"Irreducible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upset a very great body of statistics. Furthermore, in most human affairs results are produced by a multiplicity of causes; and though statistics may throw light on three quarters of all the causes that are potent in any given case, yet the other quarter which are irreducible to definite statement may wholly alter the result. If you are using statistics in your argument, therefore, as evidence of some large and complex fact, you should usually justify them to some extent by showing that there are no counteracting forces which ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... that race suicide and general limitation of births to the irreducible minimum, can be effectively justified by any conceivable appeal to economic or sociological factors, is a mistake which will eventually bring about the extinction ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... traced without difficulty to Gerald Deganway, that Lord Crawleigh had spirited Barbara away from the danger of a mesalliance. But, in wrestling with the necessary evils of life, Eric was finding, as others had done before him, that Gerald Deganway was the irreducible minimum; it was of greater importance that for three months no one would have cause to gossip about them; and by that time even the Warings could not reasonably hope for tidings ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... must pass into feeling, and thence into life, but it must underlie all real discipleship. Doctrine is not Christianity, but it is the foundation of Christianity. The Apostolic confession here is the 'irreducible minimum' of the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sound morality. That is why we find a combat in each Catholic breast as to which of the two concepts is to be accepted as guide. To every sincere mind and to one capable of entertaining both, each is irreducible to the other. To the vulgar mind, unable to combine both in thought, they exist side by side and clash with each other only occasionally when action demands a choice. Many intelligent, cultivated people, and even savants, especially specialists, avoid confronting them, one being the support ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... greater artistic gift, Mark Gertler's conviction and conscience would suffice to make him a painter of the first magnitude. Unfortunately, his artistic gift, one inclines to suppose, is precisely that irreducible minimum without which an artist cannot exist. That is his weakness. His strength is that he exploits that minimum uncompromisingly to its utmost possibility. Gertler is one who will never say an idle word in paint, no matter how charming or ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... particular night the irreducible nine hours were severely mutilated by the sudden and by no means noiseless incursion of a pyjama- clad figure into Waldo's room at an hour midway between ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... escape more readily. This proposition is unanimously negatived, until Mr. Jones, who is tilting his chair back, produces the desired effect by overbalancing himself in the middle of a comic medley, and causing a compound, comminuted, and irreducible fracture of three panes of glass by tumbling through them. Hereat, the harmony experiencing a temporary check, and all the half-and half having disappeared, Mr. Muff finds there is no great probability of getting any more, as the servant who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... space-filling, universal ether. Chemistry long ago succeeded in reducing all the various natural substances to combinations of a relatively small number of elements; and the most recent advances of that science have now made it in the highest degree probable that these elements or the (as yet) irreducible primitive materials are themselves in turn only different combinations of a varying number of atoms of one single original element. But in all this we have not as yet obtained any further light as to the real nature of these original atoms ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... they have to make fixed annual contributions to the Central Exchequer. These contributions are in no case to be subject to increase in the future, but on the contrary to be reduced gradually and to cease at the earliest possible moment compatible with the irreducible requirements of the Government of India. The Act of 1919, it is true, transfers to the Indian Legislature no direct or complete statutory control over revenue and expenditure, and powers are still vested in the Government of India to override the Assembly in cases of emergency ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... interesting to note that in his latest work Haeckel regards sensation (or unconscious sentience) as an ultimate and irreducible attribute of substance, like matter (or extension) and force (or spirit)" ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... spurious factors, such as signs (not intentional or perceptible) by the experimenter to the subject experimented with; a certain amount of falsification in interpretation of results on the part of the experimenters, etc.... But the irreducible residue of the facts is, in my opinion, still enormous as compared with the little that could perhaps be eliminated by these means from the discussion. Therefore, in the absence of anything better for the moment, and subject to further information, ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... a combination of the more minute and widespread processes which they contain. The only question therefore is: Do processes such as nutrition and reproduction arise by a combination of such events as the fall of apples? Or are they irreducible events, and units of mechanism by themselves? That is the dilemma as it appears in science. Both possibilities will always remain open, because however far mechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension presents them, will always remain irreducible to any common denominator with ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... us face to face with problems unknown to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So much of what seemed the solid continent of historical truth has weathered and crumbled away that some have wondered whether any irreducible nucleus would remain firm and permanent above the flood of the years, and whether the religion of the future must not dispense with the historical element, and the Faith-aspect that goes with it, and rest ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the Silver Knight had sworn—that the Standard so long borne By the Aureate One, in scorn irreducible Should not solitary wave. He'd squabosh that champion brave, Or would find a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... all; instead of holding together more firmly, with every successive reconstruction, its prodigious members seem always more disparate and disorganized; they will not coalesce. A subject, one and whole and irreducible—a novel cannot begin to take shape till it has this for its support. It seems obvious; yet there is nothing more familiar to a novel-reader of to-day than the difficulty of discovering what the novel in his hand is about. What was the ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... been there from the morning of time. Newton discovered the force of gravity, but that force has been in the natural situation since creation. Chemists have been able to make out sixty-five or sixty-six irreducible elements; but while chemistry is young, the elements are everlasting. Electricity is the discovery of yesterday, and yet it has been at play in man's environment from the foundation of the world. The continuity of life, from the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... urged each State to hold a similar State school to be followed by others in every election district, to carry the message to every woman that good citizens not only register and vote but know how to do so and why they do it; to set a standard of good citizenship with an "irreducible minimum" of qualifications below which no person can fall and lay claim to the title good citizen. It was planned to give certificates of endorsement to those who passed 75 per cent. in the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... of pure thought, and also the language of games, of pastimes, of tourneys, and of chivalry. In some cases no compromise took place, neither the French nor the Anglo-Saxon word would give way and die, and they have both come down to us, alive and irreducible: act and deed; captive and thrall; chief and head, &c.[402] It is a trace of the Conquest, like the formula: "La ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... in exchange for a year's work shall contain at least as much vital capital as a man uses up in doing the year's work. For no rational man could knowingly and willingly accept conditions which necessarily involve starvation. Therefore there is an irreducible minimum of wages; it is such an amount of vital capital as suffices to replace the inevitable consumption of the person hired. Now, surely, it is beyond a doubt that these wages, whether at or above the irreducible minimum, are paid out of the capital disposable ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... See. Why should he not come? we may also ask the Protestants. His second coming is an article of their faith; it is plainly taught in the New Testament, and was recently propounded by Mr. Spurgeon as part of the irreducible minimum of the Christian faith. That he will come, then, may be taken for granted; and what better opportunity could be desired than the present? Surely the faithful, all over Europe—ay, and in America, to say nothing ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight. The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness, has, coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, been Browning's ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... are sea-animals with hair-like legs, including the Barnacles and Acorn-shells.—Translator's Note.); to establish by experiment the line of demarcation between intellect and instinct; to prove, by comparing facts in the zoological progression, whether human reason be an irreducible faculty or not: all this ought surely to take precedence of the number of joints in a Crustacean's antenna. These enormous questions would need an army of workers; and we have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusc and the Zoophyte. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of the motley multiplicity of men's desires by a reference to the fundamental instincts of man stops far short of a complete unification. We are left with a number of distinct and apparently irreducible impulses and tendencies on our hands. If it is useful to go so far, may it not be much more ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... matters which lie very far back, concerning the lands of several thousand years ago, it is very generally held that they are the proper and peculiar province of specialists, dry-as-dusts, and persons with an irreducible minimum of human nature. It is thought that knowledge concerning them, not the blank ignorance regarding them that almost everywhere obtains, is a thing of which to be rather ashamed, a detrimental possession; in a word, that the subject is not only unprofitable ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn |
