"Insoluble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in my very limited reading even hint at the puzzle. I fancy that it is one of those insoluble questions that rest between the infant and his Maker. Mind and soul are not the same things, and what you and I call 'wise men' are ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an exact ellipse about the sun, and this orbit would never change in form, size, or position. With the addition of only one more body, the problem at once becomes so much more difficult as to be practically insoluble; indeed, the "problem of the three bodies" has been attacked by astronomers for years without the discovery of any general formula to express the resulting motions. For the actually existing system of many planets with their satellites and countless asteroids, only an approximation ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... pencil-marks will endure on paper for two centuries may very likely be doubted by many readers, but without reason. Plumbago-marks, if not removed by rubbing, are even more durable than ink; because plumbago is an organic, insoluble substance, not subject to the chemical changes which moisture, the atmosphere, and fluids accidentally spilled, and solvents purposely applied, make in the various kinds of ink which are known to us. The writer discovered this in the course of many amateur ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... was so; but he felt that his heart was full of noble sentiments, and he loved the theater better than the apple of his eye. Would he succeed in being an Ayala or a Tamayo? Would he be rejected by the public? It was an insoluble mystery ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... and nave, is at Tansor in Northants. The perplexity which arises here is due to the plentiful re-use of old work by the builders, the presence of which in unexpected places makes the history of the building a nearly insoluble puzzle. The church reached its present length about 1140, when probably the Saxon nave was left as the west part of a church, which was now of the same width the whole way through, and had no chancel arch. Some ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... the fundamental question for any philosophy of ethics; but it receives no answer at all from the prevailing school of metaphysical thought. This school offers no solution of the problem which was found insoluble by the type of philosophy whose aim is to co-ordinate the results of science. A comparison of the purposes and results of the two ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... manner as the foregoing, only, after exposure, instead of producing the image with a slightly alkaline powder, powdered bitumen is used, and the plate is slightly warmed, so that the powder may slightly fuse and adhere to the metal, but not enough to make the bichromated sugar become insoluble. The plate is then washed with water, and all the sugary coating removed, leaving the surface of the copper bare, except where it is protected by the bitumen forming the image. The plate is then bitten with perchloride of iron, which gives a first ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... attentively fixed on Christ and Judas as they sat together. And that strange proximity of divine beauty and monstrous ugliness, of a man with a benign look, and of an octopus with immense, motionless, dully greedy eyes, oppressed his mind like an insoluble enigma. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... made of emulsion which has been made insoluble. Compare the respective weights of the two substances—one plate weighing more than a dozen films of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... per cent of the aphides. Laundry soap, 3 to 50, was effective against the young aphides only. Arsenate of lead alone, as was to be expected, had little or no effect upon the aphides. The combination of arsenate of calcium with kerosene emulsions is not a desirable one, since an insoluble calcium soap is formed, thereby releasing some ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... rectify the injustices of this, not yet being felt, the doctrine would have been of but little service. But in later Hebrew literature, many magnificent passages revealed the despair felt by prophet and thinker over the insoluble problem presented by the evil fate of the good and the triumphant success of the wicked; and a solution was sought in the doctrine of a Messianic kingdom, until Christianity with its proclamation of a future life set the question entirely ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... commonplace way days or weeks after it is asked. Some person may say something that will be the very clue I am seeking. We are not to be anxious or troubled if many questions perplex us, or many problems seem insoluble, but wait, trusting that 'he is faithful who promised.' We must not be wishing for the same signs or powers that others have, but appreciate what is given to us, for faithfulness shall receive its full reward in due time 'if ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... speech Booker Washington had presented a solution of an apparently insoluble problem. He had offered a platform upon which, as Clark Howell said in the Atlanta Constitution, "both races, blacks and whites, could stand with full justice to each." In the course of the speech ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... course, less prima facie objection to those agents which consist of assimilable elements, such as are found making a part of healthy tissues. These are divisible into three classes,—foods, poisons, and inert, mostly because insoluble, substances. The food of one animal or of one human being is sometimes poison to another, and vice versa; inert substances may act mechanically, so as to produce the effect of poisons; but this division holds exactly enough ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... may begin to quarrel with that home on the day a complication is introduced by the question of what he shall represent—a totally different consideration from that of the method; but for Mr. Reinhart this question has not yet offered insoluble difficulties. He represents everything—he has accepted so general an order. So long as his countrymen flock to Paris and pass in a homogeneous procession before his eyes, there is not the smallest difficulty in representing them. When the case requires that they shall be taken in connection with ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... a second child back of that iridescent and enigmatic girl with the dead fowl. And the dog that barks as Jan Van Koort ruffles his drum, what a spectre dog! No, the mystery of The Night Watch is insoluble, because it is the dream of a poet. Its light is morning light, yet it is the mystic light of Rembrandt, never seen on sea or land. In The Syndics, that group of six linen-drapers, Rembrandt shows with what supreme ease he can beat Hals ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Alien.—After all is said, the immigrant problem is not insoluble. There is much in the situation to make one optimistic. Thus far the native stock has been able to survive and to give its best to the newcomer. The immigrant himself has no desire to destroy American institutions. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... a solution of iron sulphate added. Iron sulphate, or ferrous sulphate, is the green vitriol. The vitriol combines with the potash of the soap, and the iron oxide is precipitated with the fatty acid as insoluble iron soap. This precipitate is then washed, dried and mixed ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... possibility of a being existing in a holy but mutable state, and lapsing, under certain inducements, into sin. What the inducements were in the instance of the prince of darkness we are not told; and thus the question of the origin of evil seems to be insoluble by us. But the identification of it with the personal defection of Satan is far more intelligible and reasonable than the attempt to treat it as a metaphysical abstraction. All the representations of the Bible on the subject are instinct with the awful personality ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... the mirage of bigotry, and did not come into sight until the second decade of the period of peace, when Canning, Pitt's disciple, was the chief champion of the measure here first clearly outlined. Pitt, then, desired a Union as the sole means of ending commercial disputes, otherwise as insoluble as those between England and Scotland previous to the year 1707; but also for an even weightier reason, because only so could the religious discords of Irishmen be ended; only so could the chafing of the majority against the rule of a cramping caste cease. By the formation of an Imperial Parliament, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... insoluble problems of life, but having presented them as powerfully, perhaps, as is possible for human intelligence, he turned in his last period, of only two or three years, to the expression of the serene philosophy of life in which he himself must have now taken refuge. The noble and beautiful ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... self-confidence which characterized all his actions seemed to be failing him. The change had taken place almost overnight. The fact that the case had the appearance of presenting the unusual had merely stimulated him at first. But then doubts had crept in and the problem had begun to appear insoluble. ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... by the chorus is only to bring us to the point where you may be told why Dry Valley shook up the insoluble sulphur in the bottle. So long-drawn and inconsequential a thing is history—the anamorphous shadow of a milestone reaching down the road between ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... philosophers by a short cut and without effort.... In that school of philosophizers at that time the question whether the pig which is being led to market is held by the man or by the string, was considered insoluble. Also, whether he who bought the whole cloak bought the cowl. Decidedly incongruous was the speech in which these words, "congruous" and "incongruous argument" and "reason" did not make a great noise, with multifold negative particles and transitions through "esse" ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... being carried too far, they cease to be truths at all. It is his office to determine how much can be known in each province of thought; when we must be contented not to know; in what direction inquiry is hopeless, or on the other hand full of promise; where it gathers into coils insoluble by reason, where it is absorbed in mysteries, or runs into the abyss. It will be his care to be familiar with the signs of real and apparent difficulties, with the methods proper to particular subject-matters, what in each particular case are the limits of a rational scepticism, and ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Jesus, even at that hour of agony, turns Martha's thoughts to Himself. What He is is the all-important thing for her to know. If she understands Him, life and death will have no insoluble problems nor any hopelessness for her. 'I am the Resurrection and the Life.' She had risen in her grief to a lofty height in believing that 'even now'—at this moment when help is vain and hope is dead—'whatsoever ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... now in my mind that Edie Blythe was this lost granddaughter of old Mrs Willis, but the name still remained an insoluble mystery. ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... I have condensed here are as alive to-day as are thousands of other Ginx's Babies in all our big cities. While philanthropists and politicians, priests and preachers, men and women theorize about the questions, the questions grow "more insoluble." What is to be done? is the first question. How is it to be done is a question which is secondary and its discussion is useless until the first is settled. Too much State drove Ginx's Baby into the Thames. What's everybody's ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... nation assumed the responsibilities of capital those difficulties vanished," replied Dr. Leete. "The national organization of labor under one direction was the complete solution of what was, in your day and under your system, justly regarded as the insoluble labor problem. When the nation became the sole employer, all the citizens, by virtue of their citizenship, became employees, to be distributed according to ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... man left the insoluble mystery of a dog that fled from nothing but the wind, and lapsed into profound musings on human character. "Come on!" he whispered to himself. "Why should it be given to one man to say 'Come on!' with that stupendous violence of effect? Always, all his life, the man with ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Davy's. A two fluid porous cup battery with carbon negative plate, zinc positive plate, and mercury sulphate, a nearly insoluble salt, as depolarizer and excitant. Mercurous or mercuric sulphates have been used in it. Its electromotive force is 1.5 volts. The local action and waste, owing to the slight solubility of the mercury compounds, is very slight. If used on close circuit it becomes polarized. It is also subject ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... that has proved a weakness and a strength to it: a weakness because embarrassed with subtle, complicated, insoluble questions wherein mankind will always be involved, it was forced to engage in endless discussions wherein the bad or feeble reasons advanced by this or that votary compromised the whole work; a strength because whoever brings a rule of life is practically compelled to support it ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... and of how it became what it seems to us to be—Lucretius stood at the same point of ignorance as we, after the labours of Darwin and of Spencer, of Helmholtz and of Huxley, still do. Ontological speculation is as barren now as then, and the problems of existence still remain insoluble. The chief difference indeed between him and modern investigators is that they have been lessoned by the experience of the last two thousand years to know better the depths of human ignorance, and the directions in which it ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... impervious to that gaseous fluid, and be so constituted chemically as not to be oxidizable by it; if under water—especially sea water—to be impermeable to moisture, so elastic as not to crack, so insoluble as not to chloridize; to form a perfect, apparently hard, coating: and yet wear just enough to keep off incrustation, barnacles, or growth of grass. In fact, this slow wearing away is the only preventive of fouling ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Canadian sealers should give up their rights in Bering Sea for a money payment, and to arrange for a measure of reciprocity in natural products and in a limited list of manufactures. But the question of the Alaskan boundary proved insoluble, and the Commission broke up ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... theological ancestors took their origin. Septimius, the rather disagreeable hero of his last romance, is a peculiar example of a similar change. Brought up under the strict discipline of New England, he has retained the love of musing upon insoluble mysteries, though he has abandoned the old dogmatic guide-posts. When such a man finds that the orthodox scheme of the universe provided by his official pastors has somehow broken down with him, he forms some audacious theory of his own, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... standard caustic soda, evaporate to dryness in a platinum dish, and ignite the residue before the blow pipe, which converts the phosphate of soda (formed by a little phosphoric acid carried over in the distillation) into the insoluble pyrophosphate and the acetate of soda into NaHO; dissolve in water, and titrate with standard H{2}SO{4}, which gives the amount of soda combined with the acetic acid in the original sample. In a number of samples analyzed they were found to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... to me, Walter," he exclaimed in disgust, "that this mystery is considered insoluble for the very reason which should make it easy to solve—the extraordinary character ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... that no obstacle had yet conquered me, I said to myself that the solution of this problem would be due to my perseverance. I could not, in view of the importance of its expression, consider the shoulder as a neutral agent. After spending a long time in vain study, I was on the point of giving up as insoluble the problem that I had set myself. Let us see by what simple means I obtained the solution. How much trouble and pains one will sometimes give himself in looking for spectacles ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... question. Crown lands also must revert to the Crown, and had this source of revenue been duly husbanded, it might have supplied a means of dealing with many claims that proved a source of endless and insoluble difficulty. There were certain outstanding Royalists, like Ormonde, whose loyalty was so indisputable, and whose claims were so easy of proof, that restitution in their case was simple, and any resistance to it would have amounted to a confession ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... too, was marred by strange pettinesses and curious contradictions; but one can scarcely grudge to his sickly sensitive nature the anodyne of feminine sympathy. Why so close and tender a friendship never ripened into marriage is an inquiry that may be consigned to the limbo of questions insoluble. It is enough that in the checkered chronicle of the loves of the poets, "blue-eyed Patty Blount" has an immortality almost as secure as that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... has overreached himself. He has given you a choice of two problems, both of which he deems insoluble. Neither of them is insoluble. The only gleam of intelligence Old Cotangent showed was when he said that squaring the circle was too easy. He was right. It would have given you your Liebchen in five minutes. I squared the circle before I discarded pantalets. I will show you ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... brilliancy or success. How it was possible for Moses, with the assistance he had at command, to marshal and move a column of a million or a million and a half of men, women, and children, without discipline or cohesion, and encumbered with their baggage, beside their cattle, is an insoluble mystery. "And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: ... And they spoiled the Egyptians. And the children of Israel journeyed from Ramses to Succoth, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... as though the Piedmontese journal had no thought but to put insoluble problems to the Government, in the face of public opinion, so as to try to prejudice its action in advance. The Stampa's program practically means that to the diplomatic rupture with the Central Empires would be added another diplomatic rupture with the Triple Entente, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... ground, shut up to the necessity of proving that what he approves and practices is absolutely pure, and incapable of perversion. The moment it is admitted that it can, by any possibility, be turned to base uses, the lists are thrown open to all corners, and the utterly insoluble question arises, just what degree of capacity for perversion entitles an amusement to approval or rejection? Insoluble, I say, because, not to speak of any other difficulty, one is obliged to confront the fact that no ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... The reader must bear Mrs. Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her immediate circle, was in her old age "a great genealogist of all Sussex families, and much consulted." The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with such particularity that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has discovered the proverbial truth. I need hardly tell you that it is only the insoluble that is finally baffling and this is very probably insoluble. You remember the awful smash on the Central and Suburban at Knight's Cross Station ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... are not here as those who face an insoluble riddle. We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the resurrection of the dead; and with this key in our hand, we stand here at the grave's mouth, and looking backward, interpret the lesson of this closed life; and looking forward, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... for it all. His mind (the average mind) was weary with trying to solve an insoluble problem. His neighbors, who had got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and suggestion as to the cause of his ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... acceptance than surprise. I felt we were all happy, but I didn't consider how our happiness was managed. And yet there were questions to be asked, questions that strike me as singularly obvious now that there's nobody to answer them. Mr. Offord had solved the insoluble; he had, without feminine help—save in the sense that ladies were dying to come to him and that he saved the lives of several—established a salon; but I might have guessed that there was a method in his madness, a law in his success. ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... Elixir is simply an aqueous infusion of opium—procured by the ordinary maceration—and preserved from decomposing by the subsequent addition of a small portion of alcohol. Narcotin being absolutely insoluble in water is eliminated as the circular says. This fact alone would not account for the difference between its action and that of laudanum. This is explained by the fact that all the other alkaloids possess diverse rates of solubility in water, and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... The second division consists of the nitrogenous materials, containing also carbon, hydrogen, a certain amount of oxygen, sulphur, and possibly other elements. Among the carbohydrates, the commonest are starch and cellulose, which are insoluble bodies, and sugar, which is soluble. The hydrocarbons, fats, oils, and so on, form a comparatively small proportion of the rabbit's diet; the proverb of "oil and water" will remind the student that these are insoluble. The nitrogenous bodies have their type in the albumen of an egg; ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... the other side. Some, indeed, have wished to imagine that our satellite is shaped like an egg, the more pointed end being directed away from us. We are here, of course, faced with a riddle, which is all the more tantalising from its appearing for ever insoluble to men, chained as they are to the earth. However, it seems going too far to suppose that any abnormal conditions necessarily exist at the other side of the moon. As a matter of fact, indeed, small portions of that side are brought into our view from ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... As the chief ingredient is starch, long cooking is necessary, in water at a high temperature (212 deg. F.), which softens the cellulose, and breaks open the starch grains, changing the insoluble starch to soluble starch and dextrin, so that it ...
— The Suffrage Cook Book • L. O. Kleber
... child changed the universe for me. She brought into my life a new element, a new consideration. The insoluble mystery of sex, the heroism of maternity, the measureless wrongs of womankind and the selfish cruelty of man rose into my thinking with such power that I began to write of them, although they had held but academic ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and with it all possibility of growth or of liberty. This is dualism, which cuts us off from our Source of Life; and so long as we take this false conception for the true law of Being, we shall find ourselves hampered by limitations and insoluble problems of every description: We have lost the Key of Life and are consequently unable to ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... sandbank represent! what an enormous grist in the great glacier mill do these layers of clay stand for! Two feet of soil probably represent a hundred feet or more of rock. Strictly speaking, the soil is the insoluble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks, after the rains and the winds have done their work and taken their toll of the grist they have ground. Sometimes these mills take the whole grist and leave the rocks bare; but ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... confident affirmations as to the comparative influence of heredity and environment. We enter into learned disputations as to the blessing or the bane of an education such as his. But every such case is still a profound and insoluble mystery. The most comprehensive laws and the most careful generalizations meet with too many exceptions to enable us to form a science. The children of the good are too often bad and the children of the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... customs are no less opposed to the general tone of society. If the English colonies had been founded in an age of darkness, or if their origin was already lost in the lapse of years, the problem would be insoluble. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... every nerve of the body, was being definitely used. Winn and Lionel felt a strange mood of exultation. They pushed back difficulties and pierced insoluble problems with prompt escapes. Only from time to time casualties dropped in upon them grimly, ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... flatter her; then I confuted her feminine reasoning with a word, and roused her curiosity by drawing her attention to an everyday matter—to sleep, a thing so apparently commonplace, that in reality is an insoluble problem for science. The countess sat in silence for a moment when I told her that our ideas were complete organic beings, existing in an invisible world, and influencing our destinies; and for witnesses ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... some good purpose speak that evangelical word, Et ecce plus quam Salomon hic! You have here in your presence an incomparable treasure, that is, my lord Pantagruel, whose great renown hath brought me hither, out of the very heart of England, to confer with him about the insoluble problems, both in magic, alchemy, the cabal, geomancy, astrology, and philosophy, which I had in my mind. But at present I am angry even with fame itself, which I think was envious to him, for that it did not declare the thousandth part of the worth that indeed is ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... on the Surrey side were dim and grey and very mysterious, the moored, ice-blocked barges silent and deserted, and here and there a lit window shone warm. The sun sank right out of sight into a bank of blue, and the Surrey side dissolved in mist save for a few insoluble, spots of yellow light, that presently became many. And after our lovers had come under Charing Cross Bridge the Houses of Parliament rose before them at the end of a great crescent of golden lamps, blue and faint, halfway between the earth and sky. And the ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... something superadded to the motionless. This is quite legitimate in the world of affairs; but when we bring this habit into the world of speculation, we misconceive reality, we create lightheartedly insoluble problems, and close our eyes to what is most alive in the real world. For us movement is one position, then another position, and so on indefinitely. It is true that we say there must be something else, viz., the actual passing across ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... of Christian life can cope with it, and though this process may be slow, it is sure. Christian missions alone can deal with the opium traffic, now that it has attained such gigantic dimensions, and the despised missionaries are solving a problem which to statesmen is insoluble. Those, therefore, who recognise the evils of opium- smoking will most effectually stay the plague by supporting Christian Protestant Missions in ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... or the immortality of the soul does not divide them so clearly; because such a question is entirely insoluble; and a vivid consciousness of its insolubility accompanies all argument. The question of race does not divide them so clearly; because both with regard to race and with regard to class the division is very largely a superficial thing, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... new ties with the outside world. Live, work, do something! Do not sit here musing and brooding over insoluble conundrums. ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... and Urethra. They consist of a group of secreting sacs, terminating at one extremity in a closed tube, while the other opens into a common duct. The mucus varies in composition in different parts of the body; but in all, it contains a small portion of insoluble animal matter. Its functions are threefold. It lubricates the membranes, prevents their injury, and facilitates the passage of food ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... membership. How to increase the latter from without, and how to transfer recruits from the passive to the active list, are problems that have taxed the ingenuity of not a few and have not infrequently been abandoned as insoluble. It has so long been said, "This missionary work always has to be carried on by a few," that the expression has come to have something of the force of axiomatic truth which, of course, no one dares assail. And so the missionary society lives on, decade after ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various
... is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... of Thrace and opposite the mouth of the Hebrus; the Mysteries are said to have found their first home in this island, where the Cabirian gods were worshipped; this cult, shrouded in deep mystery to even the initiates themselves, has remained an almost insoluble problem for the modern critic. It was said that the wishes of the initiates were always granted, and they were feared as to-day the 'jettatori' (spell-throwers, casters of the evil eye) in Sicily ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again: ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... said my father, slowly taking his hand from his waistcoat, as if the effort were too much for him, and the problem were insoluble. "But this, begging your pardon, I do think, that before a young woman does really, truly, and cordially centre her affections on one object, she suffers fancy, imagination, the desire of power, curiosity, or Heaven knows what, to stimulate, even to her own mind, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nothing about it. What of the mind of the amoeba? A host of questions throng upon us and we can answer no one of them. All the great questions concerning life confront us here in the lowest term of the animal series, and appear as insoluble as in ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... (which cannot be discussed briefly) he is evidently acting a part and suffering acutely, while at the same time his invective, however exaggerated, seems to spring from real feelings; and what is pretence, and what sincerity, appears to me an insoluble problem. Something depends here on the further question whether or no Hamlet suspects or detects the presence of listeners; but, in the absence of an authentic stage tradition, this question too seems to ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... thoughts to go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back. The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in anger and wounded pride from ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... life after death was little known in Israel. This book was the work of a thorough pessimist, whose constant refrain was—Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity. It gives no hint of a second life; and in the absence of this faith the present life is to the writer an insoluble problem. This saying really expressed the popular belief that death ended everything. A man falls like a tree, and, like a prostrate tree, as he falls ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... in it. The priest sat and looked at his lifelong friend, his furrowed face the incarnation of cynical hopelessness. 'What is, is worst,' he seemed to say. His yellow, wise old eyes watched the quick face with the air of one who, having posed an insoluble problem, awaits with a sarcastic humour the ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... say, is or is not. That is what he refused to do. We still want a plain answer to a plain question and insist that he really means either that the saint is annihilated or enters on an infinite existence. But the true analogues to this question are the other insoluble questions, for instance, is the world infinite or finite in space? This is in form a simple physical problem, yet it is impossible for the mind to conceive either an infinite world or a world stopping abruptly with not ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... relationships from the point of view of big, broad objectives, rather than details. But on the basis of what we did discuss, I can say even today that I do not think any insoluble differences will arise among Russia, Great Britain and the ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... last a queer incident came to sober him, to send him flying down once more to the crowded life below with all its dark insoluble riddles. As he swooped, came a tap and something flying past, and a drop like a drop of rain. Then as he went on down he saw something like a white rag whirling down in his wake. "What was that?" he asked. "I ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... has no bearing at all on any moral or religious question. It is insoluble. It leaves us not in ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... These attempted solutions of an insoluble problem may be found in brief in Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Lit. i. 37. Perhaps the boldest is that of Cantorelli, that the annales were constructed not out of the tabula but out of the commentarii; but this is in conflict with the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... is seldom pure. It carries in it carbonic acid; and that acid, beating in shower after shower against the face of a cliff— especially if it be a limestone cliff—weathers the rock chemically; changing (in case of limestone) the insoluble carbonate of lime into a soluble bicarbonate, and carrying that away in water, which, however clear, is still hard. Hard water is usually water which has invisible lime in it; there are from ten to fifteen grains and more of lime in every gallon of limestone water. ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... 11th. I am pursuing my studies as usual day after day; and they lure me, too, deeper and deeper into the insoluble mystery that lies behind all these inquiries. Nay! why keep revolving in this fruitless circuit of thought? Better go out into the winter night. The moon is up, great and yellow and placid; the stars are twinkling overhead through ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a little longer." "Then," he continues, "I was so tossed betwixt the Devil and my own ignorance, and so perplexed, especially at sometimes, that I could not tell what to do." At another time his mind, as the minds of thousands have been and will be to the end, was greatly harassed by the insoluble problems of predestination and election. The question was not now whether he had faith, but "whether he was one of the elect or not, and if not, what then?" "He might as well leave off and strive no further." And then the strange fancy occurred ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the problem. It was impossible to go on like this. One might live with little food, but to live always without undressing and changing one's things was impossible. This problem was insoluble, or seemed so. Then she found a half solution. She would discard her stockings and under garments, make a bundle of them and put them under the sailcloth, she would not wear them again, she would suffer from cold, no matter, anything was better than that feeling of being fully dressed ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... England, but has greatly disappeared before the genius of agricultural improvement. Charcoal is a kind of artificial coal, used principally where a strong and clear fire is desired. It is a black, brittle, insoluble, inodorous, tasteless substance, and, when newly-made, possesses the remarkable property of absorbing certain quantities of the different gases. Its dust, when used as a polishing powder, gives great ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... long time the body is repeatedly shaken, but in vain; the tibiae or tarsi, unduly hard, refuse to yield to the patient saw. Sparrows and Mice grow dry and shrivelled, unused, upon the gibbet. Sooner in one case, later in another, my Necrophori abandon the insoluble problem in mechanics: to push, ever so little, the movable support and so to ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... but of that unknown and mysterious society usually alluded to as the Terrorists, not one of whom has ever been seen save in his crimes. How the assassin managed to enter and leave the car unperceived while the train was going at full speed is an apparently insoluble riddle. Saving the victim and the attendants, the only passengers in the car who had not retired to rest were another officer in the Russian service and Lord Alanmere, who was travelling to St. Petersburg to resume, after leave of absence, the duties of the Secretaryship to the British ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... the child, or upon something in the developed consciousness of the adult, and insist upon that as the key to the whole problem. When this happens a really serious practical problem—that of interaction—is transformed into an unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem. Instead of seeing the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture. Below all other divisions in pedagogic opinion ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... strife between the higher and the inferior clergy, which was no doubt raging in the time of the narrator. Thus the three versions are developed, the origin and collocation of which appears from every other point of view to be an insoluble enigma. The one arises out of the other in the direct line of descent: the metamorphoses took place under the influence of great historical changes which are well known to us; and in the light of Jewish history from Josiah downwards they are by ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... removed from its contiguous parts, so as to render more visible its form and insertions. Under this tissue is found with the Nos. 7, 8, and 9, the endosperm or perisperm, containing the gluten and the starch; soluble and insoluble albuminoids, that is to ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... phenomenon is one of the most curious in the history of organic forms. I say the history; for in vain would reason forbid man to form hypotheses on the origin of things; he still goes on puzzling himself with insoluble problems relating ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... wrestlings with nature, and of ceaseless questioning of the human heart, had yielded no results, then, at least, the lesson of their failure and defeat remained for the instruction of future generations. Either the problems they sought to solve were proved to be insoluble, or their methods of solution were found to be inadequate; for here the mightiest minds had grappled with the great problems of being and of destiny. Here vigorous intellects had struggled to pierce the darkness ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Wyse was back, it was well just to run over his record; partly she wanted to divert her mind from the two houses just below, that of Major Benjy on the one side and that of Captain Puffin on the other, which contained the key to the great, insoluble mystery, from conjecture as to which she wanted to obtain relief. Mr. Wyse, anyhow, would serve as a mild opiate, for she had never lost an angry interest in him. Though he was for eight months of the year, or thereabouts, in Tilling, he was ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... of poisons by a chemical union, forming an insoluble compound, or a mild, harmless one. Alkaline solutions are antidotes for the mineral acids; as soap in solution, a simple remedy, and always at hand. Lard, magnesia, and oil are antidotes for poisoning by arsenic; albumen,—in the form of the ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... the problems that the Japanese builders of the past had to face in the erection of a few of the great temples which still adorn the country have proved insoluble to many European engineers and architects. The erection and support of the magnificent pagoda at Nikko is an example in point. Dr. Dresser has referred to this and pointed out what he deemed a great waste of material in connection ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... they cannot present actions objectively as practically necessary; that they are rather to be regarded as counsels (consilia) than precepts (praecepta) of reason, that the problem to determine certainly and universally what action would promote the happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and consequently no imperative respecting it is possible which should, in the strict sense, command to do what makes happy; because happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds, and it is vain to expect that ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... had gone mad; but he had no time for insoluble questions, for below him—hardly five minutes after the first sound of the guns—a body of sailors appeared hurrying ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... temperature slightly, to insure the complete decomposition of the melt. When the decomposition is complete, which can be known by the complete absence of gritty particles, the crucible is cooled and then soaked out in cold water. This is very quickly accomplished, and we then see that we have an insoluble residue of graphite and a flocculent precipitate of lime, magnesia, iron hydrate, etc., while the organic matters have disappeared. The sulphides of iron, etc., have given up their sulphur to the potash, and everything except the graphite has suffered some change. The solution is now filtered ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... coherence of all things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,—he calls this problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal fons et origo, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat back dangerous foes"—and upon them the same Constellations look down; and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the same Sphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insoluble Question. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... occasionally with information about the rate of exchange at the moment. Madame insisted on taking this into account in comparing the cost of living in the two countries. Then we used to be faced with problems which I regard as insoluble. ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... real father of monasticism—that spirit of seclusion and self-abnegation which became so prevalent in the third and fourth centuries, and which remained in the church through the mediaeval period. Gnosticism busied itself with the solution of insoluble questions respecting the origin of evil, which Christianity justly relinquished to the domain of useless inquiries—"the wisdom of the world." Gnosticism would acknowledge no limits to human speculation; Christianity accepts mysteries hidden from the wise and prudent, and yet revealed unto ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... stood waiting beside the car. Automatically their eyes rolled towards my bonnet; the Vicar smiled, and bent his head in a courtly little bow, which said much without the banality of words. The Squire had no expression! Whether he approved, disapproved, or furiously disliked, he remained insoluble as the Sphinx. Oh, some day—somehow—some one—I hope, will wake him into life, and whoever she is, may she shake him well up, and ride rough-shod over him for a long, long time before she gives in! He ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... large set at school who were ugly, stupid, and dull, and they were devoted to one another, though they none of them cared about her. Why had God sent her into the world, if she was not wanted? She found the problem insoluble, but a certain amount of light was thrown on it by one ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... described by Faraday in 1845, and partly due to Werner Siemens, was a method of reproducing printed matter by transferring the print from paper to plates of zinc. Caustic baryta was applied to the printed sheet to convert the resinous ingredients of the ink into an insoluble soap, the stearine being precipitated with sulphuric acid. The letters were then transferred to the zinc by pressure, so as to be printed from. The process, though ingenious and of much interest at the time, has long ago ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... their steps was now the problem, apparently insoluble. As to the military force of Persia in the field, indeed, not merely the easy victory at Kunaxa, but still more the undisputed march throughout so long a space, left them no serious apprehension. In spite of this great extent, population, and riches, they had been allowed to pass ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... as Renan calls it, has in many ways more affinity with the modern mind than any other in the Old Testament. It is weary with the weight of an insoluble problem. With a cold-blooded frankness, which is not cynical, only because it is so earnest, it faces the stern facts of human life, without being able to bring to their interpretation the sublime ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... invited, and at the same time completely baffled, conjecture, as the Garden of Eden." And in another place he thinks that "the site of Eden will ever rank with the quadrature of the circle, and the interpretation of unfulfilled prophecy among those unsolved, and perhaps insoluble, problems which possess so strange a fascination." It is, however, to be remarked, (1)that all that was written before Professor Delitzsch's researches were made known; and (2)that really a great mass ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... scorner with honor, been with men, beard with shared. For the last two we have a certain sympathy as archaisms, but with the rest we can make no terms whatever,—they must march out with no honors of war. The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give a flavor of essence-pennyr'y'l to the very Beatitudes. It differs from Lowland Scotch as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... case of the oyster the radical home cure for the living irritant or insoluble substance which had gained entrance between its valves is an encasement of pearl-film. If this encasement is globular or pear-shaped, or takes the form of a button and is lucid, lustrous, flawless, and of large size, it may ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... be done satisfactorily under pressure. The bones of fish are composed of large quantities of harmless lime, bound by a matrix of collagen, which is insoluble under ordinary conditions. When subjected to a high temperature under pressure this collagen is converted into gelatin and dissolved, leaving the bones soft and friable and even edible. Bony fish, such as herring and shad, which are too small to use otherwise are greatly ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely meaningless' beauty of La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae tired me more and made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with him, unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind. And he would still have been ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... be learned from the history of other nations. Thanks to the wisdom and independent spirit of our forefathers, this is not the case. Each State having sole charge of its local interests and domestic affairs, the problem, which to others has been insoluble, to us is made easy. Rapid, safe, and easy communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific will give cointelligence, unity of interest, and cooeperation among all parts of our continent-wide republic. The network of railroads which bind the North and the South, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... The vessels when completely formed are laid in some convenient place to sun-dry. A paint or solution is then made, either of a fine white calcareous earth, consisting mainly of carbonate of lime, or of a milk-white indurated clay, almost wholly insoluble in acids, and apparently derived from decomposed feldspar with a small proportion of mica. This solution is applied to the surface of the vessel and allowed to dry; it is then ready for ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... condition of jasper and onyx." "The chemistry of the process of petrifaction or silicification," writes Doctor George P. Merrill, Curator of Geology in the National Museum, "is not quite clear. Silica is ordinarily looked upon as one of the most insoluble of substances. It is nevertheless readily soluble in alkaline solutions—i.e., solutions containing soda or potash. It is probable that the solutions permeating these buried logs were thus alkaline, and as the logs gradually decayed their organic matter was replaced, molecule by molecule, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... no reply. Was he trying to soften his mother? Had this letter put an end to his love? Many such questions, all insoluble, tormented poor Ursula, and, by repercussion, the doctor too, who suffered from every agitation of his darling child. Ursula went often to her chamber to look at Savinien, whom she usually found sitting pensively before ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... dozen men were previously employed at tillage. The farmer cannot easily—as the mine-owner—unload his burden on the general public by the increase of prices. There are many difficulties, which seem almost insoluble, if we propose to ourselves to integrate the rural laborer into the general economic life of the country by making him a partner in the industry he works on. But what I hope for most is first that the natural evolution ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... the problem is necessarily insoluble (VII) does not deserve to be regarded as an hypothesis at all; for to suppose that the problem is necessarily insoluble is merely to exclude the supposition of ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... me as my own desultory and self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience with the necessarily insoluble problem. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... between filled with rain-water, which (except in the immediate vicinity of the bituminous springs) is inodorous and without taste—an extraordinary fact, showing that this bitumen is of a nature quite different from that of pyrotechnic mineral or vegetable tar. In its dry state it is quite insoluble in water, though when charged with essential oil, as it exudes from nature's laboratory, it imparts a pungent and unpleasant taste. A considerable quantity of gas bubbles up through these bituminous springs, showing that decomposition is still active amongst the materials whence it exudes. ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... inhabit the country to the north of Point de Galle.[2] But the conjecture is erroneous, the derivation of Singhala is clearly traced to the Sanskrit "Singha;" besides which, in the alphabet of the Singhalese, n and g combine to form a single and insoluble letter. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... solution of tan upon a solution of glue, observed that they were hardly mixed together before a white felamentous precipitate took place, owing to a combination of the glue with the tanning principle contained in the solution of tan. This precipitate is insoluble in water, either hot or cold, and acquires colour by being exposed to the light. The foregoing experiment furnishes a true explanation of the process of tanning; for it will easily be conceived that the ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... revolutions; the problem of ruling this city—which in every respect might be compared to the Paris of the nineteenth century—without an armed force was infinitely difficult, and for that stiff and stately pattern-soldier altogether insoluble. Very soon matters reached such a pitch that friends and foes, both equally inconvenient to him, could, so far as he was concerned, do what they pleased; after Caesar's departure from Rome the coalition ruled doubtless ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... The further explanation of motion, the definition of a virtue or potency that produces it, first a neglected problem, then an irrelevant problem, is finally, for a naturalistic philosophy in which this progression is completed, an insoluble problem. For the sequel to this purely descriptive procedure on the part of science is the disavowal of "metaphysics" by those who will have no philosophy but science. Thus the scientific conservatism of Newton has led to the positivistic and agnostic phase of naturalism. But a further ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... fear lest the truth be bad. On the other hand, the sincere man of science, content to follow wherever the evidence leads him, becomes by each new inquiry more profoundly convinced that the Universe is an insoluble problem. Alike in the external and the internal worlds, he sees himself in the midst of ceaseless changes, of which he can discover neither beginning nor end. If, tracing back the evolution of things, he allows himself to entertain the hypothesis that all matter once existed in a diffused ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... decide whether and how much the window should be open and how many blankets should be on the bed, and at what hour they should go to bed and get up so as to avoid disturbing one another's sleep, seemed insoluble questions to me. But the members of the conference did not seem to mind. They were content to have the whole national housing problem treated on a basis of one room for two people. That was the essence ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the elements are due to the influence of light; for example, a sulphur soluble in carbon disulphide is converted into sulphur which is insoluble, and the rate of change of yellow phosphorus into the red variety is greatly accelerated by light. Hydrogen and chlorine combine under the action of light with explosive rapidity to form hydrochloric acid and there are ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... shellac will result in an extremely hard and almost insoluble varnish, a very undesirable covering for a musical instrument of any kind as it wears badly, that is, suddenly and harshly with a rough fractured edge, instead of the gentle thinning-away under usage, seen with a delicate ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... feats of this man, (hypnotist astrologer and thought-reader all rolled into one) have ever since remained an insoluble mystery. ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... out in the author one is reading or reading from. Sometimes one does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has the pleasure of puzzling it out; sometimes he never sees it, and then his life is sublimed with an insoluble conundrum. Sometimes, still, he sees what the critic means, and disagrees with him. In this case he is not likely to go to the end of his journey without finding a critic whom he agrees with about ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all trading finally involves individual preferences which are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really defined standards, every economic ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... we observe that the nitrogenous matter is to the carbonaceous in the proportion of one-sixth, which is the composition of a perfect food. Besides taking part in this composition, the bran, being in a great measure insoluble, passes in bulk through the bowels, assisting daily laxation—a most important consideration. If wheat is such a perfect food, it must follow that wholemeal bread must be best for our daily use. That such is the case, evidence on every side shows; those who eat it ...
— The Allinson Vegetarian Cookery Book • Thomas R. Allinson
... of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and 'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two lines from The Woods of Westermain, published in 1883 in the Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, sum up in themselves the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... second from the sides, the third from the belly. I confide to you these trade secrets because you are men of honor. But whether a man has hare's-skin or silk on his head, fifteen or thirty francs in short, the problem is always insoluble. Hats must be paid for in cash, and that is why the hat remains what it is. The honor of vestural France will be saved on the day that gray hats with round crowns can be made to cost a hundred francs. We could then, like the tailors, give credit. To reach ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... form, began to circulate privately only two or three years before Spinoza's death, and why his work on The Improvement of the Understanding and his Political Treatise were left unfinished, must remain something of an insoluble philosophico-literary mystery. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... have never taken doubt for a guide. They have obeyed the impulses of their blood. They have hearkened to the voice of our God. They have surmounted insuperable obstacles on the wings of a mighty faith; they have solved insoluble problems by the sovereign rule of liberty; they have made the bosom of the ocean and the heart of the wilderness their home; they have subdued nature and told history a new tale. Let American statesmanship listen to the heart-beats of the American people in the present hour and ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... difficulties, the one insoluble problem is——, given a good and perfect God, where does sorrow come from, and why is there any pain? Men have fumbled at that knot for all the years that there have been men in the world, and they have not untied it yet. They have ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... The problem was insoluble; the only way was to set one's self courageously at one's own little corner of the gigantic scheme, to attack it as faithfully as one could, by humble aspirations, quiet ministries, and tender-hearted sympathy; to take as simply as possible whatever message of beauty and hope fell to one's ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... even the dead man himself, were but the merest supers in the prelude to adventure. Moira and I were the only ones who were real, the only actors that were something more than mummers. Yet even I failed to see that what had happened that night was something more than a queer insoluble mystery. There was nothing in my experience to tell me that it was vitally connected with the early history of Victoria, that it had its being in the now far-off days before Australia became a nation. I think if any supernatural ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... abolish all contradictions. But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we have arrived at the so-called absolute truth, history is at an end, and yet it will continue to go on, although there is nothing further left for it to do—thus a newer and more insoluble contradiction. So soon as we have once perceived—and to this perception no one has helped us more than Hegel himself—that the task thus imposed upon philosophy signifies nothing different than the task that a single philosopher shall accomplish ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... mother's history himself, how could he have found out Obed Chute for his friend? and if he were acquainted with it, how could he have tolerated him as such? From either point of view the question was unanswerable, and the problem insoluble. Yet the fact remained that Lord Chetwynde was in the habit of making constant visits to the house of the man, the very man, to whom the history of Lord Chetwynde's mother was known as a story of shame, and who himself had been the chief agent ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... several different poets. This theory has been attacked and supported with great energy: for a half century men have flown into a passion for or against the existence of Homer. Today we begin to think the problem insoluble. What is certain is that these poems are very old, probably of the ninth century. The Iliad was composed in Asia Minor and is perhaps the result of the union of two poems—one dedicated to the combats of the Trojans, and the other to the adventures of Achilles. The Odyssey ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... insoluble in concentrated caustic lyes, and, for the most part, in strong solutions of sodium chloride, hence the addition of caustic soda or brine to a solution of soda soap causes the soap to separate out and rise to the surface. Addition of brine to ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... tend to regard such consideration as irrelevant; but if the starting-point of metaphysics is to be found in psychology, psychology itself depends to no small extent upon physiology. This question, however, Huxley did not pretend to solve. In the existing state of knowledge he believed it to be insoluble. But he thought it was not without its bearing upon the supposed relations of soul and body in the human subject, and should serve to give pause to current theories on ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... boys took our shoes and we disposed ourselves on the sofas, Tanno in the place of honor, I rejoicing again that his presence had solved, acceptably to all the rest, the otherwise insoluble problem of to whom ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... statement made by persons who have lived in China—among the people, but not of them—and the more superficial the acquaintance, the more emphatically is the statement made, that the ordinary Chinaman, be he prince or peasant, offers to the Western observer an insoluble puzzle in every department of his life. He is, in fact, a standing enigma; a human being, it may be granted, but one who can no more be classed than his unique monosyllabic language, which ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles |
