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More "Tendency" Quotes from Famous Books



... rather cool and curt manner towards their new passengers but in the course of a day or two visibly thawed. The captain afterwards, in explanation, stated that from information he had received in regard to the Australians he had expected to find in them an absence of discipline and a tendency to "smash things." He was now agreeably surprised to discover them so tractable and well-behaved—comparing them in a most favourable manner with ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett

... rencontre, would be your fate in the thrust of a sword, or the pulling of a trigger—I therefore prefer to apologise; and I call Desborough, if he has recovered his wits, to bear evidence that I do apologise for having suspected you, who are completely the slave of your own vanity, of any tendency, however slight, towards grace or good sense. And I farther apologise for the time that I have wasted in endeavouring to wash an Ethiopian white, or in recommending rational ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... with that in view. What she doubted was, whether a quarter of them would ever carry out their intention; and this was one thing which, favoring on the whole as she did the elective system, she could but acknowledge told against it,—the uncertainty which their youth, and the natural tendency of a girl's mind to change, gave. She had known them in one year, or even a shorter time, an enthusiast in one profession, then, becoming tired of it, and sure another was more suited to their abilities, turn ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins

... affects the breathing at first. In some it causes an oppression on the chest. On me, it had little effect, if any; and at all events, the feeling goes off, after the first month or so. There is a general tendency to nervous irritation, and to inflammatory complaints, and during September and October, on account of the heavy rains and the drained lakes on which part of the city is built, there is said to be a good deal of ague. Since the time of the cholera in 1833, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... little, this turbulence has calmed down—perhaps it was never very great. Little by little I have come to realize that if following Dionysus induces the will to bound and leap, devotion to Apollo has a tendency to throw the mind back until it rests upon the harmony of eternal form. There is ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... dependent upon some circumstance, you are compelled to understand the words according to their strictly literal meaning. Thus, if our Lord, instead of saying what he did in this case, had used such an expression as this,—"If thy right hand offend thee, and if the tendency to offend be insuperable, cut it off;" or, "If thy right eye offend thee, and its extraction would not endanger life, pluck it out," it is clear that the expressions could only have been taken in their strictly literal sense. So, in the words under review, it is also ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... polite, much more so than most American children in similar schools. They certainly appreciated warmly what we were doing for them and were most anxious to do as the children do in American schools. They lacked the life and tendency to mischief of American children. After a few weeks there was little trouble about discipline or order, and they learned to control themselves better and to pay better attention. It took months to break the habit of studying aloud, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 4, October, 1900 • Various

... matter of such diverse usage that it is difficult to generalize regarding it. The tendency seems at present to be in the direction of using the slur (in instrumental music) as a phrase-mark exclusively, it being understood that unless there is some direction to the contrary, the tones are to be performed in a ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens

... his opposite qualities. Fragile and somewhat delicate, was he seduced by the strength and dexterity which his friend exhibited in all his exercises? Timid and naturally taciturn, was he governed by the assurance of that athlete with the loud laugh, with the invincible energy? Did the surprising tendency toward art which the other one showed conquer him, as well as sympathy for the misfortunes which were confided to him and which touched him more than they touched him ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... wife, whom he had passionately loved, and by whom he had had an only son. With those same metallic powders he had wrought considerable havoc with the health of his son also, which, on the contrary, he had wished to reinforce, as he detected in his organisation anaemia and a tendency to consumption inherited from his mother. The title of "magician" he had acquired, among other things, from the fact that he considered himself a great-grandson—not in the direct line, of course—of the famous Bruce, in whose honour he had named his son Yakoff.[51] He was the sort of ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... the hope of an hour or two's release as the fruit of diligence. The performance of every hand tended accordingly to be standardized at the customary accomplishment of the weakest and slowest members of the group. This tendency, however, was almost equally strong in ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... pronunciation of French names. In general, the French distribute the accent pretty evenly among all the syllables of their words. We mark an accent on the final syllable, chiefly in order to correct a natural English tendency to slight that syllable in pronunciation. In a few cases, we let a well-established English pronunciation stand. N notes a peculiar nasal sound, ue, a peculiar vowel sound, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... reins, she seems to have yielded on all occasions with little scruple, and as little delicacy. She appears in the strongest sense a voluptuary and sensualist, but without refinement. We compassionate her errors, and respect her talents; but our compassion is lessened by the mischievous tendency of her doctrines and example; and our respect is certainly not extended or improved by her exclaiming against prejudices of some of the most dangerous of which she was herself perpetually the victim, by her praises of virtue, the sanctity of which she habitually violated, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... the old fashioned system of examination marks based on a hundred per cent scale, shows herself out of touch not only with the Scouting spirit, but with the whole trend of modern education today. When the tendency of great universities is distinctly toward substituting psychological tests for examinations, when the United States Army picks its officers by such tests, it would be absurd for a young people's recreational movement to ...
— The Girl Scouts Their History and Practice • Anonymous

... brotherhood; but a word in his ear from Pisen-face Lynch convinced Fellowes that it would be well to run straight. Fate had snatched him from behind the bar to carry out a part not unconnected with certain schemes of Judson Eells and any tendency to run out on his trusting backers would be visited with summary punishment. At least that was what he gathered in the brief moment they had together before Lynch gave him the ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge

... engineering; and still more by a subaqueous explosion of powder by the means of the voltaic battery—"a method by which Colonel Pasley was engaged near Portsmouth in raising a vessel which had sunk there." It would be hardly fair to surmise the probable tendency of the Khan's secret thoughts on thus witnessing the care bestowed on the training of those destined hereafter to maintain the Feringhi yoke on his native country; but he expressed himself highly gratified by all that he saw; and we find him, shortly after, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... palaeographical differences mark a tendency which reaches fuller development in later uncial manuscripts, it is clear that their presence in our manuscript is a sign of its more recent character as compared with manuscripts of the oldest type. Just as our manuscript is clearly older than the Codex Fuldensis ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand

... or Ferragus, is, of course, another, though a somewhat minor example—Collin or Vautrin being the chief—of that strange tendency to take intense interest in criminals, which seems to be a pretty constant eccentricity of many human minds, and which laid an extraordinary grasp on the great French writers of Balzac's time. I must confess, though it may sink me very low in some eyes, that I have never been able to ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... woman in the world to commit a morbid or ill-regulated act. But the act she was meditating now was one which seemed like the act of insanity. Yet had Hetty never in her life seemed farther removed from any such tendency. She was calm, cheerful, self-contained. If any one saw any change in her, it seemed like nothing more than the natural increase of quiet and decorum coming with her increased age. Even her husband, when he looked back on these months, trying in anguish to remember every day, every ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson

... tack. As soon as these changes have been made, away spins the little fairy bark on her new course, but always keeping the same side, or that on which the out-rigger is placed to windward. It will be easily understood that the pressure of the sail has a tendency to lift the weight at the extremity of the out-rigger above the surface of the water. In sailing along, therefore, the log just skims the tops of the waves, but scarcely ever buries itself in them, so that little or no interruption to the velocity of the canoe is caused by the out-rigger. When ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... wonder why the mouse should have any tendency to enter B, and why after so doing, it should trouble to go further, knowing, as it does from previous experiences, that entering one of the electric-boxes may result in discomfort. The fact is, a dancer has no very constant tendency to go from ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... treat the people as a herd of sheep the purpose of which is to serve as food for parasites is still very strong; but this tendency no longer goes unchallenged; it is being met with tremendous opposition; increased social knowledge and revolutionary ideas have taught the workingmen to unite their efforts against those who have been comfortably seated on their backs ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... illuminated with electric light, and the marble dining hall was extravagantly lurid. Had X. consulted his convenience he would certainly have worn his black sun spectacles, but actually feared to alarm his followers by exhibiting any further tendency to eccentricity on their first day in a strange country, and so he resigned himself to blink owlishly throughout the meal. The absence of a punkah, a necessity to which he was accustomed, was also a trial. However, there ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... A natural tendency of the youthful mind to comparative physiology had discovered a fancied resemblance which justified any graceful personalities of this kind; but Langton probably felt that candour had its limits, and that this was a question that required judgment ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... be said to be the case in a cold, raw night in November, when mankind has a tendency to become chronically cross out of doors, and nature, generally, looks lugubrious; for, just in proportion as the exterior world grows miserably chill, the world "at home," with its blazing gas, its drawn curtains, its crackling ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... heart of one anxious parent, I shall feel a much higher gratification in reflecting on this trifling performance, than could possibly result from the applause which might attend the most elegant finished piece of literature whose tendency might deprave the ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... body is not striking either for its beauty or its strength or suppleness. The breasts, except with girls of a very tender age, become deformed, and very pendant, and the great tendency to fatness rather interferes with the artistic ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... which others esteem holy. Examples, familiar to those versed in books, are therefore omitted. The dangerous side of this so-called philosophy did not lie so much in isolated expressions as in its whole tendency to cripple the spirit and harden the heart, so that victory might be rendered more sure and easy to the cunning talker, who strove, not for the cause of truth, but for his own private advantage. In the school of the clear-seeing, free-speaking Romans Zwingli soon ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

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

... establish an artist's reputation, made me understand that persistent toil and a thorough knowledge of the craft, might, in some happy hour of lucidity, power, and enthusiasm, by the fortunate occurrence of a subject in perfect concord with the tendency of our mind, lead to the production of a single work, short but as perfect as we can make it. Then I learned to see that the best-known writers have hardly ever left us more than one such volume; and that needful ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... Secondly, in doing this, we hope to treat design itself as an essential part of good workmanship. During the last century most of the arts, save painting and sculpture of an academic kind, were little considered, and there was a tendency to look on "design" as a mere matter of appearance. Such "ornamentation" as there was was usually obtained by following in a mechanical way a drawing provided by an artist who often knew little of the technical processes involved in production. With the critical attention ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher

... a strong proof of the diffusive tendency of every thing in this country, that America never yet collected a fleet. Nothing is wanting to this display of power but the will. But a fleet requires only one commander, and a feeling is fast spreading in the country that we ought to be all commanders; unless the spirit of ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... a strong taste for music, I was much attracted by choral singing; and on Sundays and in the evenings I tried to copy out airs from different books, and accustomed my hand a little to writing. This tendency was, however, choked within me by too much work with the cattle, and by other farm labour. In a word, I had but little fair weather in my search for knowledge. One thing enticed me from another, to the detriment of my plans; some fair Eve often standing with an apple ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... diabolical harpoon and dragged away in triumph. Popular opinion seems to have been divided as to the reason for the devil's particular attention to Father Jose, some asserting that the extreme piety of the Padre excited the Evil One's animosity, and others that his adipose tendency simply rendered him, from a professional ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte

... himself, but in the Prince such an attitude struck him as unbecoming. Then he cheered up. After all, John had given evidence of having a certain amount of what he would have called "get-up" in him. For the purposes for which he needed him, a tendency to make light of things was not amiss. It was essentially as a performing prince that he had engaged John. He wanted him to do unusual things, which would make people talk—aeroplaning was one that occurred to him. Perhaps a prince who took a serious view ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... is so insidious in its approach, and so distressing, and often fatal, in its consequences, that the form of its commencement ought to be known to all individuals who are liable to its attacks, either from an hereditary tendency, or other causes. When it commences in the glands about the neck, behind the ears, in the arm-pits, hams, &c., it appears as hard and indolent swellings, somewhat moveable under the skin, the colour of which is little ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent

... there is already discernible a tendency to diarrhoea and dysentery. The men are living principally upon salt meat, and there is a lack of vegetables. I have been here since Sunday and have tasted fresh meat but once since that time. I am only one of the many. Of course the worst has passed for the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... anything Elizabeth Eliza had a terror of it was a June-bug. She had heard that they had a tendency to get into the hair. One had been caught in the hair of a friend of hers, who had long, luxuriant hair. But the legs of the June-bug were caught in it like fishhooks, and it had to be cut out, and the June-bug was only extricated by sacrificing large masses ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various

... by the present. It is not possible to secure instant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification. This is so evidently true with regard to the whole of our existence, that all the precepts of theology have no other tendency than to enforce a life of faith; a life regulated not by our senses but our belief; a life in which pleasures are to be refused for fear of invisible punishments, and calamities sometimes to be sought, and always endured, in hope of rewards ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... he said, "you are too clever to fall into the common error of women, and idealize your lover. The tendency is a constituent part of the feminine nature, it is true. The average woman will idealize the old tweed coat on her lover's back. But your eyes are too clear for that sort of thing. I am a very ordinary young man, my dear. Becky ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... the cumulative wisdom of the world, becomes obedient; as a woman becomes great she grows disdainful and rebellious. Thus it is that while in the common walks of life woman is infinitely purer than man, as we ascend into the higher realms, whether in art, letters or statecraft, we discover a tendency to reverse this law until we often find great men anchorites and great women trampling on the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... inscribed Mark Twain's definition of a gentleman. He hasn't got the definition—he has only heard of it, and he wants me to tell him in which one of my books or speeches he can find it. I couldn't think, when I read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but shaving somehow has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all came ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... when she realized the tendency of Dion's mind. Fear made her clairvoyant. There were moments when she seemed to look into that mind as into a room through an open window, to see the thoughts as living things going about their business. There was something appalling in this man's brooding desire to strike ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... Holy Virgin aid you," she said gently. Yet, as she passed out of the door, with a grateful smile, a characteristic reaction came over Key. His romantic belief in the interposition of Providence was not without a tendency to apply the ordinary rules of human evidence to such phenomena. Sister Seraphina's application to him seemed little short of miraculous interference; but what if it were only a trick to get rid of him, while the girl, whose escapade ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte

... the effects upon human character, produced by the face of different countries, we might expect to find, in the Indian, among other things, a strong tendency toward poetical thought, embodied, not in the mode of expression usually denominated poetry, but in the style of his addresses, the peculiarities of his theories, or the construction of his mythology, language, ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... his sister. Mrs. Bolton was certainly not addicted to papistical observances, nor was she at all likely to recommend the seclusion of her daughter in a convent. All her religious doctrines were those of the Low Church. But she had a tendency to arrive at similar results by other means. She was so afraid of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that she would fain shut up her child so as to keep her from the reach of all evil. Vowed celibacy was abominable to her, because it was the resource of ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... at chapel twice every Sunday, and at prayer-meetings as often through the week as Musgrave chose to take him. To this he held. The Squire's pheasants suffered no longer, and Tommy's big lurcher displayed a tendency towards virtue which earned him the admiration of all the gamekeepers on the estate. Efforts were made to get the big man to pray at the ordinary love-feasts that were held in connection with the chapel, ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman

... the general tenour and tendency of the tales and traditions of the Ainos wear a widely different aspect from that which characterises the folk-lore of Japan. The Ainos, in their humble way, are addicted to moralising and to speculating on the origin of things. A perusal of the following tales will show that a surprisingly ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain

... more general word socialism might be divided into three distinct classes, namely: the political party, the theoretical socialist, and last what might be called a general tendency. ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever

... the strength of her love to God that made her unhappy in being thus barred out from him. It was rather the check thus given to the whole upward tendency of her being, with its multitude of undefined hopes and longings now drawing nigh to the birth. It was in her ideal self rather than her conscious self that her misery arose. And now, dearly as she loved Mr Cowie, she began to doubt whether ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... to win all the persons who approached her, mistresses and comrades, and she began to practise that continued comedy of attitude and of sentiment to which the fatal desire to please, so quickly leads-that charming and dangerous tendency which borders much less on goodness than falseness. At eighteen, submitted to a sort of continual cabotinage, Lydia was, beneath the most attractive exterior, a being profoundly, though unconsciously, wicked, capable of very little affection—she loved no one truly but her brother—open ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... but that it is nearly always possible to foresee every consequence with unfailing certainty. Moreover, because of the reduction of forces there is no call to take very many variations into consideration. This explains why there is a tendency in modern master play to enforce the exchange of pieces, as soon as there is the slightest advantage sufficient to bring about one of the elementary end- game positions, in which the win ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker

... Beatrice, on a note of commiseration. And if the corners of her mouth betrayed a tendency to curve upwards, she immediately compelled them down. "But perhaps he does not speak Italian ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... and secluded lakes of Wisconsin were held in esteem or fear by the northern tribes, and it was the now-forgotten events and superstitions connected with them, not less than the frontier tendency for strong names, that gave a lurid and diabolical nomenclature to parts of this region. Devils, witches, magicians, and manitous were perpetuated, and Indians whose prowess was thought to be supernatural left dim ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a slight gasping and contest against chocking, that seemed to me a perfect convulsion; for I suppose the tendency to choke and sneeze is always enhanced by the circumstance that one's life may depend on keeping still, just as yawning becomes irresistible where to yawn would be social ruin, and just as one is sure to sleep in church, if one sits in a conspicuous pew. At other ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... is necessary to acquire the right action of the hands, there being always a tendency, the same as in tatting and macrame, to confuse the movements of the two. As soon as you realize that the upward drawing of the needle and the downward pressure of the stuff with the thimble must be simultaneous, you will find that you can work with great rapidity and with admirable ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont

... judge of a horse. When the cob was stabled, and the farmer came to the inn to have a drink, he was forced to admit a tendency to cow hocks, which, it would seem, is held a fatal ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy

... will always prevent disease. It is the natural incidence of the law of cause and effect that man, collectively, cannot expect to go through life unmolested by disturbances of health. From the very outset the tendency to disease is inherited; and indeed today, although we have now learned how to combat the enemy, yet opposing hosts are seen to be so vast and strongly entrenched about us that we realize to some ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... who are superior in age and wisdom, it is incumbent, more than on your brothers, to be cautious that nothing of a contrary tendency may arise; for, in all disputes, he that is the stronger, even though he receive the injury, appears, because his power is greater, to have inflicted it. And do you, Adherbal and Hiempsal, respect and regard a kinsman of such a character; imitate his virtues, ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust

... if my pink silk was too much. Something a little more austere, in the velvet or alpaca line, might have been more appropriate to the occasion. Still, there was a rosy brightness about my silk that had a tendency to give a glow of youthful thoughtlessness to intelligence, and combine an idea ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

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

... the doctors told us that she might die in one of these attacks, so that we did all in our power to avoid these terrible accidents. My mother knew this, and rather took advantage of it, and, as I had inherited this tendency to fits of rage from her, I could not and did not wish to live with her. As for me, I am not placid. I am active and always ready for fight, and what I want I always want immediately. I have not the gentle obstinacy peculiar to my mother. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... include everything that can be said against the west front of the minster. Gothic churches have often been noble and triumphant works of art in spite of errors almost as grave. Unfortunately the west front suffers from a tendency first beginning to show itself in the middle of the fourteenth century, which afterwards became the most serious drawback of the whole Perpendicular style. It is not only because the porches do not project that it appears flat and thin. The ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock

... continued Martin, in his quick and rather heedless way, "that we Poles are under a cloud in Europe now. We are the wounded man by the side of the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and there is a tendency to pass by on the other side. We are a nation with a bad want, and it is nobody's business to satisfy it. Everybody is ready, however, to admit that we have ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... gilds exhibited in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a tendency to split somewhat along the present lines of capital and labor. On the one hand the old gild organization would be usurped and controlled by the wealthier master-workmen, called "livery men," because they wore rich uniforms, or a class ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... see here the beginning of that tendency of the Neoplatonic school to find a sanction for all their theories in some perversion of the plain ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... intellectual equipment of the average Englishman to which I have referred; for unless they had habitually only half-listened, half-read, half-understood, there could be no need for their undergoing a course of instruction late in life. Surely it is more sensible to check this peculiarly English tendency to mental laziness quite early in life, as Mr. Chittenden did with his boys. To my mind another striking characteristic of the average English man and woman is their want of observation. They don't ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... to be noticed. The first is derived from the Christian religion, which admits only of two classes of spirits, exclusive of the souls of men—Angels, namely, and Devils. This doctrine had a necessary tendency to abolish the distinction among subordinate spirits, which had been introduced by the superstitions of the Scandinavians. The existence of the Fairies was readily admitted; but, as they had no pretensions to the angelic character, they ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... of Baraguan, of Carichana, of Uniama, of Calitamini, and of Sipapo, successively appear. This sketch may serve to give a general idea of the geological configuration of the ground. We recognize everywhere on the globe a tendency toward regular forms, in those mountains that appear the most irregularly grouped. Every link appears, in a transverse section, like a distinct summit, to those who navigate the Orinoco; but this division ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... syphilis is employed, but on account of the tendency of potassium iodide to increase the oedema of the larynx, this drug must at first be used with caution. Intubation or tracheotomy may be called for on account of sudden urgent dyspnoea or of increasing stenosis. The ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... caught up the princess to throw her into the chancellor's barge. He lost his balance, however, and, dropping into the bottom of the barge, lost his hold of his daughter; not, however, before imparting to her the downward tendency of his own person, though in a somewhat different direction; for, as the king fell into the boat, she fell into the water. With a burst of delightful laughter she disappeared in the lake. A cry of horror ascended from the boats. They had never seen the princess go down before. Half ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald

... the Russian priesthood of the present time, we must call to mind this severe school through which it has passed, and we must also take into consideration the spirit which has been for centuries predominant in the Eastern Church—I mean the strong tendency both in the clergy and in the laity to attribute an inordinate importance to the ceremonial element of religion. Primitive mankind is everywhere and always disposed to regard religion as simply a mass of mysterious rites which have a secret magical power of averting evil in this world and securing ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... with great care, and were the best of their kind to be had—popular science, history, and biography, with a large, a very large, proportion of such fiction as had a tendency to elevate and instruct, while it interested, its readers. The books were not to be taken from the building, except upon rare occasions and under peculiar circumstances; but the reading-room, which was nicely carpeted, well warmed, and furnished ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow

... shapeless stains, the colour-box may be taken away till it knows better: but as soon as it begins painting red coats on soldiers, striped flags to ships, etc., it should have colours at command; and, without restraining its choice of subject in that imaginative and historical art, of a military tendency, which children delight in, (generally quite as valuable, by the way, as any historical art delighted in by their elders,) it should be gently led by the parents to try to draw, in such childish fashion as may be, the things it can see and likes,—birds, or butterflies, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... increasing civilisation, to prepare it the more easily the denser the population becomes. Carey, an eminent American economist, has pointed this out, and has thereby shown that the otherwise indisputably operative natural law, according to which a species has an inevitable tendency to outgrow its means of sustenance, does not apply to man. The fact that want and misery have, notwithstanding, hitherto always operated as checks upon the growth of the population is not the result of a natural ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... frequent rests are much better than long stops, which have a tendency to stiffen the muscles. The walker on a long tramp must pay especial attention to the care of his feet. They should be bathed frequently in cold water to which a little alum has been added. A rough place or crease in the stocking will sometimes ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller

... in his mouth, partly to show every one around how cool this inferno had left him, and partly to steady his nerves. But just as he was striking the match, a violent desire to laugh assailed him. He suppressed this tendency towards hysterics, but he shook so much that it was impossible to light the cigarette, and in the end he ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"

... seemed to me to have as much interest in watching the people who passed to and fro as in the shops. He amused himself by wondering where this one was going and what that one was doing. With his usual tendency, he chose to imagine they were all bent on mischief or folly, and because they happened to be in a certain street, and because in that street he had frequently heard some of his fellow- students speak of a low theatre, he jumped to the conclusion that every one ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed

... mortal could read, and to which no mortal could listen. I remember, that, though that not very amiable individual has outlived such wits as he once had, he has not outlived the unbecoming emotions of envy and jealousy; and he retains a strong tendency to evil-speaking and slandering. You told me, unamiable individual, how disgusted you were at hearing a friend of mine, who is one of the best preachers in Britain, preach one of his finest sermons. Perhaps you really were disgusted: there is such a thing as casting pearls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... German corps. This is not quite exact. Of nearly thirteen thousand men in the corps, only forty-five hundred were Germans. But it must be admitted that so many officers high in rank were of that nationality, that the general tendency and feeling were decidedly unlike the rest of the army. Moreover, there is not wanting testimony to show that there were some who wore shoulder-straps in the corps who gave evidence of having taken up the profession of arms to make ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge

... farm I gave some hint as to the causes which have kept us from building a better house hitherto. Some day we shall have one, of course; or, possibly, we shall have more than one, for some of our chums have been showing a tendency towards matrimony of late; and if any of us marry they must have houses of their own, I suppose. We should need a barrack else, you understand, for families ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... several life and fire insurance companies, banks, two or three railroads, and several industrials are controlled. We found that the anatomy of Big Business was strikingly like that of Tammany Hall: the same pyramiding of influence, the same tendency of power to center on individuals who did not necessarily sit in the official seats, the same effort of human organization to grow independently of legal arrangements. Thus in the life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... treasure of a small minority only, it has none the less pervaded all the great scientific and literary work done up to the middle of this century. It has presided over the birth of our new state; and the day will certainly come when public opinion in Germany will turn away from the tendency of her present literature, science, and politics—a somewhat narrow patriotism, a rather shallow materialism, and a thoroughly false parliamentary regime—and come back to the spirit of the generations to whom, after all, she owes her intellectual, though not perhaps her political ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... slave-market. Luxury increasing slaves were purchased not merely for the purposes of labour, but of pleasure. The accomplished musician of the beautiful virgin was an article of taste or a victim of passion. Thus, what it was the tendency of barbarism to originate, it became the tendency of civilization ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of certain terms, or to enlarge the significance of certain things. Nationality is excellent in its place; and the instinct of self-love is the root of a man, which will develop into sacrificial virtues. But all the virtues are means and uses; and, if we hinder their tendency to growth and expansion, we both destroy them as virtues, and degrade them to that rankest species of corruption reserved for the most noble organizations. For instance,—non-intervention in the affairs of neighbouring states is a high political virtue; but non-intervention ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... talk about the glories of faith had a disadvantage for Phillida in that it also fell in with a tendency of her nature and with the habits nourished in her by her father. Millard thought he had reached the depths of her life in coming to know about her work among the poor, but a woman's motives are apt to be more involved than a man imagines ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... of this sort would have been in the last degree difficult and dangerous with any man. With the admiral they were simply impossible. His tendency to veer about from one subject to another; his habit of keeping his tongue perpetually going, so long as there was anybody, no matter whom, within reach of the sound of his voice; his comical want of all dignity and reserve with his servants, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... was gloomy, with some tendency to rain. I passed under the hill of Dinas Bran. About a furlong from its western base I turned round and surveyed it—and perhaps the best view of the noble mountain is to be obtained from the place where I turned round. How grand though sad from ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... tendency, natural to most persons, to differ with their fellows in office (it is always difficult for a number of men to attain harmony, especially in a position of any influence)—through this natural tendency, then, all their power was dissipated and torn to shreds. None of their resolutions ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio

... bird or four-footed beast that came under my observation, often, I fancy, making too much of it, and giving the wild creatures credit for more "sense" than they really possessed. The nature lover is always tempted to do this very thing; his tendency is to humanize the wild life about him, and to read his own traits and moods into whatever he looks upon. I have never consciously done this myself, at least to the extent of willfully misleading my reader. But some of our later ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure to vary indefinitely; and secondly, from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all those in other directions; then ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley

... of Sotades and Ovid," says the writer of the Preface, who is certainly Burton, "to our own time, Western authors have treated the subject either jocularly or with a tendency to hymn the joys of immorality, and the gospel of debauchery. The Indian author has taken the opposite view, and it is impossible not to admire the delicacy with which he has handled an exceedingly difficult theme. ....Feeling convinced that monogamy is a happier state than ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... her began in the Spring of 1873. Several times since I have known her, she has been carried so low that we have thought her release near at hand; and, indeed, the general tendency has been downwards. I recently asked an intelligent physician, who had attended her for a year or more, to give me the facts in her case. He replied: 'She is diseased throughout. Her system is thoroughly soured. It responds to nothing. Almost every function ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... without the aid of the theory of maya, or illusion, which is a characteristic of Samkara's monism. This community has become very influential, chiefly in Bombay Presidency; but in recent times it has been under a cloud owing to the scandals arising from a tendency to practise immoral orgies and from the claims of its priesthood, as representing the god, to enjoy the persons ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... it best for him to go forwards before his wounds had become very painful. He accordingly rode forwards to the village of Boolinkoomboo on one of our horses. Found myself very sick, and unable to stand erect without feeling a tendency to faint; the people so sickly that it was with some difficulty we got the loads put into the tents, though it threatened rain. To my great astonishment, Ashton, the sailor whom I had left in the woods ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park

... historical works, and her memoirs, make up her literary budget. M. d'Haussonville claims that her memoirs of the court of France are not reliable, because she was so often absent from court; also, in them she shows a tendency to avenge herself, in a way, upon Mme. de Maintenon, whose friend she was until the trouble between this lady and Mme. de Montespan occurred. The latter was the intimate friend of Mme. de La Fayette. As for her literary work proper, her desire to write was possibly encouraged, if ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... impulse, which is commonly iniquitous. But what's the good of being Chief Inspector of the Universe, And prying into everything from pompous Law to puny verse, If everything or nearly so, shows a confounded tendency To go right of its own accord? My Masterful Resplendency Would radiate aurorally, a world would gaze on trustingly If only things in general wouldn't go on so disgustingly. Where is the pull of being Earth's Inspector autocratical, When the Progress ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various

... was intended to intimate that the introduction of the purchaser would not be allowed, without the cognizance and sanction of the university.[72] Nor was the bookseller able to purchase books without her consent, lest they should be of an immoral or heretical tendency; and they were absolutely forbidden to buy any of the students, without ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... "deciphering,"—garbling, manufacturing, till they make a romance of it,—alas, your Majesty? Nay, at any rate, what are the Letters? Grumkow can plead that they are the foolishest insignificant rubbish of Court-gossip, not tending any bad road, if they have a tendency. That they are adapted to the nature of the beast, and of the situation,—this he will ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... of rather terrible things, Miss Pierson," went on the principal, picking up a slip of paper and reading aloud, "'inattention, insubordination, impertinence and a tendency to make trouble.' Have you any answer to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower

... from all distinct stories of that order, in any solitary frontier between two great empires—as here, for instance, or in the desert between Syria and the Euphrates—there is an inevitable tendency, in minds of any deep sensibility, to people the solitudes with phantom images of powers that were of old so vast. Joanna, therefore, in her quiet occupation of a shepherdess, would be led continually to brood over the political ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... Jeanne and those very men against whom she hurled menace and invective had much in common; alike they were impelled by faith, chastity, simple ignorance, pious duty, resignation to God's will, and a tendency to magnify the minor matters of devotion. Zizka[1923] had established in his camp that purity of morals which the Maid was endeavouring to introduce among the Armagnacs. The peasant soldiers of Bohemia ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... to see how these circumstances react upon the village girls. The frolicsome and giddy appear to enjoy themselves much as the boys do, but the position must be cruel to those of a serious tendency. To be treated with disrespect and be made the subjects of rough wit as they go about is only the more acute part of their difficulty. One may suppose that at home they find little appreciation of any high sentiments, but are driven, in self-defence, to be rather ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... William's English campaigns the richest in political teaching. We see how near the cities of England came for a moment—as we shall presently see a chief city of northern Gaul—to running the same course as the cities of Italy and Provence. Signs of the same tendency may sometimes be suspected elsewhere, but they are not so clearly revealed. William's later campaigns are of the deepest importance in English history; they are far richer in recorded personal actors than the siege of Exeter; ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman

... strongly recommended by the parliamentary committee of 1832, the government determined to increase the rigour of transportation. The effects of the French revolution, and the pressure of commercial distress, had produced a strong tendency to crime. In the agricultural districts of England riot and arson were prevalent: the utmost exertion of the laborer did not preserve his family from want. Depredations upon game, and other species of rural property, exasperated the legislative ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... the "bad lot," had the character of being a big, surly, unattractive young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to those who knew his stock, as being of a kind which might develop at any time into any objectionable tendency. His bearing was not such as allured, and his fortune was not of the order which placed a man in the view of the world. He had no money to expend, no hospitalities to offer and apparently no disposition to ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... data demonstrate the existence of a considerable correlation between short life (brachybioty, Karl Pearson calls it) in parent and short life in offspring. Not only is the tendency to live long inherited, but the tendency not to ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... this case the old tree were a reasonable being that could co-operate with the gardener, what would the gardener's language be to it? Would it not be this: 'Yield now thyself entirely to this new nature with which I have invested thee; repress every tendency of the old nature to give buds or sprouts; let all thy sap and all thy life-powers rise up into this graft from yonder beautiful tree which I have put on thee, so shalt thou bring forth sweet and much fruit.' And the language of the tree to the gardener would be: 'When thou graftest me, oh, ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers

... some of which were brought to their minds by views of the western country through which they were passing. Professor Snodgrass took no interest in anything except a big book which he was studying carefully, at times making notes on slips of paper, which had a tendency to drop into the aisle, or under the seat when he was not looking. In consequence the car, in the vicinity of where the professor sat, looked as though a theatrical snow-storm ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young

... considers not by any means so dangerous as has been represented. At 9,000 feet above the level of the Mediterranean the air becomes extremely rarified, and the sky exhibits a blue-black appearance. He does not consider it at all safe for persons to attempt the ascent, having a tendency to apoplexy, for at the height of 15,000 feet above the level of the sea, the extremely rarified state of the air, as well as the almost unbearable oppression of the sun's rays, though surrounded with snow, would increase that tendency to an alarming extent. So ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various

... the exact symptoms exhibited by a person to whom a small dose of orosin has been administered. In most cases, however, such a state of mind develops into actual insanity with a homicidal tendency. Such a patient should be very carefully watched, for in ninety per cent. the chance of a cure ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux

... perhaps they derived an increase of knowledge in thievish arts of every description. At the commencement of the fifteenth century no nation in Europe was at all calculated to vie with the Italian in arts of any kind, whether those whose tendency was the benefit or improvement of society, or those the practice of which serves to injure and undermine it. The artists and artisans of Italy were to be found in all the countries of Europe, from Madrid to Moscow, and so were its charlatans, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... sisters and mothers;" "girls run about as they please, without care or guidance." This state of things is "a spreading social evil," and men are at their wit's end to know what is to be done about it. They are ransacking "national character and customs, religion, and the particular tendency of the present literary and scientific thought, and the teaching and preaching of the public press," to find out the root of the trouble. One writer ascribes it to the "exceeding restlessness and the desire to be doing something which are predominant and indomitable in the Anglo-Saxon ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... our fellow-creatures. If any or all of these may be considered likewise as private affections, as tending to private good, this does not hinder them from being public affections too, or destroy the good influence of them upon society, and their tendency to public good. It may be added that as persons without any conviction from reason of the desirableness of life would yet of course preserve it merely from the appetite of hunger, so, by acting merely from regard (suppose) to reputation, ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler

... Canada is much colder than our section of the Province. Learned men say something about the regular northward tendency of the isothermal lines from east to west; certain it is that, the farther west you go, the higher is the mean annual temperature, back to the Pacific, I believe. So the French Canadians have much the worst of the cold. You might have noticed flights of steps to the doors ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... doesn't get into as much mischief since he began to go to school," acknowledged Marilla. "I suppose he works off the tendency with the other boys. But it's a wonder to me we haven't heard from Richard Keith before this. Never a ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... terminated; for this second absorption of variolous matter acts like common matter, and produces only irritative fever in those children, whose constitutions have already experienced the absorption of common matter; and inflammation with a tendency to produce new abscesses in those, whose constitutions have not experienced the absorptions ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... art which are found in Duerer's MSS. and books on proportion. He did not give them the final form or order which he intended, and it seems to me that to arrange the more important according to the subjects they treat of will be the simplest way of arriving at general conceptions as to their tendency and value. We shall thus bring together repetitions of the same thought and contradictory answers to the same question; and after each series of sentences, I myself shall discuss the points raised, illustrating my remarks from modern writers whose opinion in these matters ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... narrow home of fire, hemmed in by brilliant colors, nearly all—perhaps quite all—of which could be found in a glowing furnace. Every shade of yellow is there—lemon yellow, sulphur yellow, the yellow of amber, the yellow of orange with its tendency toward red, the yellow of gold, sand color, sun color. Cannot all these yellows be found in a fire? And there are the reds—pink of the carnation, pink of the coral, red of the little rose that grows in certain ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... my taking notice, in this address to you, of an anonymous production; but the manner in which that performance has been introduced to the army, the effect it was intended to have, together with some other circumstances, will amply justify my observations on the tendency ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... very impressive, the nerve-pulp being harassed by the gradually swelling prelude. There is defiant power in the first theme, and the constant reference to it betrays the composer's exasperated mental condition. This tendency to return upon himself, a tormenting introspection, certainly signifies a grave state. But consider the musical weight of the work, the recklessly bold outpourings of a mind almost distraught! There is no greater test for the poet-pianist ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... and goddesses, which were more decent, and had more the appearance of religious solemnity, though even in these, the women dressed out in all their finery; and, adorned with flowers and garlands, either formed splendid processions, or assisted in performing ceremonies, the general tendency of which was to ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... papyrus by some amateur. The conventional attribution of the Hymns to Homer, in spite of linguistic objections, and of many allusions to things unknown or unfamiliar in the Epics, is merely the result of the tendency to set down "masterless" compositions to a well-known name. Anything of epic characteristics was allotted to the master of Epic. In the same way an unfathered joke of Lockhart's was attributed to Sydney ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... 'Every child will tell you that the tendency of spirits to return to the old haunts of bodily life is almost universal. The universal laws apply ... there is no escape from the great law, the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... according to their wishes, subject, where conflict of claim arises, to their relative ranking right. It has always been observed that the personal eccentricities of individuals in great bodies have a wonderful tendency to balance and mutually complement one another, and this principle is strikingly illustrated in our system of choice of occupation and locality. The preference blanks are filled out in June, and by the first of August everybody knows just where he or she is to report for ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... unless one could read into it a trifle of apology for her rustling silk dress and black kid gloves. She developed a love for long words which had not distinguished her in her earlier years, and this tendency betrayed her into occasional malapropisms, the best of which is perhaps worth preserving. My mother was a very notable housewife and trainer of domestic servants. It was her pet hobby to take some neglected ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... 'corners' and 'rings' and steal the money of the municipality; never mind; some day, when we have time, we will straighten things out. In youth, also, one is tempted to gallant apparel, bravery of show, a defiant bearing, gold and lace and colour. In cities this tendency of youth is shown by great buildings and big institutions. In youth, there is a natural exaggeration in talk: hence the spread-eagle of which we hear so much. Then everything which belongs to youth ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... more powerful influence than the winds, yet less taken into account. It is the spinning of the earth on its axis. Undoubtedly are the "trades" indebted to this for their direction towards the west,—the simple centrifugal tendency of the atmosphere. Otherwise, would these winds blow due northward and southward, coming into collision on the line ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... the accepted spot; the crowds gathered there, and the omnibus, stopping there, emptied and refilled. But there has been a gradual tendency towards the abandonment of the corners, causing the omnibuses to pull up farther and farther from them, so that it seems almost as if a time may come when, instead of Piccadilly Circus, for example, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various

