"Definiteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gregarious, and this is especially true of that whole order of primates to which we belong. Rudimentary moral sentiments are also clearly discernible in the highest members of various mammalian orders, and in all but the lowest members of our own order. But in respect of definiteness and permanence the relations between individuals in a state of gregariousness fall far short of the relations between individuals in the rudest human society. The primordial unit of human society is the family, and it was by the establishment of definite ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I don't know what induced me to notice her at all. There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost. The only peculiarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... of us knew with an absolute definiteness as we crouched there among the racing, dancing black and silver shadows with which the lightnings filled the blue globe—that the Metal ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... planned carefully. He had meant that only the good and beautiful should have place in David's youth. It was not that he intended that evil, unhappiness, and death should lack definition, only definiteness, in the boy's mind. It should be a case where the good and the beautiful should so fill the thoughts that there would be no room for anything else. This had been his plan. And thus far he had succeeded—succeeded so wonderfully that ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct:—It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness—until, at length, I found that the noise was not within ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... travellers—of those Westerns whose real horizon was the sacred East of Syria. He is a little before the awakening of universal interest in the unknown world, for the Christian Northmen lost with the new definiteness of the new faith much of their old infinite unrest and fierce inquisitive love of wandering, and their spirit, though related to the whole Catholic West by the crusading movement, was not fully ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... to reprobate the careless rendering of casual impression, and the mechanical copyism of unimportant subject, which are too frequently visible in our modern school.[O] Their lightness and desultoriness of intention, their meaningless multiplication of unstudied composition, and their want of definiteness and loftiness of aim, bring discredit on their whole system of study, and encourage in the critic the unhappy prejudice that the field and the hill-side are less fit places of study than the gallery ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... precise meaning to be attached to the expressions "superfluous" and "needy." And here, where we feel most of all the need of guidance, it must be confessed that few authors venture to speak with much definiteness. The instance, indeed, of a man placed in extreme necessity, all quote and explain in nearly identical language. Should anyone be reduced to these last circumstances, so as to be without means of subsistence or sufficient wealth to acquire ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... himself the notion of the Annunciation so well as by seeing such a chapel as that at Varese? Common sense says, either tell the peasant nothing about the Annunciation, or put every facility in his way by the help of which he will be able to conceive the idea with some definiteness. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... as these moved her vaguely, and without strict definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had obviously not discerned her yet in her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to which the general law of evolution introduces us are not in all cases as definite as might be wished, yet our author submits that they are more definite than those to which we are introduced by the current creed. Complete definiteness is not, of course, to be expected. Right regulation of the actions of so complex a being as man, living under conditions so complex as those presented by a society, evidently forms a subject-matter unlikely to admit of specific statements throughout ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... this has not the definiteness of an answer; it has only the music that teases us out of thought ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... sits down he does it as he does everything—with definiteness and force. He does not spill over as does the Alimentive nor drape himself gracefully like the Thoracic, but planks himself as though he ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... its attitude toward the man who in his relation with women has violated the moral law. "Leonarda" is a somewhat inconclusive work, because the issue is not clearly defined, but in "A Glove" (at least in the acting version of the play, which differs from the book in its ending) there is no lack of definiteness. This play inexorably demands the enforcement of the same standard of morality for both sexes, and declares the unchaste man to be as unfit for honorable marriage as the unchaste woman. Upon the theme thus presented a long and violent discussion raged; but if there be such a ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... conscience to interpret for itself the laws of right,—as founded upon the words of Christ,—because the extraordinary keenness, fineness, and breadth of his masterly mind enabled him to conceive with unusual definiteness the limits of civil and spiritual authority, and to ascribe the overgrowth of error upon the Church he loved to the misconception and weakness of human nature. He did not place Venice, the superb,—with her pride and pomp and power and intellectual astuteness, with her faults and worldliness ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... position, my first duty was to make a careful study of the publications of the parent society in England, with a view of learning their discoveries. The result was far from hopeful. I found that the phenomena brought out lacked that coherence and definiteness which is characteristic of scientific truths. Remarkable effects had been witnessed; but it was impossible to say, Do so and so, and you will get such an effect. The best that could be said was, perhaps you will get an effect, but more likely ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... book that the value of the scientific training to the man of letters is illustrated, not only in furnishing noble and strong analogies, but in precision of observation and accuracy of statement. In Holmes's style, the definiteness of form and the clearness of expression are graces and virtues which are due to his exact scientific study, as well as to the daylight ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... to him. He hated the blue and white, the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south; the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a sheet painted blue. He walked fast in spite of the ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... set forth with any definiteness the "religious ideas of a Roman" of A.D. 64 would be an extremely difficult task. Those ideas would differ with the individual, being determined or varied by a number of considerations and influences—by locality, education, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... defend Browning's principle and practice exactly. There is no characteristic of his work more evident, none more admirable or more rare, than the unity, the compactness and completeness, the skill and care in construction and definiteness in impression, of each poem. I do not know any contemporary of whom this may more truly be said. The assertion will be startling, no doubt, to those who are accustomed to think of Browning (as people once thought of Shakespeare) as a poet of great gifts but little skill; as a giant, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... which we cannot describe with greater definiteness, we are bound to recognise that GOODNESS is our safe and only guide. The general direction of our advance in the past we can easily trace, but the purpose of the devious paths through which we were led is too difficult to understand. Our present puzzles us, our ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... are being made in these days to meet the evident lack of homemaking knowledge in the rising generation. And since definiteness of plan lends power to accomplishment, we cannot do better than to analyze as carefully as possible the various lines of knowledge required by the prospective homemaker in entering upon ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... invisible, from the side." It was this singular union more than anything else which gave direction and motive force to the propaganda carried on by the Fabian Society for a quarter of a century, whilst to Mr. Shaw personally it gave the consistency of thought and definiteness of aim which underlie all his later work. We cannot, of course, neglect the intellectual influence of Ibsen and Nietzsche, Wagner and Samuel Butler, the individualists and aristocrats who corrected the mob-sentiment of old-fashioned ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... of the United States Government. It was useless to discuss methods of controlling big business by the National Government until it was definitely settled that the National Government had the power to control it. A decision of the Supreme Court had, with seeming definiteness, settled that the National Government had not ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... us and for their own fame, the intention of the writers as men is often at complete variance with the genius of the same men as poets. To the force of their intention we owe their mythological ornaments, and the greater definiteness of their imagery; and their passion for the beautiful, the voluptuous, and the artificial, we must in part attribute to the same intention, but in part likewise to their natural dispositions and tastes. For the same climate and many of the same circumstances ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and—kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... means and methods to each case as it arises. Study and practice are necessary to acquire proper facility in this respect. Theoretical instruction can not replace practical instruction; the former supplies correct ideas and gives to practical work an interest, purpose, and definiteness not otherwise obtainable. ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... the mental life and development of children reveals at the same time the unity and the diversity of the process involved. For the sake of definiteness and clearness, the authors have differentiated between types of mental activity and the corresponding types of classroom exercises. They have, at the same time, sought to make clear the interdependence of the various aspects of teaching method ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... was making energetic efforts to get his force in order for the accomplishment of the relief of Jellalabad. But he foresaw serious delays, and so late as the middle of March was still unable to specify with any definiteness the probable date of his arrival at that place. The European troops in Jellalabad would be out of meat rations early in April, and Havelock's calculation was that the grain, on which mainly subsisted ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... limited to supply the necessary foundation for a science such as physiology. Herein lies the great value of experiments and observations. They supplement the pupil's experience, and increase both the number and definiteness of his concepts. No degree of success can be attained if this phase of ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... competent authority. The decision of the Supreme Court in these two outstanding cases, however, put an end to the previous uncertainty. Chief Justice White, in his two opinions, laid it down with definiteness that in construing and applying the law recourse must be had to the "rule of reason." He made clear the conviction of the court that it was "undue" restraints of trade which the law forbade and not incidental or inconsiderable ones. This definitive interpretation ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... something serious to buy and equip the doll that Robina, with eight-year-old definiteness, had specified. The girl in the Red Cross dress read ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the locking-up of something in Bertha's cabinet. My interviews with my wife had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more definiteness. The recollections of the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a more distinct resemblance to the external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet to ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... an awkward dialect. Compared with Russian, the English language is decidedly weak in synonyms, and in the various shades of meaning that make for precision. Indeed, with the exception of Polish, Russian is probably the greatest language in the world, in richness, variety, definiteness, and elegance. It is also capable of saying much in little, and saying it with tremendous force. In Turgenev's "Torrents of Spring," where the reader hears constantly phrases in Italian, French, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... large wholesale company in Cleveland is a nearly exact duplication of that of other district or division offices controlled by these companies in other cities. The same is true of the Civil Service. Whatever effects standardization may have upon opportunity, it obviously makes for definiteness in regard to training requirements. All the positions are graded on the basis of experience and responsibility and a logical line of promotion from one to ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... describing the taking of a city are once more specified, so as to fulfill all the demands of definiteness ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... that an impossible task had been set for the mouse. Day by day as the tests were in progress I noticed that the animal became increasingly afraid of the entrances to the small boxes; it seemed absolutely helpless in the face of the situation. Partly because of the definiteness of the negative results obtained with No. 4 and partly because of the cruelty of subjecting an animal to disagreeable conditions which it is unable to avoid, the experiment was not repeated with other individuals. I have never conducted an experiment which gave me as much discomfort ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... interruption but a nod or a lightening eye from Farron. He spoke of Benson. "I know the man," said Farron; of Honaton, "He was in my office once." Wayne told how Mathilde, and then he himself, had tried to inform Mrs. Farron of the definiteness of their plans to ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... had come into her young, smooth face,—that was it. Maturity without the passing of Youth; definiteness, understanding, discovery,—a grip on the realities of life, just as it was with him and all the others who were awake. A year in the life of a young thing like Anne could not have created the difference that ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... stone all the range of passions—saintly, earthly, and diabolic—on the varying human face. One fancies each corbel to have had its history, its archetype in nature; a thousand possible stories spring into one's mind. They are wrought with such a startling and individual definiteness, that one feels as about Shakspeare's characters, as if they must have had a counterpart in real existence. The pure, saintly nun may have been some sister, or some daughter, or some early love, of the artist, who in an evil hour saw the convent ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... I go back between the bamboos and their shadows, from unreal reality into a definiteness of cot and pajamas and electric torch. But wild nature still keeps touch with me; for as I write these lines, curled up on the edge of the cot, two vampires hawk back and forth so close that the wind from their wings dries my ink. And the soundness of my sleep is such that time ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble passion. Even the "Mysteries of Paris" and Gaboriau's "Crime d'Orcival" are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible civilization, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis of such figures as the Vicomte d'Orcival, the Stabber,[40] ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... with any definiteness was a tete-a-tete conversation which I held with my lover on a certain yellow divan at the end of one of ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... picked examination of the University of London. Now, I do not think that is a desirable state of things. I cannot understand why physiology should not be taught—in fact, you have here abundant evidence that it can be taught—with the same definiteness and the same precision as anatomy is taught. And you may depend upon this, that the only physiology which is to be of any good whatever in medical practice, or in its application to the study of medicine, is that physiology which a man knows of his own knowledge; just ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... another characteristic of the beautiful, the absence of all lust or desire in the pleasure it bestows. The universal elements of beauty, again, Aristotle finds (in the Metaphysics) to be order (taxis), symmetry and definiteness or determinateness (to orismenon). In the Poetics he adds another essential, namely, a certain magnitude; it being desirable for a synoptic view of the whole that the object should not be too large, while clearness of perception requires that it should not ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of morality is the summum bonum, although we cannot, as long as we are progressive, define its whole content, or find it fully realized in any action. Every failure brings new truth, every higher grade of moral character reveals some new height of goodness to be scaled; the moral ideal acquires definiteness and content as humanity moves upwards. And yet the ideal is not entirely unknown even at the first; even to the most ignorant, it presents itself as a criterion which enables him to distinguish between right and wrong, evil and goodness, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Pan? Sky and stars and mountains and sea were his God! She walked aghast, forgetful of a hundred things she had heard him say that might have settled the point. She had, during the last day or two, been reading an article in which PANTHEISM was once and again referred to with more horror than definiteness. Recovering herself a little, she ventured approach ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Murdo, "Mr. McGinnis is right in asking for definiteness. My answer is that we must trust this committee to do what is wise and reasonable, and we must accept their decision as ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... me an interesting woman. She has opinions of her own, which she expresses clearly and firmly. I like her," responded Morgan with a definiteness of manner which suggested that he was not to be debarred by fear of banter from admitting that ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... he desired despite her husband, the speculation came into his mind how far he could push his influence over Ninitta. At first a mere impersonal idea, the thought was instantly, by his habit of mental definiteness, realized so clearly that his cheek flushed, partly, it is to be said to his credit, with genuine shame. He looked at the beautiful model, and turned away his eyes. Then, hardly conscious of what he was doing, he laid down his palette, and took a ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... Adams Academy, Derry, N. H., 1823; Miss Lyon's seminary, Ipswich, 1828; Bradford Academy limited its work to girls, 1836; Mount Holyoke, 1835; Vassar College, Smith College, and Wellesley College later, but dates are uncertain, as confusion results from lack of definiteness as to whether they represent the year of founding, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... scope of epic intention; such as Scott's longer poems. These might resemble the "lays" out of which some people imagine "authentic" epic to have been made. But the lays are not the epic. Scott's poems have not the depth nor the definiteness of symbolic intention—what is sometimes called the epic unity—and this is what we can always discover in any poetry which gives us the peculiar experience we must associate with the word epic, if it is to have any precision of meaning. ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... territory, it cannot be helped, for it is part of the restoration. Poland must have access to the sea by the shortest route, and everything else which that implies." None the less, the British Premier, whose attitude toward the claims of the Poles was marked by a degree of definiteness and persistency which could hardly be anticipated in one who had never even heard of Teschen before the year 1919, maintained his objections with emphasis and insistence, until Mr. Wilson and M. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... up the first creek after Milk River issued from a deep gorge to flow across a heavily timbered stretch of bottom. They would know it when they saw it. One-Eyed McCarthy had described it with sharp definiteness. It was impossible to miss ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... with an air of surprise that would have been comical under less grievous conditions. She knew, with a vague definiteness, that death was near, perhaps unavoidable, and it had never occurred to her that she or any other person on board need feel any concern about the view entertained by Liverpool as to their fate. Before she could frame a reply, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... interpreted in comparative terms, that is, with respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means the direction of power into special channels: the formation of habits involving executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific objects of observation and thought. But the comparative view is not final. The child has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt or distort the organs upon which his growth depends. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... what one psychologist calls a reflex or a series of reflexes, another will call an instinct. It seems better to consider them as of the same general character but differing from each other in simplicity, definiteness, uniformity of response, variableness among individuals, and modifiability. They range from movements such as the action of the blood vessels to those concerned in hunting and collecting; from the simple, definite, uniform knee-jerk, which is very similar ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... to the Greeks how the power of the Romans had established itself in Greece. His great work was a universal history, but of the forty books of which it consisted only five have been preserved; perhaps no historical work has ever been written with such definiteness of purpose or unity of plan, or with such self-consciousness on the part of the writer. The object to which he directs attention is the manner in which fortune or providence uses the ability and energy of man as instruments ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... woman would be secured through the responsibility which fatherhood involved. Here was the interest his life had lacked, after all—here was the explanation of that vacancy his emotions had not filled; and it appeared to him that his loves had failed in definiteness, in any vital purpose, because he had never seen himself fulfilled in the son which ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... use your behaving like that with me," she said, with the same challenging definiteness, finality: a ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... is much like the Colonial or "barn" pointing already