of them are essentially abstract. They must be thought out by a sort of mental vision without words. This is the most subtle and intimate part of the picture. These are the means by which the ideal is brought into ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... might be found who have been guilty of it without remorse. "But," said he, "there is no man who has not a horrour at some vice. Different vices and different virtues have the strongest impression on different men! Ma il virtu in astratto e il nutrimento dei nostri cuori. But virtue in the abstract, is the food ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... think that she might ask questions which no philosopher would be able to answer. For I believe that she is tormented by the pain of existence. Of course I do not mean that the riddle presents itself to her as it does to us,— nor that she can have reached any abstract conclusions by any mental processes like our own. The external world to her is "a continuum of smells." She thinks, compares, remembers, reasons by smells. By smell she makes her estimates of character: all her judgments are founded upon smells. Smelling thousands ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... Jumbo, was set down at a hotel near Whitehall, to secure apartments, while the Major went on to demand his daughter from Lady Belamour, taking with him Betty, whom he allowed to be a much better match for my Lady than he could be. Very little faith in his cousin Urania remained to him in the abstract, yet even now he could not be sure that she would not talk him over and hoodwink him in any actual encounter. Sir Amyas likewise accompanied him, both to gratify his own anxiety and to secure admission. The young man still looked pale and worn with restless anxiety; but ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to have it at once accepted by those who know, by painful experience, how doubtful all things are till they are proven, and how difficult it is to get satisfactory evidence of the most simple event in physiology or pathology. No one doubts the abstract possibility of a human being living without food, for, bearing in mind the discoveries that are constantly being made, nothing can be regarded as absolutely impossible outside the domain of mathematics. Two and two cannot make six, neither can two distinct bodies occupy the same space ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... justly more support from the public. They gave a substantial proof of their gratitude to Park, by permitting him to publish his travels for his own benefit; and a complete narrative of his journey from his own pen was speedily announced to be in preparation. An abstract, drawn up by Mr. Bryan Edwards, from Park's Notes, was printed for private circulation among the members of the Association in the meantime; it was also enriched by a valuable Memoir by Major Rennel, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... late. But Boswell's attention to the old man smoothed all difficulties,—'looking on the tour as a co-partnership between Dr Johnson and myself,' he did his part faithfully, dancing reels, singing songs, and airing the scraps of Gaelic he picked up, thinking all this better than 'to play the abstract scholar.' ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... forcing by the law. The mere fact that it is impossible to get reliable evidence in the island—not because the people are dishonest, but because they think the claim of kinship more sacred than the claims of abstract truth—turns the whole system of sworn evidence into a demoralising farce, and it is easy to believe that law dealings on this false basis must lead to every sort ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... was no longer safe to abstract articles from the store, Jasper felt that he had no more use for his late confederate. When they met he ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... sometimes, as he listened, his cheeks burned when they talked of the Cove, and he longed to jump up and plead its defence; but he knew that it would be worse than useless and he held himself in—but they didn't know, they didn't know. It enraged him most when they spoke of it as some lifeless, abstract thing, some old rubbish-heap that offended their sight, and then he thought of its beauties, of the golden sand and the huddling red and grey cottages clustering over the sea as though for protection. You might fancy that the waves slapped them on the back for good-fellowship ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... himself BETTY if he has a mind to? H'm! A pretty pass we are coming to if these women folks who ask men's rights and take men's names won't lend us theirs! And alas, alas, ye lasses! What if some-day ye do indeed abstract our census, and marshal us into helpless minority. What if we have to disguise ourselves, and shave our beards, and change our names even to get on the police! Or will ye—ye bullying Syrens!—grow whiskers and wear pantaloons, and put us in station-houses, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... Trade, a compromise has been adopted, and there are not wanting signs of a disposition to follow the example of New South Wales; but I fear this is rather out of dislike to Victoria than from any abstract recognition of the advantages of a Free ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... owing to the habit of mind whereby women in general subordinate principle to the practical welfare of the individual. If Wilfrid found a sphere for the display of his talents, Beatrice eared nothing to dwell upon abstract points. Politics were a recognised profession for gentlemen, and offered brilliant prizes; that was enough. She was pleased, on the whole, that his line should be one of moderation; it was socially advantageous; it made things pleasant with friends of the most various opinions. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... veered then, but still focused on the war. It became abstract as was so much of the war talk in America in 1916. Were we, after this war was over, to continue to use the inventions of science to destroy mankind, or for its welfare? Would we ever again, in wars to come, go back to the comparative humanity of the Hague ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... The reader who is not satisfied with the picture now given of these wretched and disgusting beings, may turn to the abstract of Bougainville's Voyage, quoted in the preceding volume of this collection, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... "ah, it is beautiful, wonderful!" He looked up, and Julia, seeing the rapt and humble admiration of his face, forgot that there was something ludicrous in the sight of a young man kneeling on a garden path reverently worshipping a striped flower. It was no abstract admiration of the beautiful, and no cultivated admiration for the new and strange; it was the love of a man for his work and appreciation of success in it, even if the success were another's; also, perhaps, in part, the expression ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... out a problem which no one but himself could solve. He was only half conscious of his surroundings; he was moving in a kind of detached world of his own, where the warders and the Sheriff and those who followed were almost abstract and unreal figures. He was living with a past which had been everlastingly distant, and had now become a vivid and buffeting present. He returned no answers to the questions addressed to him, and would not talk, save when ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... industriously through cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by painting a formalised nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature into the world of pure form, till in the end he was painting nothing but his own thoughts, externalised in the abstract geometrical forms of the mind's devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and confined within intolerably narrow limitations. ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... their short-lived pleasure. These several kinds of persons are foul objects steeped skin and all in lewdness. The lustful love, for instance, which has sprung to life and taken root in your natural affections, I and such as myself extend to it the character of an abstract lewdness; but abstract lewdness can be grasped by the mind, but cannot be transmitted by the mouth; can be fathomed by the spirit, but cannot be divulged in words. As you now are imbued with this desire only in the abstract, you are certainly well fit to be a trustworthy friend in (Fairyland) ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... A better fortune has attended the anxious enquiries which in his case, as in those of other great men have been directed to the very secondary question of ancestry and descent,—a question to which, in the abstract at all events, no man ever attached less importance than he. Although the name "Chaucer" is (according to Thynne), to be found on the lists of Battle Abbey, this no more proves that the poet himself came of "high parage," than the reverse is to be ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Montague returned. "I had the case in my lap, and the duplicate crescents in my pocket. It required very little ingenuity on my part to so engage Mrs. Vanderheck's attention that I could abstract the real stones from the case and replace them with the others. Regarding the Palmer affair," she continued, with a glance of defiance at Ray, "it only required a few lines and touches to my face to apparently add several years to my age and change its expression; ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Gentlemen, an apology for the time I have consumed in an abstract discussion; it is drawing to an end, but it still requires the notice of two questions, on which, however, I have not much to say, even if I would. First, can a civilized state become barbarian in course of years? and secondly, can a barbarian ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Medico-Chirugical Society, Birmingham—which Paper was afterwards published in the Association Journal (March 15 1856) and in Braithwaite's Retrospect of Medicine (January—June, 1856) and in Rankings Half Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences (July—December, 1856), besides in other publications. Moreover the Paper was translated into German, and published in Canstatts Jahresbericht, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... denote the restlessness of the king. And as the character of the music, especially towards the close, suggests piano and pianissimo, it would seem as though intended to express the gradual healing power of the music. As a piece of abstract music, the movement appears long, but not if the dramatic situation be kept well in mind. At length the sounds of the harp cease, and a closing, peaceful, and dignified movement in G minor tells of Saul's now tranquil state ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... attains to Heaven; and he that desires victory attains to victory. The woman quick with child gets either a son or a daughter highly blessed. The puissant Island-born Krishna, who will not have to come back, and who is Emancipation incarnate, made an abstract of the Bharata, moved by the desire of aiding the cause of righteousness. He made another compilation consisting of sixty lakhs of verses. Thirty lakhs of these were placed in the region of the deities. In the region of the Pitris fifteen ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... specially of the Celestiall courses, by reason of the continuall motion of the heauens, searching after the first mouer, and from thence by degrees comming to know and consider of the substances separate & abstract, which we call the diuine intelligences or good Angels (Demones) they were the first that instituted sacrifices of placation, with inuocations and worship to them, as to Gods; and inuented and stablished all the rest of the obseruances and ceremonies of religion, and ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in the brain that of which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time. By the absolute equalization of this movement—or of such as this—had the cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves been adjusted. By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... style of political thunder. "It matters not," he said, "what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a territory under the Constitution; the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless it is supported by local police regulations. Those police ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... ruinous of precedents, but whether any man could be so sure of himself as to go on dealing justly with gifts in his hands. But Bacon, who never dared to face the question, what James was, what Buckingham was, let himself be spellbound by custom. He knew in the abstract that judges ought to have nothing to do with gifts, and had said so impressively in his charges to them. Yet he went on self-complacent, secure, almost innocent, building up a great tradition of corruption in the very heart of English justice, till the challenge of Parliament, which began ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... old sailors, whose rough and wrinkled visages, blunt and repulsive manners, coarse and unrefined language, were enough to banish gentle Cupid to an iceberg, exhibit the kindest and tenderest feelings when speaking of WOMAN, whom in the abstract they regarded as a being not merely to be protected, cherished, and loved, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... preparations, the Russian Foreign Minister saw the German Ambassador in St. Petersburg on July 30th, and then offered on behalf of Russia to stop all military preparations, provided that Austria would simply recognize as an abstract principle that the Servian question had assumed the character of a question of European interest. As this proposal fully met the demands of the Kaiser with respect to the cessation by Russia of military preparations, the conversation as reported by the English Ambassador at St. Petersburg ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... in infancy and confirmed, through the entire period of youth, no impressions are more strong, or more universally operative. The poet and the priest either encourage the feeling, or do not take any pains to remove it. The agency of spirits and abstract principles, is countenanced by some of the records of religion, and by philosophers and physicians in their reasonings about occult causes, sympathies, coincidencies, and destinies. It is urged in vain, that ghosts and supernatural effects ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. Perhaps, if he had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to abstract thinking and intellectual analysis. A strange preference also for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet. It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Let then the second alternative be adopted according to which Brahma-hood (brahmatva) constitutes a genus inhering in Brahman as well as in non-sentient matter, just as fire constitutes the common genus for light and luminous bodies. But on this view Brahman becomes a mere abstract generic character inhering in the Lord (isvara), sentient souls and non-sentient matter, just as the generic character of horses (asvatva) inheres in concrete individual horses; and this contradicts all the teaching of Sruti and Smriti (according ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... long-pending dispute about the territory. Stuyvesant was instructed to act firmly but discreetly. Accompanied by his suite of officers, he went to Fort Nassau on the New Jersey side of the Delaware, whence he sent Printz, the governor of New Sweden, an abstract of the title of the Dutch to the domain and called a council of the Indian chiefs in the neighborhood. These chiefs declared the Swedes to be usurpers and by solemn treaty gave all the land to the Dutch. Then Stuyvesant crossed over and, near the site ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... with grain for Rouen; and on the eastern horizon the armada, in crescent at present, moving with fires banked at two knots, a glare hiding them from the naked eye, but the glass revealing them like toys in the abstract, ethereally hazy. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... Donaldson's. It softened the blow to a certain extent that Mike should be going to Wain's. He had the same feeling for Mike that most boys of eighteen have for their fifteen-year-old brothers. He was fond of him in the abstract, but preferred him ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Deaf and Dumb, which appeared to me to have an admirable teacher. One of his best aids is a young man who was his pupil. The teacher desired me to ask of this young man the meaning of some word that had an abstract meaning. I asked him what he understood by intelligence. He put his hand to his head, and thought for some time, before he attempted to reply; then he nearly covered the slate with his definition. He evidently saw the difference between intelligence ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen
... after the child. There was a mystery in the young Scotchman's behavior he could not comprehend,—a mystery that soon became more profound. It had also attracted the attention of Harry and Terence, notwithstanding the many unpleasant circumstances of the journey calculated to abstract their thoughts from him ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... London newspapers, but no one paid any effective attention to them. If Dreyfus had been convicted in England, it is probable that no voice would ever have been raised in his favour; it is absolutely certain that there would never have been a second trial. A keen sense of abstract justice is only to be found in conjunction with a rich fount of imaginative sympathy. The English are too self-absorbed to take much interest in their neighbours' affairs, too busy to care for abstract questions ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... imbued with little of mere sentiment. He gave little time to discussions belonging solely to the realm of the speculative or the abstract. He was in no sense a dreamer. What Coleridge has defined wisdom—"common sense, in an uncommon degree"—was his. In phrase the simplest and most telling, he struck at once at the very core of the controversy. Possibly no man was ever less inclined "to darken counsel with words without ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the rest was leisure. He could now have gone away somewhere as far as time went. So can a fish live in trees—as far as time goes. And in the daily riding, riding, riding over the range he found the opportunity for abstract thought which the frontier ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... national aggrandizement in both nations, is commerce; and the high road to them the ocean. We and the British are travelling the same way, in keen pursuit of the same object; and it is scarcely probable, that we shall be preserved in a state of peace, by abstract love of justice. ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... taken up at the bidding of a whim or on compulsion, Patience could not even read. It was only with great difficulty, after poring over a book for some two hours, that he deciphered a single page, and even then he did not grasp the meaning of most of the words expressing abstract ideas. Yet these abstract ideas were undoubtedly in him; you felt their presence while watching and listening to him; and the way in which he managed to embody them in homely phrase enlivened with a rude poetry was so marvellous, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... often defaced by carelessness, disproportion, and 'longueurs' intolerable. I shall leave my Edition of Tales of the Hall, made legible by the help of Scissors and Gum, with a word or two of Prose to bridge over pages of stupid Verse. I don't wish to try and supersede the Original, but, by the Abstract, to get People to read the whole, and so learn (as in Clarissa) how to get it all under command. I even wish that some one in America would undertake to publish—in whole, or part by part—my 'Readings in Crabbe,' viz., Tales of the Hall: but no one would let ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... grasp if they should be discovered. He also reflected that if he could only manage to get his late companions comfortably hanged, and himself set free for having turned King's evidence against them, he could return to the island and abstract the wealth it contained by degrees. The brilliant prospect thus opened up to him was somewhat marred, however, by the consideration that some of the pirates might make a confession and let this secret be known, in which case ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... [298] Abstract of Randolph's instructions, from his own pen (Strype, Annals iii. i. 442): 'Nothing shall be done prejudicial to the King's title, but the same to pass by private assurance from Her ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... which is the nucleus round which all that is best and highest in India has grown. Much harm has already been done by the circulation of opinions that the culture and philosophy of India was dreamy and abstract. It is therefore very necessary that Indians as well as other peoples should become more and more acquainted with the true characteristics of the past history of Indian thought and form a correct estimate ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... undertaking, and one which no philosopher has as yet approached, I mean this attempt to show how a woman may be prevented from deceiving her husband? Is not this the comedy of comedies? Is it not a second speculum vitae humanae. We are not now dealing with the abstract questions which we have done justice to already in this Meditation. At the present day in ethics as in exact science, the world asks for facts for the results of observation. These ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... mastering the broad essential truths of history, co-ordinating them, and expounding them with vigour and impressiveness. His first series of lectures was on "The History of Civilisation in Europe," a masterly abstract of a colossal subject; the second on "The History of Civilisation in France." From 1830 to 1848 Guizot occupied high offices of State, ultimately becoming prime minister; in 1848, like his master Louis Philippe, he had to fly the country. He ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Account of Kamtschatka, continued. Of the Inhabitants. Origin of the Kamtschadales. Discovered by the Russians. Abstract of their History. Numbers. Present State. Of the Russian Commerce in Kamtschatka. Of the Kamtschadale Habitations, and Dress. Of the Kurile Islands. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... of his temporal support; but none the less plainly and faithfully did he testify. Fond as he was of doctrinal subtilties, keen as was his analysis of disinterested benevolence, he did not, like some in our day, confine himself to analyzing virtue in the abstract, but took upon himself the duty of practicing it in the concrete without fear of consequences,—well knowing that there is no logic like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... of the inhabitants of Mercury and their love of abstract knowledge contains an instructive lesson. 'The spirits of Mercury imagine,' he says, 'that they know so much, that it is almost impossible to know more. But it has been told them by the spirits of our earth, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... book is business. People say to authors, just as they do to tailors: 'I want such and such an article. Make it and I'll pay you for it.' Now, your tailor may consider the Imperial Roman costume more artistic than that of today, and so may you in the abstract, but if he sent home a toga in place of a pair of trousers, you would discontinue dealing with him. So if it amuses you to make togas, well and good; I don't quarrel with it; but, personally, I mean to go into the gents' furnishing line and to ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... great majority of the Members were only too anxious to be convinced, and passed by a huge majority the "blanketing" amendment of Sir GODFREY COLLINS in favour of economy in the abstract. I don't know how this is to be squared with the PRIME MINISTER'S theory that it is the business of the Government "to see that the population is contented." That sounds a little like panem et circenses—a policy which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... order that it may ascend as far as the unconditioned ([Greek: mechri tou anypothetou]), to the first principle of the universe, and having grasped this, may then lay hold of the principles next adjacent to it, and so go down to the end, using no sensible aids whatever, but employing abstract forms throughout, and terminating ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... the keeper of his conscience. Come, Anne, if this affair did not concern Leslie—if it were a purely abstract case, you would agree ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... beautiful, the divine freshness of girlhood. For man, the cost of the attainment of manhood's full strength and power is equally great, and equally sad,—his divine faith in human nature, his divine belief that abstract justice and right and truth ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... creeds and abstract faiths many men make many methods. Some are fitted for the daily use of men counting into millions; some touch only a minute few, and shrink from the common gaze; some, again, serve the needs and lives of men having simple ways, and some ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... setter by referring to our essay on this dog, published in vol. xv, No. 47, of the "New York Spirit of the Times", or as lately transferred to the pages of an interesting and valuable sporting work, about being published by our esteemed friend, Wm. A. Porter, and from which we now abstract our remarks upon ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... desires which cannot be satisfied without their united activity can community organization be effected. The mere logical desirability of coordination of effort, however rational it may appear, is too abstract an objective to inspire enduring devotion. The allaying of antagonisms between special interests makes no appeal to any of them until they are unable to achieve their ends without joint action. Therefore, the primary consideration in community organization is to determine what is the most ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... exercises dramatize education. They enable plain men and women to visualize in the concrete that vague word which means so little to them in the abstract. More properly they dramatize the identity between real education and actual life. On the platform before the audience is a miniature engine to which steam has been piped, a miniature frame house in course of construction, and a piece of brick wall in ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... speak a plainer language, and in which the restraints of factitious or conventional decorum are exchanged for the restraints of mere sexual decency. It is a noticeable fact to all who have looked upon human life with an eye of strict attention, that the abstract image of womanhood, in. its loveliness, its delicacy, and its modesty, nowhere makes itself more impressive or more advantageously felt than in the humblest cottages, because it is there brought into immediate juxtaposition with the grossness of manners, and the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Three cheers broke spontaneously out of the throats of the men, as they thus achieved the step which assured them of the safety of the vessel, so far as the ice was concerned! In this way do we estimate our advantages and disadvantages, by comparison. In the abstract, the situation of the sealers was still sufficiently painful; though compared with what it would have been with the other schooner ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the story, so cut, one that her mother and Mr. Fenwick might have shown a more active interest in, instead of saying it was time for all of us to be in bed. She did not, however, ascribe to them any external preoccupation—merely an abstract love of Truth; for was it not nearly ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the powers of the human mind on which we set great store is that of entertaining general ideas. This is where we think we have the advantage of the members of the brute creation. They have particular experiences which at the time are very exciting to them, but they have no abstract notions,—or, at least, no way of expressing them to us. We argue that if they really had these ideas they would have invented language long ago, and by this time would have had Unabridged Dictionaries of their own. But we humans do not have to be content ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... or two upon the female intellect; thence he proceeded to a closer engagement; and before the third course he was artfully dissecting Seraphina's character to her approving husband. Of course no names were used; and of course the identity of that abstract or ideal man, with whom she was currently contrasted, remained an open secret. But this stiff old gentleman had a wonderful instinct for evil, thus to wind his way into man's citadel; thus to harp by the hour on the virtues of his hearer and not once alarm his self-respect. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grasp concrete ideas more quickly than abstract ones, specific words should be given the preference in popular articles. To create concrete images must be the writer's constant aim. Instead of a general term like "walk," for example, he should select a specific, picture-making ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the latter; "a face with which she was so contented that she spared nothing to set it off; curls, topknots, precious stones, all are in profusion... She was born with much esprit; the desire of appearing to have more made her prefer the study of the abstract sciences to agreeable branches of knowledge; she thought by this singularity to attain a greater reputation and a decided superiority over all other women. Madame worked with so much care to seem what she was not, that no one knew exactly what she was; even her defects ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... "I'm not trying anything so abstract as furnishing hope to a frustrated humanity! Nobody can supply an abstraction! Nobody can accomplish an abstraction! Everything that's actually done is specific and real! Maybe you can find abstract qualities in ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... meekness in the hour of death, cannot indeed be spoken of but with admiration, when spoken of at all, as they have often extorted unwilling praise from the most daring and malignant infidels. But are not these mentioned as qualities in the abstract, rather than as the perfections and lineaments of our patron and benefactor and friend, "who loved us, and gave himself for us;" of him "who died for our offences, and rose again for our justification;" who is even now at the "right hand of God, making intercession for us?" ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... elucidating the letters by full annotations, and have for the same reason—though with some regret—omitted in most cases the beginnings and endings of the letters. For the main facts of Mr. Darwin's life, we refer our readers to the abstract of his private Diary, given in ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... a home-like look, though the furniture was of a humble sort and not over abundant, and the knickknacks and things that go to adorn a living-room not plenty and not costly. But there were natural flowers, and there was an abstract and unclassifiable something about the place which betrayed the presence in the house of somebody with a happy taste ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... numerous Kami, more or less abstract beings without any distinguishing functions, who preceded the progenitors of the Yamato race, and there was the goddess of the Sun, pre-eminent and supreme, together with deities of the Moon, of the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... know well enough you're not a man easily won to an abstract hatred... But a personal hatred very often serves as good a turn... Everything is grist to ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... hour to read in her dressing-room, before she directed her attention to the toilet. She opened a book, and ran over a few pages of Madame de Stael's Treatise on the Passions; but such reasoning was too abstract for her present frame of mind, and she laid ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the Universe is composed, a mighty Intelligence governs it—and I look to the Cause more than the Effect. For even I am a part of the whole,—I belong to the source of the stream as much as to the stream itself. An abstract, lifeless principle without will or intention or intelligence could not have evolved the splendours of Nature or the intellectual capabilities of man—it could not have given rise to ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... assent, though rather absently to this. "I'm not much interested in the abstract ethics of it," he said. "It's disputable, of course, how far any one can be justified in making a major interference in another's life; one that deprives him of the power of choice. That's what you have done to me—the three of you. If the ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... "programme" is defined by the Century Dictionary as "a method of operation or line of procedure prepared or announced beforehand. An outline or abstract of something to be done ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... conventionalities lacked the simple perfection of the humbler room and failed on the side of poor ambition; it was only when one remembered what patient saving, and what high respect for society in the abstract go to such furnishing that the little parlor was interesting at all. I could imagine the great day of certain purchases, the bewildering shops of the next large town, the aspiring anxious woman, the clumsy sea-tanned man in his best clothes, so eager to be pleased, but at ease only ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of this affair is, as I told you, very circumstantial. I thought to have shortened it more than I have done. I wish I have not made my abstract confused, in several material places: but I have not time to clear it ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... spoken of 'marriage!'" she said. "Marriage in the abstract, with a big M. You did it in the tone of my guardian giving me away. Could I be expected to ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... into a state of great perturbation of mind by this revelation. An acquaintance of his had recently told him of a rumour that was spread about that Hunus had contrived to abstract all the remains of SS. Marcellinus and Petrus while Eginhard's agents were in a drunken sleep; and that, while the real relics were in Abbot Hildoin's hands at St. Medardus, the shrine at Seligenstadt contained nothing but a ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... because of its adaptation to the capacities and imitative disposition of children. They judge by the organs of sense, and by their perceptions of truth through externals. Naked abstract truth does not sufficiently interest them. They are pleased with history, narrative, illustration, more than with philosophy. They are awake to the first and receive from them a lasting impression; while the impression made ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... their heads to disparage their science and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological scepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid speculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to abstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over property, trade, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... induce his state. Barbara declared that he could not; though, to be sure, it was, as she added most promptly, no concern of hers; for she cared not whether I were in love or not, nor how deeply, nor with whom, nor, in a word, anything at all about the matter. It was an abstract opinion she gave, so far as love, or what men chose to call such, might be involved; as to seemliness, she must confess that she had her view, with which, may be, Mr Dale was not in agreement. The girl at the gardener's cottage must, she did not doubt, ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... and the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... much wine, too much conviviality or other luxury. It indicates every kind of forbearance. Justice is forbearance from what belongs to another. Giving to this one rightly what that one would hold wrongfully in magistrature not in the abstract, and is only a part of its office. The perfectly temperate man is also the perfectly just man; but the perfectly just man (as philosophers now define him) may not be the perfectly temperate one. I include the less in ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... saw, the more they appealed to the gypsy streak in my makeup. Each Navajo buck that came to my door peddling his rugs and silver ornaments was led into the house and questioned. Precious little information I was able to abstract at first from my saturnine visitors. As we became better acquainted, and they learned to expect liberal draughts of coffee sweetened into a syrup, sometimes their tongues loosened; but still I couldn't get all the information I craved ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... give me great pleasure and doubtless be altogether proper as a matter of abstract justice; but I fear rather impolitic. Best wait ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... maintained, had not rendered any further change possible. At the same time he contended that there was no great occasion for the change sought by the petitioners. "I will not enter," he said, "into the abstract merits of our articles and liturgy; perhaps there are some things in them which one would wish had not been there; and they are not without the marks and character of human frailty. But," he added, "it is not human frailty and imperfection, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... enter to-night on the abstract benefits of such an Establishment. I will rather take one of the ministers who was presented to one of the parishes of Mansoul, and shall thus let you see how that State Church worked out practically in one of its ministers at any rate. And the preacher and pastor ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... many types of astronomers—from the stargazer who merely watches the heavens, to the abstract mathematician who merely works at his desk; it has, consequently, been necessary in the case of some lives to adopt a very different treatment from that which seemed suitable ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... not pass an examination in anything under the sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically. His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain cheerily, forcing upon him a card—the business card of the ship-chandler—and on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... wending their way by unblockaded paths to the house of prayer, the churches once more roofed in and again made gorgeous by the stately ceremonial of the Catholic rite. In other ways, too, Alaric showed himself anxious to conciliate the favour of his Roman subjects. He ordered an abstract of the Imperial Code to be prepared, and this abstract, under the name of the Breviarium Alaricianum[92] is to this day one of our most valuable sources of information as to Roman Law. He is also said to have directed the construction of the canal, which still bears his ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... Science seems abstract, but the process is simple and the results are sure if the Science is understood. The tree must be good, which 459:27 produces good fruit. Guided by divine Truth and not guesswork, the theologus (that is, the student - the Christian and scientific ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Hester with a laugh and a yawn. "Just give me the chance—that's all!" Then she turned her head—"Lulu!—you mustn't eat any more toffy!"—and she flung out a mischievous hand and captured a box that was lying on the table, before a girl, who was sitting near it with a book, could abstract from ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 'path of uprightness' or of 'wisdom,' and the description therefore was mainly of the characteristics of the path, here the designation is 'the path of the wicked,' and the description is mainly of the travellers on it. Righteousness was dealt with, as it were, in the abstract; but wickedness is too awful and dark to be painted thus, and is only set forth in the concrete, as seen in its doers. Now, it is significant that the first exhortation here is of a negative character. In contrast with the reiterated exhortations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "The modern newspaper is admirably designed to keep people warm—both inside and out. Under circumstances such as these one can understand why it is sometimes referred to as a 'blanket sheet.' The morning is almost cold enough for a 'yellow journal,'" and the Professor wandered on into an abstract dissertation upon journalism generally, winding up with the remark that, "It was the support of the yellow press which defeated Bryan;" but then the Professor is neither a politician nor the son of a politician —being a Scotchman, and therefore a philosopher and dogmatist. The pessimistic ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... the painter and that of the calligraphist was closer, since painter and calligraphist were frequently united in one and the same person. Thence came the early tendency to use monochrome and to represent forms in the abstract, rendering them more and more as mere themes, thus reducing the subject to ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... rule can be laid down. The two elements supplement each other. In general the Anglo-Saxon element comprises concrete terms, and the Latin element abstract terms. As Trench has pointed out, "The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest childhood, the simpler emotions of the ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... for it; so much I lose! Sir, you have wronged me to amount beyond Acres, and gold, and life, which makes them rich. And compensation I demand of you, Such as a man expects, and none but one That's less than man refuses! Where's the maid You falsely did abstract? ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... preponderance of reasons in its favor? Now, whether that preponderance be a ton weight or a single grain, down goes the balance, and reason as strictly decides that it is to be received as if it were a mathematical demonstration. If the arguments, whether abstract or otherwise, absolutely demonstrative or only probable, are supposed to be exactly balanced, there is no reason for deciding in favor of one side more than the other; and there is, therefore, no belief, for the very reason that reason cannot ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... little nag stopped of itself on a small eminence, which the crooked cow-path he was following crossed, his mind yielded to the impression of more worldly and more sensible objects. As the scene, that drew his contemplations from so many abstract theories to the realities of life, was peculiar to the country, and is more or less connected with the subject of our tale, we shall ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Valentin, "is not your memory just here leading you the least bit astray? Our mother is, I may say, distinguished for her small respect of abstract reasoning. Are you very sure that she replied to your striking proposition in the gracious manner you describe? You know how terribly incisive she is sometimes. Didn't she, rather, do you the honor to say, 'A fiddlestick for your phrases! There are ...
— The American • Henry James
... the cheap severity of abstract ethics! My wife was very plain, never had my ruffs properly starched, and knew nothing about cookery. Why, there was a buck I had shot in Hogley Woods, a magnificent pricket, and do you know how she had it ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... observation," as was said by Mr Liston, "is this here," that Nelson was of what is usually called a very good family—being nearly connected with the Walpoles, Earls of Orford, and the Turners of Warham, in Norfolk. But for further information on this point, we refer them to an abstract of the pedigree prefixed to the letters. In the year 1777, and several following years, Nelson's principal correspondents were his brother, the Rev. William Nelson, who succeeded as second Baron Nelson of the Nile and of Hilborough, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the creature who learns through love the admirable gift of life, knows better than man how to throw the whole of herself into fleeting moments. She lives nearer to the edge of her actions. Her mind, which rarely attaches itself to abstract things, seems to float around her in search of every sensation. Woman passes and has seen everything; she remembers and she quivers as though the caressing touch were still upon her. Her light and charming soul drinks eternity straight out ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... poem, each word and thought enhances the value of those which precede and follow it; and every syllable has a loveliness which depends not so much on its abstract sound as on its position. Look at the same word in a dictionary, and you will hardly ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Oraison Funebre of the French proposes to itself by its original model, which must be sought in the Epideictic or panegyrical oratory of the Greeks, a purpose purely and exclusively eulogistic: the problem supposed is to abstract from everything not meritorious, to expand and develop the total splendour of the individual out of that one centre, that main beneficial relation to his own age, from which this splendour radiated. The incidents of the life, the successions ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... sang in the sunshine; Philip had filled the window with flowering plants for his mother, and the whole room was fragrant with his hyacinths. The little Greys had sent Mrs Enderby a bunch of violets; Phoebe had made bold, while the gardener was at breakfast, to abstract a bough from the almond tree on the grass; and its pink blossoms now decked the mantelpiece. These things were almost too much for the old lady. Her black eyes looked rather too bright, and her pale ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... to pass insensibly to almost equally passion late hostility toward their fellow-citizens of those States, and thus finally to fall into temporary fellowship with the avowed and active enemies of the Constitution. Ardently attached to liberty in the abstract, they do not stop to consider practically how the objects they would attain can be accomplished, nor to reflect that, even if the evil were as great as they deem it, they have no remedy to apply, and that it can be only aggravated by their violence and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... more than an arroba of straw. Let him explain to the Indians what is necessary for their salvation, and let him not play the discreet among them. Let him use similes and examples in his sermons that they can understand, and not plunge into depths of abstract ideas, for that is a jargon which they do not understand; and they especially detest Latin phrases. The statement that the Indians have no faith is a pretext of the devil, to discourage the gospel ministers. Let him do with fervor whatever he finds to do, that the corresponding ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... consider how simple the elements of perfect happiness appear to be, regarded in the abstract, it becomes surprising to think how difficult it is to attain them in the concrete. A kind magician may grant us all we ask, may transport us whither we would go, dower us with all we lack, bring to us one desired ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... together with a reduction in the weight of metal, and considerable economy of fuel. By the arrangement of the water in a number of shallow layers a large steaming surface is obtained, and there is a good steam space rendered available round the troughs. The water also enters at a point where it may abstract as much heat as possible from the furnace gases before they escape; and by the separation of the top domed chamber from the rest of the boiler the operation of scaling and cleaning is facilitated. The arrangement is also adapted to horizontal and multitubular boilers, to be fired ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... to be more familiar to me than things I'd never seen before. Especially afterwards. But while things were remembered, persons, I found by-and-by, were completely forgotten. Or rather, while I remembered after a while generalities, such as houses and men, recognising them in the abstract as a house, or a man, or a horse, or a baby, I forgot entirely particulars, such as the names of people and the places I had lived in. Words soon came back to me: names and facts were lost: I knew the world as a whole, not my own ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... over to the first comer who desires her, but only to the man who longs for woman with true, irresistible love. The necessity of this union with the full power of music desired by the poet himself I was unable to prove by abstract aesthetic definitions alone, which generally are not understood and remain without effect. I had to derive that necessity with tangible distinctness from the state of modern dramatic poetry, and I hope I ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... readers are familiar with the general construction of a flower, but in order to insure such comprehension it is well, perhaps, to freshen our memory by reference to the accompanying diagram (Fig. 2) of an abstract flower, the ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... commons. Parliament. Hist vol. v. p. 221. The king himself after all his magnificent boasts, was obliged to make his escape through a distinction which he framed between a king in abstracto and a king in concreto: an abstract king, he said, had all power; but a concrete king was bound to observe the laws of the country which he governed. King James's Works, p. 533. But how bound? by conscience only? or might his subjects resist him, and defend their privileges? This he thought not fit to explain. And so difficult ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... last two weeks, to give ourselves to prayer and consideration respecting those points. Since our return we have had, these last three evenings, meetings with the saints, before whom we stated the result to which we had been led, after prayer and examination of the Scriptures. The following is an abstract of what was stated at those meetings, which I give here, as this matter forms an important period in my experience about church matters; but the abstract will be of little use, except the reader consider carefully the passages ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller
... Seven and seventy times seven, if you like, only let them be buds, not blights. If we obeyed the laws of God, children would be like spring blossoms. They would impart as much freshness and strength as they abstract. They are a natural institution, and Nature is eminently healthy. But when they "come crowding into the home-nest," as our book daintily says, they are unnatural. God never meant the home-nest to be crowded. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... involved in a heated and prolonged controversy as to the management of his plantations; as we shall see, it did not finally die down till 1841. He was an indomitable man. In a newspaper discussion through a long series of letters, he did not defend slavery in the abstract, but protested against the abuse levelled at the planters by all 'the intemperate, credulous, designing, or interested individuals who followed the lead of that well-meaning but mistaken man, Mr. Wilberforce.' ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... us consider the power of the higher or even the average civilized man, of forming abstract ideas, and carrying on more or less complex trains of reasoning. Our languages are full of terms to express abstract conceptions. Our business and our pleasures involve the continual foresight of many contingencies. Our law, our government, and our science, continually require us to reason ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... trouble myself, to find arguments to persuade to, or commend marriage? behold a brief abstract of all that which I have said, and much more, succinctly, pithily, pathetically, perspicuously, and elegantly delivered in twelve motions to mitigate the miseries of marriage, by [5957] ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... This abstract has been given to show the singular manner of legislating in those times.* Not, but that it was necessary thus to legislate, as it was certainly better to have some kind of civil government than none. The raising of two regiments of cavalry was suggested by ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... really give the ideas of St. John, but that it represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with Jewish theology, and that its final form, which one of the most eminent among recent Christian scholars has characterized as "an unhistorical product of abstract reflection," is mainly due to some gifted representative or representatives of the Alexandrian school. Bitter as the resistance to this view has been, it has during the last years of the nineteenth century ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... they participated in the same intellectual faculties, suffered from the same wants, and were alive to the same pleasures; they perceived that there were no conventional fashions, nor national distinctions, in abstract truths and fundamental knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring them nearer to each other: and, as if literary Europe were intent to form but one people out of the populace of mankind, they offer their reciprocal ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Between the two epochs the Greek, Latin, Umbrian, and Keltic lauguages had time to acquire distinct individualities. Far earlier, therefore, than the Homeric "juventus mundi" was that "youth of the world," in which the Aryan forefathers, knowing no abstract terms, and possessing no philosophy but fetichism, deliberately spoke of the Sun, and the Dawn, and the Clouds, as persons or as animals. The Veda, though composed much later than this,—perhaps as late as the Iliad,—nevertheless preserves the record of the mental ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.—During several years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re- introduced the manly simplicity of the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... we were told the exact number of the little creatures that inhabit the sea, we could not, by any simple effort of the mind, however powerful, form a conception of what that number implied. We might shut ourselves up like the hermits of old, abstract our thoughts from all other things, and ponder the subject for weeks or months together, and at the termination of our effort we should be as wise as we were at its commencement, but no wiser. But by searching round the subject, and comparing lesser things ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... one's mind idle, you know; for, even when engaged in an abstract contemplation of the most engrossing theme, the fancy will stray off into by-paths that lead to strangely dissimilar ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... enough—and, for the matter of that, all your mother's family—to judge me better. Believe me, no conception of blaming your profession entered my mind for a moment. Whether there be such a thing as "property" in the abstract I should leave it to metaphysicians to decide: in practical affairs everything must be ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... not understand it. I believe she has not diagnosed the case with sufficient care. Did she look like a person who was theorising, or did she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to the aid of abstract science the confirmation of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... on his head, and laid numerous gifts at his feet. When at last the ceremony ended, some of the performers were so hoarse from incessant singing that they could hardly speak. [Footnote: Compare the account of La Harpe with that of the Chevalier de Beaurain; both are in Margry, VI. There is an abstract in Journal historique.] ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... the concrete to the abstract, it may not be unfitting that these pages, which have recorded so many valiant deeds, should contain some brief inquiry into the nature of those motives which induce men to expose themselves to great hazards, and to remain in situations of danger. The circumstances ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... knew of the emeralds, and for years had been hunting for the mummy—sure to be recognized from its peculiar green color—in order to get the jewels, and thus secure money for his Egyptian expedition. All through, it seems, the Professor was actuated by purely scientific enthusiasm, as in the abstract he cared very little for hard cash. Bolton told Mrs. Jasher that Braddock explained how much he desired to get the mummy, but he did not mention about the jewels. For a long time Sidney was under the impression that his master merely wanted the mummy to see the difference ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... Fathers, and the Canons, and the Acts of the General Councils; men ready to argue on the intermediate state, or on the three witnesses, or on the heretical nature of the Old Catholic schism; men prepared with minute dogmatic opinions upon every conceivable or inconceivable point of abstract theology. There were people who could trace the Apostolic succession of the old Cornish bishops, and people who could pronounce authoritatively upon the exact distinction between justification and remission of sins. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... upon a vast number of materials. Is that a correct notion?' Another said, 'One who came of himself into being.' 'So then he came,' I replied, 'out of one place into another, and before he came he was not. Is this an abstract and refined notion?' After this no one asked me any more questions, and for fear the dispute should be renewed Jaffier Ali Khan carried ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... pale and drawn; her smile was as abstract as the mystery on the lips of the Mona Lisa. She laid ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... said honestly; "I don't. Babe hasn't the make-up for a professional woman in any line. She is too self-centred, too impetuous. She needs something to humanize her womanhood, not make an abstract thing of her. I'd rather see Babe a gentle, loving woman than the greatest ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... connection with it through the lower mental and astral worlds. When he wishes to descend he draws around himself a veil of the matter of the lower mental world, which we call his mental body. This is the instrument by means of which he thinks all his concrete thoughts—abstract thought being a power of the ego himself in ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... redistributed. Unless the success of the Convention renders the task superfluous, the Government will appoint a Boundary Commission as an act of simple justice. Needless to say the announcement was received with frenzied abuse by all the Nationalist factions. Abstract justice, it seems, is the very last thing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this after we have ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... remember'd, is not an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... back, rubbed their heads with their hats, shuffled round, and seemed to take a vacant sort of interest in abstract objects, such as the pavement, the gas-lamp, ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... of luminous was at first so explained as to make the light wherewith souls were clothed, into a portion of the divine light. In my opinion the idea is a less abstract one, and shows that, as among many other nations, so with the Egyptians the soul was supposed to appear as a kind of pale flame, or as emitting a glow analogous to the phosphorescent halo which is seen by night about a piece of rotten wood, or putrefying fish. This ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and made members of a body in so weak a state as our town is in at present;" and he adds, "There is no state but in the first place will seek to preserve its own safety and peace." Whatever might be the abstract merits of Gorton's opinions, his conduct was politically dangerous; and accordingly the jurisdiction over Pawtuxet was formally conceded to Massachusetts. Thereupon that colony, assuming jurisdiction, summoned Gorton and his men ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... Japan is the simplicity of their style, which is, doubtless, in a large measure, due to the meagre range of spiritual faculties which characterize the Japanese mind. This intellectual poverty manifests itself in the absence of all personification and reference to abstract ideas. The narrow world of the poet is here a concrete and literal sphere of experience. He never rises on wings above the earth his feet are treading, and the things around him that his fingers touch. But within this limited area he revels in ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... his most acceptable tribute to the Virgin Queen. She is in love with Sir Artegal—abstract justice. She has encountered him in fierce battle, and he has conquered her. It was the fond boast of Elizabeth that she lived for her people, and for their sake refused to marry. The following portraiture will be at ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... only to have caught glimpses of her white garments,—those, I mean, of the abstract truth of which you speak. But I have seen that which is eternally beyond her: the ideal in the real, the living truth, not the truth that I can THINK, but the truth that thinks itself, that thinks me, that God has thought, yea, that God is, the truth ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... on the subject of speechification, and hold that there is, everywhere, a vast amount too much of it. A sense of absurdity would be so strong upon me, if I got up at Birmingham to make a flourish on the advantages of education in the abstract for all sorts and conditions of men, that I should inevitably check myself and present a surprising incarnation of the soul of wit. But if I could interest myself in the practical usefulness of the particular institution; in the ways of life of the students; in their examples ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... of a tree in general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular tree or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known that there never was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract, fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different tribes of savages, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... presentation of the Jewish system in the form of a "Life of Moses," and three appended tractates on the virtues "Courage," "Humanity," and "Repentance." Scholars[83] are of opinion that there are gaps in the extant "Life of Moses," but the general plan of the work is clear. It is at once an abstract and an interpretation of Jewish law for the Greek world, and also an ideal biography ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... be the critic's great concern for himself. And it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it,—but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver,—that the critic will generally do most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author's place in literature, and his relation to a central standard (and if this is not done, how are we to get at our best ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... position so admirably brought out by Browning in his 'Ring and the Book,' so it is also, I think, a truism that every man has (not always consciously) a philosophy. A philosophy is, after all, a point of view; it is not necessarily an abstract academic position; nor is it always a well-defined attempt to discover the ultimate purpose of things. It can be, and very often is, a point of view really ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... looked at the face of the evil adept. His bright red-brown eyes burned with a strange radiance of power; I felt an answering emotion of pride, of personal intoxication, of psychic richness rise up within me gazing upon him. His face was archetypal; the abstract passion which eluded me in the features of many people I knew, was here declared, exultant, defiant, giantesque; it seem to leap like fire, to be free. In this face I was close to the legendary past, to the hopeless ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... complete without a flaw, and polished without a blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is certainly the staunch opinion of men of the world; but I call on honour, virtue, and worth, to give the stygian doctrine a loud negative! However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from man the idea of an existence beyond the grave, then the true measure of human conduct is, proper and improper: virtue and vice, as dispositions of the heart, are, in that case, of scarcely the same import and value to the world at large, as harmony and discord in the modifications ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... an object that excels the sense Dazzled and spent, sunk down; and sought repair Of sleep, which instantly fell on me, called By Nature as in aid, and closed mine eyes. Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell Of fancy, my internal sight; by which, Abstract as in a trance, methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood: Who stooping opened my left side, and took From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm, And life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly with flesh filled up ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... hastened the end of the iniquitous generation was their rapacity. So cunningly were their depredations planned that the law could not touch them. If a countryman brought a basket of vegetables to market, they would edge up to it, one after the other, and abstract a bit, each in itself of petty value, but in a little while the dealer would have none left ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... shall find that we have acquired a sense enabling us, whatever poetry may be laid before us, to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality is present or wanting there. Critics give themselves great labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete examples;—to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there. They are far better ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... judgment, and perspicuity, deserves the name of a critical historian. * Note: Compare Engel Geschichte des Ungrischen Reichs und seiner Neben lander, Halle, 1797, and Mailath, Geschichte der Magyaren, Wien, 1828. In an appendix to the latter work will be found a brief abstract of the speculations (for it is difficult to consider them more) which have been advanced by the learned, on the origin of the Magyar and Hungarian names. Compare ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... was it pain, but a chilliness of soul which proceeded from the gloomy and severe task that I had undertaken—a task which, when I considered the danger and the advantages annexed to its performance, was sufficient to abstract me from every other object. It was really the first exercise of that jealous spirit of mistaken devotion which keeps the soul in perpetual sickness, and invests the innocent enjoyments of life with a character of ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... address myself, and so I departed. I went at night to the king, who received me graciously. I made my reverence to the prince, who stood beside his father, but he would not even once stir his head. Then I acquainted the king, that, according to his order, I had brought an abstract to him of our merchandize, and waited his commands. After his usual manner, he asked many questions as to what were brought, and seemed mightily satisfied with what was in the inventory, especially with the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... dramatize education. They enable plain men and women to visualize in the concrete that vague word which means so little to them in the abstract. More properly they dramatize the identity between real education and actual life. On the platform before the audience is a miniature engine to which steam has been piped, a miniature frame house in course of construction, and a piece of brick wall in process of erection. A ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... had the same origin as the Sepolture; and, passing by some trivial objections to this hypothesis, we are disposed to adopt Mr. Tyndale's conclusion, that—“the coincidence of two such peculiar monuments in the same island, their non-existence elsewhere, and their being both indicative of some abstract principle of grandeur and power, practically carried out in their construction, are strong reasons for the presumption that they may have had some mutual reference to each other,—as burying places, temples, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... papers, as has been stated, is to form a correct public opinion; for by public opinion, if misguided, great embarrassment is often caused to those responsible for the conduct of a war. As concrete examples teach far better than abstract principles, the writer suggests to the consideration of his readers how seriously would have been felt, during the hostilities, the accident which befell the battleship Massachusetts, on Dec. 14, 1898, a month after the ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... and substances and of general lines; being the complement of the law of continuity, contrast of light and shade not being enough. Interchange: as in heraldic quartering. Consistency: or breadth overriding petty contrast and giving the effect of aggregate color or form. Harmony: art is an abstract and must be harmoniously abstracted, keeping the relations ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... standard of improbabilities? Assuredly not they who are ignorant of the whole subject to which those improbabilities advert. Now it is certain, that persons who are acquainted with Popery, are generally convinced, and readily agree, that Maria Monk's narrative, is very much assimilated to the abstract view which a sound judgment, enlightened by the Holy Scriptures, would form of that antichristian system, as predicted by the prophet Daniel, and the ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... folys lewde of condicions Whose herte and tunge theyr soules doth defyle By theyr blynde prayers and yll peticions Suche folowe no techynge nor gode monysyons For often many of them with tunge doth pray Theyr mynde, abstract nat knowynge what ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... given to Napoleon upon his graduation read thus:—"This young man is reserved and studious, he prefers study to any amusement, and enjoys reading the best authors, applies himself earnestly to the abstract sciences, cares little for anything else. He is silent, and loves solitude. He is capricious, haughty, and excessively egotisical, talks little, but is quick and energetic in his replies, prompt and severe in his repartees, has great pride and ambition, ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... Miss Birdseye wanted passion, wanted keenness, was capable of the weakest concessions. Mrs. Farrinder was not weak, of course, and she brought a great intellect to the matter; but she was not personal enough—she was too abstract. Verena was not abstract; she seemed to have lived in imagination through all the ages. Verena said she did think she had a certain amount of imagination; she supposed she couldn't be so effective on the platform if ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... sense of the Presence of the Holy Christ. Then will the soul know its guilt as it never knew it before. The guilt of sin will then be no bare expression, no conventional formula, but a spiritual fact, not an abstract doctrine, ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... not only share and correct the culture which they have acquired in private, but they are stimulated to higher and wider attainment. The classroom at its best is hardly equal to a good book; from its very nature it must address an abstract average rather than the individual, while a good book startles us with the intimacy of its revelation to ourselves. The student goes to college to study; he has his name thence. But while the classroom is busied, patiently, sedulously ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... sense of what to sense appears, Sense is sense ere 'tis mine or mine in me is. When I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears. When I see, before me abstract Seeing sees. I am part Soul part I in all I touch— Soul by that part I hold in common with all, And I the spoiled part, that doth make sense such As I can err by it and my sense mine call. The rest is ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... simple the elements of perfect happiness appear to be, regarded in the abstract, it becomes surprising to think how difficult it is to attain them in the concrete. A kind magician may grant us all we ask, may transport us whither we would go, dower us with all we lack, bring to us one desired companion after ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... correct. Speculation that is purely philosophic may indeed turn round upon itself. The views of Grecian metaphysicians may continue for ever to find enthusiastic adherents; though even here, in the realm of purely abstract reasoning, the progressive development of science, of psychology, and kindred branches of knowledge cannot fail by its influence to modify the form and arrangement of thought. But in those purely positive ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... indirect self-preservation by facilitating the gaining of a livelihood. This is admitted by all; and, indeed, by the mass is perhaps too exclusively regarded as the end of education. But while every one is ready to endorse the abstract proposition that instruction fitting youths for the business of life is of high importance, or even to consider it of supreme importance; yet scarcely any inquire what instruction will so fit them. It is true that reading, writing, and ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... writer, which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know, that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early Hellenic[125] world, that I would know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... opinion with the real interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope and fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny. I say it was this fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... one through. Moreover, he was splendidly conscious of his perfect ability to carry it through. One additional impulse he had, though he did not admit it to himself, being by nature adverse to big words, and that was an abstract love of justice, the Anglo-Saxon's deep-found instinct for helping the right side to conquer, even when grave risks must thereby be ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... over him and his troubled life some sort of sheltering influence, to which he had succumbed with an effortless, an almost fatalistic impulse, finding there, at any rate, a refuge from the horrors of his empty days. It was all abstract and impersonal at first, this jealousy which had come so suddenly to disturb the serenity of an almost too perfect day, but as the hours passed it seemed to him that his thoughts dwelt more often upon the direct cause of his brief separation from Elizabeth. He turned ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... perfectly well you can't ask her to lend you something,' said an abstract reasoning power within him. 'It's just because you won all that lot for her that you can't. You'd be afraid lest she should think you were sponging on her. Can you imagine yourself ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... child fuller of life and happiness it would be hard to find. It seems as if her soul was flooded with light and filled with music that had found entrance to it through avenues closed to other mortals. It is hard to understand how she has learned to deal with abstract ideas, and so far to supplement the blanks left by the senses of sight and hearing that one would hardly think of her as wanting in any human faculty. Remember Milton's pathetic picture of himself, suffering from only one of poor little ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ancestors,—German philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working-class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working-class, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... is much free expression; but beauty not yet. No abstract expression such as Euclid's Elements, Newton's Principia, or Peano's Formulaire, no matter how rigorous and complete, is a work of art. We admire the mathematician's formula for its simplicity and adequacy; we take delight in its clarity and scope, in the ease ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... poets personify abstract things, and not poets only but sculptors[7] and painters too. All the great things of the world ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... Him, is no cold or remote Being, no abstract Principle-of-All-Things, reposing aloof and impersonal in the stillness of an eternal calm. He is rather the boundless energy of an eternal Life—"no motionless eternity of perfection, but an overflowing vitality, an inexhaustible fecundity, the everlasting well-spring ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... be seen only by spiritual eyes. The natural vision cannot see past the natural realm. And spiritual realities will never be stepped out upon until they are seen. For faith is not an abstract and aimless emotion. It requires an object that can be seen, and one that ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... uttermost to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win them back from Paris. Oxford clerks fought the battle of England against the legate Otto, and we shall see them siding with Montfort. The eminently practical temper of the academic class could not neglect the world of action for the abstract pursuit of science. Eager as men were to know, to prove, and to inquire, the age had little of the mystical temperament about it. The studies which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon law, attracted the thousands for whom philosophy or theology had little ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Aristotle. No phrase would have better expressed his point of view, that of commonsense extended by experience, and confirmed by the appeal to matters of fact, rather than to any authority, or tradition, or committee of taste, or abstract principles. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the same gentleman, who had taken the chief part in the first publication, made an able abstract and a comparison with the Grebo and Mandenga tongues ("Western Africa," part iv. chap. iv.). M. du Chaillu further abridged this abridgement in his Appendix without owning his authority, and in changing the examples he did all possible damage. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... other a "dark spirit" (angro mainyus). But this personification is merely poetical or metaphorical, not real. The "white spirit" is not Ahura-mazda, and the "dark spirit" is not a hostile intelligence. Both resolve themselves on examination into mere figures of speech—phantoms of poetic imagery—abstract notions, clothed by language with an ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... are also records of digestion experiments in which less than one-half of the phosphorus in the food consumed was recovered in the total manural excrements. As a matter of fact there is a time in the life of the young mother, as with the two-year old cow, for example, when she must abstract from the food she consumes sufficient phosphorus for the nourishment of three growing animals,—her own immature body, a suckling calf, and ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... each other. I pledge you my honour, that not a being shall ever hear of our correspondence from me, and am persuaded that I may count upon the same secresy on your part, if you adopt my plan. Meantime, that you may form some idea, I will give you an abstract ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... sacrifice was too great for this strange man when it was to gratify his second self. With all his strength, he was so weak to this creature of his making that he had even told him all his secrets. Perhaps this abstract complicity was a ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... the cheerful resolution, with which, about eight years afterwards, he suffered death in the cause of religion. The authentic history of his martyrdom has been recorded with unusual candor and impartiality. A short abstract, therefore, of its most important circumstances, will convey the clearest information of the spirit, and of the forms, of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Kind) is distinguished from other Kinds, not by any one attribute, but by an indefinite number. Man, for instance, is a species of the genus animal: Rational (or rationality, for it is of no consequence here whether we use the concrete or the abstract form) is generally assigned by logicians as the Differentia; and doubtless this attribute serves the purpose of distinction: but it has also been remarked of man, that he is a cooking animal; the only animal that dresses its food. This, therefore, is ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... very impertinent if I had ventured to give you advice. I can hardly be taxed with that presumption. We were merely discussing an abstract question,—the use of faculties accorded us, and the best mode of obtaining happiness through their employment; and you chose to apply my general remarks to your ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... nearly the same result, namely, that a cross between the flowers on the same plant does not at all increase the number of the seeds, or only occasionally and to a slight degree. I will now give an abstract of the results of the five ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... ill, when she knows he has so great a regard that he would die for her, and when he was so good as to marry her without a shilling!" Her sister's history is not unentertaining: Duke Hamilton is the abstract of Scotch pride: he and the Duchess at their own house walk in to dinner before their company, sit together at the upper end of their own table, eat off the same plate, and drink to nobody beneath the rank of Earl-would not one wonder how they could get any body ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... or, as it is very often called, "General" psychology may be summed up in a few leading principles, which sound more or less abstract and difficult, but which will have many concrete illustrations in the subsequent chapters. The facts of experience, the actual events which we find taking place in our minds, fall naturally into ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... of exciting your disgust, I must tell you that I persist in the principles I have adopted, and hold myself both heroic and generous in so doing. Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue. Each human life is a substance ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... pass that every odd bit of dry good lying round the house was, in the absence of any positive testimony on the subject, assumed to be one of my nightcaps; an utterly baseless assumption, because my achievements never went so far as concrete capuality, but stopped short in the later stages of abstract idealism. However, prejudice is stronger than truth; and, as I said, every fragment of every fabric that could not give an account of itself was charged with being a nightcap till it was proved to be a dish-cloth or a cart-rope. I at length surrendered at discretion, and remembered ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... dying to gobble it down—just in the same manner as you'll observe pussy, if you offer her a nice bit of meat, will sniff and turn away her head as if rejecting the morsel with disdain, affecting to make you believe it beneath her notice, only the next moment to abstract it slily from your hand, glad enough to get it! You'll see presently, Mr Marline, that our friend there will go at the pork again, ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... that we receive from all Quarters on this Subject; but having reflected that this same Relation would be of no Use but to Persons of the Faculty who are instructed and experienced in the Knowledge and Cure of Diseases, we have thought proper to add here an Abstract of the different Methods which we have made use of in treating the different Kinds of diseased Persons contained in the five Classes mentioned above; presuming that they may be of Service to the young ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... fur there are bones and fibres and muscles. Don't exaggerate them and call your task finished; merely remember always that they're there framing and padding the velvet skin. More is done by skilful inference than by parading every abstract fact you know and translating the sum-accumulative of your knowledge into the over-accented concrete. Reticence is a kind of vigour. It can even approach violence. The mentally garrulous kill their own inspiration. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... hardly for me," said the physician, "to interpose in so high a matter; yet, as trusted both by the noble Ursel, and by his Highness the Emperor, I have made a brief abstract of these short conditions to be kept by the high parties towards each other, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... exceed four inches, the track of the compasses is identical with that of the insect. The most pronounced deviations do not exceed the small variations which we must reasonably expect in a problem of a physical nature, a problem incompatible with the absolute accuracy of abstract truths. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... is the describing of a person by some abstract noun such as a "joy," a "delight," an "inspiration"—a way of speaking which savours both of slang and affectation, and which is not likely to appeal to people of good taste. Of course it is quite different when the ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... of the average woman's distorted notion of abstract justice to accept her statement at its face value. Woman by her very nature is incapable of appreciating or applying impartial justice, and her incapacity grows in proportion to her immediate interest in the ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... denounces, launches forth, Against all systems built on abstract rights, Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims Of institutes and laws hallowed by time; Declares the vital power of social ties Endeared by custom; and with high disdain, Exploding upstart theory, insists Upon the allegiance ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... To enable the reader more fully to understand the following orations, I have in an Appendix to this volume given a brief account of Olynthus, showing its position with reference to Macedonia, and the importance of its acquisition to Philip. The historical abstract prefixed to this volume is intended chiefly to assist the reader in reference to dates. Such occurrences only are noticed as may ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... not trying anything so abstract as furnishing hope to a frustrated humanity! Nobody can supply an abstraction! Nobody can accomplish an abstraction! Everything that's actually done is specific and real! Maybe you can find abstract qualities in it after it's done, but I'm a practical man! I'm not trying to produce an improved ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and misery, as she had vowed, for better, for worse, she would by this time have been not only a wretched but a deteriorated woman, and her son most probably would have been injured both in his moral and intellectual being. What she had done was not the abstract duty of her marriage vow, but it had been better—had it not been better for them both? In such a question who is to be the judge? And now again there came surging up into Elinor's veins the impulse of flight. To take the boy and fly. She could take him where ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... modern theory that heat light, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, and all other forms of energy are in essence motion, are convertible into one another, and as motion are indestructible. The following abstract of Count Rumford's paper is taken from "Heat as a Mode of Motion," by Professor John Tyndall, published by D. Appleton & Co., New York. This work and "The Correlation and Conservation of Forces," edited by Dr. E. L. Youmans, published by the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... political idea is from the senses, could not at all comprehend why the statesmen of the Assembly should impose upon them a fugitive king, out of respect for abstract royalty. The moderation of Barnave and Lameth seemed to them full of suspicion; and cries of treason were uttered at all their meetings. The decree of the Assembly was the signal for increased ferment, which developed from and after the 13th of July, in zealous meetings, imprecations, and ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to reason with himself, to force himself to feel the reality of his own belief that all was well; for he had no doubt of it, as an abstract truth. It was the power of getting comfort from it that was wanting. If only his heart could stop thumping and his brain burning, he would have done the rejoicing that Rosalind was there, knowing all he knew, and loving him; that Sally ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... small dower of 8000 dollars; and when he called on his son-in-law, Mr. Randall, to assist him, he could only offer to indorse his note to Mr. Oswald for the amount, acknowledging that it would be perilous at that time to abstract even half that amount from his business. It probably would have been perilous indeed, as in little more than a month after he failed for an enormous amount; but fear not, reader, for the gentle Caroline: she still retained her elegant house and furniture, her handsome equipage and splendid jewels. ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... receiving this remark as abstract philosophy, rather than as having a personal meaning. 'But I think I should consider pounds, shillings, and pence a very fair reward, if I only ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... some of the points that are peculiarly his own. One of them is the great simplicity of the structure of his mind. With an incomparable eye for the world around him in all things, great and small, he is abhorrent of everything speculative and abstract, and what may be called philosophies have no place in his works, almost the solitary exception being that he employs thought as an illustration of the rapidity of the journey of a deity. He is, accordingly, of all poets the most simple and direct. He is also the most free ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... this current as a folk-tale at Palena, in the Abruzzi, without any material variation except in the conclusion. My friend, Mr. E. Sidney Hartland, has favoured me with the following abstract of the Italian version, as given in vol. iii. of the "Archivio per lo studio delle Tradizioni Popolari" (Palermo, 1882), ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... tenement in Roosevelt Street, which was the patrimony and whole estate of two children. With the rear house taken away, the income from the front would not be enough to cover the interest on the mortgage. It was one of those things that occasionally make standing upon abstract principle so very uncomfortable. I confess I never had the courage to ask what was done in their case. I know that the tenement went, and I hope—well, never mind what I hope. It has nothing to do ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... more to health than many lectures on dietetics. Yet back, hidden away in the manager's mind, is the science of dietetics. So is it with quickening the child's power and thought in the spiritual life. We must avoid the abstract, the intellectually analytical. Religion should present itself concretely, practically, and as an atmosphere and ideal in the family. We parents must not look for theological interest in the child. A Timothy Dwight at ten or twelve, though once found in Sunday-school library books, is ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... and maxims, which enable him to judge correctly of both the acts and motives of his Foreign superior. It should be recollected to their credit, that the germ of almost every known invention, the original idea of nearly every useful secret in arts, the knowledge of the highest branches of the abstract sciences, had been familiar to the wise men of the East, and were taught in the most perfect language in the world, the mother of all other ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... their way by unblockaded paths to the house of prayer, the churches once more roofed in and again made gorgeous by the stately ceremonial of the Catholic rite. In other ways, too, Alaric showed himself anxious to conciliate the favour of his Roman subjects. He ordered an abstract of the Imperial Code to be prepared, and this abstract, under the name of the Breviarium Alaricianum[92] is to this day one of our most valuable sources of information as to Roman Law. He is also said to have directed the construction ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... of Ampere, of Davy, and of Faraday, but, in other respects, their work is too often lost sight of in the splendid modern developments of their discoveries. Again, there is another group of discoverer-inventors who occupy an intermediate position between the abstract discoverers above named and the inventors and adapters of still more recent times. To this group belong the names of Pixii and Saxton, Holmes and Nollet, Wilde, Varley, Siemens, Wheatstone, and Pacinotti, who was the first to discover a means ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... demonstrators, will work out facts for themselves and come into that direct contact with reality which constitutes the fundamental distinction of scientific education. Mathematics will soar into its highest regions; while the high peaks of philosophy may be scaled by those whose aptitude for abstract thought has been awakened by elementary logic. Finally, schools of pictorial and plastic art, of architecture, and of music, will offer a thorough discipline in the principles and practice of art to those in whom lies nascent the rare faculty of aesthetic representation, or the still ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... asked many questions about the Cortes, and when I told him that many of them made good speeches on abstract questions, but that they failed when any practical debate on finance or war took place, he said, "Oui, faute de l'habitude de gouverner." He asked if I had been at Cadiz at the time of the siege, and said the French ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... originally planned, it was published at Gettysburg with the professors as editors! It was in the interest of eliminating the specific Lutheran doctrines that, in 1845, at Philadelphia, a committee (Schmucker, Morris, Schmidt, Pohlman, Kurtz) was appointed to formulate and present to the next convention an abstract of the doctrines and usages of the American Lutheran Church, on the order of the Abstract requested in 1844 by the Maryland Synod, in which the Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence was rejected. ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... survey of these caves was communicated to the Geological Society in a paper read on the 13th of April 1831, of which an abstract was published in its Proceedings, but the particulars respecting the animal remains found by me have derived great additional importance from the discoveries made by Professor Owen since my return ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... as in every other German work that has occasion to touch on abstract matters, there occur sentences couched in a peculiar terminology and not very susceptible of translation. There are one or two sentences of this sort, more especially in the chapter on Religion in the 1st volume, and in the critique of Euripides as to which ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Chaucer's birth, the precise date of which is very unlikely ever to be ascertained. A better fortune has attended the anxious enquiries which in his case, as in those of other great men have been directed to the very secondary question of ancestry and descent,—a question to which, in the abstract at all events, no man ever attached less importance than he. Although the name "Chaucer" is (according to Thynne), to be found on the lists of Battle Abbey, this no more proves that the poet himself came of "high parage," than the reverse is to be concluded from the nature of his coat-of-arms, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... debating club of schoolboys, the resolution to which the Convention came seems to have been that which sound policy dictated. In saying this, we do not mean to express an opinion that a republic is, either in the abstract the best form of government, or is, under ordinary circumstances, the form of government best suited to the French people. Our own opinion is, that the best governments which have ever existed in the world have been limited monarchies; and that France, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the thought of other things; thus the sight of a lyre or a garment reminds us of a friend, and not only are we thus reminded of sensible objects, but of things which are comprehended by the mind alone, and have no sensitive existence. For we have formed in our minds an idea of abstract equality, of the beautiful, the just, the good; in short, of every thing which we say exists without the aid of the senses, for we use them only in the perception of individual things; whence it follows that the mind did not acquire this knowledge ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... At the same time it must be noted that this view was not suggested by the Emperor K'ang Hsi, who fixed upon T'ien as the appropriate term. It is probable that, vigorous Confucianist as he was, he was anxious to appear on the side rather of an abstract than of a personal Deity, and that he was repelled by the overwrought anthropomorphism of the Christian God. His conversion was said to have been very near at times; we read, however, that, when hard pressed by the missionaries to accept baptism, "he always excused himself by saying ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... must learn it. We have much to teach you in the sphere of abstract thought, as you have much to teach us in those of the practical reason and the knowledge of mankind. I should be glad to see you some day in a German university. I am anxious to encourage a truly spiritual fraternization between ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... on these questions at all, and remained silent in conversation when they chanced to be mooted by the men of an earlier generation. During, however, the last ten years, mainly through the revival of a taste for metaphysical inquiry in France and Germany, which has reacted on this country, abstract questions on the nature and functions of mind are again acquiring their modicum of space and importance in Scotland. Our country no longer takes the place it once did among the nations in this department, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and practical mind like Count Lardarel to turn the discovery to account and extract the blessing. In like manner it was clear that in our educational schemes for the benefit of the people, there must not only be the scientific investigator of abstract truth, but also the scientific technologist to point the way to the practical realisation of tangible profit. Moreover, and a still more important truth, it is the scientific education of the proprietors and heads we want—educated capital rather ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... glass and tea certainly would take money out of their pockets without their consent, and therefore it must be true that taxes could be rightly laid only by colonial assemblies, in which alone Americans could be represented. But of what value was it to preserve the abstract right of taxation by colonial assemblies if meanwhile the assemblies themselves might, by act of Parliament, be abolished? And had not the New York Assembly been suspended by act of Parliament? And were not the new duties to be used to pay governors and judges, thus by subtle indirection ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the artist calls the ideal ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... the stomach needs bulk as well as nutriment. It would not prosper with the necessary elements in their condensed form. So abstract truths in their lowest terms do not always promote mental digestion like more bulk in the way of pictures and discussions of these truths. Here is ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... said Mrs. Van Stuyler rather acidly, "and not only in the abstract ideas, but apparently in a certain ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... huge and silent approach of the Servile State, using Socialists and Anti-Socialists alike as its tools; and third, his recent campaign of public education in military affairs. In all these he played the part which he had played for our little party of patriotic Pro-Boers. He was a man of action in abstract things. There was supporting his audacity a great sobriety. It is in this sobriety, and perhaps in this only, that he is essentially French; that he belongs to the most individually prudent and the most collectively reckless of peoples. There is indeed a part of him that is romantic ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... persuaded that the revolutionary legacy of concentrated power was the chief obstacle to free institutions. He wrote, in three small volumes, a history of the United States, which is a most intelligent abstract of what he had learnt in Bancroft and Hildreth. He wrote with the utmost lucidity and definiteness, and never darkened counsel with prevaricating eloquence, so that there is no man from whom it is so easy and so agreeable to learn. His lectures on the early days of the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... pointed out to him. The next one he sees presents the same idea, and he gives it the same name. This he does likewise to a third and a fourth, till at last the word tree, which he first applied to an individual, comes to be employed by him as the name of a class or a genus, an abstract idea, which comprehends all trees in general. But, when he learns that all trees serve not the same purpose, that they do not all produce the same kind of fruit, he will soon learn to distinguish them by specific and particular names." This is the logic of all the sciences, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... her life, and that, having failed once, she must fail again, and again, and again—as if her whole subsequent life must be one long failure. But a greater crisis had followed hard upon the heels of the first—the struggle with self, the greatest struggle of all. Against the abstract principle of evil the woman who had failed in the material conflict with a masculine, masterful will, had succeeded, had conquered self, had been true when it was easy to be false, had dared the judgment of her peers so only that she ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... short-lived pleasure. These several kinds of persons are foul objects steeped skin and all in lewdness. The lustful love, for instance, which has sprung to life and taken root in your natural affections, I and such as myself extend to it the character of an abstract lewdness; but abstract lewdness can be grasped by the mind, but cannot be transmitted by the mouth; can be fathomed by the spirit, but cannot be divulged in words. As you now are imbued with this desire only in the abstract, you are certainly well ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... in England. Every man of them rushes back to Paris on the second Saturday of his visit, rather than confront the horrors of a second Sunday in London! However, you can try it if you like. Send me a written abstract of the case, and I will forward it to one of the official people in the Rue Jerusalem, who will do anything he can to oblige me. Of course," said Felix, turning to Mr. Troy, "some of you have got the number of the lost bank-note? ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... twelve years, and the building itself was shut up. But at the termination of that period it was reopened, and it has continued ever since to be the seminary in which instruction in the faculties of law and of medicine is communicated. For theology, and moral and abstract philosophy, on the other hand, the student must needs repair to the Clementinum; over which, till the suppression of the order by Joseph II., the Jesuits presided. Nor has the downfall of that most ambitious and subtle body, worked any important change in the constitution ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... apartments, while the Major went on to demand his daughter from Lady Belamour, taking with him Betty, whom he allowed to be a much better match for my Lady than he could be. Very little faith in his cousin Urania remained to him in the abstract, yet even now he could not be sure that she would not talk him over and hoodwink him in any actual encounter. Sir Amyas likewise accompanied him, both to gratify his own anxiety and to secure admission. The young man still looked pale and worn with restless ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... you once, some time ago, on the abstract grounds of the question we have under discussion. These, being only a wild lily, you did not comprehend. You do not love me, or you would give me my promise fast enough on other grounds. You leave me ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... I think it far more than likely that, when at last deciphered, it will be found to contain most if not all of these classes—mutatis mutandis. There seems every evidence that it is made up of pictures with probably both concrete and abstract meanings; word-conventions; and grammatical particles. It is at least probable that there are also silent determinatives and not unlikely that there is also a pure phonetic or alphabetic element. That ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... world's behoof; especially did his views on education, developed in a recent talk at the club, strike Dymchurch as commendable and likely to have influence. He asked nothing better than an opportunity of devoting himself to a movement for educational reform. The abstract now disgusted him well nigh as much as the too grossly actual. Thus, chancing to open Shelley, he found with surprise that the poet of his adolescence not merely left him cold, but seemed verbose ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... have it at once accepted by those who know, by painful experience, how doubtful all things are till they are proven, and how difficult it is to get satisfactory evidence of the most simple event in physiology or pathology. No one doubts the abstract possibility of a human being living without food, for, bearing in mind the discoveries that are constantly being made, nothing can be regarded as absolutely impossible outside the domain of mathematics. Two and two cannot make ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... his judges; "the poetry of painting required abstract trees, at metaphysical distance, not the various trees of nature, as they ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... the Age of Six Months."—Ibid. vol. xxiv. p. 165. "Account of Experimental Observations on the Development and Growth of Salmon Fry, from the Exclusion of the Ova to the Age of Two Years."—Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. xiv. part ii. (1840.) The reader will find an abstract of these discoveries in the No. of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... The general knows best whether it would be politic to shoot a skilful surgeon and an Englishman, who is willing and able to heal the wounds of the loyal subjects of King Ferdinand as well as of rebels. My belief is, that although he may love liberty in the abstract, he is too much engaged in his professional duties to interfere in any way ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... "It is abstract commerce," said Claparon,—"commerce which won't be developed for ten years to come, according to Nucingen, the Napoleon of finance; commerce by which a man can grasp the totality of fractions, and ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... to all exciting discussions, and to popular movements generally, while the younger ones could not smother a natural interest in the great reforms of the day; it followed that, although all were opposed to slavery in the abstract, there was no fixed principle of action among them. In their ranks were all sorts: gradualists and immediatists, advocates of unconditional emancipation, and colonizationists, thus making it impossible to discuss the main question without excitement. Therefore all discussion was ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... at the loss of all my expected fortune." Then, shaking hands with this peculiar being, whom she could not but respect for his ingenuity, as well as for a kindliness and sympathy which lay at the bottom of all his abstract theories, she left him to his work, at which he would continue till drowsiness made, as he said, the idea ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... back from a promised visit of indefinite duration. There was no hurry, Ethel had told him so frankly, no other suitor being in the running. At first, the thought of the past troubled him a little, in the abstract, as a kind of treason to Vera; but, after a while, he put that thought aside. She need never know, and Lalage had gone out of ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... I demanded, uncertain whether he were apostrophizing Diable's squaw, or abstract glory. "Speak out!" I shouted, shaking him ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... he replied dryly. "I supposed it was worse. Narrower, I mean. Didn't know you ever bothered yourself with abstract philosophy." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... testimony as it is presented, and decides the case on its merits, there and then. There is no necessity for employing a referee, and there are no written records of the case. The decision, the date, and the abstract records appear on the court books, and that is all. And yet, by the section of the Constitution, already quoted, this decree is regarded,—by the court that grants it, at least,—as perfectly legal and operative all over the Union. Although ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... angry at God and at Abel. The Holy Spirit speaks of faith in different ways in the Sacred Scriptures. Sometimes He speaks of faith independently of other matters. When the Scriptures speak of faith in the absolute or abstract, faith refers to justification directly. But when the Scripture speaks of rewards and works it speaks of compound or relative faith. We will furnish some examples. Galatians 5:6, "Faith which worketh by love." Leviticus 18:5, "Which if a man do, he shall live in them." ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... assiduities and some manifestation, even stronger than gallantry, and treated it merely as a matter of course. Really, without an hyperbole, she was a woman to whom an appearance of devotion might be excusable, and looked upon more as a tribute to the abstract spirit of beauty and its divine Creator, than as a sensual ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... proposition that the room in which Oleron sat was characterised by a certain sparsity and lack of vigour; so much the worse for Miss Bengough; she certainly erred on the side of redundancy and general muchness. And if one must contrast abstract qualities, Oleron inclined to ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... gave Hamilton an advantage. Jefferson never argued, and, if he had attempted it, he would have been no match for his adversary. He contented himself with a plain statement of his views and the reasons which influenced him, made in the abstract manner which was habitual with him. Hamilton, on the other hand, was an adroit lawyer, and a painstaking dialectician, who carefully fortified every position. He made long speeches to the Cabinet, with as much earnestness as one would use in court. Though ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... literary journals of the same period were Archibald Bower's Historia Literaria (1730-34); the Bee; or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet (1733-35), edited by Addison's cousin, Eustace Budgell; the British Librarian, exhibiting a Compendious Review or Abstract of our most Scarce, Useful and Valuable Books, etc., published anonymously by the antiquarian William Oldys, from January to June, 1737, and much esteemed by modern bibliophiles as a pioneer and a curiosity of its kind; a Literary Journal (1744-49) ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the ablest of the Whig orators had been engaged against the accused. It is easy for historians, writing long after the passions, the temptations, the necessities of the moment have ceased to press, to criticize the acts of the past by the "dry light" of pure reason and abstract morality. But the claims of necessity should not be ignored in delivering what is intended to form a sort of ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... unlike all His predecessors than all His followers.... Religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in selecting this Man as the ideal Representative and Guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour so to live that Christ would ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... MacFlecnoe, while the two were yoked for castigation in Part II. of Absalom and Achitophel, which appeared in 1682. Dryden possessed preminently the faculty for satire. He did not devote himself exclusively to an abstract treatment, nor, like Pope, to bitter personalities; he blends and combines the two methods most effectively. Every one of his brisk, nervous couplets carries a sting; every distich is a sound ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... in that receptacle, hanging the key on a little hook in the hall. Morning after morning it was she who received the postbag, unlocked it, and brought the contents to Mrs. Clavering, who always distributed the letters herself. Thus it was easy for Bertha to abstract the letters which contained the Dawlish postmark. She did this for a reason. It would never do for Florence to find out that her mother had not received the ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. I do not mean that all of them are hateful personally, any more than all the Inquisitors, or all the buccaneers. But the position which they occupy, and the abstract excellence of which they are in arms to vindicate, is that which the united voice of mankind habitually selects as the type of all hateful qualities. I will not bandy chicanery about the more or less of stripes or other torments which are daily requisite ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... quietness with which the women pursued their employment, in the lower and lower whispers in which the men continued their conversation. There was something pervading the air of the whole apartment that conveyed a sense of the solemn, unworldly stillness which we attach to the abstract idea ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... French kingship formed a better estimate than was formed at Rome of the effect which would be produced by such doctrine on France, in the existing condition of the French mind; they entered upon no theological and abstract polemics; they confined themselves entirely to setting in a vivid light the pope's pretensions and their consequences, feeling sure that, by confining themselves to this question, they would enlist in their opposition not only all laymen, nobles, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Hennah, who has had much practical experience, recommends the collodion to be made sensitive merely by the iodide of potassium; and he said, "if it did not work quite clearly and well, a little tincture of iodine brought it right." Here, then, is added the very thing which MR. CROOKES proposes to abstract. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... when he unconsciously brings every subject back to the original motif—"but that young man of Twickenham—he is a most pitiful fellow—" you feel Dr. Wolff was never more simply sincere and self-deluded, than Von Rosen's belief that it is an abstract criticism. Also you know how tedious broken English in a novel is, as a rule. But Black has very artistically managed his hero's idioms so as to give great effect. And as we have a brain wave on about Womanhood you may like, as much as I have, V. Rosen's ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... demanded, uncertain whether he were apostrophizing Diable's squaw, or abstract glory. "Speak out!" I shouted, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... poetry. But I do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. Perhaps, if he had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to abstract thinking and intellectual analysis. A strange preference also for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet. It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him out of the window. These ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... discussions held by men qualified by intellect and study to deal with them are the obvious resort. There is room among the two hundred judges for some such men, but the juries are little more numerous than is required for the examination of and report on objects. For more abstract inquiries they will need recruits. These should be supplied by the leading philosophical associations of this country and Europe. The governments have all an interest in enlisting their aid, and the Centennial Commission has done what in it lay to promote their action. Ethnic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... his bones. He knew how far worse it had been than Garth had told. He knew of the cruel, humiliating question: "How old are you?" Jane had confessed to it. He knew how the outward glow of adoring love had faded as the mind was suddenly turned inward to self-contemplation. He had known it all as abstract fact. Now he saw it actually before him. He saw Jane's stricken lover, bowed beside him in his blindness, living again through those sights and sounds which no merciful curtain of oblivion could ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... might ask questions which no philosopher would be able to answer. For I believe that she is tormented by the pain of existence. Of course I do not mean that the riddle presents itself to her as it does to us,— nor that she can have reached any abstract conclusions by any mental processes like our own. The external world to her is "a continuum of smells." She thinks, compares, remembers, reasons by smells. By smell she makes her estimates of character: ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... opinion; between the testimony of God and the reasonings of men; the words of the Spirit and human inferences. Faith in the testimony of God, and obedience to the commandments of Jesus, are their bond of union, and not an agreement in any abstract views or opinions upon what is written or spoken by divine authority. Hence all the speculations, questions, debates of words, and abstract reasonings, found in human creeds, have no place in their religious ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Hamilton sent to Congress his Report on Manufactures, and how anybody survived the fray which ensued can only be explained by the cast-iron muscles forged in the ancestral arena. Hamilton had no abstract or personal theories regarding tariff, and would have been the first to denounce the criminal selfishness which distinguishes Protection to-day. The situation was peculiar, and required the application of strictly business methods to a threatening and immediate emergency. Great Britain was oppressing ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... she rose, a trifle excited in the glow of abstract happiness, and walked erratically about, smiling to herself, touching and rearranging objects that caught her attention. Then an innocent instinct led her to the mirror, where she stood a moment looking back into the lovely reflected face ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Emerson (1803-1882), who lighted up its doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetical imagination. Without the formality of dogma, he was a teacher of vigorous morality in line with the ruling tendencies of the age, and bringing all the aid of abstract teaching towards the solution of the moral problems ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... "remember, that the punishment will rest on ourselves. We may, with as much philosophic justice as possible, throw the blame of our faults on our parents and preceptors, and on the early mismanagement of our minds; yet, after we have made out our case in the abstract, to the perfect satisfaction of a jury of metaphysicians, when we come to overt actions, all our judges, learned and unlearned, are so awed, by the ancient precedents and practice of society, and by the obsolete law of common sense, that they finish by pronouncing against us the barbarous ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... [Footnote 1: Abstract of paper by HENRY FOWLER, chief mechanical engineer of the Midland Ry., England, before the Institution of ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... a straight line. If we were to observe the flying raven from the moving railway carriage. we should find that the motion of the raven would be one of different velocity and direction, but that it would still be uniform and in a straight line. Expressed in an abstract manner we may say : If a mass m is moving uniformly in a straight line with respect to a co-ordinate system K, then it will also be moving uniformly and in a straight line relative to a second co-ordinate system K1 provided ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... have a horrible suspicion that however much I may try to persuade myself I'm concentrating upon some abstract theme, I've really all the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... impatient, I know," said Miss Evans, as the subject warmed and brightened under the glow of words, "to see the day when my long cherished ideas will be wrought into actual life. Will it not be grand when religion shall no longer be an abstract, soulless science, a musty theology, but a living, vital truth, lived and acted, not merely professed and preached; when the human family shall be united in one bond, and man love to do his brother good; when he who is strong, shall care for him who is weak; ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... be brought and so many wild revolutionists in whom must be instilled a respect for law and order, is it strange that we should ourselves sometimes lump the word of God and the principles of law and order together under the head of "sentimentality" and shrug our shoulders? Justice in the abstract is our aim—any American will tell you that—so why haggle over details and insist ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... like this to Philip, as she sometimes did, she seemed quite unconscious that he was a listener, it was rather as if he were part of her and thinking the same thoughts. To Philip she seemed wonderful. He had never bothered his head in that way about abstract things when he was her age, and he could not understand it in her. What was more, he could not have thought as she did if he had tried. She had that sort of mind which accepts no stereotyped reflection ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... turned to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, but she could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt, her sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion was an infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty. She was consumed by the passionate need to preserve the integrity of being herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be met unabashed by the query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach applied by those who failed to get what they ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and abettors of the fearful conspiracy in which they are alleged to be engaged. In fact, I cannot blame them. It is hard to expect that mere compassion for a persecuted sect—or, what is yet more rare, an abstract love of justice—should be powerful enough to engage men to expose themselves to the awakened fury of a whole people; for, in the present state of general agitation, whoever disbelieves the least tittle of the enormous improbabilities which have been accumulated ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... achieve reputation as an essayist. His critical faculty was pronounced, and he had carefully developed it; and it was possible that when the world had completely palled upon him, he would shut himself up at Crumford Hall and give the public the benefit of his accumulated opinions, abstract and biographical. But he was not ready for that yet; he needed several years more of experience, observation, and assiduous cultivation of the habit of analysis; and in the meantime he was in a condition ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... died in peace. From the preceding abstract it will appear, that from the year 1570 to 1600, Queen Elizabeth and the Protestant religion were constantly exposed to the machinations of the active partisans of the Roman see, who were encouraged by the pope himself. Every pontiff pursued the same course. There was ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY, (published in Boston by Gould and Lincoln), is an excellent abstract of all the chief movements and discoveries in the scientific world for the year 1850. We advise all our readers interested in any of the sciences to procure it, and its companion volume for the previous year. The work will be continued, and it will be invaluable as a library ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the theologians who attended the Elector to Augsburg, in his narrative of what occurred during the diet, giving a brief abstract of the contents of the Augsburg Confession, epitomises the, Xth Article thus: Of the Holy Sacrament of the true body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the altar; and the XXIV Article, "of the Mass, how it ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... been, was creeping into his heart. It felt like the liquid music of a low, serious voice, or it may have been a passion, such as he had seen in the depths of two large, sad, gray eyes, or it might have been the soft soothing influence of a sweet, dreamy smile. It was just as abstract as any of these, and yet just as fascinating and just as exquisite. This was Love for him, a beautiful but a dreadful thing! feeding his hungry soul and quenching his heart's awful thirst, yet swaying him with a merciless tyranny, for love caresses ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... here again, with him—up to a point. She thought (and thoughts are apt to put themselves with a bluntness which would be inexcusable in speech) that it was high time that Eleanor Scaife was married, and, from an abstract point of view, this could hardly be denied. Lady Eynesford took the next step. Eleanor and Coxon would suit one another to perfection. Hence the invitations to tea, and Lady Eynesford's considerate withdrawals into the house, or out of sight ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... ex-city treasurer? Have you any idea? I can tell. I had the matter looked up almost a month ago on my accession to office. Just a little over two hundred thousand dollars, gentlemen—just a little over two hundred thousand dollars. Here is an abstract from the files of Dun & Company for that year. Now you can see how rapidly our Caesar has grown in wealth since then. You can see how profitable these few short years have been to him. Was George W. Stener worth any such sum up ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... came into Archie's mind that young John Graham was "just trying him," as boys say; and, in perfect simplicity and good faith, he gave an abstract of the chapter, with comments of his aunt's, and some of his own upon it. It was not very clear or very complete, it is true; but it was enough to change considerably the expression of John's ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... lines; being the complement of the law of continuity, contrast of light and shade not being enough. Interchange: as in heraldic quartering. Consistency: or breadth overriding petty contrast and giving the effect of aggregate color or form. Harmony: art is an abstract and must be harmoniously abstracted, keeping the relations ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... attribute to the Blackfoot of to-day any such abstract conception of the name of the Creator as that expressed in the foregoing quotation. The statement that Old Man was merely light personified would be beyond his comprehension, and if he did understand what was meant, he would laugh at it, and aver that Na'pi was a real man, a flesh and ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... adoration?... All she had said seemed to me eternal; all she had looked on appeared to me sacred. I envied the earth on which she had trodden; the sunshine which had enveloped her during our walks appeared to me happy to have touched her. I would have wished to abstract and separate forever from the liquid plains of air, the air that she had sanctified in breathing it; I would have enclosed the empty place that she had just ceased to fill in space, so that no inferior creature should occupy it, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... right of revolution is a natural right possessed by every people. They may revolutionize their governments when they become oppressive. The Constitution was adopted as the logical consequence of this idea. There is no use now in discussing the abstract question of secession. We must treat the present condition of the Gulf States as a revolution in fact accomplished. We must meet them fairly. I vote against this amendment, and wish to stand right upon the record. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... more thousands, perhaps, that, whatsoever they may think of it in its origin, and as a matter depending upon natural right, yet take things as they are, and, finding slavery to be an established relation of the society in which they live, can see no way in which, let their opinions on the abstract question be what they may, it is in the power of the present generation to relieve themselves from this relation. And candor obliges me to say, that I believe they are just as conscientious, many of them, and the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... use of Mother Earth, to the use of the nation's natural home, workhouse and storehouse, whence, by labour, everything necessary to life and comfort can alone be derived. Winstanley realised, as they to-day realise, that to admit in the abstract the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, to admit the equal claim of all to life, and yet to deny the equal claim of all to the use of God's Earth, to share in those blessings which the great Father of all men has lavished upon His children, and which form the ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... and the directness of it, which compels him always to take the short cut and keeps it clear of crankery of every kind. The "isms" have no place in a newspaper office, certainly not in Mulberry Street. I confess I was rather glad of it. I had no stomach for abstract discussions of social wrongs; I wanted to right those of them that I could reach. I wanted to tear down the Mulberry Bend and let in the light so that we might the more readily make them out; the others could do the rest then. I used to say that to a very destructive crank who ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... development it is to be feared there were whole tracts of mind and brain left vacant—for Toni belonged, by adoption at least, to a class who read only for amusement and occupation, and are not in the least anxious to try their mental teeth on any abstract theories or philosophies of life. She was at present all for the concrete. Things seen and known were of importance, things unseen were alike uninteresting and incredible. The abstract virtues were all very well, but life was much too vivid and important to ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... "I don't. Babe hasn't the make-up for a professional woman in any line. She is too self-centred, too impetuous. She needs something to humanize her womanhood, not make an abstract thing of her. I'd rather see Babe a gentle, loving woman than the greatest light of ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... no comment. She knew that her father's resentment was based on no abstract love of law and order. It had back of it no feeling that crime had been committed or justice outraged. The frontier was in its roistering youth, full of such effervescing spirits that life was the cheapest thing it knew. Every few days some ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... the communities of insects, the results are the same as though the individual animal fully recognized the value of concerted endeavor. So among primitive savages of to-day there is only a vague conception of abstract duty as such, or it may be practically lacking, as in the case of the Fuegians. So also a growing child is substantially egoistic, and it must be taught by precept and example that the rights of others can be safeguarded only by the altruistic correction of ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... of Herat would scarcely seem worth all the noise that has been made about it. There has been a great amount of sentiment wasted in eulogizing its alleged beauty. Of its wealth and commercial importance in the abstract, I should say much exaggeration has been indulged in. Still, there is no gainsaying that it is a most valuable strategical position, which, if held by either England or Russia, would exercise great influence ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Oersted, of Ampere, of Davy, and of Faraday, but, in other respects, their work is too often lost sight of in the splendid modern developments of their discoveries. Again, there is another group of discoverer-inventors who occupy an intermediate position between the abstract discoverers above named and the inventors and adapters of still more recent times. To this group belong the names of Pixii and Saxton, Holmes and Nollet, Wilde, Varley, Siemens, Wheatstone, and Pacinotti, who was the first ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract—Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherch movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... strongly show their brotherhood with the other Spanish peoples. In this connection the spirit of their renowned kinsman, Don Quixote de la Mancha, is often in evidence. When one of them mounts his Rocinante in defense of some particularly attractive abstract proposition, nothing less than a blow from a windmill will bring him back to reality. And so when any person or group of persons become enamored of an idea they are unwilling to brook contradiction or compromise. The inclination of the majority ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... adjectives are made abstract substantives, by adding the termination ness; and a few in hood or head, noting character or qualities: as white, whiteness; hard, hardness; great, greatness; skilful, skilfulness, unskilfulness; godhead, manhood, maidenhead, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... to be one of the later writings of Plato, in which the style has begun to alter, and the dramatic and poetical element has become subordinate to the speculative and philosophical. In the development of abstract thought great advances have been made on the Protagoras or the Phaedrus, and even on the Republic. But there is a corresponding diminution of artistic skill, a want of character in the persons, a laboured march in the ...
— Philebus • Plato
... cold, stern, ignorant men, who had an intense hatred for the mere accomplishments of life. Each had two daughters, who, with the natural tastes of the sex, were not averse to the graces of education, in the abstract, but could not bear to see them displayed by their "stuck-up, pauper cousin," as they often termed that hapless young lady in private conversation. A kind offer, which she was imprudent enough, to make, to ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... them, too, inculcating this doctrine not as a cold and abstract principle, but as an imperative act of daily piety, and embodying it in ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... handle. Our natures are so sentient that objects of sense please us best. It is from this that object lessons attract the young. They can best apprehend what their senses can grasp. It is very difficult for the mind to grasp abstract truth. But right here lies the basis of all true education. The power to comprehend truth in the abstract, to take hold of its ramifications as subjects of thought, and reduce them to order in the mind, so as ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... curious to find this current as a folk-tale at Palena, in the Abruzzi, without any material variation except in the conclusion. My friend, Mr. E. Sidney Hartland, has favoured me with the following abstract of the Italian version, as given in vol. iii. of the "Archivio per lo studio delle Tradizioni Popolari" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Avarice unmistakable gleamed from their little, glittering, ratlike eyes, but he was sure that they would sell out for no small sum, and in so far as he could remember there had been in his pockets, when he came here, not more than five or six louis. Doubtless the old Michel had managed to abstract those in his daily offices about the room, for Ste. Marie knew that the clothes hung in a closet across from his bed. He had seen them there once when the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... a vivid sense of the pain and terror of life. He had been clamoring to have those Reds punished; but somehow or other he had thought of this punishment in an abstract way, a thing you could attend to by a wave of the hand. He hadn't quite realized the physical side of it, what a messy and bloody job it would prove. Two hours and more he had listened to the thud of a whip on human flesh, and each separate ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Highness has always approv'd your self a true Friend to our Country; I though it my Duty to inscribe, or, as it were, to consecrate this Abstract of our History to your Patronage. That being guarded by so powerful a Protection, it might with greater Authority and Safety come abroad in the World. Farewel, most illustrious Prince; May the great God Almighty for ever bless and ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... free banking accused a restrictionist of defrauding the poor or defacing tombstones. Politics, too, home and foreign, is a fertile source of difference of opinion; and yet gross abuse, on paper, of each other, by political disputants, discussing abstract questions having no present relation to power or pay, are very ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... among whom he moves, it is almost certain that he will make many mistakes, if not insure failure. Now few results are apt to be more delusive than a mere collection of words, or even of short sentences. The instances of "a dead policeman" as a Non-aryan equivalent for the abstract term "death" which the inquirer wanted; of the rejoinder of "what do you want?" for the repeated outstretching of the "middle finger," a special term for which was sought, and numerous other mistakes, are often perfectly avoidable, ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... nature and her works, and specially of the Celestiall courses, by reason of the continuall motion of the heauens, searching after the first mouer, and from thence by degrees comming to know and consider of the substances separate & abstract, which we call the diuine intelligences or good Angels (Demones) they were the first that instituted sacrifices of placation, with inuocations and worship to them, as to Gods; and inuented and stablished all the rest of the obseruances and ceremonies ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... interesting caller. It was his ambition to be first with every piece of intelligence, and he enjoyed telling news, even of a harassing description. Mr. Lawrence believed that Miss Abingdon's niece was already engaged to Peter Ogilvie, and he began by a series of deft questions to try to abstract the definite information that he ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... reviewers, have been further allowed for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a writer of causeries, I do not think he has been surpassed among Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment. The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most interesting books in literature) the passages and traits, the anecdotes and phrases, which have made most mark in the general ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... delight in the abstract and in the concrete of strolling and lounging about the June meadows; of lying in pickle for half a day or more in this pastoral sea, laved by the great tide, shone upon by the virile sun, drenched to the very marrow of your being with the warm and wooing influences ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... mortal sense Christian Science seems abstract, but the process is simple and the results are sure if the Science is understood. The tree must be good, which 459:27 produces good fruit. Guided by divine Truth and not guesswork, the theologus (that is, the student - the Christian and scientific expounder - of the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... to mention my everlasting Abstract (340/5. The "Origin of Species" was abbreviated from the MS. of an unpublished book.) to you again, for I am sure I have bothered you far more than enough about it; but as you allude to its previous publication I may say ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... for that same purpose—to have a good time; it was such a jolly wild place to let the Old Nick loose in; and now it seems that's to be taken for a man's natural level, and the best that he's capable of! Then I met you. You would voluntarily give up ease and luxury, for a time, for the sake of an abstract idea—whether misguided or not, I will not say, the fact remains the same—and I swear it was a new revelation to me. It was strange and perverse, and it was deuced taking! Then I tried to get you to include me among the objects of your ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... argument were wanting to prove the originality of the magnetic needle as used in China, the circumstance of their having ingrafted upon it their most ancient and favourite mythology, their cycles, constellations, elements, and, in short, an abstract of all their astronomical or astrological science, is quite sufficient to settle that point. Those who are acquainted with the Chinese character will not readily admit that their long established superstitions should be found incorporated on an ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... heard nor saw anything to justify the belief of any mental change in the opinions of Mr. Paine previous to his death; but that being very ill and in pain, chiefly arising from the skin being removed in some parts by long lying, he was generally too uneasy to enjoy conversation on abstract subjects. This, then, is the best evidence that can be procured on this subject, and we publish it while the contravening parties are yet alive, and with the authority ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... that accounts for the love of truth in mathematics and algebra may be extended to morals, politics, natural philosophy, and other studies, where we consider not the other abstract relations of ideas, but their real connexions and existence. But beside the love of knowledge, which displays itself in the sciences, there is a certain curiosity implanted in human nature, which is a passion derived from a ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... that countryman, then? I deem I have half a guess of you; your name is Old Honesty, is it not? So the old gentleman blushed, and said, Not Honesty, in the abstract,[207] but Honest is my name; and I wish that my nature shall agree to what I ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... call Cavour one of the greatest of statesmen. Those grounds are not what he hoped to do, but what he did. He was not a Prometheus chained to a rock, who hopes till hope creates the thing it contemplates. Constitutionally he was easily discouraged. In the abstract he rather exaggerated difficulties than minimised them; but in the face of any present obstacle an invincible confidence came over him in his power to surmount it. As he once wrote of himself—moderate in opinion, ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... has been sharpened by seeing it exemplified, not in the form of expressed opinions only, but in the form of private actions, for Mr. Mill was not one of those, who, to sympathy with their fellow men in the abstract, join indifference to them in the concrete. There came from him generous acts that corresponded with his generous sentiments. I say this, not from second-hand knowledge, but having in mind a remarkable example known only to myself and a few friends. I have hesitated whether to give this example, ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease Luccia and Irene about them, seeking for further information as to why they ever came to retrograde from a position so heroically taken, one of such serious import to human progress, and to condescend once more ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... in those trifling logical schools that are among us. They are so far from minding chimeras and fantastical images made in the mind that none of them could comprehend what we meant when we talked to them of a man in the abstract as common to all men in particular (so that though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our fingers, yet none of them could perceive him) and yet distinct from every one, as if he were some monstrous Colossus or giant; yet, for all this ignorance ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... man would scarcely suffice to obtain these things if men did not mutually assist one another. As money has presented us with an abstract of everything, it has come to pass that its image above every other usually occupies the mind of the multitude, because they can imagine hardly any kind of joy without the accompanying idea of ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... 116. Having perceived, by abstract meditation, that the Spirit or Self is distinct from its three bodies (viz. the gross, subtle and causal bodies), and that it is a portion of the one Spirit of the Universe (Brahma), every man ought to worship K.rish.na by means of that ...
— The Siksha-Patri of the Swami-Narayana Sect • Professor Monier Williams (Trans.)
... poor. If any one strongly impressed with the power of the human mind to triumph over circumstances will contend that the parishioners of Basset might nevertheless have been a very superior class of people, I have nothing to urge against that abstract proposition; I only know that, in point of fact, the Basset mind was in strict keeping with its circumstances. The muddy lanes, green or clayey, that seemed to the unaccustomed eye to lead nowhere but into each other, did really lead, with patience, to a distant high-road; but there ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... roundabout fashion, to the matrimonial relation. His treatment, far from suggesting an academic aloofness, was as concrete as characterization and conversation could make it; no one would have supposed, at first glance, that what chiefly moved him was a chaste abstract Platonic regard for the whole gentler sex. In short, people—such seemed to be his thesis—might very advantageously separate, and most informally too, as soon as they discovered they ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... attainment of womanhood's maturity is the beautiful, the divine freshness of girlhood. For man, the cost of the attainment of manhood's full strength and power is equally great, and equally sad,—his divine faith in human nature, his divine belief that abstract justice and right and truth rule ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... them together, nothing under heaven but the love and confidence they had in one name. Their love of right and independence wouldn't have been strong enough, and besides a good many of them got disheartened. A hungry stomach is a pretty stout arguer against abstract questions. I have seen my father crying like a child for the wants and sufferings he was obliged to see, ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... this subject, I shall not regard it in the first instance in reference to the present position of the slaveholding States, or the difficulties which lie in the way of their emancipating their slaves, but as a naked, abstract question—whether it is better that the institution of praedial and domestic slavery should, or should not, exist in civilized society. And though some of my remarks may seem to have such a tendency, let me not be understood as taking upon myself to determine that it is better ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of that malignant philosophy, which, disregarding the actual state of the world, and estimating at nothing the miseries of a vast portion of the human race, can coolly and deliberately pursue, through oceans of blood, abstract systems for the attainment of some fancied untried good, were gathered in the French West Indies. Instead of proceeding in the correction of any abuses which might exist, by those slow and cautious steps which gradually introduce reform without ruin, which ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... have already been able to accomplish ought to give weight to our words. We speak not from abstract conviction, but from experience; not as mere enthusiasts, but as men of practical common sense, holding in our hands the means of escape from the present condition of society, and from that still more frightful state ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... much interest in abstract statements. 'You remember,' she said, turning to Baruch, 'that man Chorley as has the big farm on the left-hand side just afore you come to the common? He wasn't a Surrey man: he came out ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... hesitated to speak, my good Galeotti? and didst thou think thy speaking it would offend me?" said the King. "Alack, I know that thou art well sensible that the path of royal policy cannot be always squared (as that of private life ought invariably to be) by the abstract maxims of religion and of morality. Wherefore do we, the Princes of the earth, found churches and monasteries, make pilgrimages, undergo penances, and perform devotions with which others may dispense, unless ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... were the greatest instruments of thought which were possessed by the Greek philosopher; having the same power over the mind which was exerted by abstract ideas, they were also capable of practical application. Many curious and, to the early thinker, mysterious properties of them came to light when they were compared with one another. They admitted of infinite multiplication and construction; in Pythagorean triangles ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... The abstract theorizing of one philosopher can never satisfy the individual in regard to the varied manifestations of friendship, and it is therefore interesting and profitable to note what various writers have said about this world-wide force under the varying conditions of the past and the ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... and then had himself suffocated in a warm bath, merely because he was attacked with a perfectly curable illness. The philosophy which alone professed itself able to heal men's sorrows applauded the supposed courage of a voluntary death, and it was of too abstract, too fantastic, and too purely theoretical a character to furnish them with any real or lasting consolations. No sentiment caused more surprise to the Roman world than the famous one preserved in ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... is no mere abstract dogma of theology, but it touches our daily life at all points, and is essential to the fullness of our satisfaction and our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Dean Milman in his History of Christianity. He says: "This Being [the Word or the Wisdom] was more or less distinctly impersonated, according to the more popular or more philosophic, the more material or the more abstract, notions of the age or people. This was the doctrine from the Ganges, or even the shores of the Yellow Sea, to the Ilissus; it was the fundamental principle of the Indian religion and the Indian ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... superior being, in the other would form only an attribute—swell the power and amplify the character of a Jupiter, a Mars, a Venus, or a Pan. It is in the nature of man, that personal divinities once created and adored, should present more vivid and forcible images to his fancy than abstract personifications of physical objects and moral impressions. Thus, deities of this class would gradually rise into pre-eminence and popularity above those more vague and incorporeal—and (though I guard myself from absolutely solving in this manner the enigma of ancient theogonies) ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Bayle on this matter that I could find in his works. But remembering Laurentius Valla's Dialogue on Free Will, in opposition to Boethius, which I have already mentioned, I thought it would be opportune to quote it in abstract, retaining the dialogue form, and then to continue from where it ends, keeping up the fiction it initiated; and that less with the purpose of enlivening the subject, than in order to explain myself towards the end of my dissertation as clearly ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Bruno had suggested a new course of action so much as that he had supplied a new motive power. To do good, to give alms, to be kind to poor and sick people, Doucebelle had been taught already: but the reason for it was either the abstract notion that it was the right thing to do, or that it would help to increase her little ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... to this sacrifice. I did not entirely abjure the creed which had, with great copiousness and eloquence, been defended in these letters. Besides, mixed up with abstract reasonings were numberless passages which elucidated the character and history of my friend. These were too precious to be consigned to oblivion; and to take them out of their present connection and arrangement would be to ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a woman like Alice Oke; and if the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint, can't succeed, how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with mere wretched words—words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, an impotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke of Okehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite and strange,—an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... lingering remembrances they may be led to read his straightforward account, he trusts to be able to show them that he has had no choice but to adopt the intellectual conclusions which offend them;—that the difference between them and him turns on questions of Learning, History, Criticism and Abstract Thought;—and that to make their results (if indeed they have ever deeply and honestly investigated the matter) the tests of his spiritual state, is to employ unjust weights and a false balance, which ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... to his chamber, seated himself by a table upon which were books and papers, and soon became lost in sad memories of the past that strongly linked themselves, why he could not tell, for they had no visible connection, with the present. For a long time he sat in this abstract mood, his hand shading his face from the light. At last he arose slowly and went to a drawer, from which he took a small morocco case, and, returning with it to the table, seated himself again near the lamp. He opened the case, and let the light fall strongly upon the miniature of a most ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... therefore at once abandoned. But knowing that the jurisprudence of Masonry is founded, like all legal science, on abstract principles, which govern and control its entire system, I deemed it to be a better course to present these principles to my readers in an elementary and methodical treatise, and to develop from them those necessary deductions which reason ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... Our imperfect abstract gives but a meagre notion of the fulness and completeness of this admirable work. It will accomplish its object, if it send the reader to the book itself. The appearance of the volume is timely. Events and circumstances have prepared the minds of our countrymen to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... desert would rally to his armies and fight for a short time; but at the first disaster, or whenever they became tired of the discipline and regularity of the army, they would mount their camels and return to the desert, generally managing on the way to abstract from the farms of those on their route either a horse, cattle, or some other objects which would pay them for the labors they ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... and contrast with the horizontal lines of the flat roofs and square walls. We think it right, therefore, to give the cottage the relief and contrast which, in reality, it possessed, even though we are at present speaking of it in the abstract. ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... head the creaking wings of birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment, that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... declared, "ah! in the abstract they are wonderful, but in the concrete they do not interest me. Maxendorf has come here, doubtless, with great schemes in ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... burned when they talked of the Cove, and he longed to jump up and plead its defence; but he knew that it would be worse than useless and he held himself in—but they didn't know, they didn't know. It enraged him most when they spoke of it as some lifeless, abstract thing, some old rubbish-heap that offended their sight, and then he thought of its beauties, of the golden sand and the huddling red and grey cottages clustering over the sea as though for protection. You might fancy that the waves slapped them on the back for good-fellowship when they dashed ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... project or overhang in some ancient city's walls. There are many such imperfect syncretisms or eclecticisms in the history of philosophy. A modern philosopher, though emancipated from scholastic notions of essence or substance, might still be seriously affected by the abstract idea of necessity; or though accustomed, like Bacon, to criticize abstract notions, might not extend his criticism ...
— Sophist • Plato
... voyage of Nearchus. Of this voyage we are now to speak; and as it is curious and important, not merely on account of the geographical knowledge it conveys, but also from the insight it gives us into the commercial transactions of the countries which he visited, we shall give rather a full abstract of it, availing ourselves of the light which has been thrown upon it by the learned and judicious ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... young and very brilliant journalist who had once given me lessons in philosophy, and with whom I maintained a friendship in spite of his ultra-radical politics. He reminded me now and then of Geoffrey Owen, but his enthusiasm was of a dryer sort; not humanity, but the abstract idea of progress inspired him; not the abolition of individual suffering, but the perfecting of his logical conceptions in the sphere of politics was his stimulating hope. And there was in him a strong alloy of personal ambition and a stronger of personal passion. Rather to my surprise ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... helps him to keep the constant stock of goods that at any time is a potential million of dollars. A permanent body of any kind, if it is made up of shifting tissues, is commonly described by the use of an abstract term. A waterfall, made as it is of rapidly changing drops of water, is spoken of as a "water power," since the power is the abiding thing. An endless series of living human beings is described as "humanity," since that remains through all personal changes. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... that he loves France bounded by the Rhine, and the Pyrenees, and its principal city Paris, and its history and so on. But the man who loves humanity—what does he love? There is such a thing as a state, as a nation; there is the abstract conception of man; but humanity as a concrete idea does ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... state, thou perfect model Of heaven itself, and abstract of the angels, Forgive the late disturbance of my soul! I'm clear by nature, as a rockless stream; But they dig through the gravel of my heart, And raise the mud of passions up to cloud me; Therefore let me conjure you, do not go; 'Tis said, the Guise ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... some pieces on human life and manners, such as (to use my Lord Bacon's expression) come home to men's business and bosoms, I thought it more satisfactory to begin with considering man in the abstract, his nature and his state; since, to prove any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition and ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Miss Spragg's wardrobe her dinner-dresses were not many. She had ordered a number the year before but, vexed at her lack of use for them, had tossed them over impatiently to the maid. Since then, indeed, she and Mrs. Spragg had succumbed to the abstract pleasure of buying two or three more, simply because they were too exquisite and Undine looked too lovely in them; but she had grown tired of these also—tired of seeing them hang unworn in her wardrobe, like ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... with something of suspicion. Now Jacko had been introduced to Gangoil under German auspices, and had soon come to a decision that it would be a good thing and a just to lock up all the Brownbies in the great jail of the colony at Brisbane. He probably knew nothing of law or justice in the abstract, but he greatly valued law when exercised against those he hated. The western fence of which mention has been made ran down to the Mary River, hitting it about four miles west of Medlicot's Mill; so that there was ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... Plays—those founded on Bible history—and Miracle Plays—those founded on the lives of the saints. These plays were performed both in the churches and in the open air. They were written usually by the clergy. Gradually there grew up a play in which the places of religious characters were taken by abstract virtues and vices personified, and plays called Moralities were produced. They were played chiefly by tradesmen's guilds. Alongside the sacred drama are to be found occasional secular dramatic attempts, farces, carnival ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... me what books I should take if I were contemplating a visit to the Dark Continent, like Lord RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. The question, in the abstract, and without reference to my own personality, is an interesting one, and no doubt human fallibility would, in the case you suppose, induce me to take several volumes of my own Gleanings with me,—not so much for their intrinsic merits, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... alone to a drawing-room, and she does go alone. Right here this independent girl makes a mistake. It is granted that the girl with brains and principle to bear herself discreetly during office hours is probably able—in the abstract—to exercise the same ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the writers who have given such beautiful pictures of our native land and military renown, and to the schoolmasters, who have instilled their words into the souls of the people. Marvellous power of language, which can incite a prosaic peasant lad to sacrifice life joyfully for an abstract ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... descent of the glaciers, and on the zone of perpetual congelation in the antarctic islands, may be passed over by any one not interested in these curious subjects, or the final recapitulation alone may be read. I shall, however, here give only an abstract, and must refer for details to the Thirteenth Chapter and the Appendix of the former ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... character; for, in opposition to the above, it may be said that the claim of the Southern whites that they love the Negro better than the Northern whites do is in a manner true. Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation. A number of them have heroically spent their lives in this effort (and just here I wish to say that when the ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... one of kind but of development and degree. Man has these faculties developed, the animals have them undeveloped. In the "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," published by his son, is a letter from Mr. Darwin to W. Graham, written in 1881, from which I quote the following: "I have no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless, you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done. But then, with me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... against them'—an important increment of his conditions; there is no doubt that 'the King's name is a tower of strength, which they upon the adverse faction want'—and he continued through all his letters arguing the question on its abstract merits, and repeating the topic that had been over and over again urged, but without reference to the actual state of things and the means of resistance. It seems, however, pretty clear that he will oppose this Bill just as he did the last, and he will ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... distinctly. There is not room to give this petition and the answers in full, but as all the subsequent troubles between Charles and the people of England arose out of this difficulty of his young wife's bringing in so strong a Catholic influence with her to the realm, it may be well to give an abstract of some of the principal ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... land, with every comfort about him, paying no taxes but those for the improvement of his property, feeling the government rein only as a salutary check to lawlessness, and looking stedfastly abroad, is not very likely, for abstract notions of right and equality, to sacrifice reality, or to suppose that Mr. Baldwin, amiable as he is, is infallible: whilst Mr. Baldwin himself, the ostensible, but not the real leader of the out-and-out reformers, will pause before he even dreams of alienating the ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... princes are more frequently influenced by views of temporal advantage, than by considerations of abstract and speculative truth. The partial and increasing favor of Constantine may naturally be referred to the esteem which he entertained for the moral character of the Christians; and to a persuasion, that the propagation of the gospel would inculcate the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of Cornelius's death, my father had made a transition to that of Socrates, and was giving my uncle Toby an abstract of his pleading before his judges;—'twas irresistible:—not the oration of Socrates,—but my father's temptation to it.—He had wrote the Life of Socrates (This book my father would never consent to publish; 'tis in manuscript, with some other tracts of his, in the family, all, or most ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... revivalists. Harkey moved the publication of a monthly, The Revivalist, which Synod, however, declared "inexpedient." Through the endeavors of Kurtz a committee was appointed to bring in a report on the "New Measures," which was referred back to the committee. In 1844 Synod resolved to issue an "Abstract of the Doctrines and Practise of the Ev. Luth. Synod of Maryland." Fourteen doctrinal articles were prepared by H. L. Baugher, B. Kurtz, and S. W. Harkey, containing, among other statements, also the following: "We believe that the Scriptures teach that God has given to man, as a natural ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... even than she had imagined it would be—harder because she realized now that they did not speak the same language. She felt that she had struck against something as dry and cold and impersonal as an abstract principle. A ludicrous premonition assailed her that in a little while he would begin to talk about his public duty. This lack of genuine emotion, which had at first appeared to contradict his sentimental point of view, was revealed ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... tell, Councillor Mikulin did not answer that question. He drew Mr. Razumov into familiar conversation. It is the peculiarity of Russian natures that, however strongly engaged in the drama of action, they are still turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas. This conversation (and others later on) need not be recorded. Suffice it to say that it brought Mr. Razumov as we know him to the test of another faith. There was nothing official in its expression, and Mr. Razumov was led to defend his attitude ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of his life, disregarded all semblance of danger. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes in complete enjoyment of Hussein's cigarettes, which were really excellent, and said, in the even, matter-of-fact tones of one who discusses an abstract problem— ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... antiquity, and a rich literature extending back twenty or thirty centuries; yet no history, no chronology, no annals. They have a philosophy as acute, profound and, spiritual as any in the world, which is yet harmoniously associated with the coarsest superstitions. With a belief so abstract that it almost escapes the grasp of the most speculative intellect, is joined the notion that sin can be atoned for by bathing in the Ganges or repeating a text of the Veda. With an ideal pantheism ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... protoplasm. That individual is a result of the cosmic order, the inevitable product of cause and effect. We know that. We must admit that he is just as much a fact of the universe as a shower of rain or a storm at sea that swallows a ship. We freely grant in the abstract that there must be, at the present stage of evolution, a certain number of persons with unfair minds. We are quite ready to contemplate such an individual with philosophy—until it happens that, in the course of the progress of the solar system, he runs up against ourselves. Then ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... relations in which we are placed at our birth, and the corresponding beliefs or prejudices which we have unconsciously imbibed. Such influences, it may perhaps be said, are of incomparably greater importance than the direct exhortations to which we listen, or than the abstract doctrines which we accept in words, but which receive their whole colouring from the concrete facts to which they conform. Now, I ask how such discipline can be conceived without some kind of competition; or, rather, what would ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... bad;—his father was a villain; his grand-uncle a murderer; his mother a woman of violent temper; and himself, with all this legacy, a man of powerful passions. If evil is in any degree to be palliated because it is hereditary, those who most condemn it in the abstract, may still look with compassionate leniency upon ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... am inclined to think it was good policy. The belief in the descent theory is slowly spreading in England (In October 1867 he wrote to Mr. Wallace:—"Mr. Warrington has lately read an excellent and spirited abstract of the 'Origin' before the Victoria Institute, and as this is a most orthodox body, he has gained the name of the Devil's Advocate. The discussion which followed during three consecutive meetings is very ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... youthful creed. If it only led to the knowledge of good and evil, it were well; if it only taught us to despise the illusions and retire from the pleasures of the world, it would be better. But it destroys our belief—it dims our perception of all abstract truth, virtue, and happiness; it turns life into a jest, and a very dull one too. It makes us indifferent to beauty, and incredulous of goodness; it teaches us to consider self as the centre on which all actions turn, and to which all ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... man of action, who is more real than all the philosophers—Don Quixote. There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was, in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Government of India acting fairly in these matters is immense. If anything is done, or attempted to be done, to help the natives, a general howl is raised, which reverberates in England, and finds sympathy and support there. I feel quite bewildered sometimes what to do. Everyone is, in the abstract, for justice, moderation, and suchlike excellent qualities; but when one comes to apply such principles so as to affect anybody's interests, then a change comes ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... better not go into the abstract question, Minnie. I suppose, Mr. Cavendish, you go back to Oxford ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... stationary, or wandering near. Some chosen few were within; two caryatides gentlemen leaned one on each side of the fireplace, and in the centre of the rug stood a remarkably handsome man, of fine figure, perfectly dressed, his whole air exquisitely scornful, excruciatingly miserable, and loftily abstract. 'Twas wonderful, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange! how one so lost to all sublunary concerns, so far above the follies of inferior mortals, as he looked, came here—so extremely well-dressed too! ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... claim—one of the most stupendous claims that He ever made—that He utterly, absolutely, realizes that ideal. He says, "I do always the things that please him." And then, thirdly, we have the revelation of the secret by which He has been able to realize the ideal, to make the abstract concrete, to bring down the fair vision of divine purpose to the level of actual human life and experience, and the secret is declared in the opening words: "He that sent me is with me; my Father ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... and this likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex of experience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifies particular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions,— abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the course of its normal operation. As soon as we think at all, we speak of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size,—of uniformities ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... so admirably brought out by Browning in his 'Ring and the Book,' so it is also, I think, a truism that every man has (not always consciously) a philosophy. A philosophy is, after all, a point of view; it is not necessarily an abstract academic position; nor is it always a well-defined attempt to discover the ultimate purpose of things. It can be, and very often is, a point of view ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... as the details. There may be, perhaps, some complication of the disease—the bronchial tubes, possibly, may be also inflamed; but I believe that treatment for the intestinal organs is very much more important and necessary, and more urgently required than for the lungs. Persistent study of abstract matters, and certain violent passions, have induced serious disorders in that vital mechanism. However, we are in time to set these conditions right. Nothing is too seriously affected. You will easily get your friend round again," he remarked ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... place Stanley says: "Livingstone followed the dictates of duty. Never was such a willing slave to that abstract virtue. His inclinations impel him home, the fascinations of which it requires the sternest resolution to resist. With every foot of new ground he travelled over he forged a chain of sympathy which should hereafter bind the Christian nations in bonds ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... of Aesthetics has among the Germans, by nature a speculative rather than a practical people, led to this consequence, that works of art, and tragedies more especially, have been executed on abstract theories, more or less misunderstood. It was natural that these tragedies should produce no effect on the theatre; nay, they are, in general, unsuited for representation, and wholly devoid of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning on abstract principles. Like some untaught arithmeticians, their calculations came out correct, but they could not have gone through ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Morton, in this paper, proposals, as to the abstract propriety of which I must now waive delivering any opinion. Some of them appear to me reasonable and just; and, although I have no express instructions from the King upon the subject, yet I assure ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... or family, nationality or worldly interest, the priest is a living machine, to be used in whatever direction his tyrant dictates. Every priest, therefore, be he cardinal or deacon, moves and acts the slave of an abstract idea; an idea incompatible ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... can see you smirking and posturing before the abstract mirror, which is your constant companion. It pleases you, no doubt, to think that anybody should pay you the compliment of making you the object and the subject of a whole letter. Perhaps when you have read it to the end you will alter your mood, since ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... toward realization, projects the remembrance externally in an hallucinatory form. It is this remembrance, and not the words themselves, that the observer has seen. It is thus demonstrated that rapid reading is in great part a work of divination, but not of abstract divination. It is an externalization of memories which take advantage, to a certain extent, of the partial realization that they find here and there in order to ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... so cut, one that her mother and Mr. Fenwick might have shown a more active interest in, instead of saying it was time for all of us to be in bed. She did not, however, ascribe to them any external preoccupation—merely an abstract love of Truth; for was it not nearly one ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... and his lips quivered. 'It's my job,' he said, 'and I'm not going to talk against it. I was arguing about country-work in the abstract over there in England.' Then it was that the boy came in sight with the letters. Reeve looked up and watched him with real pleasure and gratitude. He said something to him in the native language that seemed to amuse the boy very ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... the cause of both Tories and Chouans in the abstract. From the beginning it was clearly a desperate cause, and, admitting that the motive which prompted it was generous, honorable, and praiseworthy, nothing could be expected to ensue from its advocacy but accumulated disaster and greater ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... which he excelled in early life were in this direction, and at no time in his career did he display any emotional enthusiasm on subjects of general concern. But, on the other hand, he was unflinching in his adherence to abstract principle. Though not carried away by the extravagance of Rousseau, he was thoroughly discontented with the political state of Geneva. He was by early conviction a Democrat in the broadest sense of the term. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more perfect example of what it was ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... that its effect had been killed. Precisely how Illis had effected this he did not know, nor did he care to inquire. Illis had been forced into an iniquitous bargain; and, since he had taken the first chance to free himself from it, the question of abstract right or wrong was not a subject for ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... association; he had to arrange for the buying and shipping, and the rest was leisure. He could now have gone away somewhere as far as time went. So can a fish live in trees—as far as time goes. And in the daily riding, riding, riding over the range he found the opportunity for abstract thought which the frontier life had ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... notions of an exciting and somewhat disturbing sort into Roschen's little head. If one young girl might get married, so might another, no doubt she thought; and it is conceivable that from this mental statement of a rational abstract possibility her thoughts may have passed on to consideration of the concrete possibilities involved in her own relations with the good-looking Gustav Strauss, son of the rich bird-dealer, or with the good-looking young shoemaker, Ludwig Bauer, who lived ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... was, a resident, who for the more love of the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is perfect—like ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... African slave trade. But in the slave holding parts of the United States, the trade is as brisk as ever. They buy and sell you as though you were brute beasts. The North has done much—her opinion of slavery in the abstract is known. But in regard to the South, we adopt the opinion of the New York Evangelist—"We have advanced so far, that the cause apparently waits for a more effectual door to be thrown open than has been yet." We are about to point you to that more effectual door. Look around you, ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... 'You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters;' and if all the rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, they would have said the same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English culture, all that great erudition which, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... the same paper when we first heard our father reading it to our mother. Farther on the old subscriber proceeded to 'maintain', and recalled attention to the fact that it was just exactly as he had said. After which he made a few abstract, incoherent remarks about the 'surrounding district', and concluded by stating that he 'must now conclude', and thanking the editor for trespassing on the ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... 'tis hard to passe between the points of both unwounded. But yet, me thinks, the endeavour to advance the Civill Power, should not be by the Civill Power condemned; nor private men, by reprehending it, declare they think that Power too great. Besides, I speak not of the men, but (in the Abstract) of the Seat of Power, (like to those simple and unpartiall creatures in the Roman Capitol, that with their noyse defended those within it, not because they were they, but there) offending none, I think, but those without, or such within (if there be any such) as favour ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... fond of society, and justified his taste in this respect by the flattering belief that by his presence he was extending the power of the Church; certainly favoring an ambition which could not be described as being moderate. The bishop had no abstract prejudice against gentlemen who wore red hats, and under ordinary circumstances would have welcomed his brother churchman with unaffected cordiality, not to say sympathy; but in the present instance, however gracious his mien and honeyed his expressions, he only looked upon the cardinal as a dangerous ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... to Napoleon upon his graduation read thus:—"This young man is reserved and studious, he prefers study to any amusement, and enjoys reading the best authors, applies himself earnestly to the abstract sciences, cares little for anything else. He is silent, and loves solitude. He is capricious, haughty, and excessively egotisical, talks little, but is quick and energetic in his replies, prompt and severe in his repartees, has great pride and ambition, aspiring ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... hear of his putting it off any longer. Sir Edmund had been harping on this string ever since he came back from Germany, had made it both a general and a particular request, not only urging him to matrimony in the abstract, but pushing him into the arms of every young woman in the country. Ambrose had promised, procrastinated, temporized; but at last he was at the end of his evasions, and his poor father had taken the tone of supplication. "He thinks immensely of the name, of the ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... introduced this tale into vol. i., p. 223, notes on chapt. iii., apparently not knowing that it was in The Nights. He gives a mere abstract, omitting all the verse, and he borrowed it either from the Halbat al-Kumayt (chapt. xiv.) or from Al-Mas'udi (chapt. cxi.). See the French translation, vol. vi. p. 340. I am at pains to understand why M. C. Barbier de Maynard ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... to me, then, idle to thresh over old straw when the grain is not only winnowed, but gone to the mill. And so I am not here to discuss abstract questions: as, for example, whether in the year 1898 the United States was wise in going to war with Spain, though on that I might not greatly disagree with the malcontents; or as to the wisdom of expansion; or as to the possibility of a republic's maintaining its authority over a people without ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... among the Harleian MSS. contains little remarkable except some letters from Henry VIII's amb'r. in Spain, in 1518, of which, you may see an abstract in ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... that led to its being formed, and that was further cemented by its formation: "Willingly do I recall and linger upon these days and months, extending even to years, in which common studies of this abstract nature bound us together. It was the romance—the poetry—of speculation and friendship. All the vexed questions of the schools were attempted by our united strength, after our higher guide had set the example. The thorny wilds of logic were pleasant as an enchanted ground; its driest ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... invented for the express purpose. To protect the book, we have none but farcical means. Place a few bricks one atop the other; join them with mortar; and the law will defend your wall. Build up in writing an edifice of your thoughts; and it will be open to any one, without serious impediment, to abstract stones from it, even to take the whole, if it suit him. A rabbit-hutch is property; the work of the mind is not. If the animal has eccentric views as regards the possessions of others, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... and Rolling Stock," read before the Institution of Civil Engineers, in England, with an abstract on the discussion thereon, has been forwarded to us by the publishers, William Clowes and Sons, Stamford street ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... on Idealism must be read by all who believe themselves capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." The most ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... from the public. They gave a substantial proof of their gratitude to Park, by permitting him to publish his travels for his own benefit; and a complete narrative of his journey from his own pen was speedily announced to be in preparation. An abstract, drawn up by Mr. Bryan Edwards, from Park's Notes, was printed for private circulation among the members of the Association in the meantime; it was also enriched by a valuable Memoir by Major Rennel, on African Geography. This publication afterwards ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... correct the expression. To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing himself in reveries, a sea voyage is full of subjects for meditation: but then they are the wonders of the deep, and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes. I delighted to loll over the quarter-railing, or climb to the maintop, of a calm day, and muse for hours together on the tranquil bosom of a summer's sea; to gaze upon the piles of golden clouds just peering above the horizon, fancy them some fairy realms, and people ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... that in this part of his doctrine—and it is an important part—the brilliant French writer, in his endeavours to make philosophizing more concrete and practical, makes it too abstract. Intuition is not a process over against and quite distinct from conceptual thought. Both are moments in the total process of man's attempt to come to terms with the universe, and too great emphasis on either distorts and falsifies the situation ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... liberated him: he had been overreached and trepanned by one set of white men, and he naturally looked on his second captors as more successful rivals in the human, or rather inhuman, Guinea trade; therefore, this event lessened not his hatred for white men in the abstract. ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... whisky. They were still discussing when, an hour later, they, too, disappeared into the darkness that swallowed up the trail to Ashley Ranch. That was the first of many such services. The preaching was always of the simplest kind, abstract questions being avoided and the concrete in those wonderful Bible tales, dressed in modern and in western garb, set forth. Bill and Hi were more than ever his friends and champions, and the latter was heard exultantly to exclaim ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... examine the nature of exceptions. Exceptions are intended for the protection of the defendant, who is often in this position, that though the plaintiff's case is a good one in the abstract, yet as against him, the particular ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... and atoms"—I said—"For by whatever means or substances the Universe is composed, a mighty Intelligence governs it—and I look to the Cause more than the Effect. For even I am a part of the whole,—I belong to the source of the stream as much as to the stream itself. An abstract, lifeless principle without will or intention or intelligence could not have evolved the splendours of Nature or the intellectual capabilities of man—it could not have given rise to what ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... W. Hough, using the eighteen-and-a-half-inch refractor of the observatory. Inasmuch as these observations are not only of high intrinsic interest, but are in conflict, to some extent, with previous records, a somewhat full abstract of them will be useful: The object of general interest was the great red spot. The outline, shape, and size of this remarkable object has remained without material change from the year 1879, when it was first observed ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... that no effort will be made to cram into their poor little minds, theological dogmas which their tender age prevents them from understanding." Huxley defines his idea of a church as a place in which, "week by week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract propositions in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an ideal of true, just and pure living; a place in which those who are weary of the burden of daily cares should find a moment's rest in the contemplation of the higher life which is possible for all, though attained ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... hushed before the terrible significance of what they beheld. In the abstract, a life-and-death struggle meant little enough to them. Witnessing it, however, violently stirred their deepest emotions. They hated the camp boss, the libertine, drunkard, bully, Arden Laval, who only ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... prudent not to recognize the near and prospective advantages of such a mediator. Accustomed to her parents' extravagant denunciations, and her uncle's more repressed but practical contempt of them, the unfortunate girl early developed a cynical disbelief in the virtues of kinship in the abstract, and a philosophical resignation to its effects upon her personally. Believing that her father and uncle fairly represented the fraternal principle, she was quite prepared for the early defection and distrust of her vagabond and dissipated brother Stephen, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... paradise. In this great city, I, Marco, have often been, and have considered it with diligent attention, observing its whole state and circumstances, and setting down the same in my memorials, of which I shall here give a brief abstract. By common report, this city is an hundred miles in circuit[1]. The streets and lanes are very long and wide, and it has many large market places. On one side of the city there is a clear lake of fresh water, and on the other there is a great river, which enters into the city in many places, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... rooms above, came an endless banging, shrieking and caterwauling from embryonic tenori and virtuosi, such as, within a month, would have cured all but the most persistent music-lovers of any further desire for the expression of that abstract art. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... protect State amendment elections from fraud. Men's right to vote protected by Federal Constitution; state by state enfranchisement would not give this protection to women. Woman Suffrage a national question. Decision on technical and abstract question of Suffrage demands different class of intelligence from election ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... drew the mandatory arrow, and inquired who would go and steal the rice, a rat readily received the order and went off to rob the rice. Drawing another mandatory arrow, he asked who would go and abstract the beans, when once more a rat took over the arrow and started to steal the beans; and one by one subsequently received each an arrow and started on his errand. There only remained the scented taros, so that picking again a mandatory arrow, he ascertained ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... beneficent calling. No money-lender would ever get justice in a British court of law; easier for the camel to thread the needle's eye. That flagrant forgery would be accepted at sight by our vaunted British jury. The only chance was to abstract it ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... may seem somewhat unjustifiable, but if we are to study any building aright, and if we are to interpret in any measure its meaning and symbolism, it cannot wholly be done on any line of abstract aestheticism or archaeological instinct, however intuitive it may be: we must in some measure think of the builders of old times and of the influences which with them produced its inception and have left it to come down the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... attained a high degree of success in these arts; few people will deny that Albert Durer and Rubens, for example, are to be called masters in painting, and in the high kind of painting. The Celtic races, on the other hand, have shown a singular inaptitude for the plastic arts; the abstract, severe character of the Druidical religion, its dealing with the eye of the mind rather than the eye of the body, its having no elaborate temples and beautiful idols, all point this way from the first; its sentiment cannot satisfy itself, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... its classification and its character as a product of our social conditions, as typical of the national character, and so on, and so on. His attitude to the personal aspect of the case, to its tragic significance and the persons involved in it, including the prisoner, was rather indifferent and abstract, as was ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to the fact that he would starve to death and that everybody who had ever seen him would feel it had been a good thing that he had finally died. But this final plea came from him. He wanted nothing except to talk and hear words in order to relieve the loneliness of his days. He would like abstract discussions that had nothing to do with Winkelberg and the Winkelberg misfortunes. His smile now said: "I am useless, worn out and better off dead. But never mind me. My mind is still alive. It still thinks. I wish it didn't. I wish it crawled around like my body. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... strife evidently arises out of the conflict between the interests of an oligarchy based upon slavery and a democracy in which slavery, if it exists at all, exists as a mere accident that may be dispensed with without any radical social revolution. Slavery, as opposed to divine law or to abstract justice, never has brought, nor ever will bring, two countries into conflict with each other; but slavery made indispensable as a peculiar institution, as an organized fact, as a fundamental social ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... to have made a bad choice in pitching upon this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy even for an unbeliever to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.... When to this we add that to the conception of the rational critic it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... position so markedly at variance with the idealism of his later years? In all probability it was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious process. Other writers of the century—Addison, for instance—had spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion, fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square with the general notion This, as Burke points out, is more than questionable in itself, and it was certain ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... was the patrimony and whole estate of two children. With the rear house taken away, the income from the front would not be enough to cover the interest on the mortgage. It was one of those things that occasionally make standing upon abstract principle so very uncomfortable. I confess I never had the courage to ask what was done in their case. I know that the tenement went, and I hope—well, never mind what I hope. It has nothing to do with the case. The house is down, and the main issue ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... hypothesis of an abstract entity produces psychological phenomena by playing upon the brain as a musician upon his instrument be rejected, and these phenomena be held to be the result of cerebral actions, an objection is made that the latter view is "materialistic" and adverse to the notion of an independent, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... as a very great physiologist. When a happy illustration, or even a point of pretty broad humour, occurred to his mind, he hesitated not to apply it to the subject in hand; and in this way, he frequently roused and rivetted attention, when more abstract reasoning might have failed of its aim. On one occasion he happened to dine with a large party, composed chiefly of medical men. As the wine cup circulated, the conversation accidentally took a professional turn, and from the excitation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... the role of landed proprietor in the abstract. He would not have let the Manor and lived elsewhere for the world. He went regularly to church on Sunday morning, though it bored him extremely, because, like Major Pendennis, he thought that "when a gentleman is sur ses ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... things, and Mrs. Viggins, as she called herself,—I cannot imagine a Mr. Viggins for no man in his senses could have married such a creature,—as I was saying, Mrs. Viggins is not at all sacred, and I must endeavor to abstract my mind from her till tomorrow, as far as posserble. My first duty today is to induce Mr. Holcroft to take us to church. It will give the people of Oakville such a pleasing impression to see us driving to church. Of course, I may fail, Mr. Holcroft ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... Angelo, and one of his best imitators; but when his works are compared with those of the great master, or with the masterpieces of the fifteenth century, we see a decline in them. In religious subjects Giovanni was not at home; his most successful works were those which represented sentiment or abstract ideas, because on them he could lavish his skill in execution, and use ornaments that did not suit the simplicity of religious subjects. In the Loggia de' Lanzi, at Florence, there are two groups by him, the Rape of the Sabines ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the former under the name of "A Day with Beethoven." Beethoven was always trying to translate into music the depths of his heart, the subtleties of his spirit, which are not to be explained clearly by words, but which are as definite as words—in fact, more definite; for a word, being an abstract thing, sums up many experiences and comprehends many different meanings. Music is a hundred times more expressive and exact than speech; and it is not only her right to express particular emotions and subjects, it is her duty. If that duty is not fulfilled, the result is ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... luncheon before Mrs. Macallan arrived at Benjamin's cottage. The ensuing conversation between the old lady and myself (of which I have only presented a brief abstract) lasted until quite late in the afternoon. The sun was setting in heavy clouds when we got into the carriage, and the autumn twilight began to fall around us while we were still on ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... fine word, covered with fine clothes, and goes about in pomp and glitter. It builds in the abstract: telescopes for the blind, lutes for the deaf, flowers for the starved. Bah! charity has had little ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... possible—ay, and happens sometimes—that a woman unselfish, unexacting in all her affections, more prone to give than to receive, thinking perhaps very little of love or marriage, may be unconsciously attracted by some imagined perfection in the other sex, and be thus led on through the worship of abstract goodness until she wakes to find that she has learned to love the man. For what is love in its purest and divinest sense, but that innate yearning after perfection which we vainly hope to find in some other ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... done very easily, if your Majesty would assume the risk of the transportation of the money and the return of the gold. As a result, your royal treasury could in a short time be free from obligations, and could aid in the maintenance of this kingdom. [Marginal note: "Abstract this clause, and send it to the viceroy of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... came the promised vehicle, which was no hackney coach, but a private chariot, having behind it a footman, whose legs, although somewhat large for his body, might, as mere abstract legs, have set themselves up for models at the Royal Academy. It was quite exhilarating to hear the clash and bustle with which he banged the door and jumped up behind after Mrs Nickleby was in; and as that good lady was perfectly unconscious ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... he felt his ears tingling and his face getting red, as they approached the drive. It was crowded. They were kept standing a minute or two at the crossing. He made a desperate effort to abstract himself wholly from the visible world, and retire in a state of serene contemplation. But it would not do; and he was painfully conscious of the stare of lack-lustre eyes of well dressed men leaning over the rails, and the amused look of delicate ladies, lounging in open carriages, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... made an abstract from the 'Demonomagie' of Horst (founded on Hauber's original work), of the 'Hexenhammer,' under its three principal divisions. The third part, which contains the Criminal Code, and consists of thirty-five questions, is the most important section. It is difficult to decide which is the more ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... arroba of straw. Let him explain to the Indians what is necessary for their salvation, and let him not play the discreet among them. Let him use similes and examples in his sermons that they can understand, and not plunge into depths of abstract ideas, for that is a jargon which they do not understand; and they especially detest Latin phrases. The statement that the Indians have no faith is a pretext of the devil, to discourage the gospel ministers. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... savagely. Not that the abstract fact of the bells ringing was of any moment to him, but he was in a mood to be angry with everything. "Here, you!" continued he, seizing hold of a boy who was running by, "what be them bells ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... put upon him in San Domingo, is written in his most crabbed Spanish. He never wrote the Spanish language accurately, and the letter, as printed from his own manuscript, is even curious in its infelicities. It is so striking an illustration of the character of the man that we print here an abstract of it, with some passages translated directly from his ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... being presented with the freedom of the Worshipful Company of Turners, gave an address from which the following is an abstract:— ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... indeed!" cried he; "to abstract myself from all, is all that enables me to get on." And then, with his native candour, he cast aside prejudice, and very liberally praised several points in this ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... to discuss here the abstract question—Is a church an essential want of man, so as to be needed by him forever? It is enough to show that a church is needed now, and will be, for a long time to come. Every religion has had its church. No sooner does a new idea arise, than it is incorporated ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... individual is an object of dread—a creature to be shrunk from and shuddered at. Mrs Brown's horror was frogs. Jacky knew this well. He also knew of Mrs Brown's love for cranberry-jam, and her having put up a special pot. To abstract the pot, replace it by a similar pot with a live frog imprisoned therein, and then retire to chuckle in solitude and devour the jam, was simple and natural. That the imp had done this; that he had watched with delight ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... must be, to emit the wonderful sound, and though it was called the Red One, Bassett could not be sure that red represented the colour of it. Red enough were the deeds and powers of it, from what abstract clues he had gleaned. Not alone, had Ngurn informed him, was the Red One more bestial powerful than the neighbour tribal gods, ever athirst for the red blood of living human sacrifices, but the neighbour gods themselves were sacrificed and tormented before ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... of its members. Around the table, "in a room every evening as full as it could be crammed," says Aubrey, sat Milton (?) and Marvell, Cyriac Skinner, Harrington, Nevill, and their friends, discussing abstract political questions. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... ideas. They make the objections which strike them. What has happened to the hearers when the dialogue is finished? They have found something within them which they did not possess before. They have not merely accepted an abstract truth, but they have gone through a development. Something has come to life in them which was not living in them before. Is not this to be compared with an initiation? And does not this throw light on the reason for Plato's setting forth his philosophy in the form of conversation? These dialogues ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... private offices in Duck Square (where he carried on his practice as a solicitor), when in stepped a tall and pretty young woman, dressed very smartly but soberly in dark green. On the desk in front of Denry were several wide sheets of "abstract" paper, concealed by a copy of that morning's Athletic News. Before Denry could even think of reversing the positions of the abstract paper and the Athletic News the young woman said "Good-morning!" ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... this abstract I do not propose to deal with the disturbances in the system caused by traumatic influences, such as wounds, etc. We are treating only of constitutional diseases which, whether of acute or of chronic character, are all caused by the lack of such chemical elements ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... Anton?" asked Pinac gently. He could see that the old man was much moved and he wanted to bring him out of the world of abstract ideas into the world of ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... changes in fortune, there is not, to my mind, a deeper cause and opportunity for thought. For something in our ordinary actions resembles the little blunted arrows we shoot at targets; little by little we make of our successive deeds an abstract and regular entity that we call our prudence or our will. Then comes a gust of wind, and lo! the smallest of these arrows, the very lightest and most ineffective, is wafted beyond our vision, beyond the very horizon to the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... an object that excels the sense, Dazl'd and spent, sunk down, and sought repair Of sleep, which instantly fell on me, call'd By Nature as in aide, and clos'd mine eyes. Mine eyes he clos'd, but op'n left the Cell 460 Of Fancie my internal sight, by which Abstract as in a transe methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping op'nd my left side, and took From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme, And Life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... every Sunday, at the Church of the Assumption, an open discussion on matters of religion takes place, chiefly, however, among the persons who wish to pass for savants. The priests seldom or never attend. It is suspected that these discussions are encouraged by the Government, not from any abstract love it possesses for truth, but for the sake of ascertaining the opinions of those who attend them. If the governing powers suspect, from any of the opinions he utters, that a person is likely to prove dangerous, his movements and words are ever afterwards narrowly watched ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... by the Jews outside Palestine, although it never found a place in the Palestinian canon. Like most wisdom books, it describes at length the beauty and value of wisdom. The figure of Proverbs 8 and 9 is still further developed under the influence of the Greek tendency to personify abstract qualities. In the mind of the author, however, wisdom is simply an attribute of the Deity which he shares in common with men. The book is unique in two respects: (1) it contains the earliest references in Jewish literature to a personal devil and identifies him with the serpent that ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... without duly heeding abstract terms, those who make rain and hail fall on the cleanliness of the window panes, may throw stones at the simplicity of their brothers of the pen. The stones may indeed hit their brothers, who have a body, but will ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... manner at times quite importunate. It was not until after separation on the following morning that the captain and his men ascertained the secret of all this loving-kindness. In the course of their fraternal caresses, the Crows had contrived to empty the pockets of their white brothers; to abstract the very buttons from their coats, and, above all, to make free with ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... force to which the females of her country attain. Her features were beautiful, like those of all her race: never in the upper world have I seen a face so grand and so faultless, but her devotion to the severer studies had given to her countenance an expression of abstract thought which rendered it somewhat stern when in repose; and such a sternness became formidable when observed in connection with her ample shoulders and lofty stature. She was tall even for a Gy, and I saw her lift up a cannon as easily as I could lift ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ladies at the millinery shop and while selling cigarettes at the Ritzmore, when she had been modeling her manners, and had believed herself just as fine a lady as they. But that had been in the abstract. Now she was face to face with a situation that was painfully concrete—a real test: she had to place herself into close contrast with, and under the close observation of, a real lady, and in that lady's own home. And in all her life she ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... the tone of these extracts and that of our present journalists, when they touch upon the abstract principles of government, may indicate to us the firm hold which the Democratic theory has taken of our people. As that conquering party marched onward, the opposition was forced to follow after, and to encamp upon the ground their powerful enemy left ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... purpose to a life beyond life." And so literature becomes a store of inexhaustible vials, filled with the most generous elixir decanted from the world's master-spirits. Listen again to Vauvenargues: "Good literature is the essence of the best minds, the abstract of their knowledge, the fruit of their long vigils." Or let us drop metaphor, and accept, as entirely satisfying and luminous, the account given by Mr. John Morley, that "literature consists of all books ... where ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... from an abstract, speculative phase of the Monroe Doctrine, took on the concrete and somewhat urgent form of security for our trans-Isthmian routes against foreign interference towards the middle of this century, when the attempt to settle it was made ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... how this Ideal may be concentrated in a certain abstract line, not only of sensuous, but of intellectual Beauty,—a line which, while it is as wise and subtle as the serpent, is as harmless and loving as the sacred dove of Venus. I have endeavored to prove how this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... property into working order. On the 6th May the late king's conveyance was read before the Court of Aldermen, and thereupon a committee, of which Sir Martin Bowes was a prominent member, was deputed to make an abstract of the yearly revenues and charges of the house of the Grey Friars and hospital of little Saint Bartholomew, and to report thereon to the court with as much speed as possible.(1260) From a purely monetary point of view the City had ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... those waggish Inscriptions by which Men offer us their Goods, To Day for Money, and to Morrow for Nothing. They often began their Prayers very mystically, and spoke many Things in a spiritual Sense; yet they never were so abstract from the World in them, as to end One without beseeching the Gods to bless and prosper the Brewing Trade in all its Branches, and, for the Good of the Whole, more and more to increase the Consumption of the ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... personal, in which we no longer speak of some one but of some thing? Our neighbours, the English, have well succeeded in making of it a special division of literature under the modest title of "Essays." It is true that in writing of such subjects, always slightly abstract and moral, it is advisable to speak of them in a season of quiet, to make sure of our own attention and of that of others, to seize one of those moments of calm moderation and leisure seldom granted our amiable France; even when she is desirous ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... metaphysician. When she asked her mother who made God, a slap in the face demonstrated to her the limits of human inquiry. The natural instinct of the child over-rode the long travail of the race to conceive an abstract Deity, and Esther pictured God as a mammoth cloud. In early years Esther imagined that the "body" that was buried when a person died was the corpse decapitated and she often puzzled herself to think what was done with the isolated head. When her mother was being tied up ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... impatient of retaining two words which convey the same meaning; and although science had at first to do with the fact of knowing and the conditions of knowledge in the abstract, while literature meant the written record of such knowledge, a far more distinct sphere has been given to each in later times, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... regard versification as a defect. Our studies of history and of the natural sciences were not carried far, but, on the other hand, we went deep into mathematics, to which I applied myself with the utmost zest, these abstract combinations exercising a wonderful fascination over me. Our professor, the good Abbe Duchesne, was particularly attentive in his lessons to me and to my close friend and fellow-student Guyomar, who displayed a great aptitude for this branch of study. We always returned together from the college. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... mummy—sure to be recognized from its peculiar green color—in order to get the jewels, and thus secure money for his Egyptian expedition. All through, it seems, the Professor was actuated by purely scientific enthusiasm, as in the abstract he cared very little for hard cash. Bolton told Mrs. Jasher that Braddock explained how much he desired to get the mummy, but he did not mention about the jewels. For a long time Sidney was under the ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... a good abstract of the forms of the Italian campanile, by Mr. Papworth, in the Journal of the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... disposition to avoid extremities, if it could be done with propriety. With this view General Hamilton has been ready to enter into a frank and free explanation on any and every object of a specific nature; but not to answer a general and abstract inquiry, embracing a period too long for any accurate recollection, and exposing him to unpleasant criticisms from, or unpleasant discussions with, any and every person who may have understood him in an unfavourable sense. This (admitting ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... blank composure known to suffering males; that colourless unnatural speech which shows a spirit accurately balanced between homicide and hysterics; the tone in which the best of women sometimes utter words worse than death to those most dear to them. If Abstract Bones-and-Sepulchre were to be endowed with the gift of speech, thus, and not otherwise, would it discourse. Leon was a brave man, and I fear he was somewhat sceptically given (he had been educated in a Papistical country), but the ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Boys perform wonderful feats of this kind in England too. However, I once heard a German professor say that the English boy outdid the German in gesunder Menschenverstand (sound common sense), but that the German wins in the race when it comes to the abstract knowledge (Wissen) that he and his countryfolk prize above all the treasures of the earth. No one who knows both countries can doubt for a single moment that the professor was right, and that he stated ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... vivid imagination and an almost unequalled power of illustration. The thought is always concrete, and he is never satisfied with the vague ideas and abstract conceptions which so easily moved his contemporaries. No speeches, either in English or in German, preserve so much of their freshness. He is almost the only Parliamentary orator whose speeches have become to some extent ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... ever degraded humanity, with the spotless purity of the Christian rule of life,—the hesitating, speculative tone of the Master of the Academy with the decision and majesty of Him who 'spake with authority, and not as the Scribes,' whether Greek or Jewish.—the metaphysical and abstract character of Plato's reasonings with the severely practical character of Christ's,—the feebleness of the motives supplied by the abstractions of the one, and the intensity of those supplied by the other,—the adaptation of the one to the intelligent ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... a great influx of members, and three secretaries were appointed. At all meetings at which he was present Sir Charles took the chair, and through this centre exercised much influence, committing the House of Commons to a series of resolutions—abstract indeed, but none ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... questions, whenever the causes are either too inaccessible for their numerical laws to be ascertained, or are too complex for us to compute the effect, or are ever fluctuating. And, in proportion as physical questions cease to be abstract and hypothetical, mathematical solutions of them become imperfect. But the great value of mathematical training is, that we learn to use its method (which is the most perfect type of the Deductive Method), that is, we learn ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... important to private men in various situations in which they may be placed; it is useful to all men who wish either to be acquainted with modern history, or to form a sound judgment on political measures. I shall endeavour to give such an abstract of it as may be sufficient for some, and a convenient guide for others in the farther progress of their studies. The treaties, which I shall more particularly consider, will be those of Westphalia, of Oliva, of ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... annually, and the principal within a fixed term, less than nineteen years. And I hope yourself and your committee will render the immortal service of introducing this practice. Not that it is expected that Congress should formally declare such a principle. They wisely enough avoid deciding on abstract questions. But they may be induced to keep themselves within ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... became necessary for the United States either to engage in a war, or to withdraw her commerce from the ocean. The popular voice demanded the former course. Though France was, in the abstract, as unjust as England, her oppressive measures did not affect American commerce, and hence the indignation of the people was directed chiefly against Great Britain; but with the president it was ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... thoroughly given up to cowardice than he had ever been before, was not to be endured! And yet, with what utmost stretch of courage,—even though he were willing to devote himself certainly and instantly to the worst fate that he had pictured to himself,—could he immediately rush away from these abstract speculations, encumbered as they were with personal flattery, into his own most unpleasant, most tragic matter! It was the unfitness that deterred him and not the possible tragedy. Nevertheless, through it all, he was sure,—nearly sure,—that she was playing her game, and playing ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... a good poem, each word and thought enhances the value of those which precede and follow it; and every syllable has a loveliness which depends not so much on its abstract sound as on its position. Look at the same word in a dictionary, and you will ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... profession of letters, but unserviceable to one who would communicate his thoughts and feelings to others. Montaigne was not a professional author; he was a country gentleman with something of his own to say. The literature of the professionals was an ingenious and abstract superstructure built up over an idea or an emotion. Montaigne wished to set down the original thought or feeling as it sprang, hot, from the mind; and, as original thoughts and feelings present themselves always with the force of sensations, he gave them the forms of sensations—that is to ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... were, in spite of the surrounding misery, irresistibly provocative of laughter. Ample justification for this, in truth, is very readily adduceable. Mr. Squeers having, through his one eye, made a mental abstract of Cobbey's letter, for example, Cobbey and the whole school were thus feelingly informed of its contents—"Oh! Cobbey's grandmother is dead, and his uncle John has took to drinking. Which is all the news his sister sends, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end.' He goes on to point out that there is an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, not presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of such masters of pure romance as ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... scepticism and had manufactured a creed out of decent compromises which served well enough for ordinary purposes. Even Hume, a sceptic in theory, was a Tory and a Scottish patriot in politics. Scott, who cared nothing for abstract philosophy, did not bother himself to form any definite system of opinions; he shared Hume's political prejudices without inquiring into his philosophy. He thoroughly detested the dogmatism of the John Knox variety, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the latter city predilections on the black art from a consistent regard to the solemnity of the subject were delivered within the walls of a vast and gloomy cavern. The schoolmen taught that all knowledge might be obtained from the assistance of the fallen angels. They were skilled in the abstract sciences, in the knowledge of precious stones, in alchymy, in the various languages of mankind and of the lower animals; in the Belles-Lettres, Moral Philosophy, Pneumatology, Divinity, Magic, History, and Prophecy. They could controul the winds ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... armour of a man who was a courtier when he chose and the dominating spirit always, he was hot and quick of temper. His light cold eyes glowed with resentment at the dancing lights in hers, as he cynically gave her a bald abstract of the unfortunate mission. He reflected that commonly he would have fitted a different mask to the ugly skull of fact, but this young barbarian, as he chose to regard her, excited the elemental truth in him, defying him to ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... nearly allied to poetry, oratory, and painting. The drama is but the expansion of its touching scenes,—painting, the representation of its fleeting events. Even to the few who are gifted by nature with the power of abstract thought, it is often hazardous to push matters to a conclusion too openly. Lingard evinced the profound knowledge of the human heart by which the Church of Rome has ever been distinguished, when, in his skilful narrative, he concealed the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... wholly consecrated to noble thoughts and work in common. And all went well as long as the light of love was in them: for she thought only of him, and not of what she was doing. The odd thing was that everything she did in that way was well done. Her mind found no difficulty in taking in abstract ideas, which at any other time of her life she would have found it hard to follow: her whole being was, as it were, uplifted from the earth by love; she did not know it; like a sleep-walker moving easily over roofs, gravely and gaily, without seeing anything at all, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... abstractedly, from her height on the kitchen step. He dropped his eyes and looked at his feet. Then he lifted his eyes again, and looked at her. She looked back at him, as from across a distance. So they watched each other, as strangers across a wide, abstract distance. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... difficulty of finding occupation. Trade Union leaders have boldly avowed that they will thus compel the State to recognize the "right to employment," and to provide that employment by means of national or municipal workshops. With questions of abstract "right" we are not here concerned, but it may be well to indicate certain economic difficulties involved in the establishment of public works as a solution of the "unemployed" problem. Since the "unemployed" will, under the closer restrictions ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... heat is matter. He thus laid the corner-stone of the modern theory that heat light, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, and all other forms of energy are in essence motion, are convertible into one another, and as motion are indestructible. The following abstract of Count Rumford's paper is taken from "Heat as a Mode of Motion," by Professor John Tyndall, published by D. Appleton & Co., New York. This work and "The Correlation and Conservation of Forces," edited by Dr. E. L. Youmans, published by the same house, will serve as a capital ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... distanced. Many fools (speaking of you) say to me: What! would you have him perfect? I answer: Why not? What hurt would it do him or me? O, but that is impossible, say they; I reply, I am not sure of that: perfection in the abstract, I admit to be unattainable, but what is commonly called perfection in a character I maintain to be attainable, and not only that, but in every man's power. He hath, continue they, a good head, a good heart, a good fund of knowledge, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... mathematical science not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, ... but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world ... those who thus think on mathematical ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... is not any question of shame or conscience, which are abstract things. It is merely one of fact—that is, whether you did or did not help Miss Catherwood, the spy, to escape. I am convinced that you helped her—not that I condemn you for it or that I am sorry you did so. Perhaps ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... sacrificing ourselves to abstract right for five minutes. Then I leaned back in my chair, and looked at Halicarnassus. He rested his right elbow on the table, and looked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... that while this was going on, another of the thieving fraternity, who did not know of the storm that was gathering and about to burst over the heads of such as he, took advantage of the excitement to enter a tent, and abstract therefrom a bag of gold worth several hundred pounds. It chanced that the owner of it happened to be ailing slightly that day, and, instead of following his companions, had lain still in his tent, ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne
... equal, vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red, centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the reader's hand and tossed it into a corner. "Sears-Roebuck are very tactless," she declared. "Everything they have to offer reminds one of home. What do you think of home, Ban? Home, as an abstract proposition. Home as the what-d'you-call-'em of the nation; the palladium—no, the bulwark? Home as viewed by the homing pigeon? Home, Sweet Home, as sung by—Would you answer, Ban, if I stopped gibbering and gave ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... circumstances, in appearance the least important, lead to changes in fortune, there is not, to my mind, a deeper abyss for the thought. There is something in our ordinary actions that resembles the little blunted arrows we shoot at targets; little by little we make of our successive results an abstract and regular entity that we call our prudence or our will. Then a gust of wind passes, and behold the smallest of these arrows, the very lightest and most futile, is carried beyond our vision, beyond the horizon, to the dwelling-place of ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... delicate task. In a few words I could sum up his life and character, for there was nothing extraordinary in it, excepting extraordinary goodness; but, then, how could my dear children, from a few abstract ideas thrown hastily together, see the path he trod, in all its windings, compare it with that of others, and with their own, and learn the lessons it teaches? I do not mean by "extraordinary goodness" that your grandfather had no faults—that ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... Don Juan, had his gibe both at the poet and at his enemies. But we know now how mistaken they were. Keats, in a normal state of mind and body, was never unduly depressed by harsh or unfair criticism. 'Praise or blame,' he wrote, 'has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works,' and this attitude he consistently maintained throughout his poetic career. No doubt the sense that his genius was unappreciated added something to the torment of mind which he suffered in Rome, and on his death-bed he ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... upon them was meant for Arethusa at all; and, continually, it becomes a question respecting finished statues, if without attributes, "Is this Bacchus or Apollo—Zeus or Poseidon?" There is a fact for you; noteworthy, I think! There is no personal character in true Greek art:—abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue and vice,—yes: but there is no individuality; and the negative holds down to the revived conventionalism of the Greek school by Leonardo, when he tells you ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... But Hilton, though her contempt for German ways was so great as to be almost unutterable, was reconciled to a mistress who had so quickly given in to her wish to be taken back to Hill Street, and the venom was of an abstract nature, containing no personal sting of unfavourable comparisons with duchesses; so that Susie was sipping her milk in a fairly placid frame of mind when there was a knock at the door, and Anna asked if ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... real belief of the people is that they are usually examined by leading questions, and are apt to reply affirmatively to whatever the querist puts to them. Their thoughts on these dark subjects are either extremely vague and misty or extremely material; the world of abstract thought, in which European minds have learned to move with an ease and confidence produced by the possession of a whole arsenal of theological and metaphysical phrases, being ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... etre prevues d'avance, mais que le legislateur capable apprecie au moment ou il est appele a fonder la societe." On the cession of the Illyrian provinces, by Austria, after the battle of Wagram, the faiseurs, or abstract principle men, of Paris, were prompt with their plans, not for "constitutions"—Bonaparte had put an end to that branch of their metier—but for reorganizing the laws, administration, &c., of Transylvania de fond en comble, without knowing any thing of the people or country, without having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... then thoughtful, as he looked. In a dim, abstract way he had been conscious that Darsie Garnett was what he would have described as "a pretty kid," but the charm of her personality had never appealed to him until this moment. Now, as he looked at ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... own the task is hard," replied the clergyman, "because of the blindness and impotency of that same reason of which thou vauntest, and the feebleness of our mental sight; for we cannot come at any abstract truth whatsoever but by many inferences hanging together as by a chain, one link of which, not fully apprehended or made fast, loosens the whole, and the argument falls to ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... it was formally agreed between the contending parties that a statement should be drawn up in writing, whereby Principal No. 1 tendered the assurance that the offensive words 'You are a liar' were not used by him in any personal sense, but solely as an abstract proposition, in a general way, in regard to the matter of fact under dispute. To which Principal No. 2 appended his statement of his high gratification at this candid and honorable explanation, and unqualifiedly withdrew the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... every body, but a lawyer, is in search; and it is what every body, but a lawyer, is delighted to find. No wonder therefore that a lawyer should meet discomfiture, and confusion, when he pretends to discuss the abstract nature of justice, in any place except in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... memorable document that the estates were now to sit in judgment. In the case of the Confession of Faith they had been practically unanimous; but that had been a mere statement of abstract doctrines which involved no question of worldly interests, and might be subscribed with a light heart and with any degree of spiritual conviction. With the Book of Discipline it was very different. The fundamental question that had to be answered in that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... is proved by the fact that invariably she tried to hide them. They would be found in the most unlikely places; hidden behind books in the Professor's study, crammed into empty tea canisters in Mrs. Muldoon's storeroom. Mrs. Muldoon was not to be persuaded even to abstract them. The canister with its contents would be placed in silence upon the Professor's table. Malvina on returning would be confronted by a pair of stern, unsympathetic boots. The corners of the fairy mouth would droop in lines suggestive ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... between the interests of an oligarchy based upon slavery and a democracy in which slavery, if it exists at all, exists as a mere accident that may be dispensed with without any radical social revolution. Slavery, as opposed to divine law or to abstract justice, never has brought, nor ever will bring, two countries into conflict with each other; but slavery made indispensable as a peculiar institution, as an organized fact, as a fundamental social necessity, must come into conflict with the totally opposite institutions of democracy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... absolutism, culminating in the acknowledged ascendancy of Parliament and the triumphant aristocracy of 1688, was never based on abstract principles of the rights of barons and landowners, but sprang from the positive, definite conviction that those who furnished arms and men for the king, or who paid certain moneys in taxation, were entitled to be heard in the councils of the king; and the charters ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... hair the colour of brass. She walked on without a word, sick at heart. This was the first time she had been brought face to face with the hideous side of life. Like many good women, she thoroughly realised the existence of evil in the abstract; but evil incarnate in a person—it was hard to associate that with any one she knew as she had known Vincent. Her artistic nature was morbidly sensitive to impressions taken in through the eye, and nothing could have so forced home the truth as that little ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Hiden, How Justice Grew: Virginia Counties: An Abstract of Their Formation, (Williamsburg: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration, 1957). Also, because time-honored tradition as well as law influenced the organization of Virginia counties, the description of English local government in J. B. Black, ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... recalls involuntarily that of the languages of America. What a structure of little monosyllabic and disyllabic forms is added to the verb and to the substantive, in the Coptic language! The semi-barbarous Chayma and Tamanac have tolerably short abstract words to express grandeur, envy, and lightness, cheictivate, uoite, and uonde; but in Coptic, the word malice,* metrepherpetou, is composed of five elements, easy to be distinguished. (* See, on the incontestable identity of the ancient Egyptian ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... less that Billy tried to translate Pete's thought and more that he endeavored to follow his own. "It puts it up to a man so. And their beauty and purity and innocence and simplicity—." Billy seemed to be ransacking his vocabulary for abstract nouns. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... the animal worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not AEsop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... difference of human tongues. These three parts are: first, nouns—the names of things; second, verbs—the names of events; and, third, the partitives—or the words which express the relations of things to events. Thus the most abstract of verbs, "to be," refers to an event; for when a man says, "I am," he is mentioning an event in the history of the universe which did ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... "in whose hands the ashes of antiquity burn again," she writes, gave her two Greek epigrams he had recently written. All this time she is reading everything,—Sheridan Knowles's play of "The Wreckers," which Forrest had rejected, "rather for its unfitness to his own personal talent than for its abstract demerit," she concludes; and "Ion," which she finds beautiful morally rather than intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power, passion, and condensation. Reading Combe's "Phrenology," she refers to his theory that slowness of the pulse ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in response, of the men I have known or seen; and this without a single touch of the prophetic manner, the air of such professional seers as Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or abstract; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice in painting or poetry; the rest were at the service of whoever would come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to me, which I have just been reading ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... recognize in this right of franchise only a conventional or political arrangement that may be abrogated at will and taken from any; that it is simply a privilege yielded to you and me and others by society or the Government which represents society; that it is only a gracious boon from some abstract place and abstract body for which we should be proud and thankful; in other words, that it is not a right in any sense, but only a concession. Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... his father insisted on his marrying,—would not hear of his putting it off any longer. Sir Edmund had been harping on this string ever since he came back from Germany, had made it both a general and a particular request, not only urging him to matrimony in the abstract, but pushing him into the arms of every young woman in the country. Ambrose had promised, procrastinated, temporized; but at last he was at the end of his evasions, and his poor father had taken the tone of supplication. "He thinks ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... character otherwise eminently Christian. The Oraison Funebre of the French proposes to itself by its original model, which must be sought in the Epideictic or panegyrical oratory of the Greeks, a purpose purely and exclusively eulogistic: the problem supposed is to abstract from everything not meritorious, to expand and develop the total splendour of the individual out of that one centre, that main beneficial relation to his own age, from which this splendour radiated. The incidents of the life, the successions of the biographical detail, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... cannot easily embellish it, or the meanest degrade it; a subject which comes home to our own bosoms and dearest feelings; and in which we may "lose ourselves in all delightfulness," and indulge unreproved pleasure. I mean the Virgin and Child, or in other words, the abstract personification of what is loveliest, purest, and dearest, under heaven—maternal tenderness, virgin meekness, and childish innocence, and the beauty of holiness ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... was the same thing to him, as it is probably to all great ministers, was the object of his life. Compared with that, special questions were of small importance. There was nothing doctrinaire in his turn of mind; the abstract righteousness of a cause did not appeal to him, and could not divert him from the pursuit of his main object. In 1787 a bill for the relief of dissenters by the repeal of the test and corporation acts of the reign of Charles II. was brought in by Beaufoy, a supporter ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... physical nature art does not, as science does, {206} formulate merely its geometrical or dynamical skeleton; to do so would be contrary to the intent of art to represent things in their perceptual concreteness. Similarly art does not represent abstract virtues. Nevertheless, if it is not to depart from the truth art must, at the same time that it conveys the color and vividness of life, also conform to its proper laws, and demonstrate the consequences of action as they are. And the same standard of clearness and fidelity, which requires ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... should arouse the unhappy comtesse? or should we disturb her? Were it not better gently to withdraw the dead child and leave the mother to her repose? We thought so. I stepped forward, but courage failed me. I did not dare furtively to abstract the precious burden from the jealous arms which even in slumber were clasped tightly around it. Oh! my God!... While we were standing the comtesse opened her eyes: her first motion was to draw the child closer to her heart—then to look at us—then at the little one. She saw the whole. She had ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... next to examine the nature of exceptions. Exceptions are intended for the protection of the defendant, who is often in this position, that though the plaintiff's case is a good one in the abstract, yet as against him, the particular defendant, ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... accordance with the philosophical and ethical character of her mind, and with her habit of considering all things in their widest relations to the good of mankind, that she should give serious attention and consideration to the last duty which she might owe to abstract truth ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... undeveloped. In the "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," published by his son, is a letter from Mr. Darwin to W. Graham, written in 1881, from which I quote the following: "I have no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless, you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done. But then, with me, the horrid doubt always arises ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... forms, so constantly introduced into the skazka-drama, to some of the supernatural figures which are not so often brought upon the stage—to those mythical beings of whom (numerous as may be the traditions about them) the regular "story" does not so often speak, to such personifications of abstract ideas as are less frequently employed to set its conventional ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... considered the matter dispassionately, as an abstract proposition. Here was a man, who in return for certain information respecting the whereabouts of a marketable commodity had undertaken to find and share it with his informant. The commodity had proved to be valueless, but during the search for it he had ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... (1561-1626), the Frenchman Rene Descartes (1596-1650); and the German Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716). Bacon, as the earliest path-breaker, showed the way, theoretically at least, in which the sciences should be studied; Descartes, pursuing the methods pointed out by Bacon, carried the same line of abstract reason into practice as well; while Leibnitz, coming some years later, and having the advantage of the wisdom of his two great predecessors, was naturally influenced by both in his views of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... an unknown third principle, by which they are to be reconciled with our moral reasonings. But until we can detect the fallacies of the metaphysician, or supply the connecting link which is now wanting, we must rest in the unsatisfactory conclusion that abstract philosophy is with the necessarian, and that liberty and its ennobling consequences, moral agency, and moral responsibility, rest on the solitary basis ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... had been nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so lampooned ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... are false, those epithets are small; You're then the things, the abstract of them all. And you are false: You promised him your love,— No other price a heart so hard could move. Do not I know him? Could his brutal mind Be wrought upon? Could he be just, or kind? Insultingly, he made your love his boast; Gave me my life, and told me what it cost. Speak; answer. I would ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... proud it is ever a question whether to spoil the Egyptians, or to fling back even the best-earned wages, payable by Egyptians, full in the said Egyptians' face. For the firm of Barking Brothers & Barking, in the abstract, Iglesias had the loyalty of long-established habit. It had been as the rising tide, setting the ship of his fate and fortune honourably afloat in the dismal days of that early stranding. Its service had eaten up ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... appetite for the work under this master; but he revolted at the flimsy, contemptible sham; he bitterly resented the innuendoes against the piety of the Sudleys, not that he cared for piety, save in the abstract; he was daunted by the brutal ignorance, the doltish inefficiency of the imposture that had so readily accepted his patently false answers to the simple questions. He had a sort of crude reverence for education, ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... We poets personify abstract things, and not poets only but sculptors[7] and painters too. All the great things of the world are those ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... prove that some one of the genus co-existed with the Megatherium: such and many other points depend on the numbers being carefully preserved." ("Extracts from Letters etc.", pages 13-14.) In the abstract of the notes read to the Geological Society in 1835, we read: "In the gravel of Patagonia he (Darwin) also found many bones of the Megatherium and of five or six other species of quadrupeds, among which he has detected ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... systematically with the prongs and hoes of regular study, of example, and precept; and, being a vigorous sprout when she was transplanted, she has made good use of her opportunities, and, behold! early mental salad, and very fine! You men theorize, ratiocinate, declaim, dogmatize about abstract propositions, and finally get your feet tangled and stumble over facts right under your noses, that women would never fail to pick up and put aside. The soul of Thales possesses you all, whereas we ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... PROGRAMME.—The word "programme" is defined by the Century Dictionary as "a method of operation or line of procedure prepared or announced beforehand. An outline or abstract of something to be done ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... religionis, homme de religion) was never used in Latin, French, or English to mean a pious man, but exclusively for a man belonging to a religious order. See "History of the word religio in the Middle Ages," by. Professor Ewald Fluegel, of Leland Stanford Junior University—an abstract of which is printed in Transactions of American Philological Association, 1902, pp. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... pen: one an "Address to Lord Ellenborough" in defence of a man punished for having published Paine's "Age of Reason," and another an "Essay on Christianity." In the first, with all a boy's enthusiasm, he opposes the high abstract logic of truth and toleration to the hard government policy which tries to keep a reckless kind of semi-civilization in order, and cannot bring itself to believe, that, as yet, the broad principle of license is the one that can serve the cosmogony best. In the next he rather surprises the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... England, and take his appointed part in the expression and direction of its genius, learning, commerce, spirit, and sense. The land of Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Newton, Watt, the land of a host of past and present abstract philosophers, natural philosophers, and subduers of Nature and Art in their myriad forms, called to Mr Sparkler to come and take care of it, lest it should perish. Mr Sparkler, unable to resist the agonised ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... truth. Johnson was not one of those whom Plato calls the [Greek: philaekooi kai philotheamones], "who gladly acknowledge the beautiful wherever it is met with, in sounds, and colours, and figures, and all that is by art compounded from these;" much less had he ascended "to that abstract notion of beauty" which the same philosopher considers it so much more ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... about our poets is a poor substitute for a knowledge of what they have said themselves. Poetry ought to be read slowly and carefully, and the reader ought to pay his author the compliment of crediting him with ideas as important and, on occasion, as abstruse as any in a work of philosophy or abstract science. When the meaning is mastered, the poem ought to be read a second time aloud to catch the magic of the language and the verse. The reading of prose presents less difficulty, but there again the rule is, never allow yourself ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... you ask this—why any realism? These concrete accidents solidify a thin and abstract love-story for our human comprehension. Or are they, perchance, symbolical? Georgie-Porgie's promises, like pie-crust, were made to be ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... letter from Mr. P.A. Hargous, the present proprietor and holder of the privileges granted by Mexico, signifying his assent to and acceptance of the terms of its provisions. There is also an abstract of title to him from the original grantee and copies of the several powers and conveyances by which that title is derived to him. It may be well that these papers should be returned to be deposited among the archives of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... Russia's preparations, the Russian Foreign Minister saw the German Ambassador in St. Petersburg on July 30th, and then offered on behalf of Russia to stop all military preparations, provided that Austria would simply recognize as an abstract principle that the Servian question had assumed the character of a question of European interest. As this proposal fully met the demands of the Kaiser with respect to the cessation by Russia of military preparations, the conversation as reported by the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... Pickering, as if the acetylene were running out. He still admired Claire intensely and experienced disturbing emotions when he beheld her perfect tonneau and wonderful headlights; but he regarded her with a cautious fear. Although he sometimes dreamed sentimentally of marriage in the abstract, of actual marriage, of marriage with a flesh-and-blood individual, of marriage that involved clergymen and 'Voices that Breathe o'er Eden,' and giggling bridesmaids and cake, Dudley Pickering was afraid ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Our abstract does, at best, but scanty justice to the most interesting, as well as most valuable, of modern works of travel. It has revolutionized our ideas of African character as well as of African geography. It shows that Central Africa is peopled by tribes barbarous, indeed, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... rise and fall more nearly directly upon local supply and demand. Some economists will at once argue that if prices are unprofitable to the farmer the situation will correct itself by diminished production and, consequently, a general rise in the world level of prices. In the abstract, this is true, but as a matter of fact the surplus which our farmers contribute for export is only a small portion of their total production or of the world pool, yet the total of the world pool operating through this ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... render it necessary for Congress to give me the authority to run the line as we claim it, by our own people, without any further regard to the attitude of England and Canada. If I paid attention to mere abstract rights, that is the position I ought to take anyhow. I have not taken it because I wish to exhaust every effort to have the affair settled peacefully and with due regard to ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... hours were those spent with Rachel, when they talked of the business, and often branched off to more abstract subjects. To the past they never alluded. Katherine was glad to see that the dead, hopeless expression of Rachel Trant's eyes had changed, yet not altogether for good. A certain degree of alertness had brightened ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... other in her underlying "attitude," that invested her words with a new horsepower of solace. And Saltman's best stenographer actually produced an argument that Hugo had altogether passed by. She thought it worth while to point out that these things were not a question of abstract morals at all, but only of changing ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... succession, heels were still, and breathing was as monotonous as his own would be an hour later. At eleven the boys dressed and swung from their windows, not daring to leave by the courtyard. Nor did they dare go to the corral and abstract three horses. Much to their distaste, for there was nothing the Californian hated so much as to travel on two legs, they were obliged to walk the miles between the Casa and the hills. But their legs were young and their brains eager; ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... highly esteemed by the Jews outside Palestine, although it never found a place in the Palestinian canon. Like most wisdom books, it describes at length the beauty and value of wisdom. The figure of Proverbs 8 and 9 is still further developed under the influence of the Greek tendency to personify abstract qualities. In the mind of the author, however, wisdom is simply an attribute of the Deity which he shares in common with men. The book is unique in two respects: (1) it contains the earliest references in Jewish literature to a personal devil and ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... book, we have none but farcical means. Place a few bricks one atop the other; join them with mortar; and the law will defend your wall. Build up in writing an edifice of your thoughts; and it will be open to any one, without serious impediment, to abstract stones from it, even to take the whole, if it suit him. A rabbit-hutch is property; the work of the mind is not. If the animal has eccentric views as regards the possessions of others, we have ours ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... it denser and heavier; while excessive influx of fresh water at the poles, (from rain and snow and melting ice), renders the sea light;—in addition to which corallines and shell-fish everywhere abstract the lime that is in the sea, by secreting it on their bodies in the form of shells, and thus increase the lightness of those particles of water from which the lime has been abstracted. The other particles of water being generous in their nature, hasten to impart of their lime and salt to those ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... imputation as rather a slur on so respectable a neighbourhood: for to be quaint is to be picturesque, and to be picturesque is to be old-fashioned. But the stranger's voice and manner were so pleasant, almost so ingratiating, that Philip did not care to differ from him on the abstract question of a qualifying epithet. After all, there's nothing positively insulting in calling a house quaint, though Philip would certainly have preferred, himself, to hear the Eligible Family Residences of that Aristocratic Neighbourhood described ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... common it is!" said Spinks with an inward sigh, whilst his eyes seemed to be looking at the case in an abstract form rather than at the scene before him. "Such poor liquor do make a man's throat feel very melancholy—and is a disgrace to the ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... however, what I get from gesticulation alone is an abstract notion of the essential drift of what is being said, and that, too, whether I judge from a moral or an intellectual point of view. It is the quintessence, the true substance of the conversation, and this remains identical, no matter what may have given rise to the conversation, or ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... excited you are. Your eyes are full of tears. Listen to me. You chose your subject in the realm of abstract thought, and you did quite right. A work of art should invariably embody some lofty idea. Only that which is seriously meant can ever be beautiful. How ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... the pupil learns the meaning of the word as it is used, and not an abstract definition that ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... country, and however perfectly its symptoms may resemble the epidemic cholera of other countries, is not communicable. On some of those cases so properly placed before the public, I shall perhaps be soon able to offer a few remarks: meanwhile, I shall here give the abstract of a case, the details of which have not as yet, I believe, appeared, and which must greatly strengthen people in their opinion, that these cholera cases, however formidable the symptoms, and though they sometimes end rapidly ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... England; and, being imbibed in infancy and confirmed, through the entire period of youth, no impressions are more strong, or more universally operative. The poet and the priest either encourage the feeling, or do not take any pains to remove it. The agency of spirits and abstract principles, is countenanced by some of the records of religion, and by philosophers and physicians in their reasonings about occult causes, sympathies, coincidencies, and destinies. It is urged in vain, that ghosts and supernatural effects ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... intelligent abstract of the bills he was to introduce —the results of a progressive and statesmanlike brain. There was an account of him as a methodical and painstaking business man whose suggestions to the boards of directors of which he was a member had been invaluable. The article ended with a list of the clubs ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One's individuality absolutely leaves one. And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... risk of the transportation of the money and the return of the gold. As a result, your royal treasury could in a short time be free from obligations, and could aid in the maintenance of this kingdom. [Marginal note: "Abstract this clause, and send it to the viceroy ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... ourselves, or by what others say of us, but it is permanently influenced by actual, tangible, visible results. The object-lesson of one honest Negro succeeding magnificently in each community in some business or industry is worth a hundred abstract speeches in securing opportunity ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... does the selection of good and suitable material, contrivance for special purpose, expert workmanship, proper finish, and so on, far more than mere ornament, and indeed, that ornamentation itself was rather an exuberance of fine workmanship than a matter of merely abstract lines. Workmanship when separated by too wide a gulf from fresh thought—that is, from design—inevitably decays, and, on the other hand, ornamentation, divorced from workmanship, is necessarily unreal, and quickly falls into affectation. Proper ornamentation ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... large wealth either to his own or any body else's advantage. He was low born and low bred, in the worst sense of the words; and I fear that no education will change his original quality, or greatly modify his early bias. So while the wasting of his substance is a great wrong in the abstract, it may be a real blessing to him. Events in this life work out strangely to our human eyes, yet there is a Providence in them that ever educes good ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... all their hopes on riches gained by fraud. The women will be fickle and desert Their beggared husbands, loving them alone Who give them money. Kings, instead of guarding, Will rob their subjects, and abstract the wealth Of merchants, under plea of raising taxes. Then in the world's last age the rights of men Will be confused, no property be safe, No joy ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... that he has "no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low." Certainly there is nothing low in his familiars, as he presents them, at least nothing sordid. It may be the result of unconscious idealisation, but his Gypsies have nothing more sordid about them than wild ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the poor my solemn songs impart? For Oh! thou Hope's, thou Thought's eternal King, Who gav'st them power to charm, and me to sing - Chief to thy praise my willing numbers soar, And in my happier transports I adore; Mercy! thy softest attribute proclaim, Thyself in abstract, thy more lovely name; That flings o'er all my grief a cheering ray, As the full moon-beam gilds the watery way. And then too, Love, my soul's resistless lord, Shall many a gentle, generous strain afford, To all the soil of sooty passion blind, Pure ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... to the material dealt with into object images or concrete images and into word or abstract images. No one of these terms is very good as a name of the image referred to. The first group—object or concrete image—refers to an image in which the sensory qualities, such as color, size, rhythm, sweetness, harmony, etc., are present. The images of a friend, of a text-book, of the national ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... where it has been printed in the chapbook, Hibernian Tales, as the "Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen," the Black Thief being Conall, and the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr. Lang's Red Fairy Book). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his Irish Sketch-Book, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... Some of these tokens are written on a sky broad enough to cover the whole English-speaking race, others of them are visible chiefly within our own national horizon. With respect to the English book, Cardwell [3] writing in 1840 and Freeman[4] in 1855, considered revision, however desirable in the abstract, to be a thing utterly out of reach, not within the circle, as the parliamentary phrase now ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Jesus Christ. So he turned to the New Testament, and to the Gospels. He was none too familiar with their teachings, but he believed that of them all the Gospel of John contained the fullest statement of abstract principles. ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... quite sure what is here meant by "a leading idea." If it be that some abstract idea is to be developed or illustrated, we can neither subscribe to the canon nor discover the leading idea of this specimen of the author's productions; but we rather suppose that he only means to say that there should be a main stream of interest running through the whole story, to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... unity. The soul of the State is the higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State in itself and by itself. Man in such relations does often merit the reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems often to find justification. Similarly, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... those more moderate and rational owners of human cattle, who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society with which it is fraught: dangers which however distant they may be, or howsoever tardy in their coming on, are as certain to fall upon its guilty head, as is ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... education and habits of life and mental training, than Lieutenant Schwatka. He is endowed by nature with robust health and a powerful frame, to which fatigue seems a stranger. A cheerful disposition that finds amusement in the passing trifle, and powers of concentration that entirely abstract him from his surroundings, keep him free from "ennui" that is not the least disagreeable feature of life in this wilderness. And he possesses a very important adjunct, though to the uninitiated it may seem trifling, a stomach that can relish and digest fat. ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... people are attached to its institutions; it is, therefore, the first and plainest rule of sound policy, that the people be trained up in the way they should go. The state that neglects this prepares its own destruction; and they who train them in any other way are undermining it. Nothing in abstract science can be more certain ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hand. As Andreas also inferred, these chatterings put various notions of an exciting and somewhat disturbing sort into Roschen's little head. If one young girl might get married, so might another, no doubt she thought; and it is conceivable that from this mental statement of a rational abstract possibility her thoughts may have passed on to consideration of the concrete possibilities involved in her own relations with the good-looking Gustav Strauss, son of the rich bird-dealer, or with the good-looking ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... honest people: and this as a renewing, nay, as the only right way of renewing said covenants according to the circumstances, of the times. That this bond entered into by Seceders (however good it may be, considered in an abstract sense) is not a renovation of the national covenants, as they assert it to be, but a treacherous and deceitful burying of these covenants, as to their sum and substance, is abundantly evident from their industrious keeping out, and ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... Excellency, the late Supreme Director, whom I unavailingly warned of all that has happened. My letter also to San Martin, in answer to his accusations—a copy of which was officially transmitted to your predecessor in office—contains a brief abstract of the errors and follies committed in Peru; as my public letters and those documents are, of course, in your possession, I shall abstain from trespassing on your attention with a repetition of facts with which you ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... propose in this chapter to proceed further with this inquiry. It will not advance my object, nor is it absolutely necessary. Totemism in the full has been described adequately by Mr. Frazer in his valuable abstract of the evidence supplied from all parts of the world, and there is not much in dispute among the authorities when once the stage of origin is passed. There is danger, however, at the other extreme, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... impossible to mention a name which any advantageous distinction has made eminent, but some latent animosity will burst out. The wealthy trader, however he may abstract himself from publick affairs, will never want those who hint, with Shylock, that ships are but boards. The beauty, adorned only with the unambitious graces of innocence and modesty, provokes, whenever she appears, a thousand murmurs of detraction. The genius, even when he endeavours only to entertain ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... pilgrim, either for Iona or Armagh, or some more distant shrine. Pilgrimages to Rome and to Jerusalem seem to have been begun even before this time, as we may infer from St. Adamnan's work on the situation of the Holy Places, of which Bede gives an abstract. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... government, was elected without opposition. This was an unsatisfactory result after so many years of conflict, but the friends of Reform, although they had to admit defeat, were neither daunted nor discouraged. They knew that many other questions besides the abstract one of the adoption of responsible government had influenced the recent election, and that the new principles had been blamed for results that would have been avoided if they had been in operation. For instance, the transfer of the casual and territorial revenues to the treasury of the province ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... upon his graduation read thus:—"This young man is reserved and studious, he prefers study to any amusement, and enjoys reading the best authors, applies himself earnestly to the abstract sciences, cares little for anything else. He is silent, and loves solitude. He is capricious, haughty, and excessively egotisical, talks little, but is quick and energetic in his replies, prompt and severe in his repartees, has great pride and ambition, ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... that Mr. Rylands did not know. He had known this sort of thing only in the abstract. He had never had the least acquaintance with the class to which his wife had belonged, nor known anything of their methods. It was a revelation to him now, in the woman he loved, and who was his wife. He was not shocked so much ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... never, indeed, was a character that possessed less cant of any description. His work, which was a singular, wild tale—of mingled passion and reflection—was, perhaps, of too original, certainly of too abstract a nature, to suit the ordinary novel readers of the day. It did not acquire popularity for itself, but it gained great reputation for the author. It also inspired every one who read it, with a vague and indescribable interest to see and ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Union League in June, 1913, the subject of industrial education received very close attention. The importance of continuation schools after wage-earning days have commenced was not overlooked. An abstract of the discussion and the chief resolutions can be found in the issue of Life and Labor ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... students killing themselves by over-study,—some few instances of which, not traceable to over-eating, have shielded the short-comings of a million idlers. Next, there is the fear that the intellect may be developed at the expense of the moral nature,—one of those truths in the abstract which are made to do the office of lies in the application, and which are calculated not so much to make good men as goodies,—persons rejoicing in an equal mediocrity of morals and mind, and pertinent examples of the necessity of personal force to convert moral ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... has as yet approached, I mean this attempt to show how a woman may be prevented from deceiving her husband? Is not this the comedy of comedies? Is it not a second speculum vitae humanae. We are not now dealing with the abstract questions which we have done justice to already in this Meditation. At the present day in ethics as in exact science, the world asks for facts for the results of observation. These ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the History of England here reprinted calls for little or no comment. It is but a dry relation of events with no touch in the recital of any of those qualities which characterize Swift's writings. The facts were evidently obtained from the old chroniclers. What object Swift had in writing this Abstract is not known. If the dedication to the Count de Gyllenborg truly states his intention, it must be confessed that the "foreigners, and gentlemen of our own country" had not much upon which to congratulate themselves. Why Swift should have chosen the Count de Gyllenborg to whom ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... Johnson could have acted more wisely. Sir John complains that the opinion of that excellent mathematician, Mr. Thomas Simpson, did not preponderate in favour of the semicircular arch. But he should have known, that however eminent Mr. Simpson was in the higher parts of abstract mathematical science, he was little versed in mixed and practical mechanicks. Mr. Muller, of Woolwich Academy, the scholastick father of all the great engineers which this country has employed for forty years, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... more to his taste; whilst Lamb's pleasures (except, perhaps, from his pipe) lay amongst the books of the old English writers. His soul delighted in communion with ancient generations, more especially with men who had been unjustly forgotten. Hazlitt's mind attached itself to abstract subjects; Lamb's was more practical, and embraced men. Hunt was somewhat indifferent to persons as well as to things, except in the cases of Shelley and Keats, and his own family; yet he liked poetry and poetical subjects. Hazlitt (who was ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... finally accepted the compromise measures of 1850, he was looked upon as the hope of the Barnburners and the most dangerous foe of the Hunkers. Even Horatio Seymour was afraid of him. He did not advocate abolition; he did not treat slavery in the abstract; he did not transcend the Free-soil doctrine. But he spoke with such power and brilliancy that Henry Wilson, afterward Vice President, declared him "the bright particular star of the revolt."[372] He was not an impassioned orator. He spoke deliberately, and rarely with animation or with gesture; ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... egg-box collapsed under the weight of the three orators, and they sprawled in equal ignominy. But the storm was now launched. A score of the schoolboys burst into passionate abstract discussion. The unity necessary to the school strike ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Jehu, the whole of history, both that now written and that yet to come, is planned, executed according to its own power, for the course of time is marked as clearly as the tides: by its own coming and going it is revealed. Revealed, however, only in an abstract and undefined manner, so that while its marks are clearly seen, it is only by special revelations that it is shown in a comprehensive and detailed light. And that is why I have summoned you here, my dear Jehu, for you are the chosen one, summoned to ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... the interior of the houses of Russian peasants as well as the customs of the Russian peasants, which description is highly interesting, and I shall give a brief abstract of it. ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... the qualities most especially characteristic of its author, it is not superior, or indeed is but barely equal, to some of his other compositions. To take, for instance, two poems not very different in length from Adonais—The Witch of Atlas is more original, and Epipsychidion more abstract ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the passage in his letter on the strength of which Mr. Forsyth has condemned Cicero, not without abstract truth in his condemnation: "They, indeed, have consented"—that is the Salaminians—"but what will befall them if some such governor as Paulus should come here? And all this I have done for the sake of Brutus!" AEmilius ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... finding occupation. Trade Union leaders have boldly avowed that they will thus compel the State to recognize the "right to employment," and to provide that employment by means of national or municipal workshops. With questions of abstract "right" we are not here concerned, but it may be well to indicate certain economic difficulties involved in the establishment of public works as a solution of the "unemployed" problem. Since the "unemployed" will, under the closer restrictions of growing Trade ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... consequence to be trusted at the end of a rash German's sword! however, the General wrote again, and hinted at coming himself for an answer. So it happened that when he arrived, the Count was gone to the baths of Lucca-those waters were reckoned better for his health, than steel in the abstract-How oddly it happened! He Just returned to Florence as the General was dead! Now was not this heroic lover worth running after? I wonder, as the Count must have known my lady's courage and genius for adventures, that he never thought of putting ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... recognized; but new light has recently been thrown upon the subject by the philosopher Karl Blind, who has contributed valuable articles on the subject in the German periodical "Die Gegenwart" and in the "London Academy." We take the liberty of reproducing here an abstract of his article ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... Nesbit, coming for Laura in his buggy, would find Amos in the school room, and they would fall to their everlasting debate upon the reality of time and space with the Doctor enjoying hugely his impious attempt to couch the terminology of abstract philosophy in his ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... seem to me to give insufficient prominence to the gaiety of Stevenson. It was his cardinal quality in those early days. A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him; he seemed to skip the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jest; his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, a wave of humor was certain to sweep in and destroy it. I can not, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not seem funny ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... eye, protruding lips, as enlarged by the abuse of words. He began by fingering his notes with an important air, tasting the glass of sweetened water, and settling himself in his place; then he started a babble of words without sense, with the nauseous facility of the bar; misusing vague ideas, abstract terms, and words in ly and ion, stereotyped words, and ready-made phrases. A flattering murmur greeted the end of his exordium; for the French people in general, and the political world in particular, manifest a depraved taste for that sort of eloquence. Encouraged, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... had given Grouchy this verbal order, tidings came in from a scouting party that a body of Prussian troops had been seen about 9 A.M. at Gembloux, considerably northward of the Namur road. The abstract probability no doubt was that the Prussians would retire towards their base. But that Napoleon kept an open mind on the subject is evidenced by his instruction to Grouchy to "go and discover the route taken by Bluecher," ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... intimations to this effect dropped from him in his conversations with my brother and others. But, on the whole, the simple fact was that he never ventured to go deeply into the fundamental questions. His official duties left him little time for abstract thought; and his surpassingly ingenious and versatile mind employed itself rather in framing excuses for not answering than in finding thorough answers to possible doubts. He adopted a version of the doctrine crede ut intelligas, and denounced the mere reasoning machines ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... smell of the busy lure of money making. Within its gates we pass into a new element; and this element is antipathetic to the one-sided development imposed by city life. Instead of resting us, it presents a problem, and the last thing for which we now have time is abstract thought. And so we prefer the dazzling, twinkling, clashing, clamoring, death-dealing, sinking, eruptive, insistent Broadway, where every blink of the eye catches a new impression, where the brain becomes a passive, palpitating receptacle for ideas which are shot into it through all the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... agreeable to you, Senor Alferez, we will travel together.' It was settled that they should. To travel—amongst 'balcony witnesses,' and anglers for 'blind horses'—not merely with a just man, but with the very abstract idea and riding allegory of justice, was too delightful to the storm-wearied cornet; and he cheerfully accompanied Don Antonio to the house of the magistrate, called Don Pedro de Chavarria. Distinguished was his reception; the Alcalde personally renewed his regrets for the ridiculous ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... says: "Livingstone followed the dictates of duty. Never was such a willing slave to that abstract virtue. His inclinations impel him home, the fascinations of which it requires the sternest resolution to resist. With every foot of new ground he travelled over he forged a chain of sympathy which should hereafter bind the Christian nations in bonds of love and charity ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... but fervid; for one onza of gold is worth more than an arroba of straw. Let him explain to the Indians what is necessary for their salvation, and let him not play the discreet among them. Let him use similes and examples in his sermons that they can understand, and not plunge into depths of abstract ideas, for that is a jargon which they do not understand; and they especially detest Latin phrases. The statement that the Indians have no faith is a pretext of the devil, to discourage the gospel ministers. Let him do with fervor whatever he finds to do, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
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