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More "Indeterminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... formation of Substance. Substance, Pneuma, and Form being all evolved out of the primordial chaotic mass, this material world as it lies before us came into existence." And that which made it possible for Chaos to evolve was the Solitary Indeterminate (i tu or the tao), which is not created, but is able to create everlastingly. And being both Solitary and Indeterminate it tells us nothing determinate ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... at them, it was true. They were huge and ran up for fifty or sixty feet without a bough. Moreover, it was probable that the god climbed better than we could. The Kalubi began to move inland in an indeterminate fashion, and I asked him ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... among these activities, are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections, wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of huge extent, which includes that particular proposition, without ever reflecting that it includes a great deal more. The fatal facility with which Mr. Gladstone multiplies expressions stately and sonorous, but of indeterminate meaning, eminently qualifies him to practise this sleight on himself and on his readers. He lays down broad general doctrines about power, when the only power of which he is thinking is the power of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... humorous writer. I am not partial to American humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley Warner I always appreciated. In our talk I saw his serious side, for he was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State, on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories. He told me that he never talked in train: but during the three hours' journey to New York neither of us opened the books with which we had provided ourselves, and we each talked of our separate interests, ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... when entered upon under all the conditions demanded by the Church for a valid union is indissoluble.[390] A separation "from bed and board" (quoad thorum seu quoad cohabitationem) is allowed for various causes, such as excessive cruelty, for a determinate or an indeterminate period; but there is no absolute divorce even for adultery. For this cause a separation may, indeed, take place, but the bond of matrimony is not dissolved thereby and neither the innocent nor the guilty party may marry again during the lifetime of ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... valuable, but a wise man must have strength to call in his resources before middle-life, prune off divergent activities, and concentrate himself on the main work, be it what it may. It is shameful to see the indeterminate lives of many of our gifted men, unable to resist the temptations of a busy land, and so losing themselves in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... incoherence. All experience does not show that 'drowned bodies' require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the surface. Both science and experience show that the period of their rising is, and necessarily must be, indeterminate. If, moreover, a body has risen to the surface through firing of cannon, it will not 'sink again if let alone,' until decomposition has so far progressed as to permit the escape of the generated ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... both shocked and displeased. There were droppings of food all down the front of his coat; the mouth under the ragged ill-grown beard drooped sullenly; the forehead was lined and contracted; and on the lean temples the hair was a dusty indeterminate colour that might or might not have been called gray. The utter misery and self-abandonment of the man appealed to her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the wicked feeling that he was humbled and brought low who had ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... the dynamiter's activity, transferred to the world of thought. His pretended re-investigation of the foundations of the moral sentiments reminds one of the mud geysers of the Yellowstone, which break out periodically and envelop everything within reach in an indeterminate shower of mud. To me there is more of vanity than of philosophic acumen in his onslaught on well-nigh all human institutions. He would, like ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... great Franciscan, "is the indeterminate element of contingent things. This does not exist in Nature, but it has reality in so far as it constitutes the term of God's creative activity. By its union with a substantial form it becomes endowed with the attributes of quantity, and becomes Secundo Prima. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... forms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people, occupations, and aspirations of "these States," as yet undeveloped but vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tally the fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and a new world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope and flexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation and variety. Finding none ready to his hand, he created it. Not that Whitman did not draw for ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... has likewise been much increased by a class of verbs too frequent in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use so vague and indeterminate, and the senses detorted so widely from the first idea, that it is hard to trace them through the maze of variation, to catch them on the brink of utter inanity, to circumscribe them by any limitations, or interpret them by any words of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... a son. Unfortunately he employed a word of indeterminate gender: hence the lamentable denouement. For in ancient India, as in ancient Rome, the spoken word, the ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... eyes and hugging his kaross around him because of the cold, and something in his anxious, indeterminate expression told me at once that he knew himself to be a man in terrible danger. Just behind him, dark and brooding, his arms folded on his breast, his eyes fixed upon the ground, looking, to my moved imagination, ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... world becomes and the more it rises above the indeterminate, so much the farther removed it is from God; that is to say, so much the more impious it is." M. Julien Benda[12] is not led to this startling utterance by any political or sentimental grudge. It is not the late war, nor the peace of Versailles, nor the parlous state of the arts, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Argo-Mayflower, usually bearing a name thus significant, and manifesting, even at her age, traits of character justifying the compellation. What that age precisely was, could not always be known; indeed, a lady's age is generally among indeterminate things; and it has, very properly, come to be considered ungallant, if not impertinent, to be curious upon so delicate a subject. A man has no more right to know how many years a woman has, than how many skirts she wears; and, if he have any anxiety about the matter, in either case, his ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... foreign trade, therefore, as much concerned in the guilt of its expense as colonial traffic. The amount of charge, therefore, although remaining to be deducted from the colonial head, may be left as a neutral indeterminate item. But the military expenses for Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, about L.80,000, cannot be for colonial account at all, because stations merely for carrying on foreign trade, against which chargeable, with the civil establishments ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... unending questioning, {181} seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which end with infinity. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... I stood motionless and invisible in the deep shadows of the clump of bush, soft swishing sounds in the long grass grew increasingly frequent all round me, and in the misty starlight I caught frequent sudden glimpses of indeterminate forms gliding ghost-like toward the water, which was evidently the recognised drinking place for most of the game in the neighbourhood. And at length, when I had been standing there for about twenty minutes, two pairs of lambent orbs loomed up through the long grass, and Thunder ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Before the epoch of life begins there is in the given world no such form of existence. There is matter only. Then at a certain stage the epoch of life begins. The epoch of life continues for a vast indeterminate period. No doubt in some of the worlds an epoch of life has been provided ten times as great, possibly a thousand times as great, as in other planets. After the epoch of life begins only certain forms of existence are for a while possible. Then ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... grown up into an unwholesome, spotty, indeterminate young man, with a speckled necktie, and cuffs of which he was inordinately proud, and which he insisted on "flashing" every second minute. He was also evidently self-satisfied; which was odd, for I have seldom seen anyone who ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Mrs. Warricombe found herself changing places with the daughter whom she had regarded as wholly subject to her direction. Sidwell began to exercise an indeterminate control, the proofs of which were at length manifest in details of her mother's speech and demeanour. An exquisite social tact, an unfailing insensibly as the qualities of pure air: these were the points of ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... unfortunately it has the power of reproducing itself and its misery through one more generation. And degenerate men seem instinctively to make their selection from this kind of women, so that they multiply and produce indeterminate sexes to whom life is a torture. Fortunately, however, they perish in the end, either from discord with real life, or from the irresistible revolt of their suppressed instincts, or from foiled hopes of possessing the man. The type is tragical, offering ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... themselves to each other then and there, and never through life have swerved from that pledge! For some of the goodness which Rex believed in was there. Goodness is a large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future; is the germ prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and may have the healthy ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... a gnat, in a flea—there lurks a greater mystery. In an animate body, however small, there abides something of which we get no trace in the vast reaches of astronomy, a kind of activity that is incalculable, indeterminate, and super-mechanical, not lawless, but making its own laws, and escaping from the iron necessity that ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... turn up; fall to one's lot; be one's -fate &c. 601; stumble on light upon; take one's chance &c. 621. Adj. casual, fortuitous, accidental, adventitious, causeless, incidental, contingent, uncaused, undetermined, indeterminate; random, statistical; possible &c. 470; unintentional &c. 621. Adv. by chance, accidentally, by accident; casually; perchance &c. (possibly) 470; for aught one knows; as good would have it, as bad would have it, as luck would ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the shock of the Warsaw revolt, his passion for George Sand, the death of his father and of his friend Matuszynski, and the rupture with Madame Sand—these were crises of his history. All else was but an indeterminate factor in the scheme of his earthly sojourn. Chopin though not an anchorite resembled Flaubert, being both proud and timid; he led a detached life, hence his art was bold and violent. Unlike Liszt he seldom sought ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the slicker a most valuable classification until his junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of age and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon, a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless photographs of her family and her wide connection, most prominent ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... preserved an obstinate silence on the subject. She knew he had been admitted to one of the officers' training-camps, and that he was making rather helpless and puzzled purchases. Going into his room she would find a dressing-case of khaki leather, perhaps, or flannel shirts of the same indeterminate hue. She would shed futile tears over them, and order them put out of sight. But she never offered to ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... historic old mansion is of intention low-toned and dim, there is no obscurity, though plenty of innuendo and suggestion. The romance is a noble specimen of that use of the vague which never falls into the confusion of indeterminate ideas. The theme is startlingly clear: a sin is shown working through generations and only to find expiation in the fresh health of the younger descendants: life built on a lie must totter to its fall. And the shell ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... a large, clean-shaven, dark-haired man of indeterminate age. By his profession at large he was little known, but in the Guardian office he was very well known indeed and excellently understood, and an appreciation of his character and qualities truthfully set down by the observant Jimmy or by Herbert, the map clerk, would never ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of the same act, the same Court of Directors were ordered to take into consideration and to decide on the indeterminate rights of the Rajah of Tanjore and the Nabob of Arcot; and in this, as in the former case, no power of appeal, revision, or alteration was reserved to any other. It was a jurisdiction, in a cause between party ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... hand, nothing hinders infinity from being in things that are ordained to one another not essentially but accidentally; for accidental causes are indeterminate. And in this way it happens that there is an accidental infinity of ends, and of things ordained to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... smell of ozone. His whole body was tingling with electric tension. The bluish light seemed to be in indeterminate lumps scattered over the rocky floor. The rush of the wind under that tremendous ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... of what I said, but if I may take the evidence of Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively. I told them, for one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri. Little Angelo was of that indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a drunken father without regard to the child-labour laws of the State of New Jersey. His people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of miles from the glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from his work along the railroad-track. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... ever sat down to, even in England. The landlord, at my particular request, took his seat with me at table. He complained bitterly of the oppression of the taxes, and more particularly of their uncertainty, which was so indeterminate, according to his assertions, that the collectors took what they pleased, and employed their offices as means of favour, or to gratify their personal piques. One of the collectors of Amiens, it seems, ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... varied in different directions with regard to different objects, and in different degrees where the direction has on the whole continued the same, but because the very objects to be taken into computation are so indeterminate, and vary so much, not only as regards century and century, kingdom and kingdom, but also, even in the same century and the same kingdom, as regards rank and rank. That which is a mere necessary to one, is a luxurious superfluity ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... But this objection is of no weight, for it is only a dispute about words; as there is no general term which can be applied both to the office of a juryman and a member of the assembly. For the sake of distinction, suppose we call it an indeterminate office: but I lay it down as a maxim, that those are citizens who could exercise it. Such then is the description of a citizen who comes nearest to what all those who are called citizens are. Every one also should know, that of the component parts of ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... however, in shaking off the recollection between the morning's start and now; so it was annoying that he should force himself on me, just when there was no getting rid of him. At this distance, however, he might be anything. An indeterminate blot, it seems to waver, to falter, to come and vanish again in the quivering, heated air. Even so, in the old time, leaning on that familiar gate — are the tell-tale inwoven initials still decipherable? ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... discarded servant or personal enemy, for I believe you are convinced we have not merited it either by our discourse or our actions: if we had, the charge would have been specific; but we have reason to imagine it is nothing more than the indeterminate and general charge of being aristocrates. I did not see my mother or sister all the day we were arrested, nor till the evening of the next: the one was engaged perhaps with "Rosine and the Angola", who were indisposed, and the other would not forego her usual card-party. Many of our friends likewise ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... derived from observation. The time which we may suppose to be represented algebraically by the symbol t, would remain as an unknown quantity to the end. What the mathematician sought to do was to present the astronomer with a series of algebraic expressions containing t as an indeterminate quantity, and so, by simply substituting for t any year and fraction of a year whatever—1600, 1700, 1800, for example, the result would give the latitude, longitude, or radius-vector ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... was as aloof and taciturn a client as Rammer Spacelines ever had picked up. A lean, blond character of indeterminate age, with pale eyes, hard mouth. Why he had selected a bulky semifreighter like the Queen for a mineralogical survey jaunt to a lifeless little sun system far beyond the outposts of civilization was a point he didn't discuss. Gefty, needing ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... finished tea; Anne Hourican is at the back, seated on the settle knitting, and watching James. James Moynihan is about twenty-eight. He has a good forehead, but his face is indeterminate. He has been working in the fields, and is dressed in trousers, shirt, and heavy boots. Anne Hourican is a pretty, dark-haired girl of ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... of the ego—is reduced to a few elementary actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from the whole of the circumambient life and they still possess a number of those more general and indeterminate senses whereof we have been deprived by the gradual encroachment of a narrow and intolerant special faculty, our intelligence. Among these senses which up to the present we have described as instincts, for want—and it is becoming a pressing want—of a more suitable and definite word, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... blocked by large rocks which, it is said, have fallen within a few years. For this reason persons in the neighborhood are afraid to venture in. There is a rumor that the corpse of a woman, coated with stalagmite, can be seen in this cave; also several bodies (sex apparently indeterminate) lying like spokes in a wheel, with heads at the center. No one could be persuaded to go in and point out the place where ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... articles on education, and even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education, I naturally ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... definitely and emphatically deserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was no real Prussia before Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised themselves as rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic and patriotic people. In this sense there ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... I." The miller laughed uneasily. But for the corrugations of time, one might not have known if it were flour or age that had so whitened his long beard, which hung quivering down over the breast of his jeans coat, of an indeterminate hue under its frosting from the hopper. "He hev tuk up a ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... into this twofold trap, the theorists will reply that the Scoliae are descended from a precursor, an indeterminate creature, of changeable habits and changing form, modifying itself in accordance with its environment and with the regional and climatic conditions and branching out into races each of which has become a species with the attributes which distinguish ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... turmoil within her. But no good to show it! No good at all! She broke away from him, and went out into the twilight, distraught, but unconvinced. All was indeterminate and vague within her, like the shapes and shadows in the garden, except—her will to have. A poplar pierced up into the dark-blue sky and touched a white star there. The dew wetted her shoes, and chilled ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in point of fact two Clevelands—before marriage and after marriage—the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate. Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so wholly ignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be told assigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylor had grown up in the army and advanced in the military service to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... hand and switched on another lamp, in the hard brilliance of which the thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared itself, leaping out of the darkness into light. It was a terrible object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so that it glared upwards. The workmanship ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... To escape the certainty of civil war, therefore, it was necessary to lay down the line of inheritance by a peremptory order; to cut off resolutely all rival claims; and in legislating upon a matter so vital, and hitherto so uncertain and indeterminate, to enforce the decision with the most stringent and exacting penalties. From the Heptarchy downwards English history furnished no fixed rule of inheritance, but only a series of precedents of uncertainty; and while at ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... admit of such an expression as "full score," but would require the insertion of the particle "a," which cannot be, on account of the metre. And this is another great artifice of the Poet: by leaving the quantity of beating indeterminate, he gives every reader the liberty to administer it, in exact proportion to the sum of indignation which he may have conceived against his Hero; that by thus amply satisfying their resentment, they may be the more easily ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really very subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it does not express them at all, except on those occasions (now only too rare) when it indulges ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... our success was a carefully planned system, mathematically demonstrated. Everything that could be controlled was controlled, and the indeterminate factors of storms, open leads and accidents to men, dogs and sledges, were taken into consideration in the percentage of probabilities and provided for as far as possible. Sledges would break and dogs would fall by the way, of course; but we could generally make one sledge out of two broken ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... dear creature, not only in her glances, indeterminate of colour, veiled or gay like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the draping of her dress, in everything about her, even to the long curl, falling over the neck erect and delicate ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... calculate its duration or termination. It had, as diseases often have, its periods of such utter quiescence that it seemed as if it had entirely disappeared. It was not a year after Harry had received his indeterminate death sentence before he looked better than he had done for a long while. The color came back to his cheeks, his expression regained its youthful joyfulness. Everybody said that Harry Edgham was quite well again. He had observed ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Honora, in rustling garments, poised as the figurehead of this craft, beckoning him on to battle and victory. Alas! the launching happened at that grimmest and most unromantic of hours-ten minutes of eight in the morning. There was a period, indeterminate, when she poured out his coffee with wifely zeal; a second period when she appeared at the foot of the stairs to kiss him as he was going out of the door; a third when, clad in an attractive dressing-gown, she waved him good-by from the window; and lastly, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a wooden image of this being. It is rudely anthropomorphic, and is covered with fish-like scales. Its sex is indeterminate. He is supposed to ascend the river from the sea, kneeling on the back ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin, of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowing with a subcutaneous redness, thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned indeterminate superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to the steel of their machetes revolvers strapped on their ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... affection to his own country, we never expect any regard to distant nations, where a competition arises. Not to mention, that, while every man consults the good of his own community, we are sensible, that the general interest of mankind is better promoted, than any loose indeterminate views to the good of a species, whence no beneficial action could ever result, for want of a duly limited object, on ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... "I mean you, and Mrs. Easterfield, and myself, and the rest. That young woman's indeterminate methods of fascination interfere with ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... cannot dispute; all we can assert is, that we are unable to determine its value, and that it would be a mistake to suppose we can do so, even in the lowest degree, by Mr. Spencer's test of inconceivability. Nevertheless, the fact that there is such a chance renders it in some indeterminate degree more probable that what we know as Force and Matter are identical with what we know as Mind, than that what we know as oxygen and hydrogen are identical with what we know as water. So that to this extent the essential doctrine of Materialism is ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... indeterminate; nobody was committed to anything, one way or another. Hen Cooney earned Cally's undying resentment (at least for the remainder of the drive) by crying over her shoulder as ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... unreserved study of all the facts, subject to cross-examination, to be sure, but before all accessible to complete and unreserved study. This would mean a substantial participation of law in the promotion of knowledge of facts and constructive activity, and a conception of indeterminate sentence not merely in the service of leniency but in the service of the best protection of the public, and, if necessary, lasting detention of those who cannot be reformed, before they have had to do their worst. Whoever ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... on something deeper and lower. The rudimentary seems to them at such moments divine; and if they conceive a Life of Reason at all they despise it as a mass of artifices and conventions. Reason is indeed not indispensable to life, nor needful if living anyhow be the sole and indeterminate aim; as the existence of animals and of most men sufficiently proves. In so far as man is not a rational being and does not live in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions and dreamful ideas roll by without ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... shawl and seated herself on the old, high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife sitting in the penumbra, chin ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... external to the true God of India, or Brahma in the neuter gender. Brahma is alone, unchangeable in the midst of creation: all emanates from him, he comprehends all, but he remains extraneous to all: he is Being and the negation of beings. Brahma is never worshipped; the indeterminate Being is never invoked; he is inaccessible to the prayers as the actions of man; humanity, as well as nature, is extraneous to him. External to Brahma rises the Trimurti, that is to say, Brahma (masculine) the power which creates, Vishnu the power which preserves, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... his youth and the stern experience of his life, he now hardly knew in which direction the truth lay. Moreover, he had never acted save under the impulse of violent emotion, but contented himself with fine words—vague, indeterminate wishes. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minerva said she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would appear so; and there was no one person or action among them, which would not puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had seen fit to enrol his own valet as an Executive Councillor. As matter of fact they were commonly selected from the judiciary and other salaried officials, and from the members of the Legislative Council. Their number was indeterminate, but was seldom less than four or more than six, in addition to the Lieutenant-Governor himself. Their functions consisted of giving advice to the Lieutenant-Governor on all matters of governmental policy, whenever he might deem it expedient to consult them. With respect to mere matters of detail, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... courageous as her word, she wept brokenly for her mother—the mother who could, at best, have given her but such indeterminate advice. ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... rules will be found applicable to my second object,—the landed estate of the crown. A landed estate is certainly the very worst which the crown can possess. All minute and dispersed possessions, possessions that are often of indeterminate value, and which require a continued personal attendance, are of a nature more proper for private management than public administration. They are fitter for the care of a frugal land-steward than of an office in the state. Whatever they may possibly have been in other times or in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... yesterday, or forty years ago," says the verse of an Irish song. That is the kind of indeterminate "yesterday" which is described in Irish Memories by two friends who have made some memories of Ireland imperishable. "The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we were children," writes Miss Somerville, "is fast leaving us; every day some landmark is wiped out." No one knows better ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... was Monday, and at some indeterminate hour of the twenty-four, though whether it was night or noon he could not say, Ferriss woke in his sleeping-bag and raised himself on an elbow, and for a moment sat stupidly watching Bennett writing in his journal. Noticing that he was awake, Bennett looked up from the page and spoke in a voice ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... characteristic. Why do American faces hardly ever wrinkle? Is it the absence of a soul? It must be. For it is less true of the Bostonian than of the ordinary business American, in whose life exhilaration and depression take the place of joy and suffering. The women's faces are more indeterminate, not very feminine; many of them wear those 'invisible' pince-nez which centre glitteringly about the bridge of the nose, and get from them a curious air of intelligence. Handsome people of both sexes are very common; beautiful, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... preserved for us in the AEschylean Prometheus, stands midway betwixt both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it assumes an X Y Z,—(I take these letters in their algebraic application)—an indeterminate 'Elohim', antecedent to the matter of the world, [Greek: hulae akosmos]—no less than to the [Greek: hulae kekosmaemenae.] In this point, likewise, the Greek accorded with the Semitic, and differed from the Phoenician—that it held the antecedent X Y Z to be ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... would never wear plain black like most women of her age. She was one of the blue-eyed women who looks well in lavender. Her blue eyes, now looking at her son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms. A deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... me and more remarkable and disconcerting is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives, more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us, a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation, a wilderness so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to either ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... the latter case a man would no more pay for and support his wife than she would do so for him. They would be two friends, differing in kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves in a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as we have discussed it, is indeterminate between these alternatives. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... She is a young weaver, and, having just left her work, she wears a dark skirt, a blouse of some indeterminate blue-gray shade made of cotton, and a large shawl over her head and shoulders in place of a jacket and hat. A colored cotton apron covers her skirt below the waist, and the short skirt displays stout stockings similar to Sarah's. She wears clogs, and the clothes—except the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... are able to supply the right artificial environment for their weakness and treat them as incurable moral and mental invalids. We must cease to deal with such as with responsible human beings, who might do better if only they would. The "indeterminate sentence" is a step toward such treatment, but it is often rendered wholly futile by being mixed with "reward of shortening term for good behavior in prison." Good behavior inside prison walls gives no proof of ability to take ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... comprehensible), have been more and more tried for such separate actions under separate and suitable laws ever since Europe began to become a civilisation—and until the rare and recent re-incursions of barbarism in such things as the Indeterminate Sentence. Of that I shall speak later; it is enough for this argument to point out the plain facts. It is the plain fact that every savage, every sultan, every outlawed baron, every brigand-chief has always ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... properly they are applied to God. Hence Damascene says (De Fide Orth. i) that, "HE WHO IS, is the principal of all names applied to God; for comprehending all in itself, it contains existence itself as an infinite and indeterminate sea of substance." Now by any other name some mode of substance is determined, whereas this name HE WHO IS, determines no mode of being, but is indeterminate to all; and therefore it denominates the "infinite ocean ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... motives and conditions: the genuine need of a navy, and a strong one, to protect trade in the event of war, and to secure a voice in overseas policy; the genuine fear of an attack by the Powers of the Entente, an attack to be provoked by British jealousy; and also that indeterminate ambition of any great Power which may be influencing the policy of statesmen even while they have not avowed it to themselves, and which, expressed by men less responsible and less discreet, becomes part of that "public opinion" ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... $100.00 for the engraving (with an average cost of about $50.00), the price of printing is so moderate as to make this form of production popular among extensive users of business paper. Lithography gives a smooth, uniform and permanent impression on the paper, and permits of an indeterminate "run." The cost of printing from lithographic plates is practically the same as from steel or copper plates. The savings effected in large orders is in the cost of the plates, for copper and steel must be renewed as they become ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... the next day in smoking an indeterminate quantity of cigars in his study window, and so got through the hours till he could dress and go to the Hotel de Langeais. To anyone who had known the magnificent worth of the man, it would have been grievous to see him grown so small, so ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... inn the usual nightly round of mediaeval revelry was going on. This ancient structure, indeterminate in age and style of architecture, was built upon uneven ground. To save expense and trouble, in the distant days of its inception, it had been built upon two levels, without the excavating for foundations. Time and the weather had warped and twisted the old wooden ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... enough glimmer on the broad open landing for him to grope his way by, and he went noiselessly toward the staircase leading up to Beatty's rooms. Once, just as he reached it, he thought he caught the faint noise of low talking somewhere in the house, an indeterminate sound not to be located. But when he paused to listen, it had ceased and he supposed it to be only a windy ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business. He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... possessed steam yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content to earn enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying. And then, after some time,—a very indeterminate time,—when he had learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and his name would be on all men's lips. But greater than that, infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have proved himself worthy of Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for Ruth that his ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... rushed in on the boy's consciousness with startling suddenness. Across the face of the evening indeterminate, dark bodies darted low. A prolonged swish of water sounded, and the placid faint light on the lagoon fifty yards away was broken and troubled. For a moment it shimmered, and was still. Absolute darkness ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, was arranging to have his house taken ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... the thick pianist, and Rose had found him in the highest degree obnoxious. He seemed to occupy an indeterminate social position in their ship's company, between the forecastle, which was the chorus, and the quarter-deck, which comprised Galbraith (you might call him the pilot), the baby-faced man with the tortoise-shell spectacles, reputed to be the author, two awesome ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the calorific value of air-gas, unless the manufacture is very precisely controlled, are apt to be variable, and the amount of light, emitted, either in self-luminous or in incandescent burners, is somewhat indeterminate. The generating plant must be so constructed that the air cannot at any time be mixed with as much hydrocarbon vapour as constitutes an explosive mixture with it, otherwise the pipes and apparatus will contain a gas which will forthwith explode if it is ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... of past ages were known, a simple calculation would show the age of the earth's crust since the first continents were formed. But unfortunately these "ifs" stand mountain-high here, all the essential factors being indeterminate. Nevertheless, the geologists contended that they could easily make out a case proving that the constructive and destructive work still in evidence, to say nothing of anterior revolutions, could ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... become familiar with this indeterminate idea of the savage Supreme Being, which, logically, may be prior to the evolution of the notion of ghost ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... days of her convalescence, Beatrix manifested an utter indifference to the tidings from the outer world. She lay by the hour, her baby on her arm, looking down at the fuzzy little head and the red little face whose indeterminate features were fast taking the stamp of those of their father. Strange to say, the fact caused Beatrix no repulsion. The fires of her being seemed to have burned themselves out, and even her feeling to Lorimer shared in her general apathy. In the weeks which ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... violets, her own particular fragrance enveloping my body, penetrating my very heart with an inconceivable intimacy, bringing me closer to her than the closest embrace, and yet so subtle that I sensed her existence in me only as a great, glowing, indeterminate tenderness, something like the evening light disclosing after the white passion of the day infinite depths in the colours of the sky and an unsuspected soul of peace in the protean forms of life. I had not known such quietness ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... malignity, and echoed by folly; general accusations of indeterminate wickedness; and obscure hints of impossible designs, dispersed among those that do not know their meaning, by those that know them to be false, have disposed part of the nation, though but a small part, to pester ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... the effect of a constant going and coming of spectres about him. There were strange noises in his ears; extraordinary fancies disturbed his brain. He saw neither houses, nor pavements, nor chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects whose edges melted into each other. At the corner of the Rue de la Barillerie, there was a grocer's shop whose porch was garnished all about, according to immemorial custom, with hoops of tin from ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution—perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... out of him. He lay still, conscious of a pain in his head and in his ankle and somewhere else—an indeterminate spot deep in his being. He had been forbidden to see the girl who ran away out into the night to look at the stars, the girl who had not laughed at his attempt to describe the white ecstasy of the winter moon. He had frightened her—disgusted ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... connection in Germany with some people being able to favorise his evasion, has been retaken. The Company says again, in the personal interests of the prisoners, that any evasion give place to serious punition (minima) fortnight of rigourous imprisonment after that they go in the "Strafbaracke" for an indeterminate time. ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... before our very eyes. How are slums conceivable or East Ends possible where every man can plant his own yam and cocoa-nut, and reap their fruit four-hundred-fold? How can Mrs. Grundy thrive where every woman may rear her own ten children on her ten-rood plot without aid or assistance from their indeterminate fathers? What need of carpentry where a few bamboos, cut down at random, can be fastened together with thongs into a comfortable chair? What use of pottery where calabashes hang on every tree, and cocoa-nuts, with the water fresh and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... First Deputy, that Blake began to suspect his own position. Copeland was an out-and-out "office" man, anything but a "flat foot." Weak looking and pallid, with the sedentary air of a junior desk clerk, vibratingly restless with no actual promise of being penetrating, he was of that indeterminate type which never seems to acquire a personality of its own. The small and bony and steel-blue face was as neutral as the spare and reticent figure that sat before a bald table in a bald room as inexpressive and reticent as its occupant. Copeland was ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... try pertinaciously enough. This world is good, we must say, since it is what we make it,—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? M has its character indeterminate, susceptible of forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the other. All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution x. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... excellence. It is the most beautiful and most ancient of all, inasmuch as it dates back to the indeterminate times of highest antiquity. Its mission is not only to make us acquainted with the innumerable orbs by which our nights are illuminated, but it is, moreover, thanks to it that we know where and what we are. Without it we should live as the blind, in eternal ignorance of ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... establishment in orbit, the Warlock was manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate; with the psychology of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but ghastly period. On the third day there was a second fist fight. A ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... to again, thanks to my activities. The palace itself was a hotbed of conspiracy; the rank and file of the army was so disaffected that the officers never knew whom they could depend upon or whom they might trust; a secret pressure of the thumb, indeterminate in its character but nevertheless significant, was likely to be received from any hand clasp, no matter where given or with whom exchanged, and a princess or a countess was as likely to bestow it upon you as any ordinary person whom you might chance to meet. The pressure itself ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... the motor-car from that direction. There was an unoccupied muddy space for fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheels and head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude semicircle of people that hung as yet indeterminate in action about ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Lexicon,' vol. xxxvi:[8] 'Seemachten, Seepotenzen, Latin. summae potestatesmaripotentes.' 'Seepotenzen' is probably quite obsolete now. It is interesting as showing that German no more abhors Teuto-Latin or Teuto-Romance compounds than English. We may note, as a proof of the indeterminate meaning of the expression until his own epoch-making works had appeared, that Mahan himself in his earliest book used it in both senses. He says,[9] 'The Spanish Netherlands ceased to be a sea-power.' He alludes[10] to the development of a nation as a 'sea-power,' and[11] to the ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... anomaly affects the ordinary flowering branches, or the leafy shoots of the year, the summits of which, instead of developing in the customary manner, terminate each in one vast and long inflorescence, very loose and indeterminate, and with axillary flowers.[293] ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... conception of life everywhere, but no true appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction of man's nature: in its consciousness of itself, humanity is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But there Greek thought finds its happy limit; it ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Siddons, in her last stay with us, obtained my mother's consent that I should go to Edinburgh to pay her a visit, which began by being of indeterminate length, and prolonged itself for a year—the happiest of my life, as I often, while it lasted, thought it would prove; and now that my years are over I know to have been so. To the anxious, nervous, exciting, irritating ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... in integers of the indeterminate equation ax by c may be effected by means of continued fractions. If we suppose a/b to be converted into a continued fraction and p/q to be the penultimate convergent, we have aq - bp 1 or -1, according as the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... can't quite see the end of. Listen! 'Of the domain which Britannia rules by sufferance, my gross captain, knew nothing, and his Navigator, if possible, less. From the bestial recriminations and the indeterminate chaos of the grand deck, I ascended—always with a whisky-and-soda in my hands—to a scene truly grotesque. Behold my captain in plain sea, at issue with his Navigator! A crisis of nerves due to the enormous quantity of alcohol which he had swallowed ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown she looked almost girlish in spite of the imperious dignity of ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... or permanent load is one of constant and indeterminate duration, as books on a shelf. In the case of a bridge the weight of the structure itself is the dead load. All large beams support a uniform dead load consisting of their ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... the height of the bell from the bed. It was well above, and to one side—a smear rather than a print, too indeterminate to be ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Latin cantare becomes chantar in Provencal but chanter in French. But north and south of the boundary thus determined there was, in the absence of any great mountain range or definite geographical line of demarcation, an indeterminate zone, in which one dialect probably shaded off by easy gradations ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... had he done for the children? It was not easy to build everything up at once from a bare foundation, and he was sometimes tempted to leave something alone so as to accomplish the rest the more quickly. As it was now, he was really nothing! Neither the old Pelle nor the new, but something indeterminate, in process of formation, something that was greatly in need of indulgence! A removing van full of furniture on its way to a ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to women, and fresh ones open yearly. She can prepare secretly, or try her hand at first one and then another (if she begins by being indeterminate) of such congenial occupations as are open to women of her class, beyond cooking, teaching, clerking. Those engaged in reforms, economic improvements, church work, and above all, to-day, war relief work, should not be long discovering their natural bent as well as its marketable value, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... chemically intended) allegories is now easily explained. We can work it out, because it was already put in there, even if neither in the extreme form of the "titanic" (i.e., the retrograde aspect), nor in that of the "anagogic" (the progressive aspect), but in an indeterminate middle stage of the intro-determination. What gave opportunity for this play of symbolism was an effort of intelligence directed toward chemistry. The chemical content in alchemy is, so to speak, what ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... he was more anxious to make than to use a splendid army, and possibly his ideals of efficiency were too high for those early days. Yet "Little Mac" was idolized by his soldiers, with whom he fought and won bloody battles, and even the indeterminate ones are held in doubt as to his responsibility. Had Hooker obeyed his command, and crossed the bridge at Antietam and occupied the heights beyond, soldiers think to-day that Lee would have been crushed. Another fact was against him. The ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to my cable pointing out the probable results of his declared intention of sending us no "reinforcements of importance" during an indeterminate period. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... as the big tea-room began to fill with its usual late afternoon crowd of patrons,—young, old and indeterminate in age. Women of maturely years, young misses from "finishing" schools, demimondaine, social "bounders" deluded by the glitter of their own jewelry and the thrill of their wasted money that they were climbing into New York society—these and other curious types rubbed elbows in this melting ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... lighted now, all save the front of the room. There, a mass of compact boxes were piled one on another, and interconnected in various and indeterminate ways. And one table lay in a brilliant path of illumination. Behind it stood Arcot. He was talking to the dim white group of faces beyond the table, ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... from its very nature, vague, arbitrary, indeterminate. It rests, in truth, on an essentially subjective and fleeting conception, that of contrariety, which it is almost impossible to delimit scientifically; for, most often, contraries exist only by and for us. We know that this form of ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Divine things." Consequently in the old Law there was also a need for certain fixed sacraments significative of man's faith in the future coming of Christ: which sacraments are compared to those that preceded the Law, as something determinate to that which is indeterminate: inasmuch as before the Law it was not laid down precisely of what sacraments men were to make use: whereas this was prescribed by the Law; and this was necessary both on account of the overclouding of the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... were known as "the three F.'s "—viz. Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale—yet left the question in a wholly unsettled state. The fixing of fair rents, no doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants' point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and unsatisfactory system. It was incentive to indifferent farming, since the commissioners who had the fixing of rents, and the inspectors who examined the farms, made their valuations upon the farms as they saw them. True, the tenant could ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... at its first appearance, is always indefinite, and is very easily turned in a wrong direction," and he apparently accounted for inversion by this fact, and by the precocity of neurotics. Obici and Marchesini (Le 'Amicizie' di collegio, p. 126) refer to the indeterminate character of the sexual feelings when they first begin to develop. A correspondent believes that sexual feelings are undifferentiated in the early years about puberty, but at the same time considers that school life is to some extent responsible; ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... to be met with by his girl-wife, save as spirit to spirit, soul to soul, in ultramundane place. The fair-haired young Englishman lived but in her memory, as his soul, if still existent, lived in places indeterminate, unknowable to Doctor Zimmermann and his compeers. Slowly Mrs. Knollys acquired the belief that she was never to see her Charles again. Then, at last, she resolved to go—to go home. Her strength now gave ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... Marut; also of the beautiful Miss Holmes as Lady Ragnall was then called. The Scroopes, the Jeffreys and I gathered in one group and the Atterby-Smiths in another like a force about to attack, while between the two, brooding and indeterminate, stood the curate, a ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... made an indeterminate motion of his head, without otherwise replying at once. Then he took a cake of dark, hard-looking tobacco from the starboard pocket of his trousers and a clasp knife from the port side. He shaved off ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... maldeca. Indecision nedecideco. Indeed do, efektive, ja. Indefatigable senlaca. Indefinite nedifinita. Indemnify kompensi. Indemnity kompenso. Independence sendependeco. Independent sendependa. Indeterminate nedifinita. Index (names) nomaro. Index tabelo. India-rubber kauxcxuko. Indicate montri. Indicative (gram.) indikativo. Indict kulpigi. Indifferent indiferenta. Indigenous enlanda. Indigent malricxa. Indigestible nedigestebla. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... a young weaver, and, having just left her work, she wears a dark skirt, a blouse of some indeterminate blue-gray shade made of cotton, and a large shawl over her head and shoulders in place of a jacket and hat. A colored cotton apron covers her skirt below the waist, and the short skirt displays stout stockings similar to Sarah's. She wears clogs, and the clothes—except the shawl—are ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... expression which he did not find in the accepted and current poetic forms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people, occupations, and aspirations of "these States," as yet undeveloped but vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tally the fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and a new world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope and flexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation and variety. Finding none ready ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... of Calamianes consists of an infinity and indeterminate number of islands, large and small, and most of them very fertile. [72] Those best known and best supplied with the products of commerce which might make them rich are [here] set down. But their lack of attention [to these products] reduces the natives to a wretched and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... assembly. He is particularly adroit in formulating reports and propositions in awkward controversial questions; he knows how to give his draught a color of compromise without the least sacrifice of any Austrian interest, as soon as the correct interpretation comes to the aid of the apparently indeterminate expression. When his draughts become the basis of subsequent discussion, it is then usually discovered for the first time that the real purpose for which they were drawn is contained in what seemed to be casual and incidental words. If the current in Dresden ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... circumflowing; and foreign trade, therefore, as much concerned in the guilt of its expense as colonial traffic. The amount of charge, therefore, although remaining to be deducted from the colonial head, may be left as a neutral indeterminate item. But the military expenses for Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, about L.80,000, cannot be for colonial account at all, because stations merely for carrying on foreign trade, against which chargeable, with the civil establishments ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same indeterminate quality. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... would open which the sword only could decide. To escape the certainty of civil war, therefore, it was necessary to lay down the line of inheritance by a peremptory order; to cut off resolutely all rival claims; and in legislating upon a matter so vital, and hitherto so uncertain and indeterminate, to enforce the decision with the most stringent and exacting penalties. From the Heptarchy downwards English history furnished no fixed rule of inheritance, but only a series of precedents of uncertainty; and ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... this twofold trap, the theorists will reply that the Scoliae are descended from a precursor, an indeterminate creature, of changeable habits and changing form, modifying itself in accordance with its environment and with the regional and climatic conditions and branching out into races each of which has become a species with the attributes ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... purpose whether it is admitted or not. [Perfect duties are usually understood to be those which can be enforced by external law; imperfect, those which cannot be enforced. They are also called respectively determinate and indeterminate, officia juris and ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... suspension is different. Here no particular time has been appointed for the termination of the punishment. It may be continued during life, unless the court which has pronounced it think proper to give a determinate period to what was before indeterminate, and to declare that on such a day the suspension shall cease, and the offender be restored. In a case of this kind, action on the part of the lodge is necessary to effect ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... would stop the leak before it became a flood. In the exigency there was no time for the Food Administrator to devise and carefully test plans suggested by even the most favored theories of economists, if these plans offered remedies which would only be available in an indeterminate future. The scope of the war had disorganized the life and practices of the whole world, had overthrown all precedents, shattered all fundamental relations. And on nothing was its disturbing influence upon the normal more potent than in ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... a man after my own heart, Mr. Furneaux," he said. "I had no idea that the Criminal Investigation Department employed philosophers of your caliber. I suppose that you and I are about to swallow coffee containing indeterminate percentages of the chief constituents ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken. To separate from these confused conceptions those most likely to advance the lady on her way, was Lily's obvious duty; but ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... had grown up into an unwholesome, spotty, indeterminate young man, with a speckled necktie, and cuffs of which he was inordinately proud, and which he insisted on "flashing" every second minute. He was also evidently self-satisfied; which was odd, for I have ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Helena, even at indeterminate sixteen, showed promise of great beauty, and her eyes sparkled with the insolence of the spoiled child who already knew the power of wealth. The girl she addressed had only a pair of dark intelligent eyes to reclaim an uncomely face. Her skin was swarthy, her nose crude, her mouth ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... mysteries had come to me, as to many men, who wish logically to know the causes of great phenomena. From boyhood I had pondered many things. I had lain on my back and looked up at the stars and wondered how far they were, and how far the farthest thing beyond them was. I had wondered at that indeterminate quotient in my sums, where the same figure came, always the same, running on and on. I used to wonder what was my soul, and I fancied that it was a pale, blue flaming oblate, somewhere near my back and in the middle of my body—such was my boyish guess of what ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... shaped every particle of matter. Therefore, terms being fixed to that which was undetermined or infinite before, the whole became and still continues agreeable in all parts, and excellently terminated and mixed; the matter indeed always affecting an indeterminate state, and flying all geometrical confinement, but proportion terminating and circumscribing it, and dividing it into several differences and forms, out of which all things that ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Scale of Vowel Sounds coupled with the Full Scale of the (Indeterminate) Realities of Universal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of indeterminate age, advanced and shook hands. There was no mistaking him; he was Margie Fulton's son in size, in coloring, in features. "I told Bennie you could use a bright kid about his age. And ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... literature, a person who certainly has not shown himself as yet. What can be said with some confidence is, that the Saracen theory of Literature, like the Saracen theory of Architecture, so soon as it is carried beyond the advancing of a possible but slight and very indeterminate influence and colouring, has scarcely the slightest foundation in known facts, and is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with facts that are known, while it is intrinsically improbable to the very highest degree. As has been pointed out above, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... that the application of the term "reprisals," whatever may have been its etymological history, must no longer be restricted to seizure of property. It has now come to cover, and it is the only term which does cover generically, an indeterminate list of unfriendly acts, such as embargo, pacific blockade, seizure of custom-houses, and even occupation of territory, to which resort is had in order to obtain redress from an offending State without going to war with it. The ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... and that's what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming. Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don't laugh, that's just what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt all your habits here: I've grown fond of going to the public baths, would you believe it? and I go and steam myself ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... hands. . . . To us it appears that their writings contain many things excellent, well considered, and well calculated to kindle pious emotions; but also many things unduly rigorous, and derived from the Stoic and Academic philosophy; many things vague and indeterminate; and many things positively false, and inconsistent with the precepts of Christ. If one deserves the title of a bad master in morals who has no just ideas of the proper boundaries and limitations of Christian duties, nor clear and distinct conceptions ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... ultimately a derivative of the Absolute Cause, though indirectly. Matter is two-fold, intelligible and sensible. The matter of the lower world is the non-existent and the cause of evil. Matter in a more general sense is the indeterminate, the indefinite and the potential. Matter of this nature is found also in the intelligible world. The Reason as the second hypostasis, being an activity, passes from potentiality to actuality, its indeterminateness being made determinate by the One or ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... early love, his sorrow at parting from parents and home, the shock of the Warsaw revolt, his passion for George Sand, the death of his father and of his friend Matuszynski, and the rupture with Madame Sand—these were crises of his history. All else was but an indeterminate factor in the scheme of his earthly sojourn. Chopin though not an anchorite resembled Flaubert, being both proud and timid; he led a detached life, hence his art was bold and violent. Unlike Liszt he seldom sought the glamor ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... about him in an indeterminate way. Then he moved from the fountain in the direction of the Strand. "I can ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... time, is very indeterminate," said Wallingford. "It may include one, or ten years, according to the facts in the case, the views of the ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... through the carburettor. The illuminating power and the calorific value of air-gas, unless the manufacture is very precisely controlled, are apt to be variable, and the amount of light, emitted, either in self-luminous or in incandescent burners, is somewhat indeterminate. The generating plant must be so constructed that the air cannot at any time be mixed with as much hydrocarbon vapour as constitutes an explosive mixture with it, otherwise the pipes and apparatus will contain a gas which will forthwith explode if it is ignited, ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... system (the principle of the indeterminate system) and made the prisoners' liberation depend upon their conduct and character and not upon the original offence. Maconochie's experience led him to write in after years to a friend, "if you would try a social-moral one (prison system) you would soon ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... his wife than she would do so for him. They would be two friends, differing in kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves in a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as we have discussed it, is indeterminate between these alternatives. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... was Charles Dudley Warner, the humorous writer. I am not partial to American humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley Warner I always appreciated. In our talk I saw his serious side, for he was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State, on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories. He told me that he never talked in train: but during the three hours' journey to New York neither of us opened the books with which we had provided ourselves, and we ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... knew he had been admitted to one of the officers' training-camps, and that he was making rather helpless and puzzled purchases. Going into his room she would find a dressing-case of khaki leather, perhaps, or flannel shirts of the same indeterminate hue. She would shed futile tears over them, and order them put out of sight. But she never offered to ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids on the record trip, brought the team up to fourteen. But the Outside dogs, though practically broken in since their landing, did not amount to much. Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other two were mongrels of indeterminate breed. They did not seem to know anything, these newcomers. Buck and his comrades looked upon them with disgust, and though he speedily taught them their places and what not to do, he could not teach them ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... according as the anomaly affects the ordinary flowering branches, or the leafy shoots of the year, the summits of which, instead of developing in the customary manner, terminate each in one vast and long inflorescence, very loose and indeterminate, and ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... principles proclaimed by President Wilson and recognized by the Allies. Nor would it suffice even to have the faculty of reoccupation, because "this faculty" could never be a valid substitute for occupation. As regards the suggestion that a long occupation or one for an indeterminate period would cause bad feeling, M. Poincare was convinced that this was an exaggeration. A short occupation causes more irritation on account of its arbitrary limit; everyone understands an occupation without other limit than the complete carrying out of the treaty. ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... stage with all the new constructions and complications of mechanism that this progress required. As we foreshadowed in the beginning of this work, the role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter. Indeterminate, i.e. unforeseeable, are the forms it creates in the course of its evolution. More and more indeterminate also, more and more free, is the activity to which these forms serve as the vehicle. A ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... protector, had been established in order to provide further securities for the freedom of the constitution; but that by experience the remedy had been found insufficient, even dangerous and pernicious; since every indeterminate power, such as that of a protector, must be arbitrary; and the more arbitrary, as it was contrary to the genius and inclination of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... was a sense of help coming to the motor-car from that direction. There was an unoccupied muddy space for fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheels and head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude semicircle of people that hung as yet indeterminate in action about ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature—the world I could touch—was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... been much increased by a class of verbs too frequent in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use so vague and indeterminate, and the senses detorted so widely from the first idea, that it is hard to trace them through the maze of variation, to catch them on the brink of utter inanity, to circumscribe them by any limitations, or interpret them by any words of distinct and settled meaning; ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... were again the same blank windows whose scrutiny was so indeterminate. Burke let down the trap-door in the closet floor, and I paused a while to admire how cunningly it had been designed. Although knowing it to be there, I could discern no trace of the aperture. We then reentered ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... a splendid piece of bravery, he turned his back on the gambler, walking away with never a backward glance. He did not go directly home, but walked for an indeterminate interval till his spirit ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... thin. Her face was growing sharp and peaked. The steady curve of her cheek had become a little indeterminate. Her chin had begun to sag and her eyes to look a little weary. But she had not observed these things, for we do not notice ourselves very much until some other person thinks we are worthy of observation and tells us so; and these changes are so gradual and tiny that we seldom ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... emanated from Captain Desmond, even in repose. With a rapidity born of much practice Honor took stock of him, from his helmet to his boots, as he sat awaiting her, with a coolness which at once amused her and piqued her interest. A slim square chin, indeterminate colouring, and eyes of a remarkable thoughtfulness under very level brows, went to make up a satisfying, if not ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... atmosphere, but, as in all general arguments, where the conditions are equally applicable to both sides of the question, they may be fairly left out as neutralising each other, so, here it must not be forgotten, that the currents in question, being altogether indeterminate, and equally to be expected from all quarters, an equal chance exists of advantages to be derived, as of disadvantages to be encountered from their occurrence; and that, even without the means of making a selection, the admitted laws of reasoning would justify us in considering the chances ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley
... competitors and detractors. It was charged against him that he was more anxious to make than to use a splendid army, and possibly his ideals of efficiency were too high for those early days. Yet "Little Mac" was idolized by his soldiers, with whom he fought and won bloody battles, and even the indeterminate ones are held in doubt as to his responsibility. Had Hooker obeyed his command, and crossed the bridge at Antietam and occupied the heights beyond, soldiers think to-day that Lee would have been crushed. Another fact was against him. The North was not ready to behold nor strong ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... started up suddenly, for without any further warning there had come a tiny indeterminate tapping against his panel. He held his breath and listened. It came again. Then fearlessly he drew back the bolts, slid the panel open and shut his eyes, dazzled ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... a man does may be the occasion of another's spiritual downfall, because accidental causes are indeterminate. Consequently, if scandal is something that occasions another's spiritual downfall, any deed or word can be a scandal: and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... mental adjustments. Only to the mind of a Caliban could it be other than terrifying. Things grew to a size out of all reason. The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists, fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things. Strange and indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the shadow of a wind-rift on the snow. And ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... The great wall of pines and hemlocks that keep off the east wind from Stillwater stretches black and indeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull, metallic sound, like the guttural twang of a violin string, rises from the frog-invested swamp skirting the highway. Suddenly the birds stir in their nests over there in the woodland, and break into that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... raised his head as a car pulled into the curving driveway. The warm hum of the turboelectric engine stopped, and a man climbed out of the vehicle. He walked with easy strides across the grass to where the elderly gentleman sat. He was lithe, of indeterminate age, but with a look of great determination. There was something in his face that made the old man vaguely uneasy—not with fear but with a sense ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... which solidifies rapidly and may be crystallized from hot water after the addition of a little hydrochloric acid. This clouds in cooling, and after a certain time it separates in small crystals of indeterminate form which unite in warty concretions. After drying the salt forms a dull powder, melting between 275 F. and 280 F. It also melts in boiling water, and its aqueous solution exposed to the light is partially reduced, 100 grammes of water acidulated with 10 cubic centimeters ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... played with an entire pack of cards, and admitted of an indeterminate number of players, termed 'punters,' and a 'banker.' Each player laid his stake on one of the 52 cards. The banker held a similar pack, from which he drew cards, one for himself, placed on the right, and ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... questioning, {181} seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which end with infinity. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... who gave Maurice the necessary stiffening. Mr. Roper didn't like Winn, and though their intercourse had been limited to a series of grunts on Winn's part, Mr. Roper felt something unerringly inimical behind each of these indeterminate sounds. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... part. You say, "I grieve," and again the Me is not all speaking, but only the MORAL part. You say the mind is wholly spiritual; then you say "I have a pain" and find that this time the Me is mental AND spiritual combined. We all use the "I" in this indeterminate fashion, there is no help for it. We imagine a Master and King over what you call The Whole Thing, and we speak of him as "I," but when we try to define him we find we cannot do it. The intellect and the feelings can act ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to me and more remarkable and disconcerting is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives, more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us, a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation, a wilderness so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility. Such ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Ritter. He was Rand's assistant, and also Kathie's lover. He was five or six years older than his employer, and slightly built. His hair, fighting a stubborn rearguard action against baldness, was an indeterminate mousy gray-brown. It was one of his professional assets that nobody ever noticed him, not even in a crowd of one; when he wanted it to, his thin face could assume the weary, baffled expression of a middle-aged book-keeper with a ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... number could not change their quality; that an endeavour to subvert the law, or religion, or the rights of parliament, was not treason by any statute; and that the description of an offence, so vague and indeterminate ought never to be admitted;: otherwise the slightest transgression might, under that denomination, be converted into the highest ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... kale, savoy cabbage, Purple Sprouting broccoli, carrots, beets, parsnips, parsley, endive, dry beans, potatoes, French sorrel, and a couple of field cornstalks. I also tested one compact bush (determinate) and one sprawling (indeterminate) tomato plant. Many of these vegetables grew surprisingly well. I ate unwatered tomatoes July through September; kale, cabbages, parsley, and root crops fed us during the winter. The Purple Sprouting broccoli bloomed abundantly ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... numberless newspaper articles on education, and even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on this recurring substantive, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... clean grey eyes under light eyelashes. He looked as if he had been made up of different shades of one colour. His light brown hair had a little grey in it, his delicately cut face and nervous hands were both tanned, by persistent exposure to all kinds of weather, to nearly the same shade of indeterminate brown as ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... one, hoping as he did that determination would suffice to prevent him from thinking. Besides, it was too late, he could not recoil at the last moment, and if when he pronounced the last solemn vow he felt a secret terror, an indeterminate but immense regret agitating him, he forgot everything, saving a divine reward for his efforts on the day when he afforded his mother the great and long-expected joy of hearing him say his ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... conditions which were first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the providence of God. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the Guide and Educator of our race. As "the offspring of God," humanity is not a bare, indeterminate potentiality, but a living energy, an active reason, having definite qualities, and inheriting fundamental principles and necessary ideas which constitute it "the image and likeness of God." And though it has suffered a moral lapse, and, in the exercise of its freedom, has ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... elements already distinguished by common-sense. He thought the unity of nature to consist in its periodic evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (to apeiron), which, much in the manner of the "nebula" of modern science, is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar commonplace of science, begins to be recognizable. It has here reached the point of signifying a common ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... stalagmitic crust. Teeth found in the floor. A third cavern. Breccia on the surface. Similar caverns in other parts of the country. At Buree. At Molong. Shattered state of the bones. Important discoveries by Professor Owen. Gigantic fossil kangaroos. Macropus atlas. Macropus titan. Macropus indeterminate. Genus Hypsiprymnus, new species, indeterminate. Genus Phalangista. Genus Phascolomys. Ph. mitchellii, a new species. New Genus Diprotodon. Dasyurus laniarius, a new species. General results of Professor Owen's researches. Age of the breccia considered. State of the caverns. Traces ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... to the effect that they had been disturbed for several nights previously by strange and inexplicable noises in the house occupied by them on Duchess street. They had been aroused from sleep at indeterminate hours by the sound of gliding footsteps just outside of the door of their bedroom. Once they had distinctly heard the sound of voices, which seemed to come from the large front room across the hall. As the door of that room was last closed and locked, they had not been able to distinguish the particular ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... in, and he slept on the sofa. The limping began again, and she asked him if he heard anything, and he at once agreed that somebody was walking round the bed. In his own room—I forget which—he twice saw the ghost, once in the shape of an indeterminate mist, once in the shape of a man, who came in by the door and vanished in the wall. Mrs. 'G.'[B] now appears on the scene, and slept in No. 1 (I think). She heard only the bangings, which she declares were indescribably loud. They were mostly ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... capable of capturing it. Considered in itself alone, it is perhaps to be seen as governed by absolutely determined laws of its own. It is heavy, then it will fall unless obstructed; it is solid, then it will resist intrusions. But considered as material for organization by higher forms, it is indeterminate. It acts in one sort of way under the persuasion of the sheep-form, and in another sort of way under the persuasion of the [16] dog-form, and we cannot tell how it will act until we know which form is going to capture ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... with a single-barrelled gun, whistling to the hares. He must have worked among machinery in early days, for before he stood still he always shouted to himself: "Stop the machine!" and before going on: "Full speed!" He had a huge black dog of indeterminate breed, called Arapka. When it ran too far ahead he used to shout to it: "Reverse action!" Sometimes he used to sing, and as he did so staggered violently, and often fell down (the wolf thought the wind blew him over), and shouted: ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... inspiring to summon the vision of Honora, in rustling garments, poised as the figurehead of this craft, beckoning him on to battle and victory. Alas! the launching happened at that grimmest and most unromantic of hours-ten minutes of eight in the morning. There was a period, indeterminate, when she poured out his coffee with wifely zeal; a second period when she appeared at the foot of the stairs to kiss him as he was going out of the door; a third when, clad in an attractive dressing-gown, she waved him good-by from the window; and lastly, a fourth, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... attempting to explain this intimate coalition, I must suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily set out from the one, to which therefore I give hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of them I should commence, there ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... why Nineve was so called? and he will answer, from Schindler, that it was a compound of [472]Nin-Nau, [Hebrew: NIN NWH], a son inhabited. But is it credible, or indeed possible, for these cities to have been named from terms so vague, casual, and indeterminate; which seem to have so little relation to the places to which they are appropriated, or to any places at all? The history of the Chaldeans is of great consequence; and one would be glad to know their original. They are properly called Chasdim; and are, very justly, thought to have been ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... Sokrates challenging his opponent to choose the lot of an ecstatic oyster. As usual, good must be related to Intelligence; and the Dialogue gives a long disquisition upon the One and the Many, the Theory of Ideas, the Determinate and the Indeterminate. Good is a compound of Pleasure and Intelligence, the last predominating. Pleasure is the Indeterminate, requiring the Determinate (Knowledge) to regulate it. This is merely another expression for the doctrine of Measure, and for the ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... theories which the history of ethics presents, rare work with Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes, Cudworth, Mandeville, and Bentham. "Meantime," he concluded, "we do see, in point of fact, that the moral rule is most flexible, and to an indeterminate degree the creature of association, custom, and education, so that I am inclined to think that that alone is obligatory which the positive laws and institutions of any society render binding." "So that" cried Harrington, "a man both may and ought to thieve in ancient Sparta, may expose his ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... been thinly occupied in Roman times; at any rate the structures actually unearthed consisted only of a roughly built foundation (25 feet diam.) of uncertain use, which there is no reason to call a temple, some other even more indeterminate foundations, and two bits of road. More interest may attach to three ditches (one for sewage) and the clay base of a rampart, which belong in some way to the northern defences of the place in various ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... I tell you that he died in despair. By supposing that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he had invented to explain to himself the universe, were equal, he stopped the universe; yet he admitted motion in an indeterminate sense; but supposing those forces unequal, then utter confusion of the planetary system ensued. His laws therefore were not absolute; some higher problem existed than the principle on which his false ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... pledged themselves to each other then and there, and never through life have swerved from that pledge! For some of the goodness which Rex believed in was there. Goodness is a large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future; is the germ prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the shutters, pierced the heavy obscurity in all directions. Like hideous spots stood out of the gray murkiness the bepainted furniture and the sweetish oleographs on the walls. It smelt of yesterday's tobacco, of dampness, sourness; and of something else peculiar, indeterminate, uninhabited, of which places that are lived in only temporarily always smell in the morning—such as empty theatres, dance-halls, auditoriums. Far off in the city a droshky rumbled intermittently. The wall-clock monotonously ticked behind the wall. In a strange agitation Lichonin walked ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... little tedious,—what should we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me monthly,—what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the very ground of her invention ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... great antiquity. In so far as they have been reduced to writing they may be said to comprise (1) "standing orders" of a permanent character, (2) "sessional orders," operative during a session only, and (3) "general orders," indeterminate in respect to period of application. In the course of debate all remarks are addressed to the Speaker and in the event that the floor is desired by more than one member it rests with the Speaker to designate, with scrupulous ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... became silent. But soon there arose from somewhere, from some indeterminate direction, which might have been the cellar as well as the attic, a powerful monotonous snore, a deep and prolonged noise, like the throbbing of a boiler under ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... captain was in the forecross-trees, glass in hand, his eyes in every quarter, spying for an entrance, spying for signs of tenancy. But the isle continued to unfold itself in joints, and to run out in indeterminate capes, and still there was neither house nor man, nor the smoke of fire. Here a multitude of sea-birds soared and twinkled, and fished in the blue waters; and there, and for miles together, the fringe of cocoa-palm and pandanus extended desolate, and made desirable green bowers for ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... sides of the room. That opposite wall was taken up with three doors, the one small space being occupied by the table. Above the table on the old-fashioned paper, of a white satin gloss, traversed by an indeterminate green scroll, hung quite high a small gilt and black-framed ivory miniature taken in her girlhood of the mother of the family. When the lamp was set on the table beneath it, the tiny pretty face painted on the ivory seemed to gleam out with a look ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Monday, and at some indeterminate hour of the twenty-four, though whether it was night or noon he could not say, Ferriss woke in his sleeping-bag and raised himself on an elbow, and for a moment sat stupidly watching Bennett writing in his journal. Noticing that he was awake, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... to produce them, because they are vague and indeterminate. To speak only of those that play the principal role, the changing colors and forms, which deploy before us when our eyes are closed, never have well-defined contours. Here are black lines upon a white ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... amorous possibilities or not. An attitude that had no half lights in it, no delicate tints of chivalry nor romance. LaChaise would do nothing for the sake of her blue eyes. He had no interest whatever in that indeterminate, unstable emotional compound that goes, between men and women, by the name ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... out various objects—a circular bench arrangement on a wooden flooring, batteries that filled the cup between the floor and the bottom arc of the sphere, tall metal cylinders, a small searchlight set next to a mechanism that was indeterminate. At three equidistant points on the sides there were glass handles, as thick as a man's thigh, cast integral with the walls. On the top there was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... white shawl and seated herself on the old, high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... opposite her and she was both shocked and displeased. There were droppings of food all down the front of his coat; the mouth under the ragged ill-grown beard drooped sullenly; the forehead was lined and contracted; and on the lean temples the hair was a dusty indeterminate colour that might or might not have been called gray. The utter misery and self-abandonment of the man appealed to her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the wicked feeling that he was humbled and brought low who ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... was finished and below him lay the house and climbing woods,—woods that crept into the bosom of the hills, the closely growing trees tipped with tender greens melting into the softest of indeterminate greys as the breeze rippled through their tops like fingers across a harp. The darker line of moorland in the background, scant as ever of herbiage, had yet lost its menacing bareness and seemed touched with the faint colour of the earth beneath, almost ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... appearance. This dress would not please her nor that. The image of her charming oval face and well-set head ceased to satisfy her. Surely a woman's hair should be either positively blond or black, not this indeterminate brown, with warm lights in it? She feared her mouth was not small enough, the lips too full and curved for prettiness. She wished her eyes less given to change, under their dark lashes, from clear gray-blue to a nameless colour ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the goal toward which this mass of flesh was striving so frantically? Above the apex of the pyramid, amid the sheen of the lightning, was revealed a vast figure, naked and indeterminate, dim and yet seeming of a denser texture than the most abysmal beasts, a figure at the same time human and serpentine, that twisted in attitudes of human anguish, yet appeared, like a maddened serpent, to be stinging itself ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... makes possible all the rapid and facile operations of reason. The deeper this retrospective glance the less dogmatic the philosophy. A primordial constitution or tendency, however, must always remain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if we thought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin, we should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, a blank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actual experience presented. When, starting with the inevitable preformation and constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobler edifice ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... that if nature and the sacred text are fixed elements, this is not the case with the interpretations of theologians, and the results of geology. It is difficult to pronounce upon the exact relation of two quantities more or less indeterminate. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... news that Maltravers received confirmed all his expectations,—the suit of Legard had replaced his own. It was then that Maltravers began to consider how far the fortune of Evelyn and her destined husband was such as to preclude all anxiety for their future lot. Fortune is so indeterminate in its gauge and measurement. Money, the most elastic of materials, falls short or exceeds, according to the extent of our wants and desires. With all Legard's good qualities he was constitutionally careless and extravagant; and Evelyn was too inexperienced, and too gentle, perhaps, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... (i.e., pigmy black) "type," says the authority whom I have just quoted, and to whom I shall have to be still further indebted,[A] "was first placed in South Asia, which it without doubt occupied alone during an indeterminate period. It is thence that its diverse representatives have radiated, and, some going east, some west, have given rise to the black populations of Melanesia and Africa. In particular, India and Indo-China first belonged to the blacks. Invasions and infiltrations of different yellow or ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... eyes being in torments"; and the spirits of the faithful pass to rest and joy. But between these two representatives in the narrative, the one of the evil, the other of the good, there are the multitudes who are neither very good nor very evil, so varied in the indeterminate tokens of good and evil which marked their lives on earth, that it would seem to be impossible for us to know on which side of "the great gulf" their position ought to be. But if the extremes enter the Intermediate State, and there is room for ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... a union would weaken the sense of responsibility of the home churches. He thought that a denomination in America would take a deeper interest in a comparatively small native church wholly dependent upon it than it would in an indeterminate part of a larger church. Must the unity of the foreign church be sacrificed to the divisions of the home church? Perhaps there is some ground for anticipating such objections from home. But if they are found to exist, we should not cease seeking union in Asia, but begin preaching juster ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... long days of her convalescence, Beatrix manifested an utter indifference to the tidings from the outer world. She lay by the hour, her baby on her arm, looking down at the fuzzy little head and the red little face whose indeterminate features were fast taking the stamp of those of their father. Strange to say, the fact caused Beatrix no repulsion. The fires of her being seemed to have burned themselves out, and even her feeling to Lorimer shared in her general apathy. In the weeks which had followed his death, she had ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... essentially from pure fetishes, by a character more general and more abstract, pertaining to their indeterminate residence. They, each of them, administer a special order of phenomena, and have a department more or less extensive; while the humble fetish governs one object only, from which it is inseparable. Now, in proportion as the resemblance of certain phenomena was observed, it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... being somewhere about fifteen millions in August 1914, upon 700,000, or so, youths annually reaching the age of eighteen, and upon Germany being obliged to have under arms continually some five million soldiers. After that you were handling rather indeterminate factors. You might put down indispensables in civil life at half a million or at four millions just as you liked; but it made the difference of three and a half millions in your pool to start with, according to which ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... sin are indeed excellently useful, as rousing men to consider and look about them; but they do often want effect, because they only raise confused apprehensions of things, and indeterminate propensions to action, which usually, before men thoroughly perceive or resolve what they should practice, do decay and vanish. As he that cries out "Fire!" doth stir up people, and inspireth them with a kind of hovering tendency every way, yet no man thence to purpose ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... expounded and illustrated the general methods of solving equations up to those of the fourth degree (and believed that his method could go beyond), stated the law which connects the positive and negative roots of an equation with the changes of sign in the consecutive terms, and introduced the method of indeterminate coefficients for the solution of equations.[28] These innovations have been attributed on inadequate evidence to other algebraists, e.g. William Oughtred (1575-1660) ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... are reduced to act by the command of the will, since a habit is that "with which we act when we wish." Now the will is indeterminate in regard to infinite things. Yet it is not useless, even when it does not actually tend to all; provided it actually tends to everything in fitting place and time. And hence neither is a habit useless, even if all that it extends to is not reduced to act; provided that that which befits the due ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... this, and this only:—What a pudder and racket in Councils about (Greek); and in the Schools of the learned about power and about spirit;—about essences, and about quintessences;—about substances, and about space.—What confusion in greater Theatres from words of little meaning, and as indeterminate a sense! when thou considerest this, thou wilt not wonder at my uncle Toby's perplexities,—thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon his scarp and his counterscarp;—his glacis and his covered way;—his ravelin and his half-moon: 'Twas not by ideas,—by Heaven; his life ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... English Court of High Commission longer casts its upas-shadow athwart the hearts of men, the great world is "growing nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot them through that Perdition which does not hover indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology, but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; is visual, tactual,—in which untold millions of mankind writhe and shriek from the cradle ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to a cause possessing the same existence in an infinite degree, all the substantial attributes of existence that we possess equally require each an infinite cause. God, then, is no longer the Infinite, Abstract, Indeterminate Being, of which reason and the heart cannot lay hold, but a real Being, determinate like ourselves, a moral person like ourself; and the study of our own souls will conduct us, without resort to hypothesis, to a conception of God, both ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... was cut short by the entrance of the minister, the Rev. Mr. Simpson. He was a tall, gaunt man, in a coat of rusty black. His hair, of an indeterminate colour, was slightly mixed with grey. A pair of bright grey eyes looked out from underneath bushy eyebrows. His lips were close set. His bony hands were large and ungainly. The Rev. Mr. Simpson had been a carpenter ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... it. It is this sketch, and this sketch only, which is represented in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is a margin for the image. Frame the image again, there remains a margin, and a still larger margin, for the thought. The thought is thus relatively free and indeterminate in relation to the activity which conditions it in the brain, for this activity expresses only the motive articulation of the idea, and the articulation may be the same for ideas absolutely different. And yet it ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... At a glance, this Mr. Brentwick was a man of tallish figure and rather slender; with a countenance thin and flushed a sensitive pink, out of which his eyes shone, keen, alert, humorous, and a trace wistful behind his glasses. His years were indeterminate; with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and the verve of thirty assorted oddly. But his hands were old, delicate, fine and fragile; and the lips beneath the drooping white mustache at times trembled, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... that followed was broken presently by the sound of the old man's choking sobs, and the low, soothing tones of Natalie, murmuring against his ear. From the drawing-room came indeterminate scraps of Mrs. Wynyard's gay chatter, as she regaled Mrs. Rathbawne with the gossip gleaned in a round of calls. She herself was partly visible, drawing off her gloves before the fire. From the music-room beyond issued the chords of Dorothy's none-too-sure ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... vague and indeterminate in nature. Given three things, of which X includes what is in Y and Z, upon the face of the theory either X may have arisen by synthesis from Y and Z, or X and Z may owe their ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the agents and impulses that give movement and direction to the stronger currents of ordinary life. Perhaps they are also incapable of long moral or political investigations, where many complex and indeterminate elements are to be taken into account, and a variety of opposite probabilities to be weighed before coming to a conclusion. They are generally too impatient to get at the ultimate results, to go well through ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... adults and about fifty children had collected, and hailed the approach of the newly wedded couple with a faint, indeterminate cheer. All the children were holding something in little bags, and his attention was caught by the expression of vindictive concentration upon the face of a small big-eared boy in the foreground. He didn't for the moment realise ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... has a massiness and solidity, such as I have seen in no other place; it rather awes than pleases, as it strikes with a kind of gigantick dignity, and aspires to no other praise than that of rocky solidity and indeterminate duration. I had none of my friends resident, and, therefore, saw but little. The ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... or the consciousness of the danger of the experiment. He showed her what few mortals have seen, a naked soul with its scars, its stains, and its ravages from flame and convulsion. He need not have apprehended a disastrous result. She was compounded of his essences, and her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius. She listened intently, the expression of torment displaced by normal if profound sympathy. He had begun with the passions inspired by Jefferson; he finished with ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... being one of the few allusions to be found in the Zu-Vendi ritual to a vague divine essence independent of the material splendour of the orb they worship. 'Taia', the word used here, has a very indeterminate meaning, and signifies essence, vital ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... that controls conduct when habit fails, this factor that may even negate an otherwise efficient habit, is the great indeterminate in the work of teaching. To know that one has trained an effective habit or imparted a practical principle is one thing; to know that in doing this, one has not engendered in the pupil's mind a prejudice against the very thing taught is quite ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... circular screen. Pale streaks of light glowed briefly as the sweep passed over them. There were milky dots everywhere. A soft light in the lower left hand corner of the screen cut an uncertain path across the grid, and two indeterminate splotches in the upper half of the scope ...
— The Circuit Riders • R. C. FitzPatrick
... father and themselves. But how they could have thought so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of a deficiency of data on which to form any ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... diversion, however, in the case of Mr. Harringay Jones as he stood before the bookstall at Paddington, you would, I fear, have been far out in your conjecture. For Mr. Jones, who had the indeterminate baldheadedness of the bank cashier and might have been anything from thirty-five to sixty, did not purchase a volume of essays or a political autobiography, but selected a flaming one-and-sixpenny narrative of spy hunts and secret ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... its course over the body and soul of what had once been a man; and when it was over Denver Russell was a Number with eighteen years before him. Eighteen years more or less, according to his conduct, for the laws of the State of Arizona imposed an indeterminate sentence which might be varied to fit any case. As Murray had intimated, under the new prison law a man could be paroled the day after he was sentenced, though he were in for ninety-nine years. That was the law, and it was just, for no court is infallible ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... adaptation of the Iroquois word hiro, used to conclude a speech, and kou['e], an exclamation (Charlevoix). Hale gives as possible derivations ierokwa, the indeterminate form of the verb to smoke, signifying "they who smoke;" also the Cayuga form of bear, iakwai.[39] Mr. Hewitt[39] suggests the Algonkin words [-i]r[-i]n, true, or real; ako, snake; with the French termination ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... stage of her progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the arrears of the road; and she, poor thing! how little ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... face geniality and humor seemed the salient characteristics. It was a mobile face, quick-changing to inward mood and thought. Thinking was in him a visible process. Ideas chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake. His hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... comfortable as any I had ever sat down to, even in England. The landlord, at my particular request, took his seat with me at table. He complained bitterly of the oppression of the taxes, and more particularly of their uncertainty, which was so indeterminate, according to his assertions, that the collectors took what they pleased, and employed their offices as means of favour, or to gratify their personal piques. One of the collectors of Amiens, it seems, was likewise an ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... drear months of a dead world, changed as rapidly as had the smiling Place. From a shapeless gray-gold fuzzy baby, she grew lank and leggy. The indeterminate fuzz was buried under a shimmering gold-and-white coat of much beauty. The muskrat face lengthened and grew delicately graceful, with its ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... his face so crimsoning with embarrassment that actual tears were forced out of his eyes. And then just as the young man was praying that the earth might open and swallow him up, a girl came forward from the indeterminate mass of persons, who appeared to be swimming in a mist before him, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... is, from its very nature, vague, arbitrary, indeterminate. It rests, in truth, on an essentially subjective and fleeting conception, that of contrariety, which it is almost impossible to delimit scientifically; for, most often, contraries exist only by and for us. We know that this form of association is not primary and irreducible. It ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... sheeting (the bottom sheeting being left in place) is, of course, a matter of conjecture. There can be no doubt that there is an arching of the material, as suggested by the author. How much this may be assisted by the practical non-disturbance of the virgin material is, of course, indeterminate. That substructures and retaining walls designed according to the Rankine or similar theories have an additional factor of safety from too generous an assumption in regard to earth pressure is practically admitted everywhere. It is almost an engineering ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
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