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More "Arbitrary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and that the signification can be unity of descent or nothing. But I venture to repeat how much pleased I am that you go some little way with me. I find a number of naturalists do the same, and as their halting-places are various, and I must think arbitrary, I believe they will all go further. As for changing at once one's opinion, I would not value the opinion of a man who could do so; it must be a slow process. (97/2. Darwin wrote to Woodward in regard to the "Origin": "It may be a vain and silly ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... rigorously in a condition of servile dependence and subjection. They were indeed, as one of the early travelers in California put it, slaves under another name—slaves to the cast-iron power of a system which, like all systems, was capable of unlimited abuse, and which, at the very best, was narrow and arbitrary. Every vestige of freedom was taken from them when they entered, or were brought into, the settlement. Henceforth they belonged, body and soul, to the mission and its authority. Their tasks were assigned to them, their movements ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... phenomenon, or its hidden source, one of five kinds of facts. There is, however, a class of propositions which relate not to matter of fact, but to the meaning of names, and which, therefore, as names and their meanings are arbitrary, admit not of truth or falsity, but only of agreement or disagreement with usage. These verbal propositions are not only those in which both terms are proper names, but also some, viz. essential propositions, thought to be more closely related to things than any others. The Aristotelians' ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... ask what we are to make of a language which transforms Milton's line into [Greek: e shalpigx ohy proshephe ton hoplismhenon hochlon.][C] But be this as it may, these phenomena are surely too rare and too arbitrary to be adequately represented by any regularly recurring rhyme: and the question remains, what is there in the unrhymed original ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... "A man cannot be seized and held as property, because he has rights. . . . A being having rights cannot justly be made property, for this claim over him virtually annuls all his rights." This argument, it is obvious, is based on the arbitrary idea which the author has been pleased to attach to the term property. If it proves any thing, it would prove that a horse could not be held as property, for a horse certainly has rights. But, as we have seen, a limited property, or a right to the labor of a man, does not deny or annul all his ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... less artificial and arbitrary, for the truth is that all of the three divisions are but ascending degrees of the great scale of Life, the lowest point of which is undifferentiated Matter, and the highest point that of Spirit. And, moreover, the different Planes shade into each other, so that ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... address of Xerxes to his council. He concluded by saying that it was not his wish to act in the affair in an arbitrary or absolute manner, and he invited all present to express, with perfect freedom, any opinions or views which they entertained in respect to ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... overcome all other obstacles. No settlements could well have been worse managed than those of Spain in Mexico, Peru, and Quito. The tyranny, superstition, and vices of the mother-country were introduced in ample quantities among her children. Exorbitant taxes were exacted by the Crown. The most arbitrary restrictions were imposed on their trade. And the governors were not behind hand in rapacity and extortion for themselves as well as their master. Yet, under all these difficulties, the colonies made a quick progress in population. The ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... in 2001 could hamper growth in exports. Beijing will intensify efforts to stimulate growth through spending on infrastructure—such as water control and power grids—and poverty relief and through rural tax reform aimed at eliminating arbitrary local ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... was no communication from the professor. Malling might of course have written to him or sought him. He preferred to possess his soul in patience. Stepton was an arbitrary personage, and the last man in the world to consent to a process ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... gratification: at first, the promise of the life which now is, afterwards the promise of that which is to come; but even then the rewards and punishments of a future state were spoken of, by inspiration itself, as of an arbitrary character; and some of the best of the Israelites, in looking to the recompense of reward, seemed to have anticipated, coarsely, recompense in ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... a spiritual being—The immortality of the soul, so far from stimulating men to the practise of virtue, is nothing but a barbarous, desperate, fatal tenet, and contrary to all legislation—All ideas of justice and injustice, of virtue and vice, of glory and infamy, are purely arbitrary, and dependent on custom—Conscience and remorse are nothing but the foresight of those physical penalties to which crimes expose us—The man who is above the law, can commit, without remorse, the dishonest act that may serve his purpose—The fear of ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... prison as a fugitive slave. When her husband called upon Isaac T. Hopper and related all the circumstances, he thought there must be some mistake; for he could not believe that any magistrate would be so unjust and arbitrary, as to commit a woman to prison as a fugitive, when he had seen the money paid for her ransom, and the deed of manumission given. He went to Mr. Bussier immediately, and very civilly told him that he had called to make inquiry concerning a colored woman committed to prison ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... creating an artificial and self-interested loyalty than even the judge. The reasons are obvious. In the first place, the number of criminals, or even of civil litigants, in any society is limited; whereas practically the whole population consists of taxpayers. In the second place, the arbitrary methods of administering justice practised by Oriental rulers do not shock their subjects nearly so much as Europeans are often disposed to think. Custom has made it in them a property of easiness. They often, indeed, fail to appreciate the intentions, and are ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... conceal from myself that there may be much that is arbitrary in my own criterion; but this does not seem to me possible to avoid. We must therefore appeal to psychology, and ask whether it is cognisant of any phenomenon offering a violent, lasting, and ineffaceable contrast with all the rest of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... John Hawkwood. Peter d'Estaing, appointed Legate of Bologna, makes truce with Bernabo. The latter, however, continues secretly to incite Tuscany to rebel against the Pope, inflaming the indignation of the Tuscans at the arbitrary policy of the Papal Legates, and in particular of the Nuncio, Gerard du Puy, who is supporting the claims of those turbulent nobles, the Salimbeni in Siena. Catherine is in correspondence with both d'Estaing and Du Puy. On April 22nd, Gregory, ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Faustus's life was, according to the popular legend, spent in Italy, we are not aware that this legend was ever current among the Italian people. Some unfortunate attempts have been made to engraft the story of Don Giovanni upon this German stock, but, as it seems to us, by very arbitrary arguments and conclusions. The career of a mere rake, who shuns no means of gratifying his low appetites, has little analogy with that of an originally honest inquirer, led astray by the want of faith and his sensual nature. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... 1617 "a party of greedy and unprincipled adventurers" in England succeeded in having an agent of their own appointed deputy governor. This was Samuel Argall. Lord Delaware, the Governor, dying in 1618, Argall became virtual dictator, and under his arbitrary and self-seeking rule the people suffered. Meanwhile others, in England, were at work in the interest of the Virginia Company, under whose auspices, from the granting of the new charter, the colony had existed. Sir Edwin Sandys, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... wars, profound peace firmly established throughout the whole Empire; instead of the exactions of chiefs always greedy for gold, and not shrinking from any act of cruelty to extort it, moderate taxes, much lower than those imposed by the feudatory princes; arbitrary rule replaced by even-handed justice; the tribunals, once proverbially corrupt, by upright judges whose example is already beginning to make its influence felt on native morality and notions of right; no more Pindarris, no more armed bands of ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... penetrate to Timbuctoo, through Ashantee, and establish a commerce through that country, might meet with temporary success; but I apprehend that we should labour under the same inconveniences, and be subject to the same arbitrary imposts and exactions, whether in the shape of duties, part of the profits, or otherwise, as we should, by opening a communication through Tripoli. There would be a present or douceur to the king of Ashantee; others to the princes of the adjoining territories; and, finally, (taking the character ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... control over this distant and recently acquired territory. Every Moslem commander considered the town or province committed to his charge an absolute property; and accordingly exercised the most arbitrary extortions. These excesses at length became insupportable, and, at a convocation of many of the principal leaders, it was determined, as a means to end these dissensions, to unite all the Moslem provinces ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... between the bass and treble notes of a piano. That is why these opposites do not bring confusion in the universe, but harmony. If creation were but a chaos, we should have to imagine the two opposing principles as trying to get the better of each other. But the universe is not under martial law, arbitrary and provisional. Here we find no force which can run amok, or go on indefinitely in its wild road, like an exiled outlaw, breaking all harmony with its surroundings; each force, on the contrary, has to come back ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... imploring him to pardon their unhappy sister. His only reply was to belabour the miserable victim with a thick stick. Speke had carefully abstained heretofore from interfering with any of the king's acts of arbitrary cruelty. On hearing, however, his own name imploringly pronounced, his English blood was up, and, rushing at the tyrant, he stayed his uplifted arm, and demanded the poor creature's life. He, of course, ran ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... many I don't know that I could explain them all. But the most simple of the difficult ones is the taking of a number of arbitrary signs or symbols to represent the letters of the alphabet. That is what was done in Poe's 'Gold Bug,' you remember. Unless the person has a copy of the list of signs and symbols it is very difficult to decipher that cipher, or decode it, as they ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... seemed expedient and the deficit would be distributed over the remainder of the area in the same manner as the original assessment was spread. In practice such re-distribution is ordinarily made by the arbitrary adjustment in accordance with what the authorized officials consider to be fair and equitable. The method outlined is merely a mechanical means of securing distribution and must not be considered as an infallible method of making the assessment. It is always ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... on. To remove our "direful apprehensions that he will drain us of our gold and silver by his coinage:" This little arbitrary mock-monarch most graciously offers to "take our manufactures in exchange." Are our Irish understandings indeed so low in his opinion? Is not this the very misery we complain of? That his cursed project will put ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... 4. Arbitrary national sovereignty was supplemented by more or less permanent alliances and by the formal international organizations such as the Universal Postal Union, the World Court and the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... another language on such a people is to send their history adrift among the accidents of translation—'tis to tear their identity from all places—'tis to substitute arbitrary signs for picturesque and suggestive names—'tis to cut off the entail of feeling, and separate the people from their forefathers by a deep gulf—'tis to corrupt their very organs, and abridge their ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... gave me freer play than usual, and there were fewer things occurred in its course, which reminded me of the divisions of time; still the church-going, where I heard nothing that had any connection with my inward life, and these rules, gave me associations with the day of empty formalities, and arbitrary restrictions; but though the forbidden book or walk always seemed more charming then, I was ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... separate when used in regular grammatical relations and construction unless they are jointly applied in some arbitrary way. ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... The blind cells of hearing, in their dim consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world which the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... began, flushing all over. "We say that we are against arbitrary rule and despotism, and is this not the most ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... alone in a victoria in Hyde Park, and would consider her a very improper person if she asked a gentleman to drive out with her—as we do in our Park every day of our lives—in an open carriage. Truly etiquette is a curious and arbitrary thing, and differs ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... rules established for the conviction and punishment of the Christians, the fate of those sectaries, in an extensive and arbitrary government, must still in a great measure, have depended on their own behavior, the circumstances of the times, and the temper of their supreme as well as subordinate rulers. Zeal might sometimes provoke, and prudence might sometimes ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... system, by creating and perpetuating arbitrary and yet almost impassable lines of social cleavage, must be fatal to the development of a robust body politic which can only be produced by the reasonable intermingling and healthy fusion of the different classes of the community. It was perhaps chief among the causes that left Hinduism ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... trading, especially the supplying of fire- arms to the Indians, and on regulating with a strong hand all the doings of his small body of subjects. But such a policy costs money, and to obtain it by taxation he found himself compelled in August, 1647, like many another arbitrary ruler, to summon reluctantly the representatives of the people. Carefully as the functions of the Nine Men were limited, they constituted a permanent element in the governmental system, as the Twelve Men and Eight Men had not. It was inevitable that sooner or later they should ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... by his horrible helplessness. He feels that a military court reverses ordinary procedure, holding that it is better for nine innocent to suffer than for one guilty one to escape. He knows that his fate is in the hands of a tribunal from whose arbitrary decision there is no appeal, and that decision he knows may depend upon the whim of the commandant, to whom a poor breakfast or a bad night's sleep may give the wrong twist. The terrible uncertainty of it preys upon ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... the reader to glance for a moment at the condition of Ireland fifty years ago. At that time almost the whole agricultural population were in the position of tenants-at-will, with no security either against increased rents or arbitrary eviction. The housing of the rural population, and especially of the agricultural labourers, was wretched in the extreme. Local taxation and administration were wholly in the hands of Grand Juries, bodies appointed by the Crown ...
— Ireland and Poland - A Comparison • Thomas William Rolleston
... there is a beloved and a lover: The man is supposed to be the lover, the woman the beloved. Now, in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit—but deeply, deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep, unfathomable ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... supplementary constructions are requisite which, through their independence, would derange the architectural whole, no monastic congregations, no body of regular clergy; the secular clergy suffices. "Never[5157] has it been contested that the public power had the right to dissolve arbitrary institutions which do not insist on the essence of religion and which are judged suspicious or troublesome to the State." As a principle, all religious communities should be judged in this way; for they are ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... "claims." The word is very skillfully chosen. It conveys, without the slightest disrespect, Esther's sense of the arbitrary character ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... some correspondence between its meaning and the person who bore it. Hence the name should not be arbitrary in its application, but should "link its fitness to idea," and with the person, run ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... took David in hand and toyed with him and spanked him, and pelted and petted him, until finally she made him her favorite son. Dame Fortune went about this work in an abrupt and arbitrary manner. ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... the art of arranging a special code of signals, whose arbitrary import it is difficult to understand. At a ball, a flower placed in some odd way in the hair; at the theatre, a pocket handkerchief unfolded on the front of the box; rubbing the nose, wearing a belt of a particular color, putting the hat on one side, wearing one dress oftener than another, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... Southern Germany. Neither law nor edict could suppress the incessant feuds of the barons, and in Franconia especially the ancient times of club law appeared to be revived. Security of property there was none; arbitrary will everywhere prevailed; corruption of morals and rude power rarely met with even a feeble opposition; whence it arose that the cruel, but lucrative, persecutions of the Jews were in many places still practised, through the whole of this century, with their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... MANUFACTURES.—The distinction between hair and wool is rather arbitrary than natural, consisting in the greater or less degrees of fineness, softness and pliability of the fibres. When the fibres possess these properties so far as to admit of their being spun and woven into a texture sufficiently pliable to be used ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the French people may have had for America as the nation which set the example of resistance to arbitrary rule, the French government certainly was moved by no enthusiasm for abstract rights. Its only object was to check the power of their ancient enemy, and deprive it of its empire beyond the seas. Nevertheless, France did contribute materially to American success. The American government ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... consideration. All this unkindness of his twin he charged upon the fell Thing who had wrought this their first dissension, and, ah! most terrible thought, interposed between them so effectually, that Sweyn was wilfully blind and deaf on her account, resentful of interference, arbitrary beyond reason. ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... appears to be an arbitrary adaptation of the Deva-nagari characters. The shape of the letters is mostly the same but new ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... not known at the time, and came out years later. It had certainly not reached persons of the Weller class. The truth is that most of Sam's grotesque epithets, e.g., "young Brokiley sprout," were the arbitrary coinage of a fantastic mind. This, too, as Sir Walter said, "he may have heard in a crowd," or in the mazes of his own brain. "Old Nobs" is just as reasonable as Hamlet's "Old Truepenny." "Are you there, Old Truepenny," might have been said ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... awakened: he summoned the offender to his presence, and without listening to his excuses, gave the signal to the minister of death. If the cruel master had not infringed the laws of his nation, this arbitrary execution was not less unjust than it appears to have been imprudent. The Heruli felt the indignity; they halted: but the Roman general, without soothing their rage, or expecting their resolution, called aloud, as the trumpets sounded, that unless they hastened to occupy their place, they ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... projected by Sir John Blunt, who became one of the Directors of it, and ultimately one of the greatest sufferers by it, when the Bubble burst, see Smollett's "History of England," vol. ii; Pope's "Moral Essays," Epist. iii, and notes; and Gibbon's "Memoirs," for the violent and arbitrary proceedings against the Directors, one of whom ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... jealousy. Again, the broad line of gentility, which now corresponds most closely with the old distinction of nobility, is determined by such a number of considerations,—birth, connexions, means, manners, education, with the arbitrary, though almost essential, condition of not being engaged in retail trade,—that those who are just excluded by it are apt to feel their position somewhat unintelligible, and, therefore, all the more galling to their pride and self-respect ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... discovery, and it at once changed and raised the whole character of linguistic studies. Languages might have been, for all we know, the result of individual fancy or poetry; words might have been created here and there at random, or been fixed by a convention, more or less arbitrary. In that case a scientific classification would have been as impossible as it is if applied to the changing fashions of the day. Nothing can be classified, nothing can be scientifically ruled and ordered, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... to let down the bars everywhere, to remove veils and obstructions, to emulate the freedom of the elemental forces, to effuse always the atmosphere of open-air growths and objects, to be as "regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... cause of the Pretender. He was arrested in Holland in 1717, and remained in prison for several months. He was a very cunning person, and a great political intriguer. On the death of Charles XII. he was taken before an extraordinary tribunal, and condemned in an unjust and arbitrary manner to be beheaded, which sentence was executed in, ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... existed in the great monarchies of Europe. But the Governments of Lombardy and Tuscany, through all their revolutions, preserved a different character. A people, when assembled in a town, is far more formidable to its rulers than when dispersed over a wide extent of country. The most arbitrary of the Caesars found it necessary to feed and divert the inhabitants of their unwieldy capital at the expense of the provinces. The citizens of Madrid have more than once besieged their sovereign in his own palace, and extorted from him the most humiliating ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 1848 Germany possessed sixteen. In that eventful year came the revolution in Berlin, which created such high hopes, doomed, alas! to disappointment. "Instead of the rosy dawn of freedom," writes Ebers,[2] himself an old Keilhau boy, "in the State the exercise of a boundless arbitrary power, in the Church dark intolerance." It must have been an easy matter to bring charges of revolutionary doctrines against the man who said so innocently, "But I,—I only wanted to train up free-thinking, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... in time to witness the arbitrary proceeding of the British government towards Spanish traders and coasters, by virtue of the treaty for the suppression of the slave-trade. Six months after this compact was signed and ratified in London and ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... brings forth such grapes of Sodom, "Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?" Luke xiii. 7. The sword of divine justice is every moment brandished over their heads, and it is nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God's mere will, that ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... infection and may extend to other people unless due precautions are observed. This is not scientific, but it is perfectly intelligible, and forms the basis of a consistent system of practice; whereas, when the rules of uncleanness are made to rest on the will of the gods, they appear altogether arbitrary and meaningless. The affinity of such taboos with laws of uncleanness comes out most clearly when we observe that uncleanness is treated like a contagion, which has to be washed away or otherwise eliminated by physical means. Take ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... big enough for even a tennis-court, but so much love and ingenuity had been lavished on its arrangement that it had an astonishing air of space. The flower-covered trellis at the end had an air of being there because it chose, and not in the least because it marked an arbitrary division of land. The one big tree made an oasis of shade, and had a low circular seat round its trunk, and the flowers bloomed in grateful ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... inventors—and it may be truly argued concerning some of them that they were more "men of action," and less "men of mind" than many who were included in the former volume. But all distinctions and divisions and classifications are more or less arbitrary; and there is no intention, in this one, to intimate that the "men of action" were not also "men of mind," or vice versa. The division has ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... of power, was new in Scottish judicial proceedings, though now so frequently resorted to, it was exclaimed against by the lawyers on the opposite side of politics, as an interference with the civil judicature of the country, equally new, arbitrary, and tyrannical. And if it thus affected even strangers connected with them only by political party, it may be guessed what the Ashton family themselves said and thought under so gross a dispensation. Sir William, still more worldly-minded than ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... balance-wheel, of the administrative machine. This it was in theory, for there had never been any formal abolition of its existence or abrogation of its powers. In practice it was just what the sovereign, whether called Emperor or King, allowed it to be. A self-willed and arbitrary monarch, like Caligula or Domitian, would reduce its functions to a nullity. A wise and moderate Emperor, like Trajan or Marcus Aurelius, would consult it on all important state-affairs, and, while reserving to himself both the power of initiation and that ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... pause, "you must have met with many strange and beautiful things in such a life as yours; for it seems to me that such a life is open to the entrance of all simple wonders. Conventionality and routine and arbitrary law ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... lived at Greenwich palace, an incident occurred which may not be known to all our readers, and which is a striking illustration of the esteem in which he was held by Henry. It is not a little to the honor of that monarch, who, arbitrary and sensual as he was, had some noble traits of character. One day, as Holbein was painting a lady's portrait in his private studio, a nobleman intruded upon him rudely. Holbein resented the discourtesy, and, as it was doggedly persisted in, finally threw my lord downstairs. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the matrimony of his own bastards with the bastards of dukes, petty tyrants, or kings, in order to obtain some patch of territory or temporal dominion,—not because they have governed and persecuted men according to their arbitrary will; but because they cannot do other, even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Congregational Church was the direct outcome of dissatisfaction of many members of Union Bethel, now the Metropolitan Church, at the arbitrary action of Bishop Daniel A. Payne in the matter of the appointment of the Rev. John W. Stevenson as pastor of Union Bethel Church and the refusal to remove him. For these reasons 63 members decided to withdraw from the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and organized themselves in the Shiloh ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... and blinded by the artifices of those Jesuitical engineers, who have long conspired to sacrifice our religion to the idolatry of Rome, our laws, liberties and persons to arbitrary slavery, and our estates to their insatiable avarice, may possibly be deterred and amused with high threats and declarations, flying up and down on the wings of the royal name and countenance, now captivated and prostituted to serve all their lusts, to proclaim all rebels and traitors who ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... nomination of Cox at the proper juncture would have been wise as a peace-offering, but perhaps it would have let off the Senate too easily from the effect of their arbitrary act. Now the dislodging of Stanton and filling the office even temporarily without the consent of the Senate would raise a question as to the legality of the President's acts, and he would belong to the attacked ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... a charming book, with illuminating passages, but it is too logical, too plausible, too full of the preciosity of dainty generalization, to reach the dark and arbitrary soul, either of Spain or of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Theosophic movement was but a masked Buddhistic propaganda. We were taunted by ignorant Brahmins and learned Europeans that our septenary divisions of Nature and everything in it, including man, are arbitrary and not endorsed by the oldest religious systems of the East. It is now proposed to throw a cursory glance at the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Law-Books of Manu, and especially the Vedanta, and show that they too support our position. Even in their crude exotericism their ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... set forth by Locke and Chatham and Burke and Fox; a demand pushed on by the self-asserting strength of communities become too vigorous to endure control from a remote seat of empire, especially when that control was exercised in a harsh and arbitrary spirit. The revolutionary tide was swelled from various sources: by the mob eager to worry a red-coated sentry or to join in a raid under Indian disguise; by men who embodied the common sense and rough energy of the plain people, like Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine; by men of practical ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to hide the like saving knowledge from so many millions of souls, who, if I might judge by this poor savage, would make a much better use of it than we did. From hence I sometimes was led too far, to invade the sovereignty of Providence, and, as it were, arraign the justice of so arbitrary a disposition of things, that should hide that sight from some, and reveal it - to others, and yet expect a like duty from both; but I shut it up, and checked my thoughts with this conclusion: first, that we did not ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... under the arches of one of the bridges. Phineas, who was soft-hearted, did what he could to comfort her, and allowed himself to be worked up to strong parliamentary anger against the magistrates and police. "When they think that they have public opinion on their side, there is nothing in the way or arbitrary excess which is too great for them." This he said to Barrington Erle, who angered him and increased the warmth of his feeling by declaring that a little close confinement would be good for the Bunces of the day. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... and appointments were made in a cool, quiet, and arbitrary manner by Jack, to whom the natives, including the king, looked up with a species of awe amounting ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... new book we have followed a slightly different arrangement to that of the former Anthology. Instead of an arbitrary selection by an editor, each poet has been permitted to represent himself by the work he considers his best, the only stipulation being that it should not yet have appeared in book form. A sort of informal committee—consisting of more than half the authors here represented—have ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... also a suffix of adjectives, meaning relating to; as in, arbitrary, contrary, culinary, exemplary, antiquary, hereditary, military, primary, revolutionary, ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... pronunciation arise, in a great part, the various dialects of the same country, which will always be observed to grow fewer and less different, as books are multiplied; and from this arbitrary representation of sounds by letters proceeds that diversity of spelling, observable in the Saxon remains, and, I suppose, in the first books of every nation, which perplexes or destroys analogy, and produces anomalous formations, that being once incorporated, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of arbitrary words to designate prearranged or predetermined words, figures or sentences. The systems used in commerce have single words to represent whole sentences or a number of words of a sentence. This not only imparts a degree of secrecy, ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... hostile factions. The Royalist section was ultimately crushed, while the Parliamentary section was gradually absorbed into that first great standing army which this country ever knew, the New Model of 1645. For fifteen years the people groaned under the dominance of this arbitrary, conscientious, and very expensive force. Then, in 1660, came the Restoration, and with it the disbanding of the New Model and the re-establishment of the militia. The country went wild with joy at ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... Parliament for New Georgia, New Scotland, &c., but the older Colonies have Charters from the King, and not from Parliament. These Colonies claim to be subject to the King, but not to Parliament, at least not to its arbitrary power, like the newer Colonies, which owe their existence to Parliament. The latter are called Plantations within his Majesty's Dominions, ...
— Achenwall's Observations on North America • Gottfried Achenwall
... had it not been for the intervention of France. That power had all along encouraged the rebellion. She had smarted under the loss of Canada, and although her rule in her own colonies was far more arbitrary than that of England in America, she was glad to assist in any movement which could operate to the disadvantage of this country. Hitherto, nominally she had remained neutral, but now, fearing that the offers of the English would induce the colonists ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... strings of the government. Such a close corporation of special interests did the governing clique become that the administration was known in both provinces as a "Family Compact." Administrative abuses flourished in a rank growth. Judges owing their appointment to the Crown exercised the most arbitrary tyranny against patriots raising their voices against government by special interests. Vast land grants were voted away to favorites of the Compact. Public moneys were misused and neither account given nor restitution demanded from the culprit. Ultra-loyalty became a fashionable pose. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... then, not with an arbitrary call and an arbitrary choice, as if God called many in mockery, meaning to choose out of them only a few, and making his choice independently of any exertion of theirs. The picture is very different; it is a gracious call to us all, to come and receive the blessing; it is a reluctant casting ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... in public voice was Arnold here; He that on Tuscan tombs his trophies raised; And now Love's power so willingly did bear, That even his arbitrary reign ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... (London) Literary Supplement (August 18, 1921), that credibility varies as to classes of witnesses and classes of events, and also as to type of perception. Thus, perceptions of touch, odor, and taste have low evidential value. Our hearing is defective and arbitrary when it judges the source and direction of sound, and in listening to the talk of other people "words which are not heard will be supplied by the witness in all good faith. He will have a theory of the purport of the conversation, and will arrange the sounds he heard to ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the necessity of a fine day for swarming is one reason that has induced nature to admit of bees protracting the captivity of their young queens in the royal cells. I will not deny that they sometimes seem to use this right in an arbitrary manner. However the confinement of the queens is always longer when bad weather lasts several days together. Here the final object cannot be mistaken. If the young females were at liberty to leave their cradles during these bad days, there would be a plurality of queens in ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... My government are concerned to find that two British subjects, Mr. Patrick and Mr. Rahming, have been subjected to arbitrary arrest. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... chroniclers of the time "unhappy," as though some strange or painful circumstance attached to it, in the absence of both his parents: and lastly, the lonely monarch, wifeless and childless, was called upon to reap the fruits of the bitter hostility and distrust which his cruel and arbitrary rule had awakened in the breasts of his own nobles and of ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... but to break the bond, the governor granted a ticket-of-leave—thus releasing the prisoner from his assignment. The printer, notwithstanding, brought his action against the superintendent for abduction, and gained damages; the judges holding, that the sudden deprivation of the master, by an arbitrary and unusual indulgence—granted only to deprive him of his rights as assignee—was not contemplated in the law, which modified those rights by the ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... that looks like the Newgate Calendar. We turned the letters themselves over to Doc Petrie, the Ulleran philology sharp, who is a pretty fair cryptanalyst. He couldn't find any indications of cipher, but there was a lot of gossip about Keeluk's friends and parishioners which might have arbitrary code-meanings. I'm going to explain the situation to Miss Quinton, and advise her to have nothing to do with any of the people ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... the way, expresses the distance of a celestial body, such as a star or a planet, east of the vernal equinox, or the first point of Aries, which is an arbitrary point on the equator of the heavens, which serves, like the meridian of Greenwich on the earth, as a starting-place for reckoning longitude. The entire circuit of the heavens along the equator is divided into twenty-four hours of right ascension, each hour covering 15 deg. ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... lately vulgarized beyond endurance—altogether. And varieties belonging to narrow localities, or induced by horticulture, may be named as they please by the people living near the spot, or by the gardener who grows them; but will not be acknowledged by Proserpina. Nevertheless, the arbitrary reduction under Ordines, Gentes, and Familiae, {190} is always to be remembered as one of massive practical convenience only; and the more subtle arborescence of the infinitely varying structures may be followed, like a human genealogy, as far ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... principles nor by prudent councils; and the immediate results have been disastrous rather than beneficial. Changes have taken place without direct and visible improvement; and efforts to meliorate the condition of man have produced a reaction in the adherents to patient arbitrary systems, which have given occasion to much suffering and ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... longer had a philosophy of life in which motives and actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had lost his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are the special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple competently with any material problem but who stand aghast, apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before the wavering ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to seize any herd of "six hundred swine," any convoy of Lubeck or Hamburg merchant-goods, that had not contented them in passing. What were pedlers and mechanic fellows made for, if not to be plundered when needful? Arbitrary rule, on the part of these Noble Robber-Lords! And then much of the Crown-Domains had gone to the chief of them,—pawned (and the pawn-ticket lost, so to speak), or sold for what trifle of ready money was to be had, in Jobst and Company's time. To these gentlemen, a Statthalter coming to inquire ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... annoyed; for, in point of fact, it was the exercise of a fresh act of authority, a repetition of the arbitrary act, if, indeed, it is to be considered as such. He took hold of his pen slowly, and evidently in no very good temper; and then he wrote, 'Order for M. le Chevalier d'Artagnan, captain of my musketeers, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... one hand, as MAIRE DU PALAIS to the incompetent Otto, and using the love-sick Princess for a tool and mouthpiece, he pursues a policy of arbitrary power and territorial aggrandisement. He has called out the whole capable male population of the state to military service; he has bought cannon; he has tempted away promising officers from foreign armies; ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... those numerous vacancies which had fallen in England during an interdict of six years, had proceeded in the most arbitrary manner; and had paid no regard, in conferring dignities, to personal merit, to rank, to the inclination of the electors, or to the customs of the country. The English Church was universally disgusted; and Langton himself, though he owed his elevation to an encroachment ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... artificial signs for ideas?" said Charles; "they are more musical, but as arbitrary. There is no more reason why the sound 'hat' should mean the particular thing so called, which we put on our heads, than why ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... of our fees?" added the Solicitor General.—"I feel deeply for my clients," sighed Serjeant Bompas.—"We all compassionate them, brother," observed Wilde.—In short, one and all declare it was a most arbitrary and unprecedented curtailment of their little term—and, to say the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... replaced by reconciliation. The other point to be borne in mind is that Paul wrote about Religion "in a vivid and figured way"—not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, "he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion"; quoting them at haphazard and applying ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... [C. a. aurifrons and C. a. incanescens] ... merge so gradually that over a broad area the whole population is intermediate, making decisions as to any sharply drawn dividing line difficult and in part arbitrary." C. a. incanescens, according to Wetmore, occurs in western and central Texas south to northeastern Chihuahua and northern Coahuila whereas C. a. aurifrons occurs in north-central Coahuila (Monclova) and southern Texas south to Jalisco, ...
— Birds from Coahuila, Mexico • Emil K. Urban
... of the French geologist, Coquand, indicate that several of these periods at least are susceptible of further subdivision. I present here a table enumerating the periods of the Cretaceous epoch best known at present, in their sequence, because I want to show how sharply and in how arbitrary a manner, if I may so express it, new forms are introduced. The names are simply derived from the localities, or from some circumstances connected with the locality where each period has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Carolinas, as well as in Georgia, there is an awakening in the hearts of the colored people, both in the towns and in the country, for a better church life. This is inciting movements from the centralized forms of church government, with their arbitrary methods and hard taxation, into independency. Often the poverty of the people prevents their attaining anything beyond present and scanty shelter for their new free churches. The accompanying photograph is an illustration ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 50, No. 05, May, 1896 • Various
... there any necessary antagonists between either of these doctrines and that of Evolution, which embraces all that is sound in both Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism, while it rejects the arbitrary assumptions of the one and the, as arbitrary, limitations of the other. Nor is the value of the doctrine of Evolution to the philosophic thinker diminished by the fact that it applies the same method to the living and the not-living world; and embraces, in one stupendous analogy, the growth ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the Campus Martius. Lentulus Crus was dragging forth every obscure senator, every retired politician, whose feet almost touched the grave, to swell his majority. All knew that the tribunes' vetoes were to be set aside, and arbitrary power decreed to the consuls. Drusus began to realize that the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... the individual should receive, the other to what it is just that the community should give. Each from his own point of view is unanswerable, and any choice between them, on grounds of justice, must be perfectly arbitrary. Social utility alone can decide the preference.'[18] The form of justice depicted with this Janus-like aspect can scarcely be the utilitarian, since, whoever, on utilitarian grounds, selects one of its sides, must perforce, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... in my exculpation are precisely those which he has kept most concealed. Behold the just and honest inquisitor! Whatever he may have done, they tell me that there has been an end to justice, except in an arbitrary form. God our Lord is present with his strength and wisdom, as of old, and always punishes in the ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... called the god-inflicted diseases, that to his mind they were neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing as volition must ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... grief, his sad pilgrimage of grace—all this springs forth from the meaning of these lines; without hearing them, and hearing them in this place, the spectator sees in Tannhauser an inconceivable, arbitrary, wavering, miserable creature. (The commencement of his tale in the last act comes too late to make up for that which here must penetrate our mind like a thunderstorm.) Not only the close of the second ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... the Union, who could not even repeat the names of the senators who sat for them in Congress. Macaulay said, in 1852, "We now know, by the clearest of all proof, that universal suffrage, even united with secret voting, is no security, against the establishment of arbitrary power." To quote James Russell Lowell, writing a little later: "We have begun obscurely to recognize that . . . popular government is not in itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... During the midafternoon, somebody named Leighton called him from the Atomic Power Authority executive office, wanting to know what was the trouble between him and the I.F.A.W. and saying that a protest against his alleged high-handed and arbitrary conduct had been received from ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... artificial languages, called a posteriori. These are wholly based on the principle of borrowing from existing language: their artificiality consists in choice of words and in regularization and simplification of vocabulary and grammar. They avoid, as far as possible, any elements of arbitrary invention, and confine themselves to adapting and making easier ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... Clarke knew very well that most men can only be held when they do not know that they are held, but Dion, in his present condition, was not like any other man she had known. More than once in the earliest stages of their intimacy she had had really to fight to keep him near her, and so he knew how arbitrary she could be when ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... had not kiss'd the Book, and therefore would have him sworn again; tho' indeed it was on purpose to have made use of his Tenderness of Conscience in avoiding reiterated Oaths, to have put him by his being a Jury-man, apprehending him to be a Person not fit to answer their Arbitrary Ends. ...
— The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead • various
... offences which yet for the most part are the characteristics of the sabbaths in later Protestant witchcraft, excepting that the wicked apostates are there usually papistical instead of protestant. During nearly two years Arras was subjected to the arbitrary examinations and tortures of the inquisitors; and an appeal to the Parliament of Paris could alone stop the proceedings, 1461. The chance of acquittal by the verdict of the public was little: it was still less by the sentence of ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... is rigid. There are no petty rules, and no rules the justice of which can reasonably be disputed. The injustice of arbitrary discharge is avoided by confining the right of discharge to the employment manager, and he rarely exercises it. The year 1919 is the last on which statistics were kept. In that year 30,155 changes occurred. Of those 10,334 were absent ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... "Jackson rode roughshod over the Senate of the United States," he only characterized the spirit by which he controlled every branch and department of the government. In every movement Jackson had displayed an arbitrary will, determined on success, regardless of the means, and had applied without reserve the corrupting temptation of office to members of Congress. He had rewarded subserviency by appointments, and punished the want of it by removal; ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... equal, as a description of a walk in a forest,' it may be answered that the materials are certainly not equal, but that the artist who has rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... no," he interrupted, smiling. "The men were discontented, despatched a deputation, and were fired on by the Prince. English juries don't like these arbitrary German ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... tightly rendered photographic fact. The great pictures are first those of a strong suggestive quality and, secondly, those possessing a certain something the artist calls design - meaning thereby a more or less arbitrary arrangement of form and colour effects which will please the eye. The idea of design has not struck the Portuguese artist as yet; at least it is not apparent in the pictures of that section. The technical excellence of their ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... were held in great terror. They ordered everything of the best to be produced, and threatened to set fire to the house if it was not; they turned the man and his wife out of their bed, and all three went to sleep in it; and, in short, they behaved in such an arbitrary manner that nobody doubted that they were Cromwell's men. In the morning they set off again, by Chaloner's advice paying for nothing that they had ordered, although they had all of them plenty of money. They now rode fast, inquiring at the places which they passed through whether any fugitives had ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... obvious ideas, glorified by poetry,—and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from Lucretius or Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out and study the Latin passages which he does not quote. So arbitrary is taste in these matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but independently, finds Shakespeare putting a thought from the Alcibiades I of Plato into the mouth of Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, while Mr. J. M. Robertson ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... my friends who declined to have anything to do with his relatives simply because he did not like them, but I clearly recognized that my friends in the city meant more to me than any of my Wisconsin neighbors and it became more and more evident that to make and keep an arbitrary residence in a region which did not in itself stimulate or satisfy me, was a mistake. There was nothing to do in West Salem ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... psychoanalyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... which those writers, who have given the most favourable accounts of the United States, have represented them as possessing, he has proved that this colony, labouring as it is under all the discouragements of an arbitrary and impolitic government, has still a great and decided preponderancy in the balance. How much this preponderancy will be increased, whenever the changes and modifications which he has ventured to suggest, shall be in whole, or in ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... charged with abetting slavish and arbitrary principles of government. Nothing in my opinion could be a grosser calumny and misrepresentation; for how can it be rationally supposed, that he should adopt such pernicious and absurd opinions, who supported ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... but in denoting their degrees in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but only she and her compeers. The next grade in the social scale being made of leather, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... analyse, her father had become a forbidden subject. True, Lady Annabel had placed no formal prohibition upon its mention; nor at her present age was Venetia one who would be influenced in her conduct by the bygone and arbitrary intimations of a menial; nevertheless, that the mention of her father would afford pain to the being she loved best in the world, was a conviction which had grown with her years and strengthened with her strength. Pardonable, natural, even laudable as ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... "This arbitrary man is now doing me the greatest injury without even making a plea for it. His own subjects (for he is a most despotic monarch), Frenchmen, who are acquainted with the circumstances, condemn him for it; but the generality cannot believe that the commander of a voyage of discovery, ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... adequately supported by a healthy and intelligent public opinion. They saw that States must grow, and could not be suddenly constructed where the materials were wanting, and that forms are worthless in the hands of an ignorant mob. It was objected to the territorial theory that it was arbitrary, and would lead to corruption and tyranny like the pro-consular system of Rome; but it was simply the territorial system to which we had been accustomed from the beginning of the Government, and could not prove worse than the hasty ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... waste or deep gulf between themselves and the prisoner class, these may seem strange words; but there is no mystery in this language to those who have listened to individual cases of crime and punishment. Men are tried and convicted of crimes according to rules and definitions which are necessarily arbitrary and technical; but the moral character of criminals is not very well defined by the rules and definitions which have been applied to their respective cases. Our prisons contain men who are great and professional criminals,—men ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... and that she is entrusted, to that end, with certain powers. Her duty is to preserve and guard the Christian Revelation—the scheme of doctrine regarding belief and conduct by which Jesus Christ taught that souls were to be saved. She is not an arbitrary ruler. Her office is primarily that of Judge and Interpreter of the deposit ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... the peace. On account of some arbitrary act of the Russian ambassador, he had seized and confined him in the Seven Towers. Russia had demanded his release, and satisfaction for the insult. The sultan had replied by demanding the restoration ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Among other arbitrary proceedings may be mentioned numerous arrests and deportations of enemy subjects and Consuls, and even the execution of some Greek subjects, by the Allied military and ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... minimum wage of five dollars a day. No man or woman in the plant, in any capacity, shall be paid less than five dollars a day. Labor helps to earn our profits and labor should share in them. That is fair. I have set an arbitrary minimum of five dollars because there must be ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... 'Propositions of Relation' I have inserted a new Section, containing the proof that a Proposition, beginning with "All," is a Double Proposition (a fact that is quite independent of the arbitrary rule, laid down in the next Section, that such a Proposition is to be understood as implying the actual existence of its Subject). This proof was given, in the earlier editions, incidentally, in the course of the discussion ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... not," replied Key, tearing a voucher with his pencil; "but even if they do that doesn't excuse the banks. I suppose all trusts pull off arbitrary stunts, but the bank trust is the only one I happen to have personal ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... am not giving an arbitrary exercise, but simply suggesting the plan upon which the student may work. There is a great deal of fun in devising new exercises. It assists in helping the student to concentrate. Of course, these exercises are only attempted after ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Jolliffe, the master's mate, but we must introduce him more particularly. Nature is sometimes extremely arbitrary, and never did she show herself more so than in insisting that Mr Jolliffe should have the most sinister expression of countenance that ever had been ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... impotent man. Does that assertion contradict the other, just before it, that He does nothing of Himself? No; for His will, while His, is ever harmonious with the Father's, just as His love, which is ever coincident with the Father's. Does that assertion imply His arbitrary pleasure, or make man's will a cipher? No; for His will is guided by righteous love, and wills to quicken those who comply with His conditions. But the assertion does declare that His will to quicken is omnipotent, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... and currency exchange rates and expanded the state's right to intervene in the management of private enterprise. In addition to the burdens imposed by high inflation, businesses have been subject to pressure on the part of central and local governments, e.g., arbitrary changes in regulations, numerous rigorous inspections, and retroactive application of new business regulations prohibiting practices that had been legal. Further economic problems are two consecutive bad harvests, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the tesseract or fourth-dimensional cube which he describes is a reality, for it is quite a familiar figure upon the astral plane. He has now perfected a new method of representing the several dimensions by colours instead of by arbitrary written symbols. He states that this will very much simplify the study, as the reader will be able to distinguish instantly by sight any part or feature of the tesseract. A full description of this new method, with plates, is said to be ready for the press, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... inhabitants from abroad, while those we already possess are made to hold their tenure with uncertainty; and to tremble, not only under the prospect of a numerous family, but even under that of a precarious and doubtful subsistence for themselves. The arbitrary sovereign who has made this the condition of his subjects, owes the remains of his people to the powerful instincts of nature, not to any ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... monuments in two long rows on the continuous plinth that connects the bases of the pillars on each side of the nave is another of Wyatt's freaks during his terrible innovations in 1789. Not only did he sever the historical associations of centuries by these arbitrary removals, but paid so little attention to consistency that portions of monuments belonging to entirely different periods were combined with curious results, and remains transferred to other "receptacles" than those designed for them. It is ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... dominions of nature, and where your eye halts its vision, you say, 'There nature must close;' in the bigotry which adds crime to presumption, you would stone the discoverer who, in annexing new realms to her chart, unsettles your arbitrary landmarks. Verily, retribution shall await you! In those spaces which your sight has disdained to explore you shall yourself be a lost and bewildered straggler. Hist! I see them already! The gibbering ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little prayer was made, did not view the matter in at all the same light as Madelon. In the first place, if formed part of the furniture of the room, and had always been there, so far as he knew—which, to the nun, whose life was founded on a series of unquestioned precedents, allowing of nothing arbitrary but the will of the Superior, appeared an unanswerable reason why it should always remain; and, in the next place, with the lack of sympathy that one sometimes remarks in unimaginative minds, she did not in the least understand the terror with which it inspired the child, but assured ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... a Land where some degree of Law and Justice were recognised. At some times he would propitiate his crew with donatives of Rum, or even of Money; but the next day he would have his Cruelty Fit on again, and use his men with ten times more Fierceness and Arbitrary Barbarity. But to this Bible and a volume of Nautical Tables our Library was confined; and as he troubled himself very little about the latter, I was set to read to him sometimes after dinner from the Good Book. But he was ever coarse and ungovernable, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... begin the acquirement of knowledge with words, and they end with words; but an unnatural civilization has taught man to walk the greater part of his intellectual journey by means of arbitrary systems of writing and printing. When the next Columbian Year arrives we shall see him untaught (a hard thing withal) and retaught on nature's plan of learning. Nature teaches language by sound only. Artificiality writes a ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... a member of the legislature, a petition was presented to the house for an act of amnesty of all those arbitrary measures which the American officers had been obliged to adopt during the war, in order to get horses, provisions, &c. for the army. The petition was signed by the names of all the favorite officers of the state, and among the rest, by that ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... against this Continent by the British troops, in the bloody scene of the 19th of April last, near Boston—the increase of arbitrary imposition from a wicked and despotic ministry—and the dread of insurrections in the Colonies—are causes sufficient to drive an oppressed people to the use of arms. We, therefore, the subscribers, inhabitants of South Carolina, holding ourselves bound by that ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... be two sorts, Arbitrary, and Naturall. Arbitrary, is that which is agreed on by the Competitors; Naturall, is either Primogeniture, (which the Greek calls Kleronomia, which signifies, Given ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... the effects of my indignation against a rascal who dared to come and insult me in my own house, but I do know that if I had given him security I should have impugned my own honour. The impertinent scoundrel threatened to have me arrested, but I know that a just Government rules here, and not arbitrary power." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of heat on both sides. My opponent spoke of "our democratic army" (familiar phrase!) and the overbearing manner in which he connected this dictum with a number of false, irrelevant or arbitrary generalizations made me feel a momentary pang of anger and I wished he could experience a term of military service. Nevertheless, there was no actual display of bad temper or emotion and we parted with all the habitual formulae imposed by ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... from justice, the officials can, and often do, arrest his father, mother, wife and whole family, and both imprison and persecute them until the fugitive gives himself up; and such is the strength of the family tie that this arbitrary method ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... statement of four out of many calculations made, but I must state that in fixing an arbitrary standard of 36 inches for tail, I have understated the mark, for the tails of most tigers exceed that by an inch or two, though, on the other ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... made a stir: going himself to detect the knaves, he threatened and denounced them. Such, too, was the tacit opinion of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, to whom Grandier appealed. He despatched a set of rules for the guidance at least of the exorcisers, for putting a stop to their arbitrary doings; and, better still, he sent his surgeon, who examined the girls, and found them to be neither bewitched, nor mad, nor even sick. What were they then? ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... what principle, upon what rightful principle, may a State, being no more than one fiftieth part of the nation in soil and population, break up the nation, and then coerce a proportionably large subdivision of itself in the most arbitrary way? What mysterious right to play tyrant is conferred on a district of country, with its people, by merely calling it a State? Fellow-citizens, I am not asserting anything. I am merely asking questions for you to consider. And now allow me to ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... vast territory one might come across the occasional trading posts of the wide-reaching Hudson Bay Company, at each of which the resident factor ruled with the arbitrary power of ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... of honesty and charity towards each other. They seemed to be governed by that sort of tacit common-sense law which, say what they will of the inborn lawlessness of the human race, has its precepts graven on every breast. The grand principles of virtue and honour, however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same all the world over: and where these principles are concerned, the right or wrong of any action appears the same to the uncultivated as to the enlightened mind. It is to this indwelling, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... circumstance, Which often breeds affection or disdain, Yet lighting but the surface of the man, Shows not his heart. I know not what you think, And care not for your favour or your love, Save as desert may crown me. Your decree, "Red shall not marry white," is arbitrary, And off the base of nature; for if they Should marry not, then neither should they love. Yet Iena loves me, and I love her. Be merciful! I ask not Iena To leave her race; I rather would engage These willing arms in her defence and yours. Heap obligation up, conditions stern— ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... daily insulted because, after publishing thirty-two volumes of the great edition in folio and in quarto, and twelve hundred plates, one volume of the historical section is wanting? We men of letters are the servants of an arbitrary master, whom we have imprudently chosen, who flatters and pets us first, and then tyrannizes over us if we do not work to his liking. You see, my dear friend, I play the grumbling old man, and, at the risk of deeply displeasing you, place myself on the side of the despotic ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... Mr Meagles, 'I was forgetting the name itself. Why, she was called in the Institution, Harriet Beadle—an arbitrary name, of course. Now, Harriet we changed into Hattey, and then into Tatty, because, as practical people, we thought even a playful name might be a new thing to her, and might have a softening and affectionate kind of effect, don't you see? As to Beadle, that I needn't say was ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Tresler stepped on to the gravel-strewn plateau, gun in hand. He felt glad of his five-chambered companion. Those rough friends of his on the ranch were right. There was nothing so compelling, nothing so arbitrary, nor so reassuring to the possessor and confounding to his enemies, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to face, as the rest have, ever decreasing prices of labour, ever increasing profits made out of that labour by the contractors who will employ us—arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of hirelings—the competition of women, and children, and starving Irish—our hours of work will increase one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half; and in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of improvement in wages, but ever more ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... for he has quoted his figures with much assurance. I should be grateful to him if he would mention also the source of his valuable information. We have done the best we could. The preliminary drafts of the bill were based on carefully selected facts—notice please, selected facts, and not arbitrary statistics based on conjecture. If we had discovered those figures, which the quicker eye of the honorable Mr. Richter seems to have detected at a glance, and if we had believed them to be accurate, we should have gone further ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... condition in the vegetable case, and granting it in the other. If you take a few grains of wheat, and are required to plant all successive generations of their produce in the same flower-pot for ever, of course you neutralise its expansion by your own act of arbitrary limitation.[25] But so you would do, if you tried the case of animal increase by still exterminating all but one replacing couple of parents. This is not to try, but merely a pretence of trying, one order of powers against another. That was folly. But Coleridge combated this idea ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... of his ridicule. He was tall and somewhat portly, and he had a bluff and offhand manner, which, however, served not so much to intimate his good-will toward you as his abounding good-humor with himself. He was a man of most arbitrary temper, one could readily judge, not only from his own aspect and manner, but from the docile, reliant, approving cast of countenance of his reserve force—a half-dozen men, who were somewhat in the background, lounging on the rocks about a huge copper still. They wore ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... private property. This is such a violation of the statement that the sittings are all free, that it could no longer be permitted. To require these unscriptural practices to be renounced, we have reason to apprehend, would be considered as an arbitrary act of rule, and might alienate the minds of those of our dear brethren who are still, in heart, attached to that to which they hare ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller
... came down from Yedo to Hyogo with an impressive array of men-of-war. By invitation of the ex-shogun they visited him at Osaka. In reply to the representatives he made an address,(315) complaining of the arbitrary conduct of those who now had possession of the imperial person, and notifying them that he was willing and able to protect their rights under the treaties, and asking them to await the action of a conference to be summoned. In consequence of the conflict ...
— Japan • David Murray
... revision of the New Testament, must be regarded as the grammar written by a young academic teacher, George Benedict Winer, as far back as 1822, bearing the title of a Grammar of the Language of the New Testament. It was a vigorous protest against the arbitrary, and indeed monstrous licence of interpretation which prevailed in commentaries on Holy Scripture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It met with at first the fate of all assaults on prevailing unscientific procedures, but its value and its truth ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... excel only in memory, an arbitrary statement of facts to be recollected may be satisfactory, but to those who are capable of fully understanding such a science as Anthropology, arbitrary details, void of principle and reason, are repulsive. A chart of the human brain, without explanation of its philosophic basis and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... has deigned to accept with kindness my translation of the beautiful work of Beethoven which I have permitted myself humbly to offer to her. For musicians, the original of this work marks the summit of perfection of the classical style (an extremely arbitrary designation, in my opinion) among non-symphonic instrumental compositions. Beethoven—as well as many great geniuses in the history of Art— is like the ancient Janus; one of his two faces is turned towards the past, the other towards the future. The Septet ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... very ugly and detestable form of lunacy. In truth, not only is there no lesson in the Dutchman, but the whole idea is so absurd that only the power of the music enables us to swallow it at all. The condition on which the Dutchman can be saved is purely arbitrary; what difference ought it to make to him that some one, for the sake of an idea, sacrifices herself? The "good angel" who proposed it must have been temporarily out of her senses, and the Creator ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... must otherwise have been destitute. It has also had the happy effect of releasing them from vassalage, which formerly prevailed universally, and which was in some degree necessary as a protection against the arbitrary power of the different chiefs during the existence of the ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... the slightest 'incompatibility of temper' received the relief of a divorce more rapid and easy than even Germany could afford, and the estate lost nothing by any prolongation of celibacy on either side. Of course, the misery consequent upon such arbitrary destruction of voluntary and imposition of involuntary ties was nothing to ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... a cloudy prating sophist;—further, on the ground that he is a corrupter of the young, who would persuade them to follow the art of medicine or piloting in an unlawful manner, and to exercise an arbitrary rule over their patients or ships, any one who is qualified by law may inform against him, and indict him in some court, and then if he is found to be persuading any, whether young or old, to act contrary to the written law, he is to be punished with the utmost rigour; ...
— Statesman • Plato
... of your class, Miss Dexter," Ruth said firmly, "must be entirely wrong. I did not believe that they ordered us to wear baby blue tams just out of an arbitrary desire to make us obey. Had I believed that I would not have bought a ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... Vincente Yanez Pinzon—both navigators of great courage and ability, and owners of vessels—undertook to sail on the expedition, and furnish one of the caravels required. Two others were pressed by the magistrates under the arbitrary ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... explanation of the origin of the nomenclature of the days of the week, an explanation given by ancient historians and generally received, Whewell should have stated that 'various accounts are given, all the methods proceeding upon certain arbitrary arithmetical processes connected in some way with astrological views.' Speaking of the arrangement of the planets in the order of their supposed distances, and of the order in which the planets appear in the days of the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the provisions had been doled out in scanty allowance; and her cruises were unreasonably protracted. The captain was the author of the abuses; it was in vain to think that he would either remedy them, or alter his conduct, which was arbitrary and violent in the extreme. His prompt reply to all complaints and remonstrances was—the butt-end of a handspike, so convincingly administered as effectually ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... i Egypten ("The Bronze Age in Egypt"), he essayed to prove the contrary arguments of the Egyptologists wrong. His main points were that the colour of the weapons in the frescoes was of no importance, as it was purely conventional and arbitrary, and that the evidence of the piece of iron from the Great Pyramid was insufficiently authenticated, and therefore valueless, in the absence of other definite archaeological evidence in the shape of iron ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... accordingly, a fleet was sent to take possession of New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant called out his troops and made ready to fight. But the people were tired of the arbitrary rule of the Dutch governors, and petitioned him to yield. At last he answered, "Well, let it be so, but I would rather be carried ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... most important. In electing to be crushed under a vehicle she acts on her own initiative. What you propose is nothing less than a curtailment of her liberty of action. How do you think the local authorities would envisage such an arbitrary step? I imagine it may cost you dear to arrogate to yourselves a power which, in this country at least, is vested in the proper authorities. You may well find yourselves in collision with the penal code of Italy which ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to Lady Jane Grey, bishop of London, a highly arbitrary man, and a friend to neither Papist nor Puritan; he is satirised by Spenser ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Surely this is rather arbitrary dealing! We start from our theory that the original poet described the armour of "the monuments" though they are "of the, prime," while he professedly lived long after the prime—lived in an age when there must have been changes in military equipment. We then cut out, as of ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... filling those numerous vacancies which had fallen in England during an interdict of six years, had proceeded in the most arbitrary manner; and had paid no regard, in conferring dignities, to personal merit, to rank, to the inclination of the electors, or to the customs of the country. The English Church was universally disgusted; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... trees which compose it, are too obvious to require to be more than hinted at. In conducting these operations, we must have a diligent eye to the requirements of nature, and must remember that a wood is not an arbitrary assemblage of trees to be selected and disposed according to the caprice of its owner. "A forest," says Clave, "is not, as is often supposed, a simple collection of trees succeeding each other in long perspective, without bond of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and as generous, as those of the old regime ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... laws of property exist probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favor of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right,—that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience; and it is a problem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him as well as his slave,—and whether the slave may not as justifiably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the regiment, and, in fact, every member of the whole of the volunteer force of the country, felt that it was a common cause, as he might be placed in a similar situation, and, consequently, if I were punished, he himself might be liable to arbitrary and unjust dismissal by a superior officer. The Court felt and knew this. Many, very many, members of the Wilts regiments, declared that they would immediately resign if I were sentenced to any fine or imprisonment; and several of my particular ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... of expression typifying and typified by Spring—the time when bursting, pressing life almost breaks bounds, when birth and the impulse to birth are in every form of life, without and within. These festivals are not arbitrary in date. They grow ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... the grand jury, at its annual session, overstepping in its zeal the limits of its powers, returned findings against "one Ashley Thorne and Robert Orde, in the pay of the United States Government, for arbitrary exceeding of their rights and authorities; for illegal interference with the rights of citizens; for oppression," and so on through a round dozen ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... precious metals. The civilized world has adopted these as the universal solvent of its vast masses of obligation. It is assumed that some standard is indispensable; it is asserted to be the imperative duty of governments, if they would not make their exactions of taxes arbitrary, unequal, and oppressive,—if they would render the dealings of individuals mutual and just,—if they would preserve the property and labor of their subjects from the merciless caprices of the powerful, and keep society ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... in secret, in a corner. There are no arbitrary difficulties made or unnecessary darkness left in His revelation. We have no right to say that He has left difficulties to test our faith. He Himself has never said so. He deals with us in good faith, doing all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... genius of men, and destroyed every noble principle of science and virtue, was unable to resist the vigorous efforts of a free people; and Europe, as from a new epoch, rekindled her ancient spirit, and shook off the base servitude to arbitrary will and authority under which she had so long laboured. The free constitutions then established, however impaired by the encroachments of succeeding princes, still preserve an air of independence and legal administration, which distinguish the European ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... worse news? My friends, every sinner knows so well in his heart that it is worse news, more terrible news, for him, that he tries to persuade himself that death is only the arbitrary punishment of his sin; or, quite as often, that the punishment of his sin is not even death, but eternal torment in the ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... arbitrary public, I consider that I have made the amende honorable, and that we are quits; for, if you were minus a happy marriage in the last work, you have a couple to indemnify you in ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... these are the property and habitations of the cultivated and intelligent Creoles of the State. And here let me explain the term Creole, which has led to so many ludicrous, and sometimes to painful mistakes. It is an arbitrary term, and imported from the West Indies into Louisiana. Its original meaning was a native born of foreign parents; but universal use has made it to mean, in Louisiana, nothing more than simply "native;" and it is applied indiscriminately to everything native to the State—as Creole cane, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... although, according to these wise doctors, it is assumed to be utterly impossible that the same man can use two styles, or that a man at seventy will write otherwise than he did at thirty. In short, we discovered that there is nothing more arbitrary, more opinionated, and more unphilosophical than this 'philological criticism.' Applied, as these wonderful German doctors apply it, to any book ever penned, and it can be shown, 'as the result of high critical ability,' that no author ever wrote his own book. It is ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... least. Sound statesmanship regards any stretch of power better than the overthrow of the nation. Probably there never was a more able and wise body of men assembled, or more jealous of any exercise of arbitrary power, than the First Congress of the United States; and yet, almost in the commencement of our struggle for independence, when events wore such a gloomy aspect that failure seemed inevitable, rising above its ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... morning. Even the leaves declared for liberty, courting individual adventure upon the wings of that daring wind. And this sense of surrounding activity worked upon Damaris, making her doubly impatient of denials and arbitrary restraints. She sent her soul after Darcy Faircloth across the waste of waters, fondly, almost fiercely seeking him. But her soul refused to travel, curiously turning homeward again, as though aware ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... only once before, when he complained of the roof leaking, but Socknersh would not have shown surprise if he had seen Old Goodman of the marsh tales standing at his door. Joanna had stern, if somewhat arbitrary, notions of propriety, and now not only did she refuse to come inside the gate, but she made him come and stand outside it, among the seed-grasses which were like ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... was put up to Garry for a decision and as he was the leader his word always went, though he was never arbitrary and generally talked things over ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... with extraordinary resources, a solution was found by requiring that such aids should not be levied except with the consent of the Great Council, which consisted of the lords spiritual and temporal. They tried to set limits to the arbitrary imprisonments that had been hitherto the order of the day, by definite reference to the law of the land and the verdict of sworn men. But these are just the weightiest points on which personal freedom and security of property rest; and ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... It seemed intolerable that I should endure existence subject to the arbitrary visitations of a Magician who could thus play tricks with one's very stomach. If only I could in any way manage to pin him against the wall ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... prisons of the Inquisition in Italy, and particularly at Rome, were filled with victims, including persons of noble birth, male and female, men of letters, and mechanics. Multitudes were condemned to penance, to the galleys, or other arbitrary punishments; and from time to time individuals were put to death." "The following description," says the same historian, "of the state of matters in 1568 is from the pen of one who was residing at that time on the borders of Italy:—'At Rome some are every ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... beyond the internal evidence they afford. I have endeavoured to place them in the order they seem most naturally to take, with reference to colour, form, and the early influences to be observed in them, but the arrangement must necessarily be somewhat arbitrary. ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... detachment of the Thirty-ninth foot. The squadron, with the troops, then moved on to Calcutta, which surrendered on January 2d, Manickchand having evacuated the place and returned with his army to the head-quarters of the Nawab at Murshidabad. Then occurred another of Watson's arbitrary and ill-judged proceedings. Notwithstanding the orders of the Madras government, investing Clive with military and political control in Bengal, Watson appointed Coote, whose rank was that of captain, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... division between predicating a class and predicating an attribute (in quid or in quale) is a perfectly intelligible one, corresponding as it does to the grammatical distinction between the predicate being a noun substantive or a noun adjective. Nevertheless it is a somewhat arbitrary one, since, even when the predicate is a class-name, what we are concerned to convey to the mind, is the fact that the subject possesses the attributes which are connoted by that class-name. We have not here the difference between extensive and intensive predication, since, as we have ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... bosses our show"—and representing militant sacerdotalism in its most blusterous and rampant form. He was also in the habit of informing people that he was "nuts" on the Athanasian Creed, and expressing the somewhat arbitrary opinion that if the Rev. John Wesley had had his deserts he would have been exhibited in a pillory and used as a target for stale eggs. There are a few such interesting youths in Holy Orders, and the curate's friend ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... bless the land again; To stick the doctor's chair into the throne, Give law to words, or war with words alone, Senates and courts with Greek and Latin rule, And turn the council to a grammar school! 180 For sure, if Dulness sees a grateful day, 'Tis in the shade of arbitrary sway. Oh! if my sons may learn one earthly thing, Teach but that one, sufficient for a king; That which my priests, and mine alone, maintain, Which as it dies or lives, we fall or reign: May you, may Cam and Isis, preach it ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... cover the reigns of William and Mary, Queen Anne, George I, and a part of the reign of George II, or, in other words, all the time of Dutch influence. The more usual method is to leave out William and Mary, but at best the classification of furniture is more or less arbitrary, for in England, as well as other countries, the different styles overlap each other. Chippendale's early work was distinctly ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... Electric. The arbitrary or conventional potential—or briefly, the potential of a point in an electric field of force—is, numerically, the number of ergs of work necessary to bring a unit of electricity up to the point in question from a region of nominal zero potential—i. e., from the surface of the earth. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... is of a very different Turn: Her Thoughts are wholly bent upon Conquest and arbitrary Power. That she has some Wit and Beauty no Body denies, and therefore has the Esteem of all her Acquaintance as a Woman of an agreeable Person and Conversation; but (whatever her Husband may think of it) that is not sufficient for Honoria: She waves that Title to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality; that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... compose the differences in Utah. He explained and justified the appointments he had made there—appointments that had been recommended by Southern senators and representatives who, because they were Southerners, were opposed to the undue extension and arbitrary use of Federal power. He had made Caleb W. West of Kentucky governor of Utah on the recommendation of Senator Blackburn of Kentucky, my father's friend. He had made Frank H. Dyer, originally of Mississippi, United States ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... heaven, through which she passed in the course of the year, her aspects to the other bodies were considered as of prime significance, in indicating benignant or malignant influences upon human life. This system, which was based upon ignorance and superstition, and upheld by arbitrary rules and unreasoning credulity, is so repugnant to all principles of science and common sense, that it would be unworthy of notice, if we did not know that to this day there are educated persons still to be seen poring over old almanacs and peering into the darkness ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... students of character generally, swell into more imposing proportions. The sea dwindles and the land broadens. Transportation and travel become difficult and hazardous. Merchant and customer, running alike a labyrinthine gauntlet of taxes, tolls and arbitrary exactions by the wolves of schloss and chateau, found it safest to make fewer trips and concentrate their transactions. The great nations, with many secondary trade-tournaments, as they may be termed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... races, tribes, families, classes—is now acknowledged by every systematiser who forms an honest and unprejudiced judgment of the practical systematic distinction of species. From the very nature of the case there are no limits to arbitrary discretion in this department, and there are no two systematists who are at one in every instance; this one separating forms as true varieties which that one does not. (Compare on this point "History ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Collinson should, throughout his composition, speak of Nazareth as being on the sea-shore—which is the reverse of the fact. The Praeraphaelites, with all their love of exact truth to nature, were a little arbitrary in applying the principle; and Collinson seems to have regarded it as quite superfluous to look into a map, and see whether Nazareth was near the sea or not. Or possibly he trusted to Dante Rossetti's poem "Ave," ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... reasons for the indefiniteness of Indian nomenclature: The aborigines were at the time of discovery, and indeed most of them remain today, in the prescriptorial stage of culture, i.e., the stage in which ideas are crystallized, not by means of arbitrary symbols, but by means of arbitrary associations,(18) and in this stage names are connotive or descriptive, rather than denotive as in the scriptorial stage. Moreover, among the Indians, as among all other ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... recited in this way. A wall map with simply the outline of the territory, with its rivers, will be of considerable assistance in testing the accuracy of the student's geographical knowledge. While reciting, let him locate with chalk or pointer the cities, arbitrary boundary lines, and routes he finds it necessary to mention in his recitation. It will require special attention early in the course to teach students the necessity for preparation of this sort. Like everything else, map work should be reasonable ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell
... member proposed that the matter be postponed indefinitely. "Are you willing to neglect the banner of freedom?" demanded another. Yet another thought it unnecessary to insist upon thirteen stripes, and thought they might as well fix upon nine or eleven or any other arbitrary number as thirteen. The committee pleaded for the significant thirteen, and so it went on. At length Peter H. Wendover, of New York, through whose efforts Congress was held to its duty, called the attention of the House ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... thing is that their followers who live by labor and expect to live by it, and believe in the doctrine of individualism, and love liberty of action, should be willing to surrender their discretion to an arbitrary committee, and should expect that liberty of action would be preserved if all property were handed over to the State, which should undertake to regulate every man's time, occupation, wages, and so on. The central committee or authority, or whatever it might ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... found:—"I bequeath to John Wilkes, late member of parliament for Aylesbury, five thousand pounds sterling, as a grateful return for the courage with which he defended the liberty of his country, and opposed the dangerous progress of arbitrary power." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... dignity, and matchless personality are assailed, they resent it with fierce impulse, and this gives Lowe further opportunities of reminding them of his goodness. But during the long, weary years of incessant provocation, criminal retaliation was never thought of except on one occasion, when some new arbitrary rules were put ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... have been made to rate the efficiency of concrete mixers. In all cases a percentage basis of comparison has been adopted; arbitrary values are assigned to the several functions of a mixer, such as 40 per cent. for perfect mixing, 10 per cent. for time of mixing and 25 per cent. for control of water, the total being 100 per cent., and each mixer analyzed and given a rating according ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... writers, in selecting as their subject any portion of their national history or mythology, employed in their treatment of it a certain arbitrary discretion. They by no means conceived themselves bound to adhere to the common interpretation or to imitate in story as in title their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would have amounted to a resignation ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... was in Ireland in 1685, had recommended himself to his bigoted master, James II, by his arbitrary treatment of the Protestants in that country, and in the following year he was created Earl of Tyrconnel, and, being a furious Papist, was nominated by the King to the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland. In 1688 he was going to Ireland on a second expedition at the time that the advanced guard of William ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... President.—An eminent American historian,[43] writing of the power exercised by President Lincoln in time of war, said, "It is an interesting fact, that the ruler of a republic which sprang from a resistance to the English king and Parliament should exercise more arbitrary power than any Englishman since Oliver Cromwell, and that many of his acts should be worthy ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... than you, therefore you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion of genius and talent than your artists. The great painter is not satisfied with being sought after and admired because his hands can do more than ordinary hands, which they truly can, but he wants ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... truly argued concerning some of them that they were more "men of action," and less "men of mind" than many who were included in the former volume. But all distinctions and divisions and classifications are more or less arbitrary; and there is no intention, in this one, to intimate that the "men of action" were not also "men of mind," or vice versa. The division has been made simply ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... civil and criminal, all questions of property, were determined by committees, who, being themselves the legislature, were accountable to no law, and for that reason their decrees were arbitrary, and their proceedings violent. Oppression was without redress, unjust sentence without appeal; there was no prospect of ease or intermission. The parliament had determined never ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... people." The truth of the statement is very quickly recognized by even the most surface student of American politics. The struggle which began in 1774-5 was the direct outcome of the spirit of independence. Rather than submit to a degrading government by the arbitrary will of a foreign Parliament, the Massachusetts people chose to enter upon an almost unprecedented war of a colony against the mother country. Rather than admit the precedent of the oppression of a sister colony, the other ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... 'em cultivate the Talents Nature has given them; insomuch, that we see the Liberty of their Country shine in their Orations. He goes on, but as for us, who were early taught to endure the Yoke of Domination, and have been, as it were, wrapt up in the Customs and Ways of Arbitrary Rule; who in a Word, never tasted that living and Flowing Spring of Eloquence and Liberty; we commonly, instead of Orators, become pompous Flatterers, for which reason, I believe a Man Born in Servitude, may be capable of other Sciencies, but no Slave can ever be an Orator, ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... of a lapse of sixty years, the historian who attempts to portray the era of Lincoln is still faced with almost impossible demands and still confronted with arbitrary points of view. It is out of the question, in a book so brief as this must necessarily be, to meet all these demands or to alter these points of view. Interests that are purely local, events that did not with certainty ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... MIRACLES. No miracles, in the orthodox sense of the term, have ever occurred. The scientific examination of the Scriptures banishes them altogether. Neither are miracles possible, otherwise we should see them every day. They would be acts of arbitrary authority on God's part; and if he performed them he would destroy the harmony and connection of natural laws. Christianity was not introduced by miracles. It was inaugurated, and even originated, by underlying causes of a purely natural ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... a complete language must be, with its long and arbitrary vocabulary, its intricate system of sounds; the many forms that single words may take, especially if they are verbs; the rules of grammar, the sentence structure, the idioms, slang and inflections. Heavens, what a genius for tongues these simians have![1] Where another ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... surprisingly humanoid in most respects, but his complexion was textured so like the rich dark armchair he'd just been occupying that the Professor's pin-striped gray suit, which he had eagerly consented to wear, seemed an arbitrary interruption between him and the chair—a sort of Mother Hubbard dress on a ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the like arbitrary methods having amassed great treasures, and finding all things quiet at home, he raised a powerful army to invade his brother in Normandy; but upon what ground or pretext, the writers of that age are not very exact; whether it were from a principle ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... enforced by the arm of the Executive;" and another declaring "that the criminal prosecution of Susan B. Anthony by the United States, for the alleged crime of exercising the citizen's right of suffrage, is an act of arbitrary and unconstitutional authority and a blow at the liberties of every citizen of this nation." Mrs. Gage, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Blake, Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood, Rev. Olympia Brown and others made ringing speeches on the right of women to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, defended ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the Moors who favored the Cid to leave the city in disguise, thus allowing Abeniaf and his allies to plunder right and left and even to murder the Moorish king. This done, Abeniaf himself assumed the regal authority, and began to govern the city in such an arbitrary way that he soon managed to offend even ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... employer collectively by co-operating; and co-operation is the only way. Evan knew that it was the only way for bankclerks to obtain their rights. The banks would not do business with an individual because they didn't have to; it was easier to dismiss him. But their offensively arbitrary methods could not be employed where a great number of clerks were concerned. If the bankclerks of Canada were united they could talk as a body, and the banks of Canada would be compelled to listen. It did not occur to Evan for a moment that the boys would go on strike: but they would have the power ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... his triumph at the polls in 1857, Lord Palmerston had been somewhat arbitrary in his demeanour, and had defied public opinion by taking Lord Clanricarde into the Government, after some unpleasant disclosures in the Irish Courts. While walking home on the 18th, after obtaining an immense majority on the India ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... be with you I cannot foretell. But you may be sure that He never works in an arbitrary way. He has a reason for everything He does. You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... tenant of Mr. Tyrrel, one Hawkins;—I cannot mention his name without recollecting the painful tragedies that are annexed to it! This Hawkins had originally been taken up by Mr. Tyrrel, with a view of protecting him from the arbitrary proceedings of a neighbouring squire, though he had now in his turn become an object of persecution to Mr. Tyrrel himself. The first ground of their connection was this:—Hawkins, beside a farm which ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... of individual taste meant emancipation from arbitrary codes and an opportunity to embrace a compass as wide as the range of literary excellence. Realizing that every reader, even the professed critic, is hemmed in by certain prejudices arising from his temperament, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... which many have formed of punishment is that of a mere arbitrary annexation of a certain amount of suffering in the next world to a certain amount of crime committed in this—so many stripes for so many sins; and, as if obvious injustice were inflicted on men, by threatening them with coming woe for present wickedness, they exclaim, "Surely such ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... foreign power or another had not touched Americans closely, but now conditions changed. When rumors of the last treaty finally reached the United States, the planters in the Mississippi Valley became alarmed. The laws and customs regulations of the Spaniards at New Orleans were arbitrary, and their business methods antiquated, complicated, and irksome to the colonists, and there had already been friction between them, the Spaniards being aided by Indians hostile to the frontiersmen. The right ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... point of view normal sexual love is the sway of a fetich—more or less arbitrary, more or less (as Binet terms it) polytheistic—and it can have little objective basis. But, as we saw when considering "Sexual Selection in Man" in the previous volume, more especially when analyzing the notion of beauty, we are justified in believing that beauty has to a large ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... long and familiar use, as has been said, come to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily, that they are apt to suppose a natural connexion between them. But that they signify only men's peculiar ideas, and that BY A PERFECT ARBITRARY IMPOSITION, is evident, in that they often fail to excite in others (even that use the same language) the same ideas we take them to be signs of: and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... travelers in California put it, slaves under another name—slaves to the cast-iron power of a system which, like all systems, was capable of unlimited abuse, and which, at the very best, was narrow and arbitrary. Every vestige of freedom was taken from them when they entered, or were brought into, the settlement. Henceforth they belonged, body and soul, to the mission and its authority. Their tasks were assigned to ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... in "obtaining a decree by which he was authorized to enter upon the possessions of his deceased debtor!" But the adherents of Charles Etienne did not readily yield to the new adventurer. They had tasted the sweets of religious liberty, and were not disposed to come within the arbitrary yoke without a struggle. Disregarding the "decree," they stood out manfully against the forces of Le Borgne. Again were Catholic French and Protestant French cannon pointed against each other in unhappy ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... keeping within the limits of tradition. The poet who deals with Siegfried and Brunhilde, or with Lohengrin or Faust, may very properly require us to accept the miracles which pertain in each case to the saga. But such a being as Schiller's Johanna is found in no saga; she is a purely arbitrary creation. A very thoughtful German critic, Bellermann, attempts to defend our love-episode by showing how Schiller took good care in the preceding scenes to depict his heroine as susceptible to the tender emotions of her sex; in other words, to depict her as a maiden who might conceivably ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... an arbitrary being dealing out rewards and punishments grows dim, for we see the regular workings of Cause and Effect. We begin to talk of Energy, the Divine Essence, and the Reign of Law. We speak, as Matthew Arnold ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Green, Eteree; Mr Parkinson, Patini; Mr Sporing, Poliui; Petersgill, Petrodero; and in this manner they had now formed names for almost every man in the ship: In some, however, it was not easy to find any traces of the original, and they were perhaps not mere arbitrary sounds, formed upon the occasion, but significant words in their own language. Monkhouse, the midshipman, who commanded the party that killed the man for stealing the musket, they called Matte; not merely by an attempt to imitate in sound the first syllable ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Yorkist Kings had seen that absolutism was the condition of stability; Henry perceived that, applied as they had applied it, the stability would still be wanting. He had to find a mean between the wantonly arbitrary absolutism which had been attempted a century before by Richard II. and recently by Edward IV. and Richard III. on the one hand, and on the other hand the premature application of constitutional ideas under the House of Lancaster. The actual method evolved was the concentration ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... very important man behind the curtain at every performance on every stage, whose rule is arbitrary and absolute, and who is not on the company payroll. This is the house fireman, a city officer, with the power of the city and state behind him. The fire regulations are posted in plain sight on every stage. "No smoking" is one peremptory order that admits of no ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... tribute are making rich. "Averse to go to the root of the matter," one Deputy complained, "the Government punishes a woman who, on the market sells a herring five copecks dearer than the current price, yet at the same time it permits the Governors to promulgate their own arbitrary laws regulating imports and exports from their own provinces. In this way Russia is split up into sixty different regions, each one of which pursues its ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also by a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at least offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite its unfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose the substitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle for the plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt rightly, that her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangman or the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favourable to ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... what is meant in history and literature by "the critical method," which in history may be defined as the "science of what is credible," and in literature as "the science of what is rational," is to invite fiasco. The theologian in such a state sees no obstacle to accepting an arbitrary list of documents with all the strange stuff they may contain, and declaring them to be sound historical material, while he applies to all the strange stuff of a similar kind surrounding them the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... such distressing circumstances, would make him; she used all the arguments which her reason could suggest, to persuade me that it was my duty to bear with his temper, and to submit to his will, however arbitrary. But, as I was now of age, and as I had laboured incessantly in my father's business for nearly five years, and had scarcely ever left it for a day, I was mortified at his unnecessary severity, in denying me the privilege of a day or two upon such an occasion; and, besides, as my father's temper ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... to put the question. If a member is aggrieved by the conduct or decisions of the Master, he has his redress by an appeal to the Grrand Lodge, which will, of course, see that the Master does not rule his lodge "in an unjust or arbitrary manner." But such a thing as an appeal from the Master of the lodge to its members ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... was of an arbitrary system of thought and training, and by so much divorced from the natural instincts of youth and age alike, the confident joy of the one, the mature acquiescence of the other—in overhearing this brief conversation suffered embarrassment amounting almost to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... to employ unnatural or arbitrary punishments. Even the smallest child has an instinctive idea of justice and resents anything which he regards as unjust. On the other hand, he learns quickly the inevitableness with which pain follows the violation of law, and ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... as to discover it. Mr. Wilson is a man who, to use Carlyle's favorite expression, has "swallowed all formulas." The principles that have generally been held to govern the use of language appear to him mere arbitrary rules, invented by the "sevenfold censorship" and the Spanish Inquisition, for the purpose of preventing the free communication of ideas. All such trammels he rejects; and, accordingly, we have to thank him, so far as mere ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... evidently point out the origin of "Jim-jam bugs" in No. IX, and the better known modern synonym for brain, "bug-house," but it indicates the arbitrary tendency of all language to create gradations of caste in parts of speech. It is to this mysterious influence by which some words become "elegant" or "poetic," and others "coarse" or "unrefined," that we owe the contempt in which slang is held ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:—For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:—For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:—For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:—For ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... appears, that of the Byzantine sovereigns, from the disappearance of the Theodosian race to the last Constantine who dies on the ramparts of the city made by the first, shows a great deterioration.[29] There was no acknowledged principle of succession. Arbitrary force determined it. One robber followed another upon the throne; so that the eastern despot seemed to imitate that ghastly rule, in the wood by Nemi, "of the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... had been at perpetual war among themselves or with some neighbour were reduced to quietude. Communities which had been liable to sudden invasion and to all manner of arbitrary changes in their conditions of life, in their burdens of taxation, and even in their personal freedom, now knew exactly where they stood, and, for the most part, perceived that they stood in a much more tolerable and a distinctly more assured position than before. ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... rigid lines of any literary circle; nor shall I press him into the narrow frame of school or party; nor stamp upon him the distinctive label of any particular ism. He would break such fetters; his free spirit, his great individuality would overflow the arbitrary confines of "the sole Truth," "the only true principle." The waves of his soul would break down all artificial barriers and rush out to join the ever-moving ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... rightful principle may a State, being not more than one-fiftieth part of the nation in soil and population, break up the nation, and then coerce a proportionally larger subdivision of itself in the most arbitrary way?" ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... Theft legitamised by Government; that is by Force. A vagrant may not take a sheaf of your wheat, a fowl from your hen-house: if he do so, the law protects you and punishes him. A syndicate of rich men, of powerful men, may take the whole of your land, and the State will compel you to accept any arbitrary price which it may choose to put upon your loss. According as you are rich or poor yourself, so great or so small will be the amount awarded to you. All the sub-prefects, all the syndics, all the officials in this province, will ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... upon power as belonging of right to the strongest; the weak, or those who differ from him in opinion, he will treat with contempt and cruelty, and will think they have no rights he is bound to respect. In power, such a man will be arbitrary and cruel; out of power, he will be faithless, hypocritical and subservient. Trust him with authority, he will abuse it; trust him with money, he will steal it; trust him with your confidence, and he will betray it. Such a man—Pagan and unprincipled as he is—may nevertheless ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
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