... so-called Sheppard-Towner Bill is one answer in the United States to the right of the child and its mother to life and health. There are those who deplore the tendency to seek for such aid to individuals through the Federal Government. The Governor of New York State, for example, although a man of progressive ideas and liberal point of view, opposed "starting aid to mothers and babies from the Washington end," declaring that work for the "welfare of ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... kinds are apt to beget love, so experience teaches us that none have a more direct tendency this way than those of a religious kind between persons of different sexes. The doctor found himself so agreeable to Miss Bridget, that he now began to lament an unfortunate accident which had happened to him about ten years before; namely, his marriage with another woman, who was not only ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... Heaven to all Anglo-Saxon races, but which nevertheless a proper education ought in the end to achieve. Were I asked whether I saw in America any improvement upon Britain in the supreme matter of intellectual honesty, I should reply, No. I seemed to see in America precisely the same tendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that things are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike of the whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious and universal ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... martial law in Canada, and placing arms in the hands of people unaccustomed to their use, hostile to our institutions, and heated by intestine dissensions, have a direct tendency to disturb the peace of our citizens, and demands the immediate interference ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... acquainted evidently with grief but not weakened by it, had a high forehead to which the quality of the skin gave a singular polish—it glittered even when seen at a distance; a nose which achieved a high free curve; and a tendency to throw back her head and carry it well above her, as if to disengage it from the possible entanglements of the rest of her person. If you had seen her walk you would have felt her to tread the earth after a fashion suggesting ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... this fern the novice should bear in mind the tendency of the curved sori of youth to become straightened and even confluent with age, although such changes are rather unreliable. Possibly the suggestion of the poetic Davenport may be helpful to some ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton

... to beg Remonencq to come with him to the registrar as a second witness. Here in Paris, in this land of ours besotted with Equality, the inequality of conditions is glaringly apparent everywhere and in everything. The immutable tendency of things peeps out even in the practical aspects of Death. In well-to-do families, a relative, a friend, or a man of business spares the mourners these painful details; but in this, as in the matter of taxation, the whole burden falls heaviest upon ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... special degree irritating to me that, as often as I turned the conversation upon music, and particularly upon singing, he was sure to interrupt me, with that sardonic smile upon his face and those repulsive singing tones of his, by some remark of a quite opposite tendency, very often of a commonplace character. From the great distress which at such times Antonia's glances betrayed, I perceived that he only did it to deprive me of a pretext for calling upon her for a song. But I didn't relinquish my design. The hindrances which the Councillor threw in my ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... his messages to Congress, the President foretold and denounced the tendency of wealth acquired in masses and rapidly by the war contractors and the like as "approaching despotism." He saw liberty attacked in "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with—if not above—labor in the structure of government." It is never to be forgotten ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... formed of personalities essentially different in origin and in tendency," he said. "Yet the most important fact in the political history of recent years is the possibility, I should say the necessity, to introduce unity of views in the government of the republic. These are ideas which you, my dear Garin, have expressed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... other hand, the tortoise was just sent as a souvenir we should discourage the practice. The tendency on the part of our soldiers in India and Egypt to send home elephants and camels as mementos of the localities in which they are serving is already putting something of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various

... speaking, we reached the summit of a little hill which sloped down to the valley; Madame Pierson, yielding to the downward tendency, began to trip lightly down the incline. Without knowing why, I did the same, and we ran down the hill, arm in arm; the long grass under our feet retarded our progress. Finally, like two birds, spent with flight, we reached the ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... made to the objections of the modern audience to the state of nudity which would be natural to the time in which the story is laid. But even making allowance for this, the tendency is always to overdo, to have too many beads and fringes and war-bonnets. No more than his white brother did the Indian wear all his ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin

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

... stout," says the book, "a single pair of pre-molars in each jaw, first toe of the fore-foot rudimentary, tail cylindrical," etc. The dormouse was anything but stout—six months' fasting, save for half a nut, had effectually restrained any tendency that way. No doubt in other respects he was in fair accordance with museum pattern, but he differed in ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... destroy their influence, by arousing the distrust of the Indian, and by separating, when possible, the latter from their side. In proof of this, and so that my statement may not be taken as an exaggeration, it is sufficient to cite substantially two notable measures which, by their tendency, were obviously intended to weaken the influence and good ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various

... perpetuated. The ministers of the new truth inevitably rise in dignity till they grow into a hierarchy. That truth inevitably seeks to establish itself as scientifically true, and with the aid of the ruling philosophical tendency of the day clothes itself in a view of the universe and in a creed. Thus the essence of Christianity came to consist not in loving the Master and following him in faith and love, but in upholding the authority ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... sleep and propagate his kind like the lower animals. Despite his thick veneer of selfishness, man is at heart a creature of sentiment, and religion is the poetry of the common people. Crude it may be, but its tendency is toward the stars, while all else in man is animalistic and of the earth. Strike the religion, the poetry, out of a people, and you reduce them to the level of educated animals. Annul the power that draws them upward and they must sink back to primordial ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... natural that after the first occupation of the New World the tendency of the explorers should have been to turn their attention to the south and to the still undiscovered lands. At the first glimpse the aspect of the Atlantic coast to the south of Brazil gave little promise of the wealth—that is to say, of the gold—sought by the pioneers, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... western facade of the Palaces of Food Products and Education are examples of the new tendency in sculpture. These are "The Triumph of the Field" and "Abundance" by Charles R. Harley, the modernist. He has made them intricate and teeming with imagery, giving the beholder much food for study and personal ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry

... in England, Walderhurst had seen him occasionally, and had only remarked and heard unpleasant things of him,—a tendency to selfish bad manners, reckless living, and low flirtation. He once saw him on the top of a bus with his arm round the waist of an awful, giggling shop-girl kind of person, who was adorned with tremendous feathers and a thick fringe coming unfrizzled with the heat and sticking out here ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... only be stimulated by the most delicately-applied influences. Observant and reflective parents, who have not chosen to leave the entire development and upbringing of their children in the hands of nurses, will have noticed that there is a natural tendency on the part of a child, if not interfered with, to think and to expand its faculty of imagination. This tendency is not shared to an equal extent by all children; there are, of course, dissimilarities caused by ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... population, dependant finally on the minimum yearly produce of the district they control. If ever they rise above that limit the natural checks of famine, and of pestilence following enfeeblement, will come into operation, and they will always be kept near this limit by the natural tendency of humanity to increase. The limit would rise with increasing public intelligence, and the organization of the towns would ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... simple, truthful work. But the Pre-Raphaelites are exposed to especial dangers; just now to the dangers that come from success. And these are of two kinds; first, the undermining of that humility which is the secret of mastery; and secondly, the tendency to the development of peculiarities and mannerisms, to the exaggeration of special features that have attracted attention in their work, and which have a factitious value set upon them by the public, as they are taken to be the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... strong after other advocates were exhausted. In his pleadings before a jury he used every resource at his command, indulging in flights of oratory that kindled the imagination, dazzling his hearers with rhetorical tropes and figures, at times humorous and playful, with a tendency to personal allusion most uncomfortable for his opponent. Jordan was terrible in sarcasm. One Asbury Newman, a poor, worthless, drunken fellow, ever ready to testify on either side for a drink of whiskey, was brought upon the witness ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... harmless, or even praiseworthy, sense. What could that sense have been? This question each ancient mythologist answered in accordance with his own taste and prejudices, and above all, and like all other and later speculators, in harmony with the general tendency of his own studies. If he lived when physical speculation was coming into fashion, as in the age of Empedocles, he thought that the Homeric poems must contain a veiled account of physical philosophy. This was the opinion of Theagenes ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... here. The most respectable houses, known throughout the length and breadth of the country for their honorable dealings, are exposed to legal prosecution any moment that an officious fanatic or jealous rival pleases to bring a charge that certain works in their store have an immoral tendency." ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various

... which he formed a part, the singular characters with whom he was placed in contact, the risk and responsibility which seemed suddenly to have encompassed him with their ever-stimulating influence, and, lastly, by the novelty of foreign travel, which, even under ordinary circumstances, has a tendency to rouse and stir ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... in politics, and when of late the King, wishing to check so dangerous a tendency, had sought to know the reason why, she had answered with perfect frankness: "Max says" (for to her, also, Max, the man born to inaction, had been talking), "Max says he is not sure if he means to come to the throne. If he doesn't, it is just as well ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... ran a great wall, with watch-towers and a deep moat, but no person questioned their right to the freedom of the place; a sleepy soldier at the gate merely glancing indifferently at them as they passed beneath the heavy archway. Gabled houses, with a tendency to incline from the perpendicular, overlooked the winding street; dull, round panes of glass stared at them, fraught with mystery and the possibility of spying eyes behind; but the thoroughfare in that vicinity appeared deserted, save for an old woman seated in a doorway. Before this grandam, whose ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... years before this time, with his mother and sister. He was bright, but inclined to be indolent, except when aroused, when his energy knew no limit. He was slow in speech, having the soft Southern drawl with a tendency to slur his r's, and was a natural leader among his companions, both in their ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor

... Parliamentary proceeding to the technical subtilties of the inferior courts. Secondly, that the question put to the Judges, and their answer, were strictly confined to the law and practice below; and that nothing in either had a tendency to their delivering an opinion concerning Parliament, its laws, its usages, its course of proceeding, or its powers. Thirdly, that the motion in arrest of judgment, grounded on the opinion of the Judges, was made only by Dr. Sacheverell himself, and not by his counsel, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... storm was heard because a storm was really raging. The breeze therefrom that ruffled our little world sounded in reality but little above a murmur. Therein it failed to satisfy our minds, so that our attempts to imitate the blast of a hurricane led us easily into exaggeration,—a tendency which still persists and may not ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

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

... in a desultory way for half an hour longer and then prepared for bed. Paul was somewhat nervous and excited, and displayed a tendency to stop short in the middle of removing a stocking to gaze blankly before him for whole minutes at a time. Once he stood so long on one leg with his trousers half off that Neil feared he had gone to sleep, and so brought ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... constructed with loose stones, ranged for the most part with some tendency to circularity. It must be placed where the wind cannot act upon it with violence, because it has no cement; and where the water will run easily away, because it has no floor but the naked ground. The wall, which is commonly about six feet high, ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... an innocent way of obtaining relaxation; and opportunities thus offered the weary clergyman of studying nature in her ever-changing but always restful moods, must indeed be grateful after being for months in daily contact with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The tendency of the present age to liberal ideas permits clergymen in large towns and cities to drive fast horses, and spend an hour of each day at a harmless game of billiards, without giving rise to remarks from his own congregation, but let the overworked rector of a country village seek in his ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... a thoroughly justified tendency to look down, had at any rate an attentive and considerate lover. Elaine walked towards the Park gates feeling that in one essential Suzette possessed something that had been denied to her, and at the gates she met Joyeuse and his spruce young rider preparing ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... by week. It was a life of perpetual restraint, of refusal to every wish, of denial to every desire that rose in me, in which there was a bar laid upon every impulse, and an immovable chain upon every tendency. I was ambitious, and I could get no recognition. I was gifted, at least in my own estimation, and I could force open no field for my gifts. I was in love, and there was no means of attaining its object. Patience! patience! This was what I ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... his house to be scattered with profane and wicked Books, such as stir up to lust, to wantonness, such as teach idle, wanton, lascivious discourse, and such as has a tendency to provoke to profane drollery and Jesting; and lastly, such as tend to corrupt, and pervert the Doctrine of Faith and Holiness. All these things will eat as doth a canker, and will quickly spoil, in Youth, &c. those ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan

... 2. Is the tendency in modern life toward a lower or higher valuation of the individual? To what extent is this due to ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... substantial fixture. Fat, ugly, and spiteful when she dared, she became a thorn in the side of the poor tutor, and supported on all occasions the whims and squabbles of her niece. Whenever the "coach" evinced any tendency to travel too fast, Mrs. Porkington put the "drag" ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... paper, well steeped in hog's lard or oil, we buried it in a horse dunghill, paying it a daily visit for the purpose of making it straight by doubling back the bends or angles across the knee, in a direction contrary to their natural tendency. Having daily repeated this until we had made it straight, and renewed the oil wrapping paper until the staff was perfectly saturated, we then rubbed it well with a woollen cloth, containing a little ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton

... the Philebus, the Parmenides, and the Sophist, we may observe the tendency of Plato to combine two or more subjects or different aspects of the same subject in a single dialogue. In the Sophist and Statesman especially we note that the discussion is partly regarded as an illustration of method, and that analogies are brought from afar which ...
— Statesman • Plato

... controversy is of singular significance. It is the peculiar tendency to unfairness which the advocates of unrestricted experimentation seem to display in every discussion regarding the practice. In all controversy there is something to be said on both sides of the question, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... of corporations, statutes of apprenticeship, and all those laws which restrain in particular employments, the competition to a smaller number than might otherwise go into them, have the same tendency, though in a less degree. They are a sort of enlarged monopolies, and may frequently, for ages together, and in whole classes of employments, keep up the market price of particular commodities above the natural ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... shall be pardoned, therefore, for elaborating suggestions already made in this direction, in the paragraphs which treated of the ornamentation of spiral ware, and of the derivation of basket decorations from stitch- and splint-suggested figures. All students of early man understand his tendency to reproduce habitual forms in accustomed association. This feeling, exaggerated with savages by a belief in the actual relationship of resemblance, is shown in the reproduction of the decorations of basket vessels ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing

... wait on the table. When the spoiler makes her rush, it is usually at a Bee who meets her half-way, and, so to speak, flings herself into her clutches, either thoughtlessly or out of curiosity. There is no wild terror, no sign of anxiety, no tendency to make off. How comes it that the experience of the ages, that experience which, we are told, teaches the animal so many things, has not taught the Bee the first element of apiarian wisdom: a deep-seated horror of the Philanthus? Can the poor wretch take comfort by relying ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... there may have been a hundred different things, and in his swan-long life of a singer there would probably be a hundred yet, and all different. But we take the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range and tendency. Many parts of his work offer themselves in confirmation of our judgment, while those which might impeach it shrink away and hide themselves, and leave us to our ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... is often a genuine True Story, jealously observant of facts, and embellished only to the extent that the author has endeavored to make his style vivid and picturesque. Such stories are a result of the tendency of the modern newspaper to present its news in good literary form. The best illustrations are the occasional contributions of Ray Stannard Baker to ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett

... with all his heart the one for the Arachne. The subject, at any rate, is better adapted to my art than to his, and so I should be tolerably certain of my cause. Yet my anxiety about the verdict of the judges remains, for surely you know how much the majority are opposed to my tendency. I, and the few Alexandrians who, following me, sacrifice beauty to truth, swim against the stream which bears you, Myrtilus, and those who are on your side, smoothly along. I know that you do it from thorough conviction, but with other acknowledged ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... are no longer to be considered as conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authors; the word for the sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant clauses, has been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen, by hasty detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may be changed: the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... you and of the poems that you will write, and of that strange rainbow crown called fame, until the vision is before me.... My pride and my hopes seem altogether merged in you. At my time of life and with so few to love, and with a tendency to body forth images of gladness, you cannot think what joy it is to anticipate....' So wrote the elder woman to the younger with romantic devotion. What Miss Mitford once said of herself was true, hers was the instinct of the bee sucking honey from the hedge flower. Whatever ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... a leaning to virtue's side, to which some collectors have been, by reputation at least, addicted—a propensity to obtain articles without value given for them—a tendency to be larcenish. It is the culmination, indeed, of a sort of lax morality apt to grow out of the habits and traditions of the class. Your true collector—not the man who follows the occupation as a mere expensive taste, and does not cater for himself—considers himself a finder or discoverer ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... is one of the stumbling blocks the student encounters, and the tendency of the day to classify "styles" by the restricted formula of monarchical periods is likewise misleading. No style is ever solely distinctive of one reign, or even one century, the law of evolution rules the arts as it does nature, there is always a correlation between styles in art and ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands

... the volume, in a very brief chapter, called "Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,'' Marx allows one moment's glimpse of the hope that ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... of Sidney and Jonson, who knew the theories of the Italian renaissance, the English critics believed with Horace that poetry was at once pleasant and profitable, and agreed with Plutarch that poetry, if rightly used, would be of benefit in the education of youth. But there was little tendency to follow this to the conclusion of asserting that because poetry has a moral effect on the reader, it is the purpose of poetry as an art to exert this moral effect for the good of society. Most of these critics believed ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark

... sceptics, and among the peasants are found many men who have no hesitation in proclaiming their disbelief in "thim owld shtories," and who even openly affirm that "laigends about fairies an' giants is all lies complately." In the face of this growing tendency towards materialism and the disposition to find in natural causes an explanation of wonderful events, it is pleasant to be able to conclude this chapter with an undisputed account of the origin of Lough Ree in the River Shannon, the accuracy of the ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.

... future. I am not sure, by the way, that the music of Richard Wagner is not highly typical of the present (1868) state of German unity,—an undefined longing which nobody exactly understands. There are those who think they can discern in his music the same revolutionary tendency which placed the composer on the right side of a Dresden barricade in 1848, and who go so far as to believe that the liberalism of the young King of Bavaria is not a little due to his passion for the disorganizing operas of this transcendental writer. Indeed, I am not sure that any other ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... greatest names in art. Under such conditions the technical relationship between the line of the painter and that of the calligraphist was closer, since painter and calligraphist were frequently united in one and the same person. Thence came the early tendency to use monochrome and to represent forms in the abstract, rendering them more and more as mere themes, thus reducing the subject to ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci

... experiences were the cause of much laughter. She had learned a good deal while she was away from home, not precisely what it was intended she should learn, and she came back with a strong, insurgent tendency, which was even more noticeable when she returned from Germany. Neither of the sisters lived at the school in Weimar, but at the house of a lady who had been recommended to Mrs Hopgood, and by this lady they were introduced to the great German classics. She herself ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... be governed in the future, the Government are allowing it to become ungovernable by anybody. A new and agreeable Parliamentary innovation has been introduced by Sir Eric Geddes in the shape of an immense diagram showing the downward tendency of the U-boat activities. Other orators might with advantage follow this method. Indeed, there are some whose speeches would be more enjoyable if they were all diagrams. As for that pledge of the New Citizenship, the Education Bill, the debate on the second reading has been such ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of "fine language"; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... him; but then that is human nature. Between eighteen and thirty-five, ninety per cent. of the men in the world would like to centre in themselves the affections of every young and pretty woman they know, even if there was not the ghost of a chance of their marrying one of them. The same tendency is to be observed conversely in the other sex, only in their case with a still smaller ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... be noticed in passing, much of the tendency on the part of our shipmen in this period to self-help in offence as well as in defence, was due to the fact that the mercantile navy was frequently employed in expeditions of war, vessels and men being at times seized ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... that he was first attacked by gout in the feet when he was thirty-three years of age. He had inherited the complaint, for it often happens that a tendency to disease is handed down like other qualities in a sort of succession. While he was in the prime of life he overcame his malady and kept it well in check by abstemious and pure living, and when it ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger

... some length by a mixed audience, if he very carefully picked his phrases; it would not, however, be good Welsh or good Breton. But the same would only apply in a far less degree to Cornish, for Cornish is very much nearer to Breton than Welsh is. {7} The divergence is increased by the tendency of all the Celtic languages, or, indeed, of all languages, to subdivide into local dialects. Thus the Irish of Munster, of Connaught, and of Ulster must be mutually intelligible only with great difficulty; the dialect of Munster, by ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner

... happens? The balloon will simply swing till this sail is in front, and thus continue its straightforward course. Suppose, however, that as soon as the side sail is hoisted a trail rope is also dropped aft from a spar in the rigging. The tendency of the sail to fly round in front is now checked by the dragging rope, and it is constrained to remain slanting at an angle on one side; at the same time the rate of the balloon is reduced by the dragging rope, so that it travels slower than the wind, which, now acting ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... world. But man, by means of the Luciferian influence, drew them into his soul which was separated from his physical body during sleep. Thus he came in contact with beings whose influence was highly corrupting. They increased in his soul the propensity for error; especially the tendency to misuse the powers of growth and reproduction, which since the separation of the physical and etheric bodies were now ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... instance of a national trait, which was unusually prominent in the early part of the nineteenth century owing to the state of our insular politics at the time though it must be admitted that English artists of all periods have an inherent tendency to moralise which has sometimes been a weakness, and sometimes has given them ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... who doubt that the words in which Petrarch clothed his love for Laura were words of sincerity and truth, and who blame his fatal tendency to utilize every incident and feeling connected with her. Unquestionably, there was a strong element of earthliness, a dilution of the pure essence of his affection, in much that Petrarch wrote. It could hardly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... dispassionate and matter-of-fact, that it had a calming effect on Garth, giving him also a sense of security. The doctor might have been speaking of a sore throat, or a tendency ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay

... Philosophy; a History of Mathematics, with Mathematics, not with History; for the philosophy and history are simply the form which these books have taken. The true content or subject is Art, and Mathematics, and to the student of these subjects they are most useful. The predominant tendency or obvious purpose of the book, usually decides its class number at once; still many books treat of two or more different subjects, and in such cases it is assigned to the place where it will be most useful, and underneath the class number are written the numbers of any other ...
— A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library [Dewey Decimal Classification] • Melvil Dewey

... on which you touch in your letter that encourages and pleases me greatly. You condemn, as is right, the exaggerated sentimentality, and the tendency to be easily moved and to weep from childish motives, from which I told you that I suffered at times; but, since this disposition of soul, so necessary to combat, exists in me, you rejoice that it does not affect my prayers and meditations, ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera

... bract or spathe. It is of considerable size,—from four to six inches in length, by from two to three inches in breadth,—of a broadly elliptical and yet somewhat lanceolate form, deeply but irregularly corrugated, the rugae exhibiting a tendency to converge towards both its lower and upper terminations, and with, in some instances, what seems to be the fragment of a second spathe springing from its base. Another and much smaller vegetable organism of the same beds presents the form of a spathe-enveloped bud or unblown ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... a tendency in human nature to be over-credulous as to our own achievements, and over-sceptical as ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates

... preferences, she would never put on the screw; but this would not make her love the child any more. So Raymond interpreted certain signs, which at the same time he felt to be very slight, while the conversation in Mrs. Temperly's salon (this was its preponderant tendency) rambled among questions of bric-a-brac, of where Tishy's portrait should be placed when it was finished, and the current prices of old Gobelins. Ces dames were not in the least ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... however, who wish to behold this tendency in its fullest and freest development, we would recommend the perusal of a novel by Rhoda Broughton, called "Second Thoughts,"—a bright, vivacious, almost witty little book, marred only by its ineradicable defects of style. The heroine, Gillian Latimer, is described ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various

... was longing for the suppression of the representatives of this tendency, he would not, therefore, demand the extermination of ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... now rapidly opening out to that spirit of intense inquiry which arose in France, and threatened to sweep before it not only all that was corrupt, but everything that tended to corruption. It is in the very essence of all kinds of power to have that tendency, and, if not checked by salutary means, to reach that end. But the reformers of the last century, new in the desperate practice of revolutions, seeing its necessity, but ignorant of its nature, neither did nor could place bounds to the careering ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... stands for the true aims of international relations, namely, in exchange of goods, which must benefit either party, to be mutually satisfactory, it will engender friendly feeling among all the peoples, advance civilization, and thereby have a sure tendency toward disarmament. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... of the German governor it was imperative that a blow, and a stunning one, should be struck at this tendency among the Liege workmen. Had the authors of this latest outrage been captured, an example would have been easy. Unfortunately, they had again escaped, and in a manner so impudent and daring that the exasperation of the Germans was greatly intensified. Rewards had been ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill

... benevolent criticism, in such a personage as Martesie with her shrewdness, her maid-of-honour familiarity with the ways and manners of courtly human beings, and that very pardonable, indeed agreeable, tendency, which has been noticed or imagined, to flirt in respectful fashion with Cyrus, while carrying on more regular business with Feraulas. But it is little more than a suggestion, and it has been frankly admitted that it is perhaps not even that, but an ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... member, was a very different person. He looked like a fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short—so short that when he put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows. He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller

... away from the Reformation. I have been thinking of that comparison in the essay of the present with the past. Such comparisons seem to me very useful, as they best enable us to understand our own times. And, then, when we have ascertained the state and tendency of our own age, we ought to strive to enrich it with those qualities which are complementary to its own. Now with all this toleration, which delights you so much, dear Milverton, is it not an age rather deficient ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... cacao has in the past generally been over-stated. Whether this is because the planter is an optimist or because he wishes others to think his efforts are crowned with exceptional success, or because he takes a simple pride in his district, is hard to tell. Probably the tendency has been to take the finer estates and put their results ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp

... Sellers in that book has become immortal, and it is a character that only Mark Twain could create, for, though drawn from his mother's cousin, James Lampton, it embodies—and in no very exaggerated degree—characteristics that were his own. The tendency to make millions was always imminent; temptation was always hard to resist. Money-making schemes are continually being placed before men of means and prominence, and Mark Twain, to the day of his death, found such schemes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... strongest terms against the increasing habit of smoking foreign cigarettes, to show the trend of official opinion on the subject. After having referred to the enormous advances made in the imports of cigarettes, the proclamation deplored the general tendency of the people to support such an undesirable trade, and exhorted the citizens to turn from their evil ways. We cannot stop the importation of cigarettes, it read, but there is no need for ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... no exclusiveness about Nantasket; but, at the same time, the tone of the place is excellent, and there seems to be no tendency toward its falling into disrepute, as has been the case with other very popular watering-places. It is, in fact, admitted by a New York newspaper that "Bostonians are justly proud of Nantasket Beach, where one can get cultured clams, intellectual ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various

... appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her sentimental being up to the highest pitch. Feeling herself to be naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, Sylvia requires that she shall be continually played upon—if not by one person, then by another. Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies; and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end. The precautionary ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen

... warned you about your tendency to apoplexy. You bother your brain, such as it is, too much with figures. Stick to your last, Mr. Shoemaker, and don't eat so much. When you fell off the stage this morning I was sure you were killed, and we were ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... knowledge that he was their author. It is probable that in this case, as in others, he was a victim of that casuistry which teaches that "the end justifies the means;" that he hoped and believed that the assertion of these baleful doctrines would act solely as a check upon any tendency to further centralization of power in the General Government and insure that strict construction ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... every part of the world, all believed to be due to the gradual shrinking of the heated interior to which the solid crust has to accommodate itself, and they are especially interesting and instructive for our present purpose as showing the tendency of such fractures of solid rock-material to extend to great lengths in straight lines, notwithstanding the extreme irregularity both in the surface contour as well as in the internal structures of the varied deposits and formations through which ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace

... still the subject of earnest and not unfrequently of melancholy discourse, around the fire-sides of the Colonists; nor was the victory achieved without accompaniments which, however unavoidable they might have been, had a tendency to raise doubts in the minds of conscientious religionists concerning the lawfulness of their cause. It is said that a village of six hundred cabins was burnt and that hundreds of dead and wounded were consumed in the ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... for themselves. On the question of fibroid tumours he had come to the conclusion that these were not a cause but in a sense a consequence of sterility. Women who were subjected to sexual excitement with no physiological outlet appear to have a tendency to develop fibroids. He would like the opinion to go forth from the section that the use of contraceptives was ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... experience, and their roots lay, not upon the surface, but went deep down to the perennial springs, and the articles of their creed became a vehicle for the expression of the most real emotions. Evangelicalism, however, to Mr. Cardew was dangerous. He was always prone to self-absorption, and the tendency was much increased by his religion. He lived an entirely interior life, and his joys and sorrows were not those of Abchurch, but of another sphere. Abchurch feared wet weather, drought, ague, rheumatism, loss of money, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford

... trying on a frock," she answered, her face charmingly pink in its warmth, her long lashes betraying a tendency to droop, and her rich round voice quivering. "Those two women in there made me come out here so they could see me. I ought to have ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... had he—no fad, except A tendency to strum, In mode at which you would have wept, ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert

... youth had quite disappeared. The queer tendency to call on Heaven for practical aid in any practical difficulty—to make of prayer a system of 'begging-letters to the Almighty'—which had of ten quieted or distracted him in his early years of struggle, affected him no longer. His inner life seemed to himself ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... inopportune it might be: which at first we found rather a disagreeable propensity, as it often interrupted the flow of very agreeable conversation—and, indeed, I cannot too strongly record my disapprobation of this tendency in general—but we became so used to it at last that we found it no interruption whatever; indeed, strange to say, we came to feel that it was a necessary part of our enjoyment (such is the force of habit), and found the sudden outbursts of mirth, resulting ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne

... and analyze data, 4) disseminate their research findings, and 5) prepare curricula to instruct the next generation of scholars and students. This examination would produce a clearer understanding of the synergy among these five processes that fuels the tendency of the use of electronic resources for one process to stimulate its use for other processes of ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly

... speech sounds to-day,—speech demanding growth for a part of a country, denying it for the whole, speech ignoring the nationalist tendency so soon to overwhelm all bounds, all creeds in the making of a mighty America that should be a home for all the nations. But as the gray-headed old doctor went on he only voiced what was the earnest conviction of many of the ablest men of his ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough

... complement she considers her task accomplished, whether the victims are still there or not. How, then, does she know when she has made up the number 24? Perhaps it will be said that each species feels some mysterious and innate tendency to provide a certain number of victims. This would, under no circumstances, be any explanation; but it is not in accordance with the facts. In the genus Eumenes the males are much smaller than the females.... ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant

... only when his senses had been sufficiently drugged. In sober intervals he now had neuritis and a limp to distract his mind; also his former brother-in-law with professions of esteem and respect and a tendency to borrow. And drunk or sober he had the Ariani. But the house that Youth had built in the tinted obscurity of an old New York parlour—no, he didn't have that; and even memory of it were wellnigh gone had not ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... stated that the trouble with the War Department and with too many other people, is the tendency to treat Negroes as a homogeneous whole, which cannot be done. Some are densely ignorant and some are highly intelligent and well educated. In this officer's opinion, there is as much difference between different types of Negroes as there is ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney

... much consider whether each reform is just, as what will be the ultimate ascendency given to particular principles. Cimon preferred to all constitutions a limited aristocracy, and his practical experience regarded every measure in its general tendency towards or against the system which ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... in with a tray, set it down, lit a naked gas-jet, which roared faintly, and drew down a crackly dark-green blind, which showed a tendency to fly back ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... were watching them closely and individually and discovering their level. If our children showed an aptitude to become farm laborers and nurse-maids, we were going to teach them to be the best possible farm laborers and nurse-maids; and if they showed a tendency to become lawyers, we would turn them into honest, intelligent, open-minded lawyers. (He's a lawyer himself, but certainly not ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... accepted as 'a working hypothesis' that it is made from ether as the drop of water is made from gas, by the chemical union of a large amount of ether of different kinds, the etheric molecules of which consist of 2 and 3 or 5 and 4 etheric atoms, and that the tendency to combine in this or that number in physical matter is an inherited tendency brought with it from the etheric world of matter on which, or in which, each element of this world is two or more. There is no kind of matter in this physical world, that has not ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson

... vexed Leslie; she tried not to see it; it made her curious, anxious; and what had she to do with Hector Garret's flushed cheek and shining eye? Some anniversary, some combination of present associations and past recollections—a tendency to fly from himself, besetting at times the most self-controlled—might have caused this change in his appearance. Ah! better twist and untwist the rings of little Leslie's fair hair, and dress and undress her as she had done ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... manner it is interesting and sometimes illumining to know the literary school or tendency to which a writer belongs. Every author has his limitations and idiosyncrasies. First of all, he may be a writer of prose alone or of poetry alone. In prose he may confine himself to a single department, as fiction or history; or in poetry he may be ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... presumes to ignore this order of nature and demands not only that the borrower shall resist this tendency of capital to decay, but shall also pay a price for ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

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

... twin souls, Mr Chalmers! Tell me, I know your game is nearly perfect, but if you have a fault, is it a tendency to ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... the coast of Canada. Gaspe was not far off when, still held back by the constitutional tendency of the Norman not to close a bargain till compelled to do so, Jean Jacques sat with Carmen far forward on the deck, where the groaning Antoine broke the waters into sullen foam. There they silently watched ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... readily enough to this paltry gossip, but found that it robbed the poet's memory of some of the reverence that was its due. Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much the same tendency and effect as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visiting just previously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings, and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from these, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... marriage was realized. She was received as La Baronne de Feucheres at the Court of Louis XVIII. She was happy—up to a point. Some unpretty traits in her character began to develop: a violent temper, a tendency to hysterics if crossed, and, it is said, a leaning towards avaricious ways. At the end of four years the Baron de Feucheres woke up to the fact that Sophie was deceiving him. It does not appear, however, that he had seen through her main deception, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... place whence she started, set her off myself. I had fancied that I could make her sail directly before the wind; but he explained the impossibility of doing this without a person on board to steer, as she would have a tendency to luff up to the wind. He evidently took a pleasure in teaching me, and I didn't grow weary of learning, so that at the end of the first day I fancied I could manage my little craft to perfection. I called her "The Hope." He promised ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... seem that the innate tendency to conservatism latent in man, the disposition to leave things as they are and to stick to the familiar devil rather than fly to unknown gods, is in itself sufficient to account for those lapses in mass-achievement and those long periods of stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere. ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... or to enlarge the significance of certain things. Nationality is excellent in its place; and the instinct of self-love is the root of a man, which will develop into sacrificial virtues. But all the virtues are means and uses; and, if we hinder their tendency to growth and expansion, we both destroy them as virtues, and degrade them to that rankest species of corruption reserved for the most noble organizations. For instance,—non-intervention in the affairs of neighbouring states is a high political virtue; ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... had been much tendency to misinterpret in both countries, but that things were now better. I might take it that our precision about the Entente with France, and our desire to rest firmly on the arrangement we had made, were understood in Germany, and that it was realized that we were not likely to be able ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane

... silly," snapped Mrs. Meredith, made the more angry by his defence of the girl. "Men are all of a piece, and cannot hold anger if the eyes be bright, or the waist be slim," she thought to herself wrathfully, quite forgetful of the time when that very tendency in masculine kind had been to her one of its merits. "Set to on the quilt, girl, and see to it that there's no sneaking to ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... like to see, in every school-room of our growing country, in every business office, at the railway stations, and on street corners, large placards placed with "Do not slouch" printed thereon in distinct and imposing characters. If ever there was a tendency that needed nipping in the bud (I fear the bud is fast becoming a full-blown flower), it is ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... day. The theologians point to this as a proof of the existence of a supreme being. An investigation of this assertion leads the Martian to the conclusion that religions have continued to exist mainly because of the power which inherited superstitions wield over mankind. Men are born with a marked tendency towards superstitions. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... still very dark and the fire did little to dispel the gloom, the wind having a tendency to blow the smoke in several directions at once. But the fire kept them fairly warm and for that they ...
— Guns And Snowshoes • Captain Ralph Bonehill

... even seem to reverence most those of their opinions whose origin has least to do with deliberate reasoning. When Mr. Barrie's Bowie Haggart said: 'I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion,'[20] he was comparing the merely rational conclusion which might have resulted from a reading of Burns's works with the conviction about them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the more sacred to him and more intimately ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... lawyer, "the road by which a young man of education can, by perseverance, hope to earn for himself a competency and a good position in the social scale, is that of the church, the navy or in the military service of his country. As for the pulpit, unless the aspirant has a special tendency for it, or some good friend who has a living to bestow, he will hardly realize a sufficient income to support himself as a gentleman; and to send him up to London to study law, or medicine for two or three years would but expose him to the temptations and dissipations ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest

... beneath any right-minded person. But we must—I say we must," Landis raised her finger impressively, and repeated the words as though she intended at that moment to root out the evil with tooth and nail, "We must get rid of this deceptive tendency. It will have an evil effect on Exeter. Perhaps, in time, destroy ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird

... the Christian is a man under continual exercises, sometimes one way, and sometimes another; but all his exercises have a tendency in them more or less to spoil him; if he deals with them hand to hand; therefore he is rather for flying than standing; for flying to Christ, than for grappling with them in and by his ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... and their power of concentration is greater than that of the average person, but I have not found them to be unusually religious. I do not think that blindness increases or decreases the religious tendency. ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley

... many compromises were designed to secure an equilibrium between the sections, and to preserve the interests as well as the liberties of the several States. African servitude at that time was not confined to a section, but was numerically greater in the South than in the North, with a tendency to its continuance in the former and cessation in the latter. It therefore thus early presents itself as a disturbing element, and the provisions of the Constitution, which were known to be necessary for its adoption, bound all the States to recognize and protect that species of property. When ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... return to the men of genius who answer more strictly to the popular notion of inventors. We have BOCCACCIO'S own words for a proof of his early natural tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy of the gods:—"Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, was without a master, and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... not to fail of straightness in the limbs, compactness in the body, smallness in hands and feet, and exceeding symmetry and comeliness throughout. Possibly between the two sides of the occipital profile there may have been an Incaean tendency to inequality; but if by any good fortune her impressible little cranium should escape the cradle-straps, the shapeliness that nature loves would soon appear. And this very fortune befell her. Her father's detestation of an infant that ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... against him is so strong that I speak as I do," continued Colwyn, in the same earnest tones. "Innocent men have been hanged in England before now on circumstantial evidence. It is for that very reason that we should guard ourselves against the tendency to accept the circumstantial evidence against him as proof of his guilt, instead of examining all the facts with an open mind. We are the investigators of the circumstances: it is not for us to prejudge. That is the worst of ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment. Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word. As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey









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