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Tendency   Listen
noun
Tendency  n.  (pl. tendencies)  Direction or course toward any place, object, effect, or result; drift; causal or efficient influence to bring about an effect or result. "Writings of this kind, if conducted with candor, have a more particular tendency to the good of their country." "In every experimental science, there is a tendency toward perfection."
Synonyms: Disposition; inclination; proneness; drift; scope; aim.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tendency" Quotes from Famous Books



... have been laid open to the very roots, there is a strong tendency not to drop them altogether. Thus Mr. H. Merivale is far too good an historian to admit the presence of Jews in Cornwall as far back as the destruction of Jerusalem.(82) He knows there is no evidence for it, and he would not repeat a mere fable, however plausible. Yet Marazion ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... has grown to cover a vaguer period, and there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way of calling Dante the "morning star of the Renaissance"; and the period of the great poet's work, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... We were perfectly well aware what would be the consequence of detaching ourselves from the car as we moved along. We should still retain the forward motion of the car, and of course accompany it in its flight. There would be no falling one way or the other. The car would have a tendency to draw us back again by its attraction, but this tendency would be very slight, and practically inappreciable at ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss

... crest. If a map of the world be examined it will be noticed that there are three large oceans branching off the Southern Ocean, namely, the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; and although there is the same tendency for the formation of tides in these oceans, they are too restricted for any very material tidal action to take place. As the crest of the primary tidal wave in its journey round the world passes these oceans, the surface of the water is raised in them, which results in secondary or derivative ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams

... produced in Paris a few years before. Da Ponte, the librettist, wisely omitted all the political references, which contributed so much to the popularity of the original play, and left only a bustling comedy of intrigue, not perhaps very moral in tendency, but full of amusing incident and unflagging in spirit. It speaks volumes for the ingenuity of the librettist that though the imbroglio is often exceedingly complicated, no one feels the least difficulty in following every detail of it on the stage, though ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... be scarcely recognised; but if individual cases could be estimated, the difference in frequency between the two would be very much more obvious. This may, perhaps, be explained by the fact that the branch has a greater tendency to grow in length than it has to develop buds from the axils of the leaves. The flower is admitted to be homologous with the branch, and it is also known that, up to a certain time, the branch-bud ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... a greater criticism has been that the levelling tendency, as is supposed, of the Fourieristic doctrines, is inimical to every-day experience, and that the natural differences of characters, ambitions and mental conditions were not recognized in the system, consequently there would be no place for all these varied human ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... it is; and the Stock Exchange is in such a fearful state now that it is difficult to make a bare living." She sighed heavily, and glanced round the expensively furnished drawing-room, as if wondering whether that abominable tendency towards suspicion on the part of the public, which was causing it to eschew all sorts of speculation, might not result in her losing the few luxuries ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... that belief a tendency to express itself in certain ceremonial practices, which retain in a greater or less degree the character of the ritual observances of which they are the survival. Mr E. K. Chambers, in The Mediaeval Stage, remarks: "If the comparative study of Religion proves ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... integral part of our civilization. However useful this information would be, it is, in a majority of cases, unobtainable. Most of the translations appeared without any indication as to authorship. One thing that may partly account for this was the tendency of the early magazines to copy and plagiarize. Scores of poems were found which had previously been printed in other periodicals (American or English), but for the source of which no credit was given. Even the author's name was suppressed. In one instance an editor inserted a poem that had appeared ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... her by being conventional and not wholly sincere. She liked the artist best when he spoke without restraint, even though she might not agree with his extravagances and often detected a trace of artificiality in his clever epigrams. It seemed to her that the whole tendency of Edith's influence upon her husband was towards restraint, yet she could not be sure whether the ultimate result upon Fenton's character might ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates

... under their breaths—"Then is there no story!—and was Judith Sabin's whole narrative a delusion?" But with whatever might be true in that narrative no public interest was now bound up; and discussion grew first shamefaced, and then dropped. The tendency strengthened indeed to regard the whole matter as the invention of a half-crazy and dying woman, possessed of some grudge against the Fox-Wilton family. Many surmised that some tragic fact lay at the root of the tale, since those concerned had not chosen to bring the slanderer ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the conversation of week-days, but a thing altogether finer in point and higher in tone. They invariably discussed the sermon, dissecting it, weighing it, as above or below the average—the general tendency being to regard it as a scientific feat or performance which had no relation to their own lives, except as between critics and the thing criticized. The bass-viol player and the clerk usually spoke with more authority than the rest on account of their official connection ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... and it is more than plausible that what is called the vital principle, or the vital force, forms a link in the chain of the other known physical forces, and is, therefore, transmutable into any of them; granted even that there is such a thing as a distinct vital force. The tendency of modern Biology is then to discard the notion of a vital entity altogether. If vital force is to be indestructible, then so are also indestructible heat, light, electricity, &c.; they are indestructible in this sense, that whenever ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... had some time ago, while we still advanced, noted a remarkable discrepancy in the peculiar whine produced by the different shells in their rapid flight through the air as they passed over our heads, some sounding shrill, with a rising tendency, and the others rather dull, with a falling cadence. A short observation revealed the fact that the passing of a dull-sounding shell was invariably preceded by a flash from one of our own cannon in the rear on the hill, ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler

... silent and sad the boys all seemed to be. There was none of the noise and clamour of a schoolroom; none of its boisterous play, or hearty mirth. The children sat crouching and shivering together, and seemed to lack the spirit to move about. The only pupil who evinced the slightest tendency towards locomotion or playfulness was Master Squeers, and as his chief amusement was to tread upon the other boys' toes in his new boots, his flow of spirits was rather ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... properly, clearing the image: it is the simple act of dissolving out or from the film all free nitrate, chloride, iodide, or bromide. Cyanide of potassium does not attack the metallic deposit unless very strong. It has then a tendency to reduce the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various

... is this. The lover of his countryside knows its physical features by heart, and to him they have personality. You will have observed the tendency of Londoners to guide you by the names of public-houses; you will have noticed their blank ignorance of points of the compass. To a great extent these defects characterise the Home Counties, and one might try to excuse them in various ways. In the North of ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... there is emulation and striving for precedence between the spiritual and the physical, and this very emulation may determine the rate of progression of the whole. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, may be in advance, but all the time the tendency is towards the distant goal. Sometimes the two keep abreast, and then there is the greatest harmony in speed. In Ellen Brewster at twelve and fifteen the spiritual outstripped the physical, as is often the case. Her eyes grew intense and ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... entertained a wish to bring this country under an hereditary executive, or introduce an hereditary branch of legislature, &c. See his letter. Alexander Hamilton condemning Mr. Adams's writings, and most particularly Davila, as having a tendency to weaken the present government, declared in substance as follows: 'I own it is my own opinion, though I do not publish it in Dan or Beersheba, that the present government is not that which will ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... of the list was made up of members of the Barrel Club (impossible because of their inherent tendency to break out into personal paragraphs); writers like Fermin and Gresham, above me on the literary ladder, and consequently unapproachable in a matter of this kind; certain college friends, who had vanished into space, as men do on coming down from the 'Varsity, leaving no address; ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... derangement of the will. It is in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual mode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living a sort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence, since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, there is a tendency now towards pthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. The great sympathetic center of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs, burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful lower centers are no ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... of their national existence; as no small part of the glory, surpassing that of former wars, which has become the common heritage of North and South. For perhaps not many conquerors, and certainly few successful statesmen, have escaped the tendency of power to harden or at least to narrow their human sympathies; but in this man a natural wealth of tender compassion became richer and more tender while in the stress of deadly conflict he developed an ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... is that verse will scan, while prose will not. The difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin have been in prose. It can only be stated that, as a rule, writers have shown an instinctive tendency to choose verse for the expression of the very highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in verse that it is ill work deciding between them. In the sense in which poetry is best understood, ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett

... traceries; and the adoption of a leafy finial at the extremity of the cusps in the door of San Stefano, as opposed to the simple ball which terminates those of the Ducal Palace, is an unmistakable indication of a tendency to decline. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... incomprehensible. The same observation may be applied to those well-intended and able arguments, by which the probability of a future state is shewn from analogy and from the constitution of the mind. These are founded chiefly on three considerations,—the tendency of virtue to produce happiness, and of vice to be followed by misery,—the unequal distribution of good and evil in the present life,—and the adaptation of our moral faculties to a state of being very different from ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie

... his leisure UNTILL tillage and agriculture, and boasted himself to be possessed of a bull of matchless merit, brought from the county of Devon (the Damnonia, of the Romans, if we can trust Robert of Cirencester). He is, as ye may well suppose from such a tendency, but of yeoman extraction—SERVABIT ODOREM TESTA DIU—and I believe, between ourselves, his grandsire was from the wrong side of the Border—one Bullsegg, who came hither as a steward, or bailiff, or ground-officer, or something in that ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... falls upon the grass-leaf, that make our blood to shiver and our flesh to quake, and will not by any means permit themselves to be passed by or nullified? 'T is a fact that is irrepressible; and, in persons with imagination of morbid tendency, this spontaneous sympathy takes a hold so strong as to present visibly the image about which there is concern,—and, behold! your veritable spectre is begotten! So, again, of your 'love at first sight,' comme on dit,—that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... and seminaries of a high grade for girls, this tendency is being decidedly checked in the vicinity of Beirut, and girls are not given up as incorrigibly old, even if they reach the age ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... such as might be used as a sitting-room. All around the house, except, indeed, upon the sea-ward side, stood gnarled and twisted trees; Scotch firs in abundance, here and there a Weymouth pine, and occasionally a knotted dwarf oak with a tendency to run inland. The garden was, however, rich enough in shrubs and undergrowth, and to the landward side was a gleam of still water, being all that remained ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... tendency to small joking and weak epigram I would also caution you to beware; they will have no success in the quarter to which you are going, and they will only damage other qualities which you might possibly ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... rule; that such tyrant or priest could find no better creed to serve his purpose than meek, submissive, non-resisting, heaven-seeking Christianity. Thus we find Mosheim saying of Constantine: "It is, indeed, probable that this prince perceived the admirable tendency of the Christian doctrine and precepts to promote the stability of government, by preserving the citizens in their obedience to the reigning powers, and in the practice of those virtues that render a State happy" ("Eccles. ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... splendour of his achievements seems to have brought history again into the sphere of romance. The appearance of all great men in the world is followed invariably by the rise of that mythopoeic spirit and that tendency to look for the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting conditions of rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not very long ago. While the founding of that city of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... had taught the niece of an elderly lady, who was of noble family and very rich. The aunt was always present at the lessons; and, knowing that she was very devout, I rejected all songs that were of an amorous tendency, and would only practise such as were unimpeachable. In my demeanour I was always sedate and respectful—full of humility and self-accusation. When I received my money from the old lady, I used to thank her in the name of our convent, for whose use it was to be appropriated, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... studies. The ideal did not worry him in the least; and when he had said his mass, read his breviary, confessed the devout sinners and visited the sick, he gave the rest of his time to profane but respectable amusements. He was of robust temperament, with a tendency to corpulency, which he fought against by taking considerable exercise; his face was round and good-natured, his calm gray eyes reflected the tranquillity and uprightness of his soul, and his genial nature was shown in his full ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... step taken to counteract their tendency to Hibernicize themselves, was to bestow additional honours on the great families. The baronry of Offally was enlarged into the earldom of Kildare; the lordship of Carrick into the earldom of Ormond; the title of Desmond was conferred on Maurice Fitz-Thomas ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... inquiries which were thought entitled to consideration before the determination was taken to accept the invitation was that whether the measure might not have a tendency to change the policy, hitherto invariably pursued by the United States, of avoiding all entangling alliances ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson

... hereafter subject the plainness and simplicity of a Parliamentary proceeding to the technical subtilties of the inferior courts. Secondly, that the question put to the Judges, and their answer, were strictly confined to the law and practice below; and that nothing in either had a tendency to their delivering an opinion concerning Parliament, its laws, its usages, its course of proceeding, or its powers. Thirdly, that the motion in arrest of judgment, grounded on the opinion of the Judges, was made only by Dr. Sacheverell himself, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... blunder foolishly over it and add it up to a wrong total, it is again and again wiped off the blackboard, and again and again rewritten for our more careful consideration. Possibly the secret of our failure to conquer Nature lies in ourselves, and our own obstinate tendency to work in only one groove of what we term 'advancement,'—namely our material self- interest. Possibly we might be victors if we would, even to the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... more ridiculous than the sight of a couple of hundred well-mounted men riding day after day in a slow procession through gates, "craning" at the smallest obstacles, or dismounting and "leading over." No; hard riding is the best antidote in the world for the luxurious tendency of these days. A hundred years ago, when the sport of fox-hunting was in its infancy and modern conditions of pace were unknown, there was less need for this kind of recreation, "the image of war without its guilt, and only twenty-five per cent of its danger." ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... been to good and thoughtful men, to find the Government passing a bill for the employment of our people on unproductive labour. Not only did the Labour-rate Act exclude productive labour from its own operations, but its direct tendency was to discourage and put a stop to improvement on the part of others. This is manifest enough. The baronies—that is, the lands of the baronies—were to be taxed to pay for all the works undertaken to give ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... less tendency to criminality, debauchery, and intemperance in the race; this, again, can in a measure be ascribed to their family influence, which even in our day has not lost that patriarchal influence which tinges the home or family life in the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... insist that some of the hogs which we saw were so thin that the connection between their fore and hindquarters was only a single thickness of skin, with hair on both sides—but then Andrews sometimes seemed to me to have a tendency ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... might have aspired. Nevertheless, when the girl from the Mandarins had been brought home as Mrs. Trevelyan, Lady Milborough had received her with open arms,—had received even the sister-in-law with arms partly open. Had either of them shown any tendency to regard her as a mother, she would have showered motherly cares upon them. For Lady Milborough was like an old hen, in her capacity for taking many under her wings. The two sisters had hardly done more than bear with her,—Nora, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... gives a name and stops. If you ask for the cause of such torturous pain in head and back, with fever and vomiting, he will tell you that the very best authorities agree that the cause is malaria, with its peculiar diagnostic tendency to affect the brain, spine and stomach, and administers quinine and leaves, thinking he has ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still

... literature. He felt impelled to give her lessons, and she became as much his pupil as model. Her water-colour drawings done under his tuition gave proof of a wonderful eye for colour, and displayed a marked tendency to style. The subjects, too, were admirably composed and often exhibited unusual poetic feeling. It was very natural that such a connection between persons of kindred aspirations should lead to friendship and finally ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... Twenty-fifth Infantry, and adds immediately: "We then helped ourselves to cocoanuts which we found in abundance near the landing." Ordinarily this statement, so trivial and apparently unimportant, would not merit repetition, but in its connection here it is significant as showing the immediate tendency of the men to resort to the fruits of the country, despite all warnings to the contrary. The two weeks' experience on board the transports had made the finding of cocoanuts an event to be noted, and the dry pulp and strongly flavored milk of this tropical fruit became extremely grateful ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward

... you aware of this, Steam?—the plating at the bows, and particularly at the stern—we would also mention the floors beneath us—help us to resist any tendency to spring." The frames spoke, in the solemn, awed voice which people use when they have just come across something entirely new for the very ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling

... panung each day of the week,—on Sunday, red; Monday, cream; Tuesday, purple; and so on,—for good luck. Another is the use of buttons adorned with representations of animals, symbolical of the year in which certain persons are born,—this also for good luck. The tendency naturally leads to great respect being shown to fortune-tellers. The youth of Siam are, however, it is said, outgrowing this ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... fulfilment evidently lies close to the dream life, which has become known through psychoanalysis. Most of us when we dream, according to the words of Protagoras, "lie still, and do not stir." In some persons there is however a special tendency to motor activity, in itself a symptomatic manifestation, which necessitates the carrying out of the dream wish through walking in the sleep. The existence of this fact, together with the evidence of an influence of the shining of the moon upon this tendency to sleep walking, ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... tried each other; if you add to this the mistakes arising from the hopes of those who live more particularly either by their minds, or by their hearts, or by action, who either think, or feel, or act, and whose tendency is misunderstood in the close association in which two persons, equal counterparts, find themselves, you will have great indulgence for sorrows to which the world is pitiless. Well, Lady Dudley gratified the instincts, organs, appetites, the vices and virtues of the subtile matter of ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac

... conceit, and vanity. Fools wish to pass for wits; wits want to be thought men of talent; men of talent wish to be treated as men of genius; as for men of genius, they are more reasonable; they consent to be only demigods. This tendency of the public mind of these days, which, in the Chamber, makes the manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator jealous of the writer, leads fools to disparage wits, wits to disparage men of talent, men of talent to disparage those ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... the Neapolitan minister, the Duke Di Sangro, was likewise weak enough to maintain the same opinion. The vexation which these impolitic scrupulosities occasioned in the superior mind of our decided hero, is difficult to be described. He saw the destructive tendency of such mental imbecility, and trembled for the fate of a country which was condemned to be thus served. His lordship's feelings will be best conceived, by his own account of what passed in his anxious bosom on the occasion, thus addressed to ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison

... consequence of this pause in the regular business of sealing, and the promised holiday. A strict order was given that no one should go among the seals, as it was feared that some indiscretion or other might have a tendency to create an alarm. In all other respects the island was placed at the disposal of the men, if anything could be made of such a lone spot, a speck on the surface of the antarctic seas, and nearly encircled by mountains of ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... force towards him. That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... whatever else the believer imposes upon himself here below. Man is so constituted that the only things which make a deep impression are those that the body also feels. The teacher's blow has a greater effect than his words, a gift produces more willingness than an entreaty, and the tendency toward asceticism and penance is genuinely Christian, and belongs to many a people of a different faith. Your Erasmus said that his heart was Catholic, but his stomach desired to be Protestant. You have an easier task ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Brier was naturally greatly superior to his wife, as Mrs. Wynn had said, but was biased in his opinions by that lady, who ruled him with no gentle sway. With another woman, whose society would have had a tendency to elevate him, there is no telling what this man might have become. But having been entrapped into an early marriage, with a woman of inferior intellect and but little ambition, he had sunk down several grades lower ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... observing and combining faculties, which are so well developed by big game shooting, yield real education, or the leading out and development of the mental resources, while books provide the individual merely with instruction which has often a tendency to cramp and even to fossilize ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... they are getting more careless about it. During the past week bigamy has crowded baseball out of the papers, and while this may be due in part to the fact that it was a cold, rainy week and little baseball could be played, yet there is a tendency to be noted there somewhere. All those wishing to note a tendency will continue on ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley

... a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which, however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like a horse's hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about like a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place, jumping round ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... that is what Dr. Brice meant when he said that mother's good care of her health had overcome in us children to a great extent the tendency to consumption which is in her family. Nearly all my cousins on her side die with it, but when she was a little girl her father made her live out of doors all the time and she grew strong, and we none of us seem to ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen

... constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity, and some obscure recollections will always remind him of the home he has lost; but we are now speaking of the predominant tendency of his endeavours. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... dry scrub—sometimes ten, sometimes thirty miles wide. In this scrub, manna is not unfrequently found, to the great delight of the natives, who are very fond of it. It is of a very excellent description, and in colour has a slight tendency to pink. ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey

... have quoted show that Mr. Romanes is upholding the same opinions as Professor Hering's and my own, but their effect and tendency is more plain here than in Mr Romanes' own book, where they are overlaid by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always easy ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... it; and, moreover, his natural tendency to crime must have been very strong or he would ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc

... all by an indefinite increase in the powers of the State. More than a generation ago Mill wrote: "There is in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation; and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... and personality from inanimate things, to select from among spirits One more powerful than the rest, to recognise that One as disembodied, as superior, then as supreme, then as unique, and so to attain the monotheistic conception, has been, according to the evolutionary hypothesis, the tendency ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... sketch from the last number of Blackwood's Magazine. The parents of the writer were of "a serious cast," and attached to evangelical tenets, which he soon imbibed, together with an occasional tendency to gloom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various

... confine himself to the reproduction of documents, and this is the present tendency. But these documents, for periods as near us as the Revolution, are so abundant that a man's whole life would not suffice to go through them. Therefore the historian ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... Tendency to introduce personal observations cropped up from time to time through debate, which occupied greater part of sitting. CARSON having genially alluded to main body of Ministerialists as "lunatics," NEIL PRIMROSE, turning upon the WISTFUL WINSTON, who hadn't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various

... religion. Ada had grown up to regard church-going as a sign of respectability, but without a shadow of religious faith. Her incredible ignorance of the Bible story, of Christian dogmas, often amazed him. Himself a believer, though careless in the practice of forms, he was not disturbed by the modern tendency to look for morals apart from faith; he had not the trouble of reflecting that an ignorant woman is the last creature to be moralised by anything but the Christian code; he saw straight into the fact—that there ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... Hogarth described as a mere comic painter, as one of those whose chief ambition was to raise a laugh. To deny that there are throughout the prints which I have mentioned circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency, would be to run counter to the common notions of mankind; but to suppose that in their ruling character they appeal chiefly to the risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of man, its best and most serious feelings, would be to mistake no less grossly their aim and purpose. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... make head against the dissenters now? Let the duty lapse but one single week, my dear friend, and you will see the chapels overflowing once more. My brother has always had a hard fight to keep them to church, for they have a natural tendency to dissent here. And a great number don't care what the denominations are, so long ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... controlled and directed during the action? At what instant has he had a tendency to quit the line in order to remain behind or to ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq

... reinstated, and the small Roman Catholic minority remained at home on the feast-days. Even the lowest class of the population—elsewhere, from ignorance and prejudice, the stronghold of the papal religion—here seemed to share in the universal tendency, and, unfortunately, as a local chronicler, to whom we are indebted for these particulars, informs us, took no better way of testifying its devotion than by "mutilating sepulchral monuments, unearthing the dead, and committing ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... who could not sleep stretched out at full length. One of the strongest symptoms of Bright's disease is a tendency to draw the knees up close to the body in sleep. Captain, and to twist the arms above the head. Of all the men under this roof, this man here was the only one who slept like that last night!" He paused and looked down at ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... if I had been a very inquisitive and very censorious old painter, with a tendency to poke my nose into and criticise other people's business, I would at once have put two and two together and asked myself innumerable questions. Why, for instance, the charming couple did not arrive ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... tendency, in this country only, for working people in general to look upon domestic service as an unworthy, if not altogether degrading vocation. The cause may perhaps be found in the fact that this same scorning public having for the most part little opportunity to know high-class servants, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... easy-going, cultured and kindly gentlemen, rather limited in their views, without a trace of their sister's force of intellect or her strenuous temper. E. resembled her in person, he was tall, fair, with auburn curls; he cultivated a certain tendency to the Byronic type, fatal and melancholy. A. was short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to common sense; bluff and chatty. As a little child, I adored my Uncle E., who sat silent by the fireside holding me against his knee, saying nothing, but looking unutterably sad, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... of, unless a very active performance on the several occasions of breakfast, dinner, and supper, with a tendency towards port, and an inclination to sleep ten in every twenty-four hours, be a sign of sickness; these symptoms I have known many of the family suffer for years, without the slightest alleviation, though, strange as it may appear, they ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... impossible to tell whether they should be ascribed to the beginning, to the end, or to an intermediate period of the laying. To sum up: in the laying of the Three-pronged Osmia, no order governs the succession of the sexes; only, the series has a marked tendency to begin with females and to ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... as she had got over any tendency to faint, but she had no intention of leaving him to his fate. She had just seen in a pocket of his leather apron those big garden-shears which she had noticed him plying with such marked incompetence, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey

... ingenuity and industry so comprehensive and so various in themselves and their results, that it must supersede all others, and be accepted in every country where there are people capable of understanding it. From the time of the first Crusade there has been a steady tendency to the unity of Christian countries; and notwithstanding all their conflicts with one another, and partly as one of the effects of those conflicts, they have "fraternized," until now there exists a mighty Christian Commonwealth, the members of which ought to be able to govern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... is that the whole white South, including the wise, conservative, law-abiding element, may find itself represented before the bar of public opinion by the mob or lawless element, which gives expression to its feelings and tendency in a manner that advertises the South throughout the world; while too often those who have no sympathy with such disregard of law are either silent, or fail to speak in a sufficiently emphatic manner to offset in any ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... quite a long time now since you and I first caught sight of each other and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing Road of the world. O quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control my tendency to shiver at their number from the fact that we have travelled them, always within hailing distance of each other, I with the comfortable knowledge that near by I had so good a ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... The constant tendency of science, operating by the Deductive Method, is to resolve all laws, even those which once seemed ultimate and not derivative, into others still more general. But no process of resolving will ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... came the French Revolution. This furnished him with an excuse for every kind of suspicion. He began to discover a revolutionary tendency in everything; to concoct terrible and unjust accusations, which made scores of people unhappy. Of course, such conduct could not fail in time to reach the throne. The kind-hearted Empress was shocked; and, full of the noble spirit which adorns crowned heads, she uttered words still engraven ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... satirical cast, until the seaboard itself was reached, when newspapers ceased altogether and letters began to take their place. These were addressed, with complete absence of subterfuge, to Medora, and they displayed an increasing tendency toward the drawing of comparisons between the East and the West, with the difference more and more in favour of the latter. Abner felt with growing keenness the formality and insincerity of an old society, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... Jews, while St. James remained at Jerusalem. Two Jewish Christians, Silas and Barsabas, went back with the two Apostles, to notify the resolution to the Church at Antioch, and St. Peter shortly followed them; but there continued to be a great tendency among the Christians of Jewish blood to avoid their Gentile brethren, and St. Peter was drawn in to do the same, so that St. Paul, always more stedfast, was forced to rebuke him. Paul and Barnabas intended to set out on a second journey, and Barnabas wished again to take his now repentant ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... still found the night beautiful—oh, inexpressibly beautiful!—but moonlight nights were what made lovers want to look into each other's eyes, and sing each other love songs "with expression." To be sure, she had formerly considered this very tendency an elysian feature of such nights; but that was when she thought that love always was right for its own sake, that true lovers never should be thwarted. She still held by that belief; and yet—she visioned Uncle Charlie, dear Uncle Charlie, so fond ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... and whip, and very espiegle face—a face surrounded by waves of silky black hair, with a clear pale skin, and good eyes and teeth, which Polly always declared were her fortune in the way of good looks; but her snub nose was neither of a vulgar nor coarse tendency—it was a very lively, coquettish, handsomely ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... close application to business allowed the pleasure very rarely. Mr. Deane, he considered, was the "knowingest" man of his acquaintance, and he had besides a ready causticity of tongue that made an agreeable supplement to Mr. Tulliver's own tendency that way, which had remained in rather an inarticulate condition. And now the women were gone, they could carry on their serious talk without frivolous interruption. They could exchange their views concerning the Duke of Wellington, whose conduct ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... early education was colored by contact with the polished, studious, timid priests, who, educated in Continental seminaries, introduced into Ireland all the grace and dignity and holiness, and all the dread of secular authority with the slight tendency to compromise, that seemed to have marked the French clergy, at least in the years immediately succeeding the revolutions and the Napoleonic wars. These were the good men who fraternized with landlords, and lent their ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... Again, he says that "the Christian religion is the religion of a civilised people; it is entirely spiritual, and the reward which Jesus Christ promises to the elect is that they shall see God face to face; and its whole tendency is to subdue the passions; it offers nothing to ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... of terminating this unhappy struggle was obviously a difficult one. Bonaparte therefore resolved to impose it on Bernadotte; but this general's conciliatory disposition, his chivalrous manners, his tendency to indulgence, and a happy mixture of prudence and firmness, made him succeed where others would have failed. He finally established good order and submission to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... employers were afraid the journeymen would set up for themselves and compete against them. And instinctively they feared the big employers more than the journeymen, and were shy of entering the Union with them. The inner tendency of the industrial movement was to concentrate everything in a few hands, and to ruin the small business. The small employers had yet another crow to pluck with Meyer, who had extended his business at the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... between the landowner and the labouring peasant, still flourishes in France, notwithstanding the severe denunciations passed upon it by various writers. If it were a very bad system, it would have fallen into disuse long before now, for although the French have a tendency to keep their wheels in old ruts, they are as keen as any other people in protecting their own interests. It is a system that would soon become impossible without trustfulness and honesty. On both sides there must be fair dealing. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... market. I knew that dealers had sent to Sydney for a supply of flour, and I feared that their orders would be filled, but in this I was agreeably mistaken. Flour at Sydney was ten shillings per barrel higher than at Melbourne, with an upward tendency; while not a sack could be obtained of the few farmers who raised wheat, short of eighty pounds per ton,—just double what ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... The tendency is to condemn the violation of these commandments, not in proportion to the injury done, but rather in inverse proportion. No one will dispute the validity of the injunction against covetousness as long as the object coveted is of little value or not greatly desired, but the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... of our kid, and eat with his jack-knife. Yet the man was ill at ease all the time, was sparing of his conversation, and kept up the notion of a condescension under stress of circumstances. One would say that, instead of a tendency to equality in human beings, the tendency is to make the most ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... on two persons at the same time, and we considered that that number should not be exceeded. But now their activity seemed daily increasing, and it was not without concern that we noticed in her a certain restlessness and a growing tendency to discuss with the serpent questions relating to the acquisition of prohibited apples. After a while, and perhaps in consequence of the good advice we gave her, she sobered down and surprised us by her docility; but at best her moods were uncertain and ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... ratiocination," said one of them, "do you arrive at the conclusion that the division of society into producing and non-possessing classes predicates failure when compared with competitive systems that are monopolizing in tendency and result ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... to have more than a political significance. By ill or good hap those words are beginning to assume a double meaning; and maugre all efforts to the contrary, the days must soon unfold the twofold tendency and result of the "Union and Progress" ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... for the danger in such cases has matured by the time of trial or it was never present. The test applies and had meaning where a conviction is sought to be based on a speech or writing which does not directly or explicitly advocate a crime but to which such tendency is sought to be attributed by construction or by implication from external circumstances. The formula in such cases favors freedoms that are vital to our society, and, even if sometimes applied too generously, the consequences cannot be grave. But its ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... regarded Zoellner at the time as of more or less unsound mind. His disease, as described by them, seems to have been chiefly emotional, showing itself in a passionate dislike of contradiction, and a tendency to overlook any evidence contrary to ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission

... well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr. Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact is a very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign critics who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to compel larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are promoted, not by any ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled for them into a hemisphere of shadow, as dim, cold, and negative as the unlit portion of the crescent moon. Lamb's general tendency, though he too could warmly admire, was in a different direction; he was ever introducing streaks and gleams of light into darkness, rather than drowning certain objects in floods of it; and this, I think, proceeded ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... this tendency created an embarrassment to Union commanders. A few days after General Butler assumed command of the Union troops at Fortress Monroe, the agent of a rebel master who had fled from the neighborhood came to demand, under the provisions of the fugitive-slave law, three field hands alleged ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... unfathomable monad-Souls! Made in the image"—a hoarse frog croaks from the pool— "Hark! 'twas some god, voicing his glorious thought In thunder music! Yea, we hear their voice, And we may guess their minds from ours, their work. Some taste they have like ours, some tendency To wiggle about, and munch a trace of scum." He floated up on a pin-point bubble of gas That burst, pricked by the air, ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers

... Overripe or cracked heads should not be stored. The heads are placed in the pit with their heads down and roots up. The second layer is also placed heads down between the roots of the first layer. It is well not to have more than two layers, on account of the weight having a tendency to crush ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... Prophecy, for instance, had been considered extinct for some centuries: nevertheless these last-times, as indeed is the tendency of last-times, do revive it; that so, of French mad things, we might have sample also of the maddest. In remote rural districts, whither Philosophism has not yet radiated, where a heterodox Constitution of the Clergy is bringing strife round the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... sites of a bull cult or that some myth, like that elaborated in the Tain, had been there localised.[698] But, as possibly in the case of Cuchulainn and the bull, the animal tended to become the symbol of a god, a tendency perhaps aided by the spread of Mithraism with its symbolic bull. A god Medros leaning on a bull is represented at Haguenau, possibly a form of Mider or of Meduris, a surname of Toutatis, unless Medros is simply Mithras.[699] Echoes of the cult of the bull or cow are heard in Irish tales of these ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... in the early years of the century the School was not so large in numbers as it had been in the best years of Mr. Style; the choice of players was therefore more limited. Nevertheless, throughout the School there was a general tendency to take up more than one branch of sport. Golf, Fives, Gymnastics, all received gifts of Challenge Cups, and considerable competition resulted. In 1908 Captain Thompson, of Beck House, generously presented a Cup for a Cross Country Race. The Scar-Rigg Race, as it has been called, is three miles ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell

... bring. Being thus without theoretic guidance, and quite incapable of guiding herself by tracing the mental processes going on in her children, her rule is impulsive, inconsistent, mischievous; and would indeed be generally ruinous were it not that the overwhelming tendency of the growing mind to assume the moral type of the race usually ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... Presbyterian order and organization, the dividing line between these two bodies of Nonconformists naturally faded out. There was little, if anything, to keep them apart on the score of doctrine; and in time the Presbyterians certainly exhibited something of the tendency to variety of opinion which had always marked the Independents. Besides these bodies, the Baptists and Quakers stand out amid the sects comprised in Nonconformity. In both of these there were distinct signs of Anti-trinitarianism from time ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant

... my love," rejoined her friend Matilda, "that it has a tendency to sprain our ankles if we remain long standing; and, by-the-way, did you not hear the children speak about our having some new paper-muslins?" and thereupon the two ladies fell to discussing dress with great animation. General Popgun growing meanwhile quite puffed out with pride, ...
— Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... another chapter, we return to the subject and deal with it in a more comprehensive way. Our conclusion, as for the moment we must now be content to leave it, is not that the labourers have not a claim, practically valid, to the only portion of their income which has any tendency to grow, but merely that they should understand the source from which this portion is drawn—a source which consists of the efforts of other ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... impossible. He would consult the physician first, and Judge St. Claire next. The doctor gave it as his opinion that Jerrie was in no danger, if she were only kept quiet. She had taken a severe cold and overtaxed her strength, while most likely she had inherited from some one a tendency to be flighty when anything was the matter, and he thought Harold might venture to ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... The tendency to which attention is drawn in the original preface, the pendulum swing from the old notion that Alaska is a land of polar bears and icebergs to the new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of mineral wealth and unbounded agricultural ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... is the result of culture. There are two things often confounded with it—(a) good nature and (b) good humor. Good nature is something born with us—an easy, contented disposition, and a tendency to take things quietly and pleasantly. We inherit it. There is little merit in possessing it. Good humor is the result of pleasant surroundings and agreeable circumstances. A good-humored man is so when everything goes ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees

... disorder and in establishing a respect for law and government is not to be overlooked. She presented in her own organization an example of authority, of system, and of obedience, which, despite many failings and abuses, was of great value to the world. But there is in human nature an irrepressible tendency toward growth and progress, and when this tendency began to show itself in the Middle Ages, it found in the theological spirit, then personated by the Roman Church, its most bitter and most powerful enemy. The ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... active and passive voices, and impersonations of inanimate objects), get the habit of borrowing them to explain other phenomena by a sort of original Fetichism. Even Reid allows that there is a tendency to assume volition where it does not exist, and that the belief in it has its sphere gradually limited, in proportion as fixed laws of succession ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... handsomest Venetian of his day. Yet of the two, most men and women would have been more attracted to Venier at first sight. For Contarini's silken beard hardly concealed a weak and feminine mouth, with lips too red and too curving for a man, and his soft brown eyes had an unmanly tendency to look away while he was speaking. He was tall, broad shouldered, and well proportioned, with beautiful hands and shapely feet, yet he did not give an impression of strength, whereas Venier's languid manner, assumed as it doubtless was, could ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... and enlarged the giant's foundation; but nearly every trace of their occupation has disappeared. Indeed, even the ramparts, built only a few hundred years ago by Francis I., have utterly vanished; and the tendency of the town has been so decidedly toward pulling down and building up again that it now wears quite a modern and ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier



Words linked to "Tendency" :   tend, dislike, drift, nonpartisanship, understanding, way, impartiality, disposition, tendencious, proclivity, mental attitude, direction, predisposition, set, denominationalism, trend, electronegativity, tendentious, stainability, devices, disapproval, Militant Tendency, literalism, hybrid vigor, disfavor, favoritism, buoyancy, negativity, movement, sympathy, inclination, favouritism, bent, partiality, propensity, leaning, desire, call, favour, perseveration, heterosis, disfavour, partisanship, attitude, favor



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