referred to,—the wide open joints being filled with mortar brought well to the surface of the stones and smoothed off by the flat of the trowel with little regard to definiteness of line, after which about one-fourth of the width of the pointing is cut sharply away at the bottom so as to leave a sloping weathered edge considerably below the center of the joint. This is sometimes left as cut, in order to preserve a difference in texture, or is gone over with a trowel, either ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... the Biographic Sketches which she contributed to a London newspaper. They have since been collected in a single volume, now in its fourth edition. They are masterpieces in the style of the vignette. Their conciseness, their clearness in fact, their definiteness in judgment, and above all, the rightly graduated impression of the writer's own personality in the background, make them perfect in their kind. There is no fretting away of the portrait in over-multiplicity ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... own nationality. From that moment the Bond fell back upon the policy of 1881. The Dutch Press, pulpit, and platform commenced an active nationalist propaganda on the old racial lines; and the advocacy of anti-British aims increased in boldness and in definiteness as the Transvaal grew strong with ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the twelve pages is devoted to this object, although the explicit statement is made, on the third page, that "psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help." But so little space is given to this declaration that, in spite of its definiteness and positive character, the class as a whole reached the conclusion that he was advising teachers not to study psychology at all. In other words, they had failed to balance up one part of the chapter against the other; and their failure left them ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Alcuin of York, came of a patrician family of Northumberland. Neither the date nor the place of his birth is known with definiteness, but he was born about 735 at or near York. As a child he entered the cathedral school recently founded by Egbert, Archbishop of York, and ultimately became its most eminent pupil. He was subsequently assistant master to Aelbert, its head; and when Aelbert succeeded to the archbishopric, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... out of pre-existing matter. All this shows that in the verb bara, as in the Sanskrit tvaksh or taksh, there is no trace of the meaning assigned to it by later scholars, of a creation out of nothing. That idea in its definiteness was a modern idea, most likely called forth by the contact between Jews and Greeks at Alexandria. It was probably in contradistinction to the Greek notion of matter as co-eternal with the Creator, that the Jews, to whom Jehovah was all in all, asserted, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... and that these judgments may be the first steps in that insensible process by which the unpretending but subtle and powerful engine of interpretation has been applied by the courts to give a certain turn to law and policy; applied, in this instance, to undermine the definiteness and certainty of doctrine, and in the end, the understanding itself which has hitherto existed between the Church and the State, and has kept alive the idea of her distinct basis, functions, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... definiteness and simplicity about this description of poetry which may well make us wonder why this precious thing (producible, apparently, as easily as Pope's imitators supposed, although by means different from theirs) ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... social customs seem all to assume a definiteness of preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement. They ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... wishes to make his personal allusion blind, he can always do so with the greatest ease and without the slightest degree of grammatical incorrectness. "Caught cold," "better ask," "honorably sorry," "feel hungry," and all the common sentences of daily life are entirely free from that personal definiteness which an Occidental language necessitates. We shall see later that the absence of the personal element from the wording of the sentence does not imply, or prove, its absence from the thought of either the speaker or hearer. The ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... at this time to state with much definiteness are few (doubling consonants, dropping silent e's, changing y's to i's, accenting the penultimate and antepenultimate syllables, lengthening and shortening vowels). In addition we may classify exceptions, for the sole ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... interested him. It was perhaps this quality in Stella that most appealed to him. He was aware that his Aunt Lucretia hoped for a romantic conclusion to the friendship. He himself had given the matter an occasional thought. Yet somehow Stella's definiteness left no room for the imaginative element to become active. It was difficult for him to visualize her as an established factor in his life, either as the restful center of a home or the adaptable companion of his nomadic wanderings. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... these contemporary judgments upon the alleged military defects of Patrick Henry, no reader can now fail to note an embarrassing lack of definiteness, and a tendency to infer that, because that great man was so great in civil life, as a matter of course, he could not be great, also, in military life,—a proposition that could be overthrown by numberless historical examples to the contrary. It would greatly aid us if we could know precisely ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... equal definiteness. This work consists of fifteen books, written by Persian prophets, and was written originally in the Avestaic language; "God" is Ahura-Mazda, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... therefore found firm and staunch friends in Harree, John o' the Bathhouse and the other Hollanders. In three days Pete discarded the immateriality which had constituted the exquisite definiteness of his advent, and donned the garb of flesh-and-blood. This change was due equally to La Soupe and the canteen, and to the finding of friends. For Pete had been in solitary confinement for three months and had had nothing ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Laurance Donovan was in Constantinople, at a café where I was dining. He got into a row with an Englishman and knocked him down. It was not my affair, but I liked the ease and definiteness with which Larry put his foe out of commission. I learned later that it was a way he had. The Englishman meant well enough, but he could not, of course, know the intensity of Larry’s feeling about the unhappy lot of Ireland. In the beginning of my own acquaintance ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... particularly deficient. Yet even this branch of knowledge can boast of some eminent names. When men sailed timidly along the coasts, and dared not explore distant seas, the true position and characteristics of countries could not be ascertained with the definiteness that it is at present. But geography was not utterly neglected in those early times, nor ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... upon their minds, and the mutual sympathy which exists between them, which is his strength and influence when he addresses them. They hang upon his lips as they cannot hang upon the pages of his book. Definiteness is the life of preaching. A definite hearer, not the whole world; a definite topic, not the whole evangelical tradition; and, in like manner, a definite speaker. Nothing that is anonymous will preach; nothing that is dead and gone; nothing even which is of yesterday, however religious in itself ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... these conclusions may be modified by future experiments it is, of course, impossible to predict, but they clearly point the way towards definiteness and boldness in the design of types as well as to a preference for the larger sizes in their use. All this, as we shall see in the next chapter, is in harmony with what experience has been gradually confirming in the practice of ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Definiteness of aim is characteristic of all true art. He is not the greatest painter who crowds the greatest number of ideas upon a single canvas, giving all the figures equal prominence. He is the genuine artist who makes the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of character which had not yet asserted itself to those who knew him best. Correspondingly, his nose, although of a Greek type, was more notable for substance than clearness of line or modelling; while his lips had a boyish fulness along with a definiteness of bow-like curve, which manly resolve had not yet begun to compress and straighten out. His chin was at least large enough not to contradict the promise of his face; his shoulders were square, and his chest and limbs well developed: altogether it was at present a fair tabernacle—of whatever ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... throughout a Communist revolution, a number of conditions must be fulfilled which are not, at present, fulfilled anywhere. Consider, for the sake of definiteness, what would happen if a Communist revolution were to occur in England to-morrow. Immediately America would place an embargo on all trade with us. The cotton industry would collapse, leaving about five ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... industrial monopoly, the problem now before us, there is a good deal of vagueness and misunderstanding because of lack of definiteness in the use of words which have rapidly shifted in meaning. The word "trust" originally applied, and still in legal usage applies, to a particular form of organization, that of a board of trustees holding the stock, and thus unifying the control, of ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... had plenty of time before her, so she did not hurry her work, and it took long centuries before there was any large amount of land thrust up out of the bosom of the sea. The scientists are able to tell us, with some definiteness, which came forth first. They say that on the continent of America the earliest born land was a mass of granitic rock in Canada,—the Laurentian Hills. The next to peer above the surface and feel the warmth of the sun were peaks and ridges that made islands of themselves, in what are now known ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... the pope on the subject of lay investiture, declared that he must stand by that position, and that if Henry also would not obey the pope, he must leave England again. Here was a sharp issue, drawn with the greatest definiteness, and one which it was very difficult for the king to meet. He could not possibly afford to renew the quarrel with Anselm and to drive him into exile again at this moment, but it was equally impossible for him to abandon this right of the crown, so long unquestioned and ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... But it is in the piano-music that the sonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one as nothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of the works of Schoenberg's second period made in the hope of arriving at definiteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of the synagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and the Mouse, Teeny Tiny, or The Old Woman and Her Pig, will the repetitive passages be an aid to verbal expression. The child learns to follow the sequence of a story and gains a sense of order. He catches the note of definiteness from the tale, which thereby clarifies his thinking. He gains the habit of reasoning to consequences, which is one form of a perception of that universal law which rules the world, and which is one of the biggest things he will ever come upon in life. Never can he meet ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... vast wealth? It is impossible to answer the question with anything like definiteness. Figures have been compiled to show that five per cent of the people own two-thirds to three-quarters of it; that the poorest two-thirds of the people own five per cent of it, and that the well-to-do or middle class own the remainder. These figures would make it appear that ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity—nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the city, the symbols of the Apocalypse are terminated. What follows are the words of Christ. The import of these is guarded by his declaration that they are "true and faithful." There is a reality and definiteness in them, which will not admit of their being added to, or taken from. So that any attempt to fritter away their meaning, will be followed by the curses written in the book, and a loss ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... problem any hesitation or lack of definiteness in making plans might cause failure even with victory within our grasp. Moreover, plans as great as our national purpose and resources would bring conviction of our power to every soldier in the front line, to the nations associated with us in the war, and to the enemy. The tonnage for material ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... satisfied me. The delightful vagueness of Stanley, which just suited my mother's broad views, because it was vague and beautiful, was denounced by Pusey—not unwarrantably— as that "variegated use of words which destroys all definiteness of meaning". When she would bid me not be uncharitable to those with whom I differed in matters of religion, I would answer in his words, that "charity to error is treason to truth", and that to speak out the truth unwaveringly as it was ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... man, because he has enthusiasm, because he is brilliant and speaks with as much heat as Lvov does (Act I., Scene 7). She loves him so long as he is excited and interesting; but when he begins to grow misty in her eyes, and to lose definiteness of outline, she ceases to understand him, and at the end of Act III. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... intercourse with him, which was boyishly intimate and affectionate, was that of all 'the apostles of the newness,' as they were gayly called, whose counsel he sought, Brownson was the most satisfactory to him. I thought then that this was due to the authority of Brownson's masterful tone, the definiteness of his views, the force of his 'understanding,' as the word was then philosophically used in distinction from the reason. Brownson's mental vigor and positiveness were very agreeable to a candid mind which was speculatively adrift and experimenting, and, as it seemed to me, which ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... people who don't know their own minds and apparently are least likely to take an eligible residence when they most profess satisfaction with it. Be that as it may, house agents' offices in general have a want of definiteness unknown to, say, banks or pawnbrokers'. There is no exact spot for you to stand or sit; you are unaware as to which of the clerks is going to attend to you, and the odds are heavy that the one you approach will transfer you to another. There is also a certain air of familiarity or friendliness: ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... from her pocket-book, on which was inscribed, in Spencerian definiteness of black and white, "Miss Barbara Allen." It had been the card of Lady Boxspur's eminently respectable maid—and Frances Durkin had saved it for ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... was in the shape of a letter from Col. Trezvant, which reached Richmond Tuesday morning, too late for the columns of the (Richmond) "Enquirer," which was a triweekly. The letter was written on the 21st of August, and lacked definiteness, which gave rise to doubts in reference to the 'insurrection.' It was first sent to Petersburgh, and was then immediately dispatched to the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... and in which the bulk of the gold has been found, has a total area, approximately, of 192,000 square miles, of which 150,768 square miles are included in the watershed of the Yukon. Illustrating this, so that it may appeal with definiteness to the reader, it may be said that this territory is greater by 71,100 square miles than the area of Great Britain, and is nearly three times that of all the ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... has a fairy fineness. There is a strange earnestness in his worship of beauty, which throws a charm over his impassioned song, more easily felt than described, and not to be escaped by those who have once felt it. We think that he has more definiteness and roundness of general conception than the late Mr. Keats, and is much more free from blemishes of diction and hasty capriccios of fancy.... The author imitates nobody; we recognize the spirit of his age, but not the individual form of this or that writer. His thoughts ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... might better be called after-sensations, occur in other senses than sight, but nowhere else with such definiteness. The main fact here is that the response outlasts the stimulus. This is true of a muscle, and it is true of a sense organ. It takes a little time to get the muscle, or the sense organ, started, and, once it is in action, it takes ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... familiar to everybody. It has been elaborated in endless detail, and has expressed itself in the constitutions of all modern democracies. What Karl Marx did, and did for the first time, was to invest this theory of the all-efficiency of the majority with a definiteness, in respect of distribution of wealth, similar to that with which it had been invested already in respect of the making of laws and ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... to get me going or a hooker to keep me under way. I find, now that I know the other side of it, that the chief mental effect of alcohol, taken as I took it, is to induce a certain scattering and casualness of mind. Also, it induces a lack of definiteness of view and a notable failure of intensive effort. A man evades and scatters and exaggerates and makes loose statements when ...
— The Old Game - A Retrospect after Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon • Samuel G. Blythe
... side of the compartment, forever wiping the window with the napkin, and straining their eyes to see the invisible, diverted his unsettled attention. A new perception of how much he liked them and enjoyed having them with him, took hold of his thoughts. It had not occurred to him before, with any definiteness, that he would be insupportably lonely when the time came to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... been engaged in had grown louder than the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr. Warren, of Rondell & Co. Both men turned to look back at each other, and both bowed. The action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by the slightness of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... language of an indictment, and contained the extended argument of a stump speech. Its one pervading thought, emphasized in resonant phrase, iterating and reiterating, "that reform is necessary," was an additional proof of its origin. But with all its effusiveness of expression, it lacked definiteness in the enunciation of principles. Only two or three propositions upon pending issues were explicitly set forth. It accepted the Constitutional Amendments; denounced "the present tariff levied upon nearly four thousand articles as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... yawned, at the tender age of ten, over a certain dissertation on the etiquette of travel, given one summer afternoon by Mademoiselle D'Ormy, Felicia aged twenty-seven, embarked upon her first journey alone, found herself musing with mighty comfort upon the charming definiteness of those never-to-be-forgotten axioms. For Mademoiselle had made the small Felicia recite them over and over ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... more definiteness of thought than ever before, what were the deep feelings which her reticent little mother—Marguerite was an inch the taller—kept hid in that dear breast. Rarely had emotion moved it. She remembered its terrible heavings at ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the developer. Presently I saw a faint smudge of black appear in the upper part, and after that others, indistinct and wavering of outline. I held the negative up to the light. The marks were rather small, and were almost entirely confined to one end of the plate, but as I have said, lacked definiteness. Yet, such as they were, they were sufficient to make me very excited and I shoved the thing quickly back ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... to do my part without any too great display of my own disturbance. The clearness of my remarkable client's instructions, the definiteness with which her mind was made up as to the disposal of every dollar of her vast property, made it easy for me to master each detail and make careful note of every wish. But this did not prevent the ebb and flow within me of an undercurrent of thought full of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... convey with some degree of definiteness the power of resistance to phylloxera, an arbitrary scale has been agreed on by viticulturists. In this scale, maximum resistance is indicated by 20 and minimum by 0. Thus, the resisting power of a good Vulpina is put as 19.5 and that of a ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... everyone else, and their well-ordered home had always a cheering effect on Levin, he felt a longing, now that he was so dissatisfied with his own life, to get at that secret in Sviazhsky that gave him such clearness, definiteness, and good courage in life. Moreover, Levin knew that at Sviazhsky's he should meet the landowners of the neighborhood, and it was particularly interesting for him just now to hear and take part in those rural conversations concerning ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... a public duty to shoot their own fathers to prevent the spread of infection." He was always rather sad, however, if one suggested a little hedging of this kind when one was reading over the final proofs of the paper. What he liked, and as a journalist was quite right to like, was definiteness. Qualifying words were an abomination to his strong imagination. No man ever loved the dramatic side of life more than he did. He even carried this love of drama to the lengths of honestly being inclined to believe things simply and solely because ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... with so sudden a flash. The torch is passed on to those only whose hands are outstretched to receive it. To read with the imagination, one must take time to let the figures reform in his own mind; he must see them with great distinctness and realise them with great definiteness. Benjamin Franklin tells us, in that Autobiography which was one of our earliest and remains one of our most genuine pieces of writing, that when he discovered his need of a larger vocabulary he took some of the tales ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... decision which had crystallised out of the long black hours of the night of her return to Friars' Holm—Gillian had merely laughed the notion aside, attaching little importance to it. But now, a week later, when Magda reverted to the subject with a certain purposeful definiteness, she grew suddenly frightened. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... judge of character. You have a full development of language devoted rather to accuracy and definiteness of meaning than volubility; and yet I doubt not you talk fast when excited—that belongs to your temperament. Your intellect is active and your mind more naturally runs in the channel of intellect than of feeling. It seeks an intellectual development rather than to be developed through the affections ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper |
