"Discontinuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... living like the lifeless, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. Perceiving in an organism only parts external to parts, the understanding has the choice between two systems of explanation only: either to regard the infinitely complex (and thereby infinitely ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... cases so far apart on the hayloft as to permit 10 per cent of our flasks to take in air without contracting contamination. A quarter of a century ago Pasteur proved the cause of 'so-called spontaneous generation' to be discontinuous. I have already referred to his observation that 12 out of 20 flasks opened on the plains escaped infection, while 19 out of 20 flasks opened on the Mer de Glace escaped. Our own experiment at the Bel Alp is a more emphatic instance of the same kind, 90 per cent of the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... semiarid; mild, wet winters with hot, dry summers along coast; drier with cold winters and hot summers on high plateau; sirocco is a hot, dust/sand-laden wind especially common in summer Terrain: mostly high plateau and desert; some mountains; narrow, discontinuous coastal plain Natural resources: crude oil, natural gas, iron ore, phosphates, uranium, lead, zinc Land use: arable land 3%; permanent crops NEGL%; meadows and pastures 13%; forest and woodland 2%; other 82%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: mountainous areas subject ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... went on, "people used to think matter and motion were continuous, but scientists have proved that they are discontinuous. Now some of them think time may be, too. Maybe everything is just imaginary, and appears to our senses in whatever way we want it to appear. We are so well-trained that we see everything just as we are taught to see it by generations of artists, writers, and other symbol-makers. If we could see ...
— Vanishing Point • C.C. Beck
... is given. Professor Shield Nicholson finds two laws or tendencies which operate in reducing this disturbing influence of machinery. He holds (1) that a radical change made in the methods of production will be gradually and continuously adopted; (2) that these radical changes—these discontinuous leaps—tend to give place to advances by ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... and desert; some mountains; narrow, discontinuous coastal plain lowest point: Chott Melrhir -40 m ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... spectacle afforded by a very large portion of the Milky Way in that interesting region near its point of bifurcation in Scorpio, where, through the hollows and deep recesses of its complicated structure, we behold what has all the appearance of a wide and indefinitely prolonged area strewed over with discontinuous masses and clouds of stars, which the telescope at last refuses to analyse. Whatever other conclusions we may draw, this must anyhow be regarded as the direction of the greatest linear extension of the ground-plan of the galaxy. And it would appear to follow also that ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... admirable. The writer's vocabulary has become opulent, his phrases flash and detonate, each page is full of unconnected sparks and electrical discharges. A sort of aurora borealis of wit streams and rustles across the dusky surface, amusing to the reader, but discontinuous, and insufficient to illuminate the matter in hand. It is extraordinary that a man can make so many picturesque, striking, and apparently apposite remarks, and yet leave us so frequently in doubt as to his meaning. If this was the result of the imitation of Aretino, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... and freight rates offered it without the ability to check or regulate them, and buying its goods at whatever prices the industrial producers set. Its leadership up to the present time has been of the sporadic and discontinuous sort. It has been individualistic, lacking social outlook and vision. Consequently for community purposes its significance has ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... of the mountain continuing or increasing, the terror at Resina, Portici, and Naples became universal. It seemed as though the tragic calamities of the eruption of A.D. 79 were about to be repeated. But gradually the force of the explosions decreased, and the noise from the crater became discontinuous, so that on the 30th the detonations were very few, and by the 1st May the ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... a very distinguished and a very independent man of Science. It was he who insisted, at a time when the domination of a very rigid form of Darwinism was much stronger than it is to-day, that the picture of Nature as seen by us is a Discontinuous picture, though Discontinuity does not exist in the environment. And it was he who asked whether the Discontinuity might not be in the living thing itself, and prefixed to the monumental work[3] in which he discussed this question the significant text from the Bible: "All ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... hills and mountains separated by deep, narrow valleys; coastal plains wide in west, discontinuous ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... exceedingly in distance, but brought by the effect of projection into the same, or nearly the same, visual line; in particular, that at the anterior edge of what we have called the main stream, we see foreshortened a vast and illimitable area scattered over with discontinuous masses and aggregates of stars in the manner of the cumuli of a mackerel sky, rather than of a stratum of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... We prefer to make it, if you will, the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations. We must ever keep it in mind, though without dwelling on it too much, somewhat as a skilful fencer must think of the discontinuous movements of the lesson whilst his body is given up to the continuity of the fencing-match. We will now endeavour to reconstruct the sequence of comic forms, taking up again the thread that leads from the horseplay ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the time, to a standstill; though, in the line of thought-movement in history, radium was merely the next position, familiar and inexplicable since Zeno and his arrow: continuous from the beginning of time, and discontinuous at each successive point. History set it down on the record — pricked its position on the chart — and waited to be led, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... really pigeon-holed and discontinuous in two respects, in respect to time and in respect to classification; whereas one has a strong persuasion that the world of fact is ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... ingrained in thought, with all the usual exaggeration of implication, that no one laughs at talk about Swedish painting or American literature. And I will confess and point out that my own detachment from these delusions is so imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage I have committed myself to a short assertion of the exceptionally noble quality of the English imagination. [Footnote: Chapter the Seventh, section 6.] I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about English superiority which I should reject indignantly ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the compilers of a modern work, The Good Loo Guide, were parodying a well-known guide book to British restaurants, so the unknown authors of The Merry-Thought had some notion, however discontinuous, of parodying the nation's polite literature. Were not Pope and Swift famous for their distinguished miscellanies? What could be more amusing than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic ideal—a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic merit claimed by the superstars ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... way to secure for one's self a just appreciation of the Principle of Continuity is to try to conceive the universe without it. The opposite of a continuous universe would be a discontinuous universe, an incoherent and irrelevant universe—as irrelevant in all its ways of doing things as an irrelevant person. In effect, to withdraw Continuity from the universe would be the same as to withdraw reason from an individual. The universe would run deranged; the world would ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... many centuries, perhaps a whole millennium, before western Europe scaled the heights on which these men now stood, it had been gradually raising itself from the depths of post-Roman decline. The ascent was not only slow but also discontinuous, yet it was sufficient to establish within a few centuries of Gregory of Tours a social order different from Rome and less glorious to behold across a thousand years of history, but nevertheless sufficiently exalted to draw the interest, and even to command ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... perceived the applicability of the surprising discovery of line-shiftings through end-on motion to the study of prominences, the discontinuous light of which affords precisely the same means of detecting movement without seeming change of place, as do lines of absorption in a continuous spectrum. Indeed, his observations at the sun's edge almost compelled recourse to an explanation made available just when the need of it began to be ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... of what we now call a Station of Experimental Evolution. Leibnitz discusses in so many words how the species of animals may be changed and how intermediate species may once have linked those that now seem discontinuous. "All natural orders of beings present but a single chain".... "All advances by degrees in Nature, and nothing by leaps." Similar evolutionist statements are to be found in the works of the other "philosophers," to whom Prof. Osborn refers, who were, indeed, more scientific ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... it is intended to resist, and parts intended for tension may be in compression; hence it may need to be stiffened by timber during rolling. The bending action on the bottom boom in passing over the rollers is also severe. Modifications of the system have been adopted for bridges with discontinuous spans. In narrow ravines a bridge of one span may be rolled out, if the projecting end is supported on a temporary suspension cable anchored on each side. The free end is slung to a block running on the cable. If the bridge is erected when the river is nearly dry a travelling ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Purushas, homogeneous units, countless in number, stands Prakriti, Matter, the second in the Samkhyan duality. Prakriti is one; Purushas are many. Prakriti is a continuum; Purushas are discontinuous, being innumerable, homogeneous units. Continuity is the mark of Prakriti. Pause for a moment on the name Prakriti. Let us investigate its root meaning. The name indicates its essence. Pra means "forth," and kri is the ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... shattered, shivered; disconnected, discontinuous, interrupted; impaired, shattered; subdued, humbled, contrite, penitent, crushed, trained, subjugated, tractable; violated. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... consider the Italian volcanoes as a whole, we find that they lie in a long, discontinuous line extending from the northern part of the valley of the Po, within sight of the Alps, to AEtna, and in subterranean cones perhaps to the northern coast of Africa. At the northern end of the line we have a beautiful group of extinct volcanoes, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler |
