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More "Speculative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heart and reason of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... two minds, one simple and practical, the other sensitive and speculative, did not move in the same atmosphere, and could not understand one another. Ambrose was in the condition of excitement and bewilderment produced by the first stirrings of the Reformation upon enthusiastic minds. He had studied the Vulgate, made out something of the Greek ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quite true; but it might have been vastly different. That is the point that most concerns the bank. Whoever took the money"—and he bowed, deprecatingly, with ironical consideration to Mortimer—"must have needed a thousand dollars for—well, some speculative purpose, perhaps. Good fortune has enabled the some one to make good, and the money has ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... figure—spangled, gaudy, standing among her lions— seemed by these. To think of her, his veins thumping thus, was an insult to all three: to Delia, one unpardonable. And yet he could not take his eyes off her. Her performance was splendid. He was interested, speculative. She certainly had flown high; for, again, why should not a dompteuse be a decent woman? And here were money, fame of a kind, and an occupation that sent his blood bounding. A dompteur! He had tamed moose, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... days, the last beating of the failing pulse of the Old Year, throbbed slowly and heavily away, the baby took upon its wan visage a strange expression—the solemn expression of worn-out and suffering age. Its blue eyes grew more solemnly speculative and dreamy, and after a while it seemed to lose all taste for the petty things of this world and the low desires of mere humanity. It lay very quiet in Liz's arms; it never cried, and was no longer fretful, and it seemed to listen with a sort of mild approval to the tones of her voice as ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... be necessary to consider inflammation at more length. The theory of inflammation has passed through various stages. At first heat was considered as its essential and dominant feature, then redness, then exudative swelling; while the speculative neuropathologists consider pain the fons et ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... contrariwise to big business practices. They took virtually their first step in "trust-busting" when they tried to break up the Northern Securities Company, which had been concocted to handle the celebrated Northern Pacific case. Labor troubles supervened. Many great speculative stock campaigns collapsed. The banks yielded to the imperative need to reduce credits. The year 1902 had almost experienced a widespread panic: but the marshaling of great private resources had restored confidence temporarily, and ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... follow the lure to that sort of speculative inquiry he and Wade were fond of. He said, with an abrupt return to the personal ground: "Then you don't think Jack Wilmington need be any further considered ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... his Familie to dissemble," (i.e., to conceal his religion when questioned by the magistrate); and (2.) "H.N. maketh God the Author of sinne, and the sinner guiltless," (but no proof is alleged that this speculative impiety was carried out ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... directly opposite nature, these men presume to talk to us of impossibilities! We may rather contend that they furnish a fresh proof of the soundness of our reasonings. We lay it down as a fundamental position, that speculative knowledge alone, that mere superficial cursory considerations, will be of no avail. Nothing is to be done without the diligent continued use of the appointed method. They themselves afford an instance of the truth of our assertions; and while they supply no argument against the efficacy of ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... lessons is governed by experimental psychology. And this trend, without doubt, is in contrast to that of the past, which was governed by speculative psychology, on which the whole of the educational methods commonly in use in ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... peace abroad and prosperity at home. The latter was interrupted for a time in 1720 by the speculative madness created by the "South-Sea Bubble." Men were almost crazed by the rise in the value of shares from 100 pounds to 1,000 pounds; and then plunged into despair and ruin when they suddenly dropped to nothing. The suffering caused by this wreck ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... world, life, the whole spirit of things had suddenly grown sinister, of the quality of nightmare. It was true that all the ground of this ominous depression which had darkened round him, was conjectural and speculative, that diplomacy, backed by the horror of war which surely all civilised nations and responsible govermnents must share, had, so far from saying its last, not yet said its first word; that the wits of all the Cabinets of Europe were at this moment ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... three times wearing around, providing they didn't come to mending before that," mused the "Pet," with a speculative look in her blue eyes, but with a quiver of the dimples that evoked another paroxysm of laughter from her audience. "But I say, Sadie," she went on with the next breath, "Miss Minturn is a downright sweet-looking girl, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... as his manner on the occasions to which I refer was always merry, such talk awoke little uneasiness; and I believe that he never had at the moment any conscious attraction to the subject stronger than a speculative one. At the same time, however, I believe that the speculative attraction itself had its roots in the misery with which in other and prevailing moods ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... systematic evasion of the social hardship caused now-a-days by new inventions and economies in method. There will exist throughout the world an organized economic survey, which will continually prepare and revise estimates of the need of iron, coal, cloth and so forth in the coming months; the blind speculative production of our own times is due merely to the dark ignorance in which we work in these matters, and with such a survey, employment will lose much of the cruel intermittence it now displays. The men in these great productive services, quite equally with teachers ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... is either speculative or practical. In the first case we study merely that we may know; in the latter that we ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... been discussing philosophy—or, rather, I had been feeling her out; and from a sketch of Spinoza's anticipations of the modern mind, through the speculative interpretations of the latest achievements in physics of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Ramsay, I had come, as usual, to De Casseres, whom I was quoting, when Mr. Pike snarled orders to ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the name of the brokerage firm that always handled Jadwin's rare speculative ventures. Converse was dead long since, but the firm still retained its original name. The house was as old and as well established as any on the Board of Trade. It had a reputation for conservatism, and was known more as a Bear than a Bull concern. It was immensely wealthy and immensely important. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... not question the authenticity of the Scriptural narrative of the Virgin-mother and Bethlehem babe, and the Messianic mission of Christ Jesus; but in our time no Christian Scientist will give chimerical wings to his imagination, or advance speculative theories as to the recurrence ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... man which gives such weight to the very sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for instance, falls with very different weight from a mere speculative theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels restlessly ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition. His prophecy, I remember, appeared in November ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... national demand of the Volunteers to have a free constitution, that the Volunteers would have been fully justified in taking up arms in defence of the country." He, however, for his part, considered the question a merely speculative one, as, so far as he knew, no one contemplated an appeal to physical force, under the present circumstances, which would be madness, folly, and wickedness. He considered it very unwise to be putting those tests when ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... seconds, but for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of seconds! And still there is no end, no end where the weary mind can rest and contemplate; the finite mind of man can only cry out that there is no limit. In spite of all its strivings and groping by aid of speculative philosophy, the finite cannot attain to the Infinite, nor get any nearer to where the mighty sea of time breaks in noiseless waves on the dim ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... with startled interest. Now and then he cocked up his speculative eyes, and gazed fixedly into the preternaturally solemn face of Byers, who reiterated, "A good old ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... get education at all risks. Put him on Juan Fernandez, and he would make a spelling-book first, and a salt-pan afterward. In coelum, jusseris, ibit,—or the other way either,—it is all one, so anything is to be got by it. Yet, after all, thin, speculative Jonathan is more like the Englishman of two centuries ago than John Bull himself is. He has lost somewhat in solidity, has become fluent and adaptable, but more of the original groundwork of character remains. He feels more at home with Fulke Greville, Herbert of Cherbury, Quarles, George ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of fact, no such inquiry came in, but as Miss Joyce, my secretary, knew that Mr. Forbes was in Europe, I was conscious for some months afterwards that Miss Joyce's eyes occasionally rested on me in a speculative and ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the free man! He realized that this was a flag of danger, and he answered the warning by sedulously avoiding Bambi for the next few days. She was too busy with the plans for the book to notice, although she caught him looking at her once or twice in a strange, speculative way. Their peace was broken, however, a few days after Mr. Strong's famous visit by a letter from the Belasco office, accompanied by the play. Mr. Belasco regretted that the play was not just what he wanted. It had some excellent points, ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... in a way that showed me his brainstorm over Robert Gordon had been checked. But there was a startled look in his eyes which changed to a more speculative scrutiny before ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... Buxton and Prof. W. W. Kinsley, the pioneers of modern Falls Church, first settled here, the increase of population has been slow, but it has been of steady and sterling growth. The conservatism of the land-owners has given less rapid growth than were its tone purely speculative. The population as reported by the United States census for 1890 was 792; the census of 1900 gives the population at 1007, an increase of over 27 per cent. during the ten years. The tax roll for 1903 shows property of ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... and their pale colour would enable the sun's rays to be reflected to a greater extent than if the material were of the blackness of basalt.[4] So much for the material. We have now to consider the structure of the moon's surface, and here we find ourselves treading on less speculative and safer ground. All astronomers since the time of Schroter seem to be of accord in the opinion that the remarkable features of the moon's surface are in some measure of volcanic origin, and we shall presently proceed to ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... tell me anything about this scheme that you've not told me before," declared Cressler. "You'll win, of course. Crookes & Co. are like Rothschild—earthquakes couldn't budge 'em. But I promised myself years ago to keep out of the speculative market, and I mean to stick ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... little impression; and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have deceived themselves." Moreover, this kind of proof could lead only to a speculative knowledge, and to know God only in that way was not to know Him at all. The only way to reach God was to deny the value of reason, and to deny reason ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... new-fashioned slang to give spice and vigour to his conversation. 'There isn't a move on the board that I don't know.' He advised his friends excellently, and there were perhaps half a score of fairly well-to-do speculative people who had to thank him, and him alone, for the comfort they lived in and the consideration they enjoyed. He had been wise for others all his life, and in his own interests he had always acted like a greenhorn. ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... worthy of observation, that among emigrants possessing the qualities of industry and perseverance so essential to success in all countries, those who possess the smallest share of original talent and imagination, and the least of a speculative turn of mind, are usually the most successful. They follow the beaten track and prosper. However humbling this reflection may be to human vanity, it should operate as a salutary check on presumption and hasty conclusions. After a residence of sixteen years in Canada, during which my young ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... some foregoing remarks of a speculative nature were made merely to bring out curious features of alternate currents or electric impulses. By their help we may cause a body to emit more light, while at a certain mean temperature, than it would emit if brought to that temperature ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... Speculative Science may be divided into three kinds[13]: Physics, Mathematics, and Theology. Physics deals with motion and is not abstract or separable (i.e. [Greek: anupexairetos]); for it is concerned with the forms ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... Copernican theory, he wrote an essay on the primary motion, attributing it to the rotation of the earth, and this not for the mathematical reasons brought forward by Copernicus, but, as he himself says, on physical or metaphysical grounds. In 1595, having more leisure from lectures, he turned his speculative mind to the number, size, and motion of the planetary orbits. He first tried simple numerical relations, but none of them appeared to be twice, thrice, or four times as great as another, although he felt convinced that there was ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... night, ruminative, speculative. The breeze which had rippled across the Indian corn during the day had sunk to rest. The darkened field lay tranquil under the stars big and luminous. From far across the veldt came the occasional beating of a buzzard's wings, like the beating of muffled drums. A patch of gum ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... leather trousers. That made me nervous. When he piled us all in with our grips, he put me in the seat beside him, whether I liked it or not. I was fool enough to tell him I loved to travel fast. What do you think he said? Well, he eyed me in a rather cool and speculative way and said, with a smile, 'Miss, I reckon anything you love an' want bad will be coming to you out here!' I didn't know whether it was delightful candor or impudence. Then he said to all of us: 'Shore you had better wrap up in ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... greatest services which the National Trust is doing for the country is the preserving of the natural beauties of our English scenery. It acquires, through the generosity of its supporters, special tracts of lovely country, and says to the speculative builder "Avaunt!" It maintains the landscape for the benefit of the public. People can always go there and enjoy the scenery, and townsfolk can fill their lungs with fresh air, and children play on the greensward. These oases afford sanctuary to birds and beasts and butterflies, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... invasions of novelty. His athletic intellect was exercised in all manner of curious questions. The only matter about which it never concerned itself was reality, the existence of which he probably doubted. At any rate, he considered truth, right, wrong, to be subjects for speculative philosophy. As a practical man, he had minutely acquainted himself with all the things that behoved to be believed by an orthodox Brahmin, and he was not the man to give way to mere facts. This frame of mind begot in him a large tolerance, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... magistrate presiding over a real commonwealth. And indeed for most young men a college thesis is but an exercise for sharpening the wits, rarely dangerous in its later effects. But in the case of Samuel Adams, the ability to distinguish the speculative from the actual reality seemed to diminish as the years passed. After 1764, relieved of the pressure of life's anxieties and daily nourishing his mind on premises and conclusions reasonably abstracted from the relative and the conditioned ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... Secretary of War a letter from Mr. Westmoreland, Wilmington, complaining that he is not allowed by government agents to transport cotton to that port, where his steamers are, in redemption of Confederate States bonds, while private persons, for speculative purposes, are, through the favor (probably for a consideration) of government officials, enabled to ship thousands of bales, and he submits a copy of a correspondence with Col. Sims, Assistant Quartermaster-General, and Lieut. Col. Bayne, ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... just when the ship was beginning to drift in moral helplessness. He was the founder of a school of practical wisdom, singularly well adapted to the Roman character and intellect, which were always practical rather than speculative; and far better suited to ordinary human life than the old rigid and austere Stoic ethics, of which the younger Cato was the only eminent Roman disciple. From what we know of Panaetius' ethical teaching,—and ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... He tried various expedients, with a clumsy haste which would have removed any chance of succeeding that he might have had. He tried to borrow, but was everywhere refused. In his despair, he staked the little he had left on wildly speculative ventures, and lost it all. From that moment there was a complete change in his character. He relapsed into an alarming state of terror: still he said nothing: but he was bitter, violent, harsh, horribly sad. But still, when he was with ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... of the matters of faith that they should in some measure be acquainted with and believe, that are admitted into full communion with the Church of Christ. And these and other truths must not be known and believed in a general, notional, light, and speculative manner; but heartily, powerfully, and particularly: not for others, but for themselves; otherwise their faith and knowledge will no way ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... citizen with efficient senses, sound organs, and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it. Whether she be financed in the undertaking by herself, or by the father, or by a speculative capitalist, or by a new department of, say, the Royal Dublin Society, or (as at present) by the War Office maintaining her "on the strength" and authorizing a particular soldier to marry her, or by a local authority under a by-law directing that women may under certain circumstances ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... Barwood was of a speculative turn of mind, and had also by nature a strong leaning towards whatever was curious and out of the common. These proclivities Megilp's conversation, pursuits, and studio full of trumpery were calculated to gratify. A moderate sort ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... rather hazy and speculative contribution on Okenian lines to the problem of the relation of Arthropods to Vertebrates, likening the carapace of Crustacea to an enormously developed hyoid, the appendages of the tail to the ventral ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... stream. His scope of vision was indeed great, but it had its limits, and these were not imposed by time or necessity, but by the unyielding will of his own prejudices. As his virtues were massive, so were his errors grievous. He ventured to grasp the great speculative themes of existence with a mind that was neither profound nor suggestive. He swam with all the wondrous ease of an athlete through the billows and across the currents and counter-currents of elegant literature, of politics, of theology, yet possessed not the diver's power to win ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... had adopted uncommonly rigid and severe views of religion, imitating in her ideas of reformed faith the very worst errors of the Catholics, in limiting the benefit of the gospel to those who profess their own speculative tenets. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... trudging gravely along behind the moving office fixtures, their goggle eyes cast down in Christian meditation, their horizontal ears flopping solemnly in unison with their measured tread. Ever and anon the leader halts, uprolls the speculative eye, arrests the oscillation of the ears, laying them rigidly back along the neck, exalts the conscious tail, drops the lank jaw, and warbles a psalm of praise that shakes the blind hills from their eternal repose. His companions ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... as it then was. The students of those polite days insisted on retaining their hats in the class-room. There was a cab-stance in front of the College; and 'Carriage Entrance' was posted above the main arch, on what the writer pleases to call 'coarse, unclassic boards.' The benches of the 'Speculative' then, as now, were red; but all other Societies (the 'Dialectic' is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some rooms of which it is pointedly said that 'nothing else could conveniently be made of them.' However horrible these dungeons may have been, it ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fascinating it may appear at first sight, to look carefully into the facts, and to endeavor to determine independently whether it is well founded or not. On the other hand, there is some danger to be apprehended from a tendency, sometimes observed, to denounce everything speculative, no matter how broad the basis of facts upon which it rests may be. Without legitimate speculation, it is clear that there could be no great progress in any subject. As far as the hypothesis under consideration is concerned, the writer is firmly of the opinion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... hypothesis founded on the opinion of Major Rennel, carries with it no evidence whatever, but the speculative theory of that learned geographer. The identity or connection of the two Niles, and the consequent water communication between[312] Cairo and Timbuctoo receives (supposing the Quarterly Review to be correct), as our intelligence respecting Africa increases, additional confirmation: and even the ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... yet, the thought of any attempt to withhold from her a knowledge of evil brought a sardonic smile to his lips. She had as yet everything to learn of the world about her. Could such learning be imparted to her free from error or hypothesis, and apart from the fiat of the speculative human mind? It must be; for he knew from experience that she would accept his teaching only as he presented every apparent fact, every object, every event, as a reflection in some degree of her immanent God, and subject to rigid demonstration. Where historical events externalized only the evil ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the effect of this statement. Willie having never heard of such things before, and having a thoughtful and speculative as well as waggish turn of mind, listened with open eyes and mouth and earnest attention, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... hinting, Monsieur Valmont, that I engaged others until my money was gone, then came to you with a speculative proposal. Let me assure you such is not the case. Incompetent hands, I grant you, but the hands were my own. For the past six months I have lived practically as my uncle lived. I have rummaged that library from floor to ceiling. It was left in a frightful state, littered with old newspapers, ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... reached Dodson and Fogg. He speaks of "the kind generous people o' the perfession 'as sets their clerks to work to find out little disputes among their neighbours and acquaintances as wants settlin' by means of law suits." This system, however, cannot be checked, and "the speculative attorney" even in ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... angry debates in our senate, and perpetual tumults and confusions abroad; until these maxims are entirely altered, or else, which God forbid, the spirits of the people are depressed, and they become inured to disgrace and servitude. This has long been the prospect in the minds of speculative men. The body of the people are now in council. Their opposition grows into a system. They are united and resolute. And if the British administration and government do not return to the principles of moderation and equity, the evil which they profess to aim at preventing by ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... the despotism of public opinion in the United States, have already excited some remarks in this country, and will probably give occasion to more. As stated in the preface to this edition, the editor does not conceive himself called upon to discuss the speculative opinions of the author and supposes he will best discharge his duty by confining his observations to what he deems errors of fact or law. But in reference to this particular subject, it seems due to the author to remark, that he visited the United States ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. The love for ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... put into universal practice, and may always be depended upon within half a degree, which is sufficient for all nautical purposes. If, therefore, observing and calculating were considered as necessary qualifications for every sea officer, the labours of the speculative theorist to solve this problem might be remitted, without much injury to mankind: Neither will it be so difficult to acquire this qualification, or put it in practice, as may at first appear; for, with the assistance ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... was a philosophical poet. But his philosophy was much more definite than Coleridge's; it gave substance to his character and edge to his intellect, and, in the end, can scarcely be distinguished from the emotion generating his verse. There is, however, no trace of originality in his speculative writing, and we need not regret that, after hesitating whether to be a metaphysician or a poet, he decided against philosophy. Before finally settling to poetry, he at one time projected a complete and systematic account of the operations of the human mind. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... altogether from contact with this world and from all possibility of action in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints and most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculative problems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongs to my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends upon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche, assume and require these ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... and nation, the entire citizenship in each case concerned is in details operating the government. In certain cantons it is done in every detail. Doing this, the Swiss are moving rapidly in practically grappling with social problems that elsewhere are hardly more than speculative topics with scholars and theorists. In other countries, consequently, interested lookers-on, having from different points of view taken notes of democratic Switzerland, are, through newspaper, magazine, and book, describing its unprecedented progress and suggesting to their ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... "that the party holding to the only constitutional policy is to be supported at all hazards, and I think the great party to which we belong is that party. Our principles are all true, and our measures are all just. Speculative persons and dreamers talk about independent political action. But politics always beget parties. Governments are always managed by parties, and parties are ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... be one of the later writings of Plato, in which the style has begun to alter, and the dramatic and poetical element has become subordinate to the speculative and philosophical. In the development of abstract thought great advances have been made on the Protagoras or the Phaedrus, and even on the Republic. But there is a corresponding diminution of artistic skill, a want of character in the persons, a laboured ...
— Philebus • Plato
... that Benin and Portuguese cloths are sold at Egga by many of its inhabitants, so that it would appear that some kind of communication is kept up between the sea-coast and this place. The people are very speculative and enterprising, and numbers of them employ all their time solely in trading up and down the Niger. They live entirely in their canoes, over which they have a shed, that answers completely every purpose for which it is ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... he want?" inquired his wife. He had sunk on his doorstep on coming home at dusk, and sat with speculative eyes on the pale western sky, while his wife sat judicially, quite filling with her heated bulk a large rocking-chair, placed for greater coolness in front of the step, in the middle ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and heart, the worship of Beauty. The entire series illustrates a tribute to Beauty expressed in the first one—"Delight in her made trouble in my mind." This mental disturbance is here the spur to composition. They are experiments in relative, meditative, speculative poetry; and while they contain some memorable lines, and heighten one's respect for the dignity and sincerity of their author's temperament, they are surely not so successful as his other work. They are not clearly articulate. Instead of the perfect ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... apt to employ reason merely as an instrument for acquiring the sciences, whereas we ought to avail ourselves of the sciences, as an instrument for perfecting our reason; justness of mind being infinitely more important than all the speculative knowledge which we can obtain by means of sciences the most solid. This ought to lead wise men to make their sciences the exercise and not the occupation of their mental powers. Men are not born to employ all their time in measuring lines, in considering ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... for the political side of the 'philosophy of the century,' if we are to use this too comprehensive expression for all the products of a very complex and many-sided outburst of speculative energy. Apart from its political side, we find M. Taine's formula no less unsatisfactory for its other phases. He seems to us not to go back nearly far enough in his search for the intellectual origins, any more than for the political origins, of his contemporary France. He has ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... abates; he acknowledges that they are the representatives rather than the corrupters of the world. He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive, passing beyond the range either of the political or the speculative ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage Plato himself seems to intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who had passed his whole life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and not to be always repeating the notions of other men. There is no evidence that either the idea of good ...
— The Republic • Plato
... while it cannot be said to clash, takes on a variety of shades—as needs will happen among men, who, at one on basic principles, on the material substructure of institutional superstructure, cannot but yield to the allurements of speculative thought on matters as yet hidden in the future, and below the horizon. For one, I hold there is as little ground for rejecting monogamy, by reason of the taint that clings to its inception, as there would be ground for rejecting co-operation, by reason of the like taint that accompanied ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... then ensued for the two on the part of the more speculative among the buyers, who were willing to risk a little possible loss on the chance of obtaining two slaves for a trifle more than the price of one; and finally they were purchased by a man who had all the appearance of being an overseer on some extensive ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... get the cessio, when the bonorums are all spent—But what, are you puzzling in your pockets to seek your only memorial among old play-bills, letters requesting a meeting of the Faculty, rules of the Speculative Society,* syllabus' of lectures—all the miscellaneous contents of a young advocate's pocket, which contains ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... fundamental sentiment which opposes the cumulus of violence and usurpation, which in a great degree constitutes historic international law and corrects the deductions made from purely speculative theories,—a sentiment we accept without demur, and which is asserted like the axioms that serve as the basis and foundation of all reasoning and as a rule inspiring ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... prepared the scheme of such a paper and submitted it to several publishers before he and his associates determined upon carrying it themselves into execution. And soon after it was started, as will be seen, the services of a speculative printer were ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of the pawnbroker's shop be calculated to attract the attention, or excite the interest, of the speculative pedestrian, its interior cannot fail to produce the same effect in an increased degree. The front door, which we have before noticed, opens into the common shop, which is the resort of all those customers whose habitual ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... to the humdrum of existence—on this soil a grave race flourishes, of quick conscience and serious life. The old saying Frisia non cantat marks the lack of exuberance and of the spirit of revelry. But shy reticence finds compensation in good-natured humor. Unenthusiastic but substantial realism, speculative meditation, and a certain didactic tone make the Low German country the home of the fable and the great epic. That such a great dramatist as Hebbel was also a scion of this stock seems almost exceptional. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... at the age of eight-and-twenty making a name for himself on the headquarters staff of the Customs Department. His thin, eager face, with its hooked nose, pale blue eyes and light, rather untidy-looking hair, formed a true index of his nimble, somewhat speculative mind. What he did, he did with his might. He was keenly interested in whatever he took up, showing a tendency, indeed, to ride his hobbies to death. He had a particular penchant for puzzles of all kinds, and many a knotty problem ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... and perfectly separable: nor is it to be doubted that they were equally separable in the learned languages."—Walkers's Observations on Gr. and Lat. Accent and Quantity, Sec.20; Key, p. 326. In the speculative essay here cited, Walker meant by accent the rising or the falling inflection,—an upward or a downward slide of the voice: and by quantity, nothing but the open or close sound of some vowel; as of "the a in scatter" and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of the new star of 1892, known as Nova Aurigae, is also indicated on the map. While this never made a brilliant appearance, it gave rise to a greater variety of speculative theories than any previous phenomenon of the kind. Although not recognized until January 24, 1892, this star, as photographic records prove, was in existence on December 9, 1891. At its brightest it barely exceeded magnitude four and a half, and its maximum occurred ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... deduction from this agreeable numerical fact was, that in an equally short period your agent's payments to your bank account would also be doubled. In the meantime the drays were busy carting the wool to the seaports as fast as they could be loaded, whilst speculative drovers rode all about the country buying up the fat cattle and wethers from every run. These were wanted to supply the West Coast Diggings which had just "broken out" (as the curious phrase goes there), and so was every description of grain and ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... of speculative pressure on the Thai baht, the government decided to float the currency in July 1997, the symbolic beginning of the country's current economic crisis. The crisis—which began in the country's financial sector—has spread throughout the economy. ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... chalky-faced self-sufficiency. He has said very little, and has eaten nothing, but had a sleep this afternoon for a couple of hours, out in the patio on a chaise-longue. It hurt him, I think, to find his own children look at him with such cold and speculative eyes. But he has changed shockingly since they last saw him. And they have so much to fill up their little lives. They haven't yet reached the age when life teaches them they'd better stick to what's given them, even though there's a bitter tang ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... the ashes out of his pipe into a metal tray, refilled it, lighted it, and then puffed meditatively, gazing at Hugh with kind but speculative eyes. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... in Paris is the whereabouts of the Turks. They must be found and observed. My chief difficulty will be to keep that delightful commissary from imprisoning them, if, as I imagine, we find the little thief a captive in the Rue Barbette. So you see my actions are speculative. Yours, on the other hand, will ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... basis, it was good for eighty. To know which way he would decide, to extract any information from that inscrutable mind—that were to open a steel vault with a pen-knife. "All trading," the Sun assured its readers, "will be speculative; it is considered a ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... the exercise of Johnson's modesty, when he was called upon to compare his own arduous performance, not with those of other individuals, (in which case his inflexible regard to truth would have been violated, had he affected diffidence,) but with speculative perfection[851]; as he, who can outstrip all his competitors in the race, may yet be sensible of his deficiency when he runs against time. Well might he say, that 'the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned[852],' for ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... were the rich men who kept chariots and competed at the Olympic games. In these Sicilian cities the intellectual improvement kept pace with the material, and the little town of Elea supported the two greatest speculative philosophers of Greece—Parmenides and Zeno. Empedocles, of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... had only yesterday achieved his second birthday, watched, with a speculative eye, his nurse. He was seated on the floor with his back to the high window that was flaming now with the light of the dying sun; his nurse was by the fire, her head, shadowed huge and fantastic on the wall, nodded and nodded and nodded. Ernest Henry was, in figure, ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... appointed, it might, upon experiment, have been found less convenient than some other time. The same answer may be given to the question put on the other side. And it may be added that the supposed danger of a gradual change being merely speculative, it would have been hardly advisable upon that speculation to establish, as a fundamental point, what would deprive several States of the convenience of having the elections for their own governments and for the national government ...
— The Federalist Papers
... that were sad. If it is strange for me to look back from a distance both in time and space on these bygone adventures of our youth, it must be stranger for you who tread the same streets—who may to-morrow open the door of the old Speculative, where we begin to rank with Scott and Robert Emmet and the beloved and inglorious Macbean—or may pass the corner of the close where that great society, the L. J. R., held its meetings and drank its beer, sitting in the seats of Burns and his companions. I think I see you, moving there ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Augustine) advanced the question to the Theological stage, by connecting it with the great doctrines of Original Sin and Predestination; in which stage it shared all the speculative difficulties attaching to these doctrines. The Theological world, however, has always been divided between Free-will and Necessity; and probably the weightiest names are to be found among the Necessitarians. No ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... other land of the island, though that too is very elevated and rugged. Our telescopes revealed serrated gullies upon the mountain sides, and showed us the fastnesses of the island in a manner that made us long to explore them. We deceived ourselves with the hope that some speculative fisherman might come out to us with oranges and grapes for sale. He would have realised a handsome sum if he had, but unfortunately none was aware of the advantages offered, and so we looked and longed in vain. The other islands were Palma, Gomera, and Ferro, all of them lofty, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... conduct is contrary to the first and great duties of social virtue. Ought you to quarrel with any man because he is taller or shorter, fairer or blacker than yourself? And yet we can no more help our differing in speculative opinions than in stature or complexion. If you happen to feel the knowledge and perception of divine things supernaturally implanted on your mind, rejoice and be happy, but let not your Wrath arise against those who are not blest with the same sensations. Would you ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... include, according to Professor Masson's subdivision, (a) Biographies, such as Shakespeare or Pope—Joan of Arc falls here, yet has some claim to a place in the first class; (b) Historical essays, like The Caesars; (c) Speculative and Theological essays; (d) Essays in Political Economy and Politics; (e) Papers of Literary Theory and Criticism, such as the brilliant discussions of Rhetoric, Style, and Conversation, and the famous On the Knocking at the Gate in 'Macbeth.' As ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... usual form. The great concern in those times, was to lay all religion upon a level; in order to which, this maxim was advanced, "That no man ought to be denied the liberty of serving his country upon account of a different belief in speculative opinions," under which term some people were apt to include every doctrine of Christianity: however, this Act, in favour of the Quakers, was only temporary, in order to keep them in constant dependence, and expired of course after a certain term, if it were not ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... informs us, with a carefully-cultivated taste for the fine arts, who was considered by his contemporaries an excellent judge of a picture or a sculpture, though in Stewart's opinion he appeared interested in works of art less as instruments of direct enjoyment than as materials for speculative discussions about the principles of human nature involved in their production. Smith seems to have been one of Foulis's chief practical advisers in the work of the Academy of Design, in settling such details, for example, as the pictures which ought ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... left a pleasant atmosphere of excitement behind him when he disappeared between the portieres. At once the company broke into eager, speculative whispers that soon grew to a perfect storm of shrill inquiry. Every one was guessing, and every one was guessing as loudly as possible in order to be heard above the clamour. It might have been observed that at least three or four of the servants shot furtive glances in ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... refreshments thrown in to boot. So he got on a long and continuous spree, and went to the bad, until his wife had to divorce him and turn him out to "root hog or die." Then, after a while, he began to rally and reform; and a grand, speculative idea striking him, he traded his faithful squirrel dog and his old shot gun for a warrantee deed for one hundred acres of land in the upright region of Cleveland County. Then, as Wesley began to prosper, he found himself in need ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... cheap slop-shops in Market Street. And after all the care Jane and me took of her, giving up our time and experience to her, she never so much as made Jane a single present." Popular opinion, which regarded Mrs. Stiver's attention as purely speculative, was not shocked at this unprofitable denouement; but when Peg refused to give anything to clear the mortgage off the new Presbyterian church, and even declined to take shares in the Union Ditch, considered by many as an equally sacred and safe investment, she ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... principles been merely inert or speculative. For the last ten or twelve years slavery has altered her tactics, and from a defensive she has become an aggressive power. Every compromise which the moderation of former times had erected to stem the course of this monster ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... them unless they have time, heaps of time, and an oppressive stock of enthusiasm, and I may add, fascinating experience, upon which to draw. The last-mentioned quality is invaluable in all such enterprises. If you have it, full play is permitted the speculative, if not the imaginative, faculties. If you have it not, then the work is merely a brutal exercise, in ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... expression—will, more likely than not, elect is in preparation preferentially to is being prepared. If there are any who, in their zealotry for the congruous, choose to adhere to the new form in its entire range of exchangeability for the old, let it be hoped that they will find, in Mr. Marsh's speculative approbation of consistency, full amends for the discomfort of encountering smiles or frowns. At the same time, let them be mindful of the career of Mr. White, with his black flag and no quarter. The dead ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... and popular theology on the other is this: Shall Science explain cause and effect as being 126:18 both natural and spiritual? Or shall all that is beyond the cognizance of the material senses be called supernatural, and be left to the mercy of speculative 126:21 hypotheses? ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... point, taking advantage of Lake Sunapee, a canal could easily be run in a north-westerly direction to the Connecticut at Windsor, Vt.; and thence, making use of intermediate streams, communication could be opened with the St. Lawrence. The speculative mind of Sullivan dwelt upon the pregnant results that must follow the connection of Boston with New Hampshire and possibly Vermont and Canada. He consulted his friend, Col. Baldwin, sheriff of Middlesex, who had a natural taste ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... practical men to discuss. Nor was I concerned with the ethical discussion of burglary (to give the matter its old legal and technical title); it was lack of judgment, sudden actions due to nothing but impulse, and what I think I may call "the speculative side" of a ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... safe, and with uncertain hands placed package after package of papers on the desk in careful order. Last, from an inner compartment, he took one labelled "Ravenel," and stood looking at it with speculative eyes. ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... those who contemplated suicide never spoke of it, and as his manner on the occasions to which I refer was always merry, such talk awoke little uneasiness; and I believe that he never had at the moment any conscious attraction to the subject stronger than a speculative one. At the same time, however, I believe that the speculative attraction itself had its roots in the misery with which in other and prevailing moods he ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... The heart of criminal psychology is here; and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in our academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and abstract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue, and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... its practical value; many of the first lines were extremely profitable, and the hostility with which they had been first received soon changed to an enthusiasm which was just as unreasoning. The speculative craze which invariably follows a new discovery swept over the country in the thirties and the forties and manifested itself most unfortunately in the new Western States—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Here bonfires and public meetings whipped ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... that discerns the interiors of things," and "the all-seeing land"; once or twice I even let fall the forbidden terms "the Third and Fourth Dimensions." At last, to complete a series of minor indiscretions, at a meeting of our Local Speculative Society held at the palace of the Prefect himself,—some extremely silly person having read an elaborate paper exhibiting the precise reasons why Providence has limited the number of Dimensions to Two, and why the attribute of omnividence is assigned to ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... been chronicling, as a fact provocative of especial wonder, the enterprise of some speculative merchant of New-York, who has just been dispatching a cargo of one hundred cats to the republic of New Granada, in which it would appear the race, owing, as we may believe, to the frequently disturbed state of the country, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... bear upon a matter vital to the State one-half the intelligence, zeal and sense of responsibility you will throw this evening into some ambiguous question of fleeting policy of speculative finance. Here are one hundred and eighty souls to whose correction, cure and protection the State is pledged. No one of all these lives is safe a single day. In six weeks I have saved two lives that were ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... flaming horns—they are endless in variety, but all expressing something not only quite definite, but remotely inherited. Or take houses—how perfectly simple and graceful an old homestead can be, how frightfully pretentious and vulgar the speculative builder's work often is, how full of beauty both of form and colour almost all the houses in certain parts of the country are, as in the Cotswolds, where the soft stone has tempted builders to try experiments, and to touch ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to pay, or only to pay as fast as they could sell tracts to some purchasers, on which occasions they paid the surveying fee and obtained deeds for the portion they sold. In this way they have held millions of acres for speculative purposes, waiting for a rise in prices, without taxation, while the farmers in adjacent lands paid taxes." [Footnote: ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... speculative glance at the maid. Was it possible she was lying? Was this all part of some scheme on Therese's part to allow her time to get away? Had Aline connived at her escape? The suspicion took root. They were now at the top of the ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... assiduously for a period of four centuries. Their labours were, however, confined chiefly to observational work, in which they excelled; unlike their predecessors, they paid but little attention to speculative theories—indeed, they regarded with such veneration the opinions held by the Greeks, that they did not feel disposed to question the accuracy of their doctrines. The most eminent astronomer among the Arabs was ALBATEGNIUS (680 A.D.). He corrected the Greek ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... have considered the insects as having descended from the Crustacea (some primitive zoea-form), and Dohrn has adduced the supposed zoea-form larva of these egg-parasites as a proof, we cannot but think, in a subject so purely speculative as the ancestry of animals, that the facts brought out by Ganin tend to confirm our theory, that the ancestry of all the insects (including the Arachnids and Myriopods) should be traced directly to the worms. The development of the degraded, aberrant Arachnidan ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... or ten years which followed 1849 are notable not only for a sudden outburst of railway construction and speculative activity throughout the provinces, but for the beginning of that close connection between politics and railways which is distinctively Canadian. In this era parliament became the field of railway debate. Political motives came to the front: 'statesmen' began to talk of links of Empire ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... observations and experiences, close and full, as his mother liked them in regard to fact, and generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for Whitwell. The Eastern question became in the snow-choked hills of New England the engrossing concern of this speculative mind, and he was apt to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other defenceless moments. He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic inquiry, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... young affects In me defunct,—and proper satisfaction; But to be free and bounteous to her mind: And heaven defend your good souls, that you think I will your serious and great business scant For she is with me: no, when light-wing'd toys Of feather'd Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and offic'd instruments, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, And all indign and base adversities Make ...
— Othello, the Moor of Venice • William Shakespeare
... housing problem is not so easily nor so successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of the speculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving him as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale of indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that they are an insult ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... glorious day, and the lock was crowded; and, as is a common practice up the river, a speculative photographer was taking a picture of us all as we lay upon the ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... and authoritatively arranged. The chapters which he has written on the more involved features of the subject, as sex and the relative influence of parents, should go far toward setting at rest the wildly speculative views cherished with reference to these questions. The striking originality in the treatment of the subject is no less conspicuous than the superb order and regular sequence of thought from the beginning to the end of the book. The book is intended ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... the Caliph Omar in 640; at one time a place of great commerce, but that has very materially decayed since the opening of the Suez Canal. Alexandria, from its intimate connection with both East and West, gave birth in early times to a speculative philosophy which drew its principles from eastern as well as western sources, which was at its height on the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species; by which means I have made my self a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life. I am very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Oeconomy, Business, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... explain but must be explained by it. My thesis is, then, that every Freudian mechanism applies to anger as truly as it does to sex. This by no means assumes the fundamental identity of every feeling-emotion in the sense of Weissfeld's very speculative theory. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... deserts with a clear fetch of a thousand miles, was not going to last many hours; meantime, I set myself to work out scientifically its genesis, operation, and hidden purpose. The first and second considerations were merely matters of research and calculation; the third was largely speculative, admitting of no more definite conclusion than that the time had come when hygienic necessities required a thorough rousing and ridding-out of microbes, bacteria, and other pests too minute to be worth particularising. But I was better enlightened before ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... purely theoretical or speculative, and as few opinions and conclusions as can possibly be given in a historical narrative. The work finally reaches a period when the Present and the Future become its subject, and when therefore it can no longer relate any events of history which ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... "A speculative country, that is true," said Planchet,—"a country that I know well. What sort of an affair, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... idea, perception has a completely speculative interest: it is pure knowledge. Therein lies the ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... was angry with Dangle. And all four of them, being souls living very much upon the appearances of things, had a painful, mental middle distance of Botley derisive and suspicious, and a remoter background of London humorous, and Surbiton speculative. Were they really, ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... good reason to reflect on the service his practice did him in counteracting his personal cares. He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients, the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them, played sharply "for keeps"; the bony old dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes, that measured their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look. Even the churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder in the hills, where the few field-people—Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen— gathered every Sunday, and air ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... undulating waves of grayish sand surrounding it, seemed for once to drowse. Its solemn visage that had impassively watched ages come and go, empires rise and fall, and generations of men live and die, appeared for the moment to have lost its usual expression of speculative wisdom and intense disdain—its cold eyes seemed to droop, its stern mouth almost smiled. The air was calm and sultry; and not a human foot disturbed the silence. But towards midnight a Voice suddenly arose as it were like a wind in the desert, crying ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... us to enter successfully into this speculative region, it is essential that we should, as far as possible, conform to the Rules of Philosophy, and endeavour to gain some conception of an aetherial atom from the results of experience and observation. In doing this, we are at once confronted with the difficulty, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... of these eager speculative spirits, the Corresponding Society must have travelled far from its original business of Parliamentary Reform. Here is an extract from evidence given before the Privy Council, which relates the proceedings at one ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... The great speculative spirits of the world, those who overturn tradition and discover new ideas, have had minds far different from this. They have not written plays. It is to these men,—the philosopher, the essayist, the novelist, the lyric poet,—that ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... with the White-boys, who being labouring Catholics met with all those oppressions I have described, and would probably have continued in full submission had not very severe treatment in respect of tithes, united with a great speculative rise of rent about the same time, blown up the flame of resistance; the atrocious acts they were guilty of made them the object of general indignation; acts were passed for their punishment, which seemed calculated for the meridian of Barbary. This arose ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... inflict the very thing which I see another suffer! What a violent metaphor for a very minute matter! It is only a review which I have been reading, in which a pompous, and I imagine clerical, critic comes down with all his might on a man whom I gather to be a graceful and mildly speculative writer. The critic asks ponderously. What right has a man who seems to be untrained in philosophy and theology to speculate on philosophical and religious matters? He then goes on to quote a passage in which the writer attacks the current view of the doctrine ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been the creation of the government, of which it has never ceased to be the nursling. In all the parts of England in which manufacturing pursuits have given the artisan some command of time, the cultivation of mathematics and other speculative studies has been, as is well known, a very frequent occupation. In no other country has the weaver at his loom bent over the Principia of Newton; in no other country has the man of weekly wages maintained ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled everything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping there undisturbed for close on a hundred years, and was only waiting for the charming Prince—or, as it turned out a few years later, alas! the speculative builder and the railway engineer—those princes ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... reason; this is nature's order. As the sentient being becomes active his discernment develops along with his strength. Not till his strength is in excess of what is needed for self-preservation, is the speculative faculty developed, the faculty adapted for using this superfluous strength for other purposes. Would you cultivate your pupil's intelligence, cultivate the strength it is meant to control. Give his body constant exercise, make it strong and healthy, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... served to concentrate the various speculative objects which had been hovering before Hawthorne's imagination during the past winter, and when he reached Florence six weeks later, the chief details of the plot were ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the foreign fellow said, you may get the cessio, when the bonorums are all spent—But what, are you puzzling in your pockets to seek your only memorial among old play-bills, letters requesting a meeting of the Faculty, rules of the Speculative Society,* syllabus' of lectures—all the miscellaneous contents of a young advocate's pocket, which contains everything but briefs ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... brought a reminder of the misery of the moment when a thing long postponed must at last be performed. The softness of speculative fancy faded from his face. His lips tightened in a way that seemed to bring his chin into prominence in mastery of his being. As he called Firio, his voice unusually high-pitched, he did not look out at P.D. and Wrath of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... his simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey of every base practice round him; but he is the only example even approximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus—Caesar—Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;—Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... suffered for the faith. No religious community could produce a list of men so variously distinguished:—none had extended its operations over so vast a space; yet in none had there ever been such perfect unity of feeling and action. There was no region of the globe, no walk of speculative or of active life, in which Jesuits were not to be found. They guided the counsels of Kings. They deciphered Latin inscriptions. They observed the motions of Jupiter's satellites. They published whole libraries, controversy, casuistry, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... plank was thrown over its dangerous depth. Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly lost his portmanteau, and was fain to dispose of his entire interest in it for the sum of two dollars and fifty cents to a speculative stranger on the wharf. As the stranger's search was rewarded afterwards only by the discovery of the body of a casual Chinaman, who had evidently endeavored wickedly to anticipate him, a feeling of commercial insecurity was added to the ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... the millions of which I had dreamed, but still enough. To make the most of it and to be sure that it remained, I invested it very well, mostly in large mortgages at four per cent which, if the security is good, do not depreciate in capital value. Never again did I touch a single speculative stock, who desired to think no more about money. It was at this time that I bought the Fulcombe property. It cost me about L120,000 of my capital, or with alterations, repairs, etc., say L150,000, on which sum it may pay a net two and a ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... gradually you get the idea of Norman franchise carried out in the free-rider or free-booter; not safe from degradation on that side also; but by no means of swinish temper, or foraging, as at present the British speculative public, only with ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... you be content with the old span, even though it is clearly the best by all rules," said Reginald. The other smiled; he was the most speculative of the two, being perhaps the most thoughtful; and he had no fifteenth-century chapel to charm, nor old foundation to give him an anchor. He smiled, but there was a little envy in his mind. Even to have one's life set out before one within clear lines like this, would not that ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... study of Dante, and his works on the subject are unique, exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante's conception of Beatrice, which he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... would enable the sun's rays to be reflected to a greater extent than if the material were of the blackness of basalt.[4] So much for the material. We have now to consider the structure of the moon's surface, and here we find ourselves treading on less speculative and safer ground. All astronomers since the time of Schroter seem to be of accord in the opinion that the remarkable features of the moon's surface are in some measure of volcanic origin, and we shall presently proceed ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... which, although it was as far from impairing its graceful character as the tinge it communicated to her cheek was from diminishing her beauty, was obvious at a glance even to Mrs Nickleby. Not being of a very speculative character, however, save under circumstances when her speculations could be put into words and uttered aloud, that discreet matron attributed the emotion to the circumstance of her daughter's not happening to have her best frock on: 'though I never saw her look better, certainly,' she reflected ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... an opinion as to the source of the gambling propensity of Englishmen. 'The English,' says M. Dunne,(68) 'the most speculative nation on earth, calculate even upon future contingences. Nowhere else is the adventurous rage for stock-jobbing carried on to so great an extent. The fury of gambling, so common in England, is undoubtedly a daughter of this speculative genius. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... is placed at so near a distance as that the interval between the eyes bears any sensible proportion to it, the opinion of speculative men is that the two OPTIC AXES (the fancy that we see only with one eye at once being exploded) concurring at the OBJECT do there make an ANGLE, by means of which, according as it is greater or lesser, the OBJECT is perceived to be nearer or ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... sighed Mrs. Sallie; and then, as this was a mood far too speculative for her, she recalled herself to practical life suddenly. "If we should have to adopt this ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... as the savings remain in possession of their owners, these hazardous gamblings in speculative undertakings are almost the whole effect of an excess of accumulation over tested investment. Little effect is produced on the general trade of the country. The owners of the savings are too scattered and far from the market to change the majority of ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... because you're judging it outside of its own framework," Auerbach answered. I couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or speculative. "What I don't understand," he went on, "is that once the cylinders having been activated by whatever force there was in action—all right, call it psi—well, why didn't they retain it, the way the other ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landed aristocracy. Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia and Maryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning what they could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking another ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... jolt beyond what the roughness of the road necessitated. He came out here when he was twenty-one years old, and rushed at once to the gold-fields; found 1,100l. in three days, on an alluvial field 300 miles inland from Sydney; lost it two days after, by putting it into a speculative mining concern which failed the day after he parted with his money. He then became a gentleman's coachman at Sydney, and had several other mining and reefing adventures on some fields near the Johnstone River. All went well with him until he had an attack of fever, which laid ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... who are only intuitive cannot have the patience to reach to first principles of things speculative and conceptual, which they have never seen in the world, and which are altogether out of ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... side paddle wheel axle on the lower deck, but its mode of operation is unknown. Possibly it was of the jet type, with pumps operating off the paddle wheel axle and with a return of condensate from a hot well into the feed water line. A number of possibilities could be mentioned, all speculative. However, there was no doubt that this equipment could be properly installed in the reconstructed hull, either on the lower deck or in ...
— The Pioneer Steamship Savannah: A Study for a Scale Model - United States National Museum Bulletin 228, 1961, pages 61-80 • Howard I. Chapelle
... no theory, sir. Mr. Glenarm always warned me against theories. He said—if you will pardon me— there was great danger in the speculative mind.” ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... young father regarded the little face with amused, speculative eyes. "'Pert' does not commend itself to me as precisely the best word which could be found. Solemn little beggar, I call him! He seems quite oppressed by the wickedness of the world. I say, that's rather a peculiar mouth, isn't it? Something funny ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 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 in a manner so obscure, that nobody understood it. And leaving these speculative conundrums, in coming to the great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws, Coleridge did so little real work, that he left, as a res integra, to Dr. Alison, the capital argument that legal and adequate provision for the poor, whether impotent poor or poor accidentally out ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... she made her ablutions, soaping herself from head to foot, turning her head leisurely from time to time to survey her leafy environment, or watch the flight of some tiny woodland bird, or study with pretty and speculative eyes the soap-suds swirling in a ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... of the mind, which these new philosophers put forward as the solution of all human pursuits, rarely presents itself but to the speculative enquirer in his closet. The savage never dreams of it. The active man, engaged in the busy scenes of life, thinks little, and on rare occasions of himself, but much, and in a manner for ever, of the objects of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... at last rigged herself out a perfect guy at some cheap slop-shops in Market Street. And after all the care Jane and me took of her, giving up our time and experience to her, she never so much as made Jane a single present." Popular opinion, which regarded Mrs. Stiver's attention as purely speculative, was not shocked at this unprofitable denouement; but when Peg refused to give anything to clear the mortgage off the new Presbyterian church, and even declined to take shares in the Union Ditch, considered by many as an equally sacred and safe ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... tails, presumably by sitting upon them. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented and patented the entire business, including descent with modification, if such notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large's speculative intelligence. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker—a bystander. Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own,—these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity. But his interest in his particular role had been comparatively weak, and in analysing other individualities he had run some ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... operate as a safety-valve for the fanatical and visionary ferment which would otherwise burst forth and disturb society. In his remarks on the death of Duroc and in the reasons he alleged against suicide, both in calm and speculative discussion and in moments of strong emotion (such as occurred at Fontainbleau in 1814), he implied a belief both in fatality ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... of those three men, I was certain of obtaining consideration and influence in my own country. Besides, I found it very flattering to my vanity to become the subject of the speculative chattering of empty fools who, having nothing else to do, are always trying to find out the cause of every moral phenomenon they meet with, which ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Co. was the name of the brokerage firm that always handled Jadwin's rare speculative ventures. Converse was dead long since, but the firm still retained its original name. The house was as old and as well established as any on the Board of Trade. It had a reputation for conservatism, and was known more as a Bear than a Bull concern. It was immensely wealthy and immensely important. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Wilberforce, who had only yesterday achieved his second birthday, watched, with a speculative eye, his nurse. He was seated on the floor with his back to the high window that was flaming now with the light of the dying sun; his nurse was by the fire, her head, shadowed huge and fantastic on the wall, nodded and nodded and nodded. Ernest Henry ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... barks of his countrymen might yet be propelled, thus superseding the ponderous paddle of teak, He here expected to be involved in an intricate labyrinth of mechanical inventions,—in a stormy discussion on the comparative merits of rival machinery,—to be immersed in speculative but gigantic theories. He was elected an honorary member of a news-room; had his coat whitened with cotton; and was obliged to confess that he knew of no beverage that could equal their superb cold ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... his own account. To a great extent the same evils prevail now, but two things have tended to lessen them. Poor ores are now worked profitably which used to be neglected by the miners; and, as these ores occur in almost inexhaustible masses, their mining is a much less speculative affair than the old system of mining for rich veins. Moreover, the men are, in some of the largest mines, paid by the day, so that their life has become more regular. In many places, however, the work is still done on shares by the miners, who ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Alan Tremaine and Elisabeth Farringdon grew apace during the next twelve months. His mind was of the metaphysical and speculative order, which is interesting to all women; and hers was of the volatile and vivacious type which is attractive to some men. They discussed everything under the sun, and some things over it; they read the same books ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... gentleman as the gentleman was in him, the wastrel contemplated the river with grimly speculative eye. But when suddenly Borrodaile's sauntering figure came to a standstill near the lower end of the bench, the tramp turned his head and watched dully the gloveless hands cross one over the other on the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... forces seemed to tend contrariwise to big business practices. They took virtually their first step in "trust-busting" when they tried to break up the Northern Securities Company, which had been concocted to handle the celebrated Northern Pacific case. Labor troubles supervened. Many great speculative stock campaigns collapsed. The banks yielded to the imperative need to reduce credits. The year 1902 had almost experienced a widespread panic: but the marshaling of great private resources had restored confidence temporarily, and ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... he went on in the same speculative tone, "Mista God know allee bad things, allee same like Mista Yen ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the curious and speculative of the other sex in this city, just now, is the grand exposition of Lincoln dresses at the office of Mr. Brady, on Broadway, a few doors south of Houston street. The publicity given to the articles on exhibition and for sale has excited the public curiosity, and hundreds of people, ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... announced the small-pox. Inoculation was still with us considered very problematical; and, although it had already been intelligibly and urgently recommended by popular writers, the German physicians hesitated to perform an operation that seemed to forestall Nature. Speculative Englishmen, therefore, had come to the Continent, and inoculated, for a considerable fee, the children of such persons as were opulent, and free from prejudices. Still, the majority were exposed to the old disease: the infection raged through families, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and hurried into my boots so as to show decision taken, in the necessary interviews. They came of course - the interviews - and I explained what I was going to do at huge length, and stuck to my guns. I am glad to say the natives, with their usual (purely speculative) sense of justice highly approved the step after reflection. Meanwhile off went S. and I with the three CORPORA DELICTI; and a good job I went! Once, when our circus began to kick, we thought all was up; but we got them down all sound in wind and limb. I judged I was much ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "physician" who, speaking as a divinely-inspired prophet, advises Satyananda, the leader of "the children of the Mother," to abandon further resistance, since a temporary submission to British rule is a necessity; for Hinduism has become too speculative and unpractical, and the mission of the English in India is to teach Hindus how to reconcile theory and speculation with the facts of science. The general moral of the Ananda Math, then, is that British ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... "For the understanding speculative there are some general maxims and notions in the mind of man, which are the rules of discourse and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... a very simple explanation, I admit, and one within the scope of everybody: in itself a sufficient recommendation for any one who has neither the inclination nor the time to undertake a more thorough investigation. The popularity of certain speculative views is due entirely to the easy food which they provide for our curiosity. They save us much long and often irksome study; they impart a veneer of general knowledge. There is nothing that achieves such immediate success as an explanation of the riddle of the universe in a word or two. The thinker ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... Stamp Act imposed on the colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain, engrosses the conversation of the speculative part of the colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of taxation, as a direful attack upon their liberties, and loudly exclaim against the violation. What may be the result of this, and of some other (I think I may ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... him to require explanation, and the explanation is that this thing is the doing of some god. If the thing that arrests attention is some disaster, which calls for remedy, the community approaches the god with prayer and sacrifice; its object is practical, not speculative; and no myth arises. But if the thing that arrests attention is not one which calls for action, on the part of the community, but one which stimulates curiosity and provokes reflection, then the reflective answer to the question, ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... she said, after a while, looking at him with a speculative, deliberating air, "you've deduced and pieced this together. You've a ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... take part in their discussion; but it could scarcely be expected that, with his numerous other employments, he should really sound to their utmost depths the profundities of Greek thought, or understand the speculative difficulties which separated the various schools one from another. No doubt his knowledge was superficial, and there may have been ostentation in the parade which he made of it; but we must not deny him the praise of a quick, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... the soul, contemplation and practise, according to that general division of objects, some of which only entertain our speculation, others also employ our actions, so the understanding, with relation to these, not because of any distinction in the faculty itself, is accordingly divided into speculative and practical; in both of which the image of God was ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... atmosphere evoked by Vere and Phillida. It is impossible to describe the sunny charm they created about the commonplace. Our gay, simple breakfasts where Phillida presided in crisp middy blouse or flowered smock; where the gray cat sat on the arm of Vere's chair, speculative yellow eye observant of his master's carving, while the Swedish Cristina served us her good food with the spice of an occasional comment on farm or neighborhood events—how perfect a beginning for the ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... die, hate, love, With Hope to lead and help our eyes to see Through labour daily in dim mystery, Like those who in dense theatre and hall, When fire breaks out or weight-strained rafters fall, Towards some egress struggle doubtfully; Though we through silent midnight may address The mind to many a speculative page, Yearning to solve our wrongs and wretchedness, Yet duty and wise passiveness are won,— (So it hath been and is from age to age)— Though we be blind, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... results need to be stimulated or checked? Is it not the better rule to leave all these works to private enterprise, regulated and, when expedient, aided by the cooperation of States? If constructed by private capital the stimulant and the check go together and furnish a salutary restraint against speculative schemes and extravagance. But it is manifest that with the most effective guards there is danger of going too fast ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... histories, treatise after treatise; covering every realm of speculative investigation; every field of fact and fancy; of inspiration and deed, past and present, that in this 20th century of haste and bustle, of miraculous mechanical equipment, are born daily and die as quickly. But there are also books, that like some men marked ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... not it will remain lost for ever, with the material and origin of it, are things equally speculative at the present time. If the present purchaser is a collector, one would have expected the enquiries of Mr. Wace to have reached him through the dealers. He has been able to discover Mr. Cave's clergyman and "Oriental"—no other than the Rev. James Parker ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Spinoza's religious opinions. This afternoon Mr. D. came again; talked about the Trinity and other theological points. This evening, heard Prof. Silliman. I have nearly finished Fichte, and like him on the whole exceedingly, though I think he errs in placing the roots of the speculative in the practical reason. It seems to me that neither grows out of the other, but that they are coincident spheres. Still, there is a truth, a great truth, in what he says. It is true that action is often the most ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... was indeed great, but it had its limits, and these were not imposed by time or necessity, but by the unyielding will of his own prejudices. As his virtues were massive, so were his errors grievous. He ventured to grasp the great speculative themes of existence with a mind that was neither profound nor suggestive. He swam with all the wondrous ease of an athlete through the billows and across the currents and counter-currents of elegant literature, of politics, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... colonized by the French; and a French settler there, De Gronsseliers, an enterprising and speculative man, after travelling in various directions, reached a country, where he received information respecting Hudson's Bay: he therefore resolved to attempt to reach this bay by sea. In the course of this undertaking he met with ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... Abbey, and rode homewards, towards Handicap Lodge, in a melancholy and speculative mood. His first thoughts were all of Harry Wyndham. Frank, as the accepted suitor of his sister, had known him well and intimately, and had liked him much; and the poor young fellow had been much attached ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... parents and to rulers. His morality reaches its acme in the Golden Rule, which he gives, however, only in its negative relation: "Do not unto others what you would not that others should do unto you." Laou-tsze is a more speculative and mystical thinker. In his moral aphorisms, he approaches the theory of the ancient Stoics. TEH—i.e., virtue—is lauded. Teh proceeds from TAO. To explain what the Chinese sage means by Tao,—a word that signifies the "way,"—is ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... lady spent many evenings in Madame Magnotte's salon. The old Frenchwoman gossipped and wondered about her; but the most speculative could fashion no story from a page so blank as this joyless existence. Even slander could scarcely assail a creature so unobtrusive as the English boarder. The elderly ladies shrugged their shoulders and pursed ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... it sees, and turns everything it comes in contact with into dollars, cents, and republicanism. To such it is a mysterious power, moved by chemical agency. As for Littlejohn, he thought that in addition to our speculative spirit we should be governed by modesty, an example of which his forefathers had set us. This he recommended on the principle of a gentleman who keeps up his dignity, gaining one half his object through the influence ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... purpose he arranged three grades of ascent, viz., the three intellects spoken of above, the material or possible intellect, the acquired intellect (this is the actual functioning of the possible intellect and the result thereof) and the active intellect. The second intellect is partly speculative or theoretical and partly practical. The theoretical intellect studies and contemplates all intelligible existents which are separate from matter. There is nothing practical in this contemplation, it is just the knowledge of existents and their causes. This is ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... in this essay, it interested them both. There was nothing which gave the least reason to suspect insanity on the part of the writer, whoever he or she might be. There were references to suicide, it is true, but they were of a purely speculative nature, and did not look to any practical purpose in that direction. Besides, if the stranger were the author of the paper, he certainly would not choose a sheet of water like Cedar Lake to perform ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... after this, I published a book called 'Creeds of the Day.' My purpose was to show, in a popular form, the bearings of science and speculative thought upon the religious creeds of the time. I sent Owen a copy of the work. He wrote me one of the most interesting letters I ever received. He had bought the book, and had read it. But the important content of the letter was the confession of his own faith. I have purposely excluded all correspondence ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... wonderful works of God. Of course the mountains are wonderful enough; but they make me feel that humanity plays a very trifling part in the mind and purpose of God. I do not think that if I were a preacher of the Gospel, and had a speculative turn, I should care to take a holiday among the mountains. I should be beset by a dreary wonder whether the welfare of humanity was a thing very dear to God at all. I should feel very strongly what the Psalmist said, "What is man that Thou art mindful ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... intended for speculative purposes. Thus, there were instances in which a line occupying a given territory had antagonized its patrons by poor service, and extortionate charges. Thereupon another company would obtain a charter—which was ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... in business affairs. Already, before the European trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary ventures. He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income. The old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless mining days, always possessed him. There were no silver mines in the East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but there were plenty of equivalents—inventions, stock companies, and the like. He had begun by ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... scholar has been protected by his definitely directed life from the temptations of this speculative equity; and I believe his writings to contain the truest expression yet given in England of the feelings with which a Christian gentleman of sense and learning should regard the art produced in ancient days, by the dawn of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... fastened his keen, speculative eyes upon his anticipated prey, as he replied, slowly, "Cost?—can't say to a certainty; thousand francs do ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Labour and Rest in the lower Part of Mankind, make their Being pass away with that Sort of Relish which we express by the Word Comfort; and should be treated of by you, who are a SPECTATOR, as well as such Subjects which appear indeed more speculative, but are less instructive. In a word, Sir, I would have you turn your Thoughts to the Advantage of such as want you most; and shew that Simplicity, Innocence, Industry and Temperance, are Arts which lead to Tranquility, as much as Learning, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... made to put down this dangerous revolt. Pompey was still in Spain. The only man at home of any military reputation was the praetor Crassus, who had amassed an enormous fortune by buying up property at famine prices during the Proscription of Sulla, and in speculative measures since. ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... money had come to Philip Crane. The gambler spirit, that was his of inheritance, had an instinctive truth as allied to finance; but, unfortunately for Philip Crane, chance and a speculative restlessness led him amongst men who commenced with the sport of kings. With acute precipitancy he was separated from the currency that had come to him. The process was so rapid that his racing experience was of little avail as an asset, so he committed ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... full of eyes, and all his eyes are full of light. It does not stagger me to hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty mind,' or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen,' and 'the blessed Behmen.' 'In speculative power,' says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system surpasses everything of the kind ever written.' Some of his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON ploughed with ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... average in the 1970s, and a 4% average in the 1980s. Growth slowed markedly in the 1990s largely because of the aftereffects of overinvestment during the late 1980s and contractionary domestic policies intended to wring speculative excesses from the stock and real estate markets. Government efforts to revive economic growth have met little success and were further hampered in late 2000 by the slowing of the US and Asian economies. The crowding of ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... gods on painted ceilings have no such ties, acting beautifully by their very nature; and here on the floor of the world one had them and one had to make the best of them.... Are we making the best of them? Mr. Brumley was off again. That last thought opened the way to speculative wildernesses, and into these Mr. Brumley went wandering with a novel desperate enterprise to find a kind of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... systematise what has been hitherto either empirical observation, or the establishment of critical rules on a false basis. I know but of one exception to this sweeping censure, and that is the essay on the Philosophy of Style, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, [Spencer's ESSAYS: SCIENTIFIC, POLITICAL, AND SPECULATIVE. First Series. 1858]. where for the first time, I believe, the right method was pursued of seeking in psychological conditions for the true ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the pet nickname he had bestowed on the younger Miss Horneck—the heroine of the speculative romance just mentioned; "Little Comedy" was her sister; "the Captain in lace" their brother, who was in the Guards. No doubt Mrs. Horneck and her daughters were very pleased to have with them on this Continental trip so distinguished a person as Dr. Goldsmith; and he must have ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... all about this sort of thing, for he had seen it occur over and over again in Ballarat and Melbourne. So many came to the web and never got out alive, yet fresh flies were always to be found. Vandeloup was of a speculative nature himself, and had he been possessed of any surplus cash would, no doubt, have risked it in the jugglery of the share market, but as he had none to spare he stood back and amused himself with looking at the 'spider and the fly' business which was constantly ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Rentowels) maintained his character with the common people, although he preached the practical fruits of Christian faith, as well as its abstract tenets, and was respected by the higher orders, notwithstanding he declined soothing their speculative errors by converting the pulpit of the gospel into a school of heathen morality. Perhaps it is owing to this mixture of faith and practice in his doctrine, that, although his memory has formed a sort of era in the annals of Cairnvreckan, so that the parishioners, to denote what ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... spot from whence he wandered. Thus the land of Philosophy consists partly of an open champaign country, passable by every common understanding, and partly of a range of woods, traversable only by the speculative, and where they too frequently delight to amuse themselves. Since then we shall be obliged to make incursions into this latter tract, and shall probably find it a region of obscurity, danger, and difficulty, it behoves us to use our utmost endeavours ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... to draw a comparison between an ordinary roadside inn in England and its synonym up in the country of America; a better parallel is a speculative railway tavern verging always on bankruptcy. There is an utter absence of the old-fashioned coziness which enables you easily to dispense with luxuries. You enter at once into a stifling, stove heated bar-room, defiled with all nicotine ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... There are few records of acquaintanceship with any of his distinguished contemporaries, except the chemist Thomas Thomson, who became a lifelong friend. He probably made acquaintance with Brougham, and may have known Jeffrey; but he was not a member of the Speculative Society, joined by most ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... them? Some, it is said, from the Chaldaeans; but whence did they reach the Chaldaeans? To this we shall return later, but, as to early Greek star-lore, Goguet, the author of 'L'Origine des Lois,' a rather learned but too speculative work of the last century, makes the following characteristic remarks: 'The Greeks received their astronomy from Prometheus. This prince, as far as history teaches us, made his observations on Mount Caucasus.' That was the eighteenth century's method ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... nature and honesty lose, hence the more thrift to the former, and the less gain, pecuniarily considered, to the latter. The subject is very prolific, and as my present purpose is as much to point a humorous sketch as to adorn a moral, I needs must cut speculative philosophistics for facts, in the case of my friend John Jenks, an emphatic—"used up" ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... little court of Mademoiselle with so many discreetly flattering pen-portraits, has left two badly written and curiously spelled notes upon the merits of Socrates and Epictetus, which throw a ray of light upon the tastes of this aristocratic and rather speculative circle. Mme. de Sable writes an essay upon the education of children, which is very much talked about, also a characteristic paper upon friendship. The latter is little more than a series of detached sentences, but it indicates the drift of her thought, and might have ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... have to relate great social or speculative changes, the overthrow of a monarchy or the establishment of a creed, they do but half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... children filed out, every head turning for a last unpleasingly speculative look at the outlaw. Then Miss Spence closed the door into the cloakroom and that into the big hall, and came and sat at her desk, near Penrod. The tramping of feet outside, the shrill calls and shouting and the changing voices of the older boys ceased to be heard—and ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... be no prosperous and permanent revival of business and industries until a policy is adopted—with legislation to carry it out—looking to a return to a specie basis. It is easy to conceive that the debtor and speculative classes may think it of value to them to make so-called money abundant until they can throw a portion of their burdens upon others. But even these, I believe, would be disappointed in the result if a course should be pursued which ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... tons. An inch fall or rise in the barometer shows that this load is lightened or increased, sometimes in a few hours, by nearly 1,000 pounds; and no notice is taken of it, except by the meteorologist, or by the speculative physician, seeking the subtle causes of epidemic and endemic complaints. At Dorjiling (7,400 feet), this load is reduced to less than 2,500 pounds, with no appreciable result whatever on the frame, however suddenly it be transported to that elevation. And ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... year 1695, a number of savans associated in Paris for the purpose of procuring information respecting the American Indians. They were called shortly The Theoretical and Speculative Society of Paris, but their title at large was The Society for Prosecuting Researches in the Western Hemisphere, and for procuring Speculations to be made, and Theories drawn up, of the Origin and History of its Ancient ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... sight Of cosmic grandeur of the universe, A sense of vague and overwhelming awe; Of inconceivable immensity, The being's inmost recess permeates; And man, the atom in comparison, In spellbound admiration, mutely stands; With speculative meditation, dwells On that most solemn of impressive thoughts, The goodness of the Deity ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... lectures I wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to keep free from all speculative complications. Nevertheless, I do not wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count myself a materialist. I cannot see how ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... Brewster adds his testimony as follows: "Geology does not pretend to give us any information respecting the process by which the nucleus of the earth was formed. Some speculative astronomers indeed have presumptuously embarked in such an inquiry; but there is not a trace of evidence that the solid nucleus of the globe was formed by secondary causes, such as the aggregation of attenuated matter diffused through space; ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... islands." Having spent thirty years in that country, he has much knowledge of it and of its moral and social conditions, and much experience in ecclesiastical government. "He was very learned in theology, whether speculative or practical, moral or scholastic; and very expert in the despatch of business." He is aided in his duties by Fray Raymundo Berart, very learned in canon and civil law, who has left great opportunities of advancement in Espana "to come to this poor ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... anthropomorphic divinity. Archaic, predatory human nature is not satisfied with abstruse conceptions of a dissolving personality that shades off into the concept of quantitative causal sequence, such as the speculative, esoteric creeds of Christendom impute to the First Cause, Universal Intelligence, World Soul, or Spiritual Aspect. As an instance of a cult of the character which the habits of mind of the athlete and the delinquent require, may be cited ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... the material universe, rediscovering a lost interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the many. The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven and a new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a new birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell; worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity which Christianity had ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... none to bring him to an account, except some rival, who could only attack him on those practical subjects which were known to both. Independently of this, there was a good-natured collusion between them on those points which were beyond their knowledge, inasmuch as they were not practical but speculative, and by no means involved their character or personal interests. On the next Sunday, therefore, after Mat's establishment at Findrainore, you might see a circle of the peasantry assembled at the chapel door, perusing, with suitable reverence and admiration on their faces, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... good fish in the sea as has ever been caught, as I told her," said the first woman, with speculative ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... things, dear, and stand to me for your back hair. I think I could make a really good effect with your back hair." Peggy put her head on one side and stared at the flaxen mane in speculative fashion. "A long muslin gown—a wreath of flowers—a bunch of lilies in your hands! If you weren't so fat, you would do splendiforously for Ophelia. I might manage it, perhaps, if I took you from the back, with your head turned over your shoulder, so as to show only the profile. Like ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... which present themselves respecting the objects in this planet; for not the millionth part of her surface has yet been explored, and we have been more desirous of collecting the greatest possible number of new facts than of indulging in speculative theories, however seductive to ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... with his eye half closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to make a "haul" or a "clean up." It was evidently simply a matter of the head, and as far as one could judge, Jeff's own was the very type required. I don't know just at what time or how Jefferson first began his speculative enterprises. It was probably in him from the start. There is no doubt that the very idea of such things as Traction Stock and Amalgamated Asbestos went to his head: and whenever he spoke of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... tried; but they do not care to be told how M. Waddington has emended the Monumentum Ancyranum, what connection there was between Mariana and Milton, or between Penn and Rousseau, or who invented the proverb Vox Populi Vox Dei. Sir Erskine May's reluctance to deal with matters speculative and doctrinal, and to devote his space to the mere literary history of politics, has made his touch somewhat uncertain in treating of the political action of Christianity, perhaps the most complex and comprehensive question that can embarrass a historian. He disparages ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
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