"Potentiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... child. Even after birth the dawn of mind is as slow as it is wonderful. To begin with, there is in the ovum and early embryo no nervous system at all, and it develops very gradually from simple beginnings. Yet as mentality cannot come in from outside, we seem bound to conclude that the potentiality of it—whatever that means—resides in the individual from the very first. The particular kind of activity known to us as thinking, feeling, and willing is the most intimate part of our experience, known to us directly apart from our senses, and the possibility of ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... learned much of himself. Along with his humbleness because he knew so little, there arose a conviction of power. He felt a sharp gradation between himself and his shipmates, and was wise enough to realize that the difference lay in potentiality rather than achievement. What he could do,—they could do; but within him he felt a confused ferment working that told him there was more in him than he had done. He was tortured by the exquisite beauty of the world, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... worker in the field ought to master, and those in respect of which he needs only to know where to look when he has occasion to make use of them; between knowledge which ought to become part of a man's self, and information which he may be content to possess only in potentiality. A mediaevalist should know how to read and understand mediaeval texts; he would gain no advantage by accumulating in his memory the mass of particular facts pertaining to the History of Literature and Diplomatic which are to be found, in their proper ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... at his creation, wherefore immediately after the words just quoted, "Thou wast the seal of resemblance," we read: "Full of wisdom." But the first man, at his creation, had not yet received this likeness actually but only in potentiality. Thirdly, as to the power of operation: and neither angel nor man received this likeness actually at the very outset of his creation, because to each there remained something to be done whereby to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... with his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him. To-night, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... empty name. Every thing in the process of the mind's development goes to show, that, whatever its capacities, tendencies, faculties, "potentialities," (call them what you will,) a certain external influence is necessary to awaken its dormant life; to turn a "potentiality" into an "energy "; to transform a dim inkling of a truth into an intelligent, vital, conscious recognition of it. Nor is this law confined to mind alone; all nature attests its presence. All effects are the result of properties or susceptibilities in one thing, solicited by external ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... she had learned to judge intelligently and to note those little signs that are, to the intelligent, the essentials, full of significance. She had concealed her amazement from Branch, but amazed she was, less at his news of Craig as a personage full of potentiality than at her own failure, through the inexcusable, manlike stupidity of personal pique, to discern the real man behind his mannerisms. "No wonder he has pushed so far, so fast," reflected she; for she appreciated ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... to what he should do, he returned to his hotel, and the room. As he entered he was struck anew with her beauty, and with the irresistible appeal of her personality. In the glow of the shaded lamp she seemed a figure of marvelous potentiality. ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... this instance, of course, are to be considered all cases of stigmata, both ancient and modern: and then the question is obvious enough: what limits can we place to the powers of the imagination? Has not the imagination the potentiality at least of performing any miracle, however marvelous, however incredible, according to our ordinary standards? As to the decoration of the story, that is a mingling which I venture to think somewhat ingenious of odds and ends ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... feelings of a murderer really were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play. But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity of human nature, I suppose. After all, there's the potentiality of every kind of man in every man. If you've known what it is to hate, you've known what it is ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Potentiality and actuality are correlative terms corresponding to matter and form. Matter is the potential, form is the actual. Whatever potentialities an object has it owes to its matter. Its actual essence is due to its form. A thing free from ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... consisting (in Brazil) chiefly of gneiss, mica schists and granite, solidified into their present form by intense eruptive phenomena and dissolved—not by immersion in ocean waters, as some suppose, but by deluges of such potentiality as the human mind can ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... conventional selfish crust over the hearts of his colleagues, as the warm lips and balmy breath of equatorial currents kiss away the jagged ledges of drifting icebergs. In his laborious life, that which is ordinarily denominated "love" had been so insignificant a factor, that he had never computed its potentiality; much less realized its tremendous importance in solving the problem of his social, financial, and professional success. Beauty had not allured, nor grace enthralled his fancy; and his betrothal was a mere incident in the quiet tenor of business routine, a necessary means ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... quantity; hence out of the formal relationship an intimacy never developed, and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early cult as exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real affection is not present until a much later day. The potentiality of the gods always overshadowed their personality. But this was not all loss, for the absence of personality prevented the growth of those gross myths which are usually found among primitive peoples, for the purer more inspiring myths ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... presents is never a satisfying one. The same is true in even greater degree of the southern face, all photographs agreeing with all travellers as to its tameness. There is only one face of the Denali group that is completely satisfying, that is adequate to the full picturesque potentiality of a twenty-thousand-foot elevation. The writer has seen no other view, no other aspect of it, comparable to that of the northwest face from Lake Minchumina. There the two mountains rise side by side, sheer, precipitous, pointed rocks, ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... deal more than some. I've seen that everything wears out, and that when a thing's worn out it's for good and all. I think it's reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for good and all, too. There isn't anything of us, as I look at it, except the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope, grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you've had them, that's the end of it; you've exhausted your capacity; you're ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... United States Government, even with the proviso and State pledge that it was to be "used" should occasion arise, rather than leave him to his own devices to do as he pleased with the apparently terrific potentiality of which he alone had the knowledge and the mastery. And while his thoughts thus buzzed in his head like swarming bees, Manella stood regarding him in a kind of pitiful questioning like a child with a broken toy who can not understand ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... this mandate with as much potentiality as if she had been a recognized authority in the house ever since it had been a house, and having looked out to confront the amazed Peggotty coming along the passage with a candle at the sound of a strange voice, Miss Betsey shut ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... air is charged with potentiality of new life, hardly dreamt of by our faith on its low stagnant levels. Here are heights to be stormed by faithful unself-seeking love. This way lies deliverance and new creation, and the breaking of prison bars and the turning of our captivity ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... to the truth that our theory depends essentially not upon action or talk, but upon the quality and rationale of thought. It is a question of Potentiality, rather than of Dynamics. It is the process of reasoning which concerns us, not its translation into conduct. A man may be a devoted supporter of Mrs. Grundy and yet be a Sulphite, if he has, in his own mind, reached an original conclusion that ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... that the young man of the idiot metaphor was gifted with piercing acumen. Beneath the Jaquesian melancholy of my temperament he diagnosed the potentiality of canine rabidness. No rational being is afflicted with this grotesque concentration of idea, this fierce hot fury waxing in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... weapons by pitting them in conflict against other weapons. But modern warfare is of so complex a nature that direct comparisons fail, and only a careful analysis of military experience determines the potentiality of a weapon and its influence on warfare. Robert Fulton and Admiral Fournier both indicated that they believed in the submersible's supremacy in actual encounter with capital ships. The war, so far, has shown that, in action between fleets, the submersible has played ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... embodies, as it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention of the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure. The material to be pure brass. I have also in progress an allegorical group commemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only a potentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at Washington. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his speeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on his own steel ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the potentiality of intellectual development and work which the countryman brings with him on his entry to town life is thwarted and depressed by the progressive physical enfeeblement. Most of the best and strongest intellectual work done in the towns is done by ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing. But, again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and potentially nothing; for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a limitation. If the Infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as incomplete, and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic feature ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... invention of the microscope from a simple lens magnifying 3 or 4 times into progress up to 1500 diameters has given birth to new sciences. But still higher magnification is demanded in unravelling the mystery of movements associated with the simplest type of life as seen in plants. Greatest potentiality in life is often latent; the gigantic banian tree grows out of a thing which is smaller than the mustard seed. Within the seed-coat the dormant life remains in safety, protected from dangers outside. The seeds may thus be subjected without harm to ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... our South Land especially, for setting up a laudable ideal in the classification of educational institutions, and then working up to it during subsequent ages. They believe there is much in a name or title. This keen sense of potentiality being in the classification, college or university, is too often misleading ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... research in a futile effort to find a satisfactory solution of the problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the day as it seeks enlightenment on the potentiality of the future life. The stage presents plays based on spiritualistic manifestations or upon supernatural healing or miraculous intervention. Many recent novels have either psychical phenomena for their central interest or plots evolved out of the ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... the next day Fitzpiers went on his old rounds as usual. But it was easy for so super-subtle an eye as his to discern, or to think he discerned, that he was no longer regarded as an extrinsic, unfathomed gentleman of limitless potentiality, scientific and social; but as Mr. Melbury's compeer, and therefore in a degree only one of themselves. The Hintock woodlandlers held with all the strength of inherited conviction to the aristocratic principle, and as soon as they had discovered that Fitzpiers ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... men began to feel that this Infinite Being was already in every one of them, and that it rested with themselves to remove the sensual obstructions and reveal him in their own lives. In every individual there was, they realised, the potentiality of Buddha—that is to ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... is and must be "free from qualities." For since it is capable of perceiving ALL qualities it must obviously not be itself imprisoned or tied in any quality—it must either be entirely without quality, or if it have the potentiality of quality in it, it must have the potentiality of EVERY quality; but in either case it cannot be in bondage to any quality, and in either case it would appear that there can be only ONE such ultimate Witness in the universe. For if there were two or more ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... religious faith has a pragmatic value. Granting it be only a theory it nevertheless produces results in conduct. This is in sharpest contrast to religious delusions. They never lead to sustained effort, they bring with them no social potentiality. They exist for the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Now it corresponds to a really significant intro-determination when we hear that in the alchemistic work the father is the same as the son, and when we understand that the father is a state, or psychic potentiality, of the "son," whom the latter in himself, has to conquer, exactly in the same manner as Lea in the lecomantic study strove to put off the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... fact that a large percentage of these illiterates are of foreign birth or extraction and have never learned either to speak or understand the language of their adopted country, the situation is seen to be even more serious in potentiality, both in peace and war. Our authorities have been too lax, it seems, in not requiring that all children of foreign extraction, whether foreign or American born, be educated in the English language. In communities thickly settled by alien peoples they ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice' (Lord Lucan's anecdote of ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... immaturity. This may seem to be a mere truism—saying that a being can develop only in some point in which he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state—a capacity to ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... any reason to believe that the elevation and improvement of women are to be secured by investing them with political power. There are, however, in these days, many believers in the potentiality of "votes," [1122] who anticipate some indefinite good from the "enfranchisement" of women. It is not necessary here to enter upon the discussion of this question. But it may be sufficient to state ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... of it? And now suddenly a wild idea came to him. He had heard somewhere that it is the women who read fiction. And was not Corydon a perfect specimen of the average middle-class young lady, and therefore of that mysterious potentiality, "the public", to which he must appeal? Why not see what ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... them to penetrate enough into the soul, to think them very significant. The stimulation of fireworks, or of kaleidoscopic effects, seems to us trivial. But everything which has a varied content has a potentiality of form and also of meaning. The form will be enjoyed as soon as attention accustoms us to discriminate and recognize its variations; and meaning will accrue to it, when the various emotional values of these forms ally the new object to all other experiences ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... what I said already in my lecture, that only if there exists such a relationship between two congruous identities, being can conflow into becoming of higher potentiality." ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... forbidden by a sign-board to enter on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... plain English—which is better—is just that by the death of Christ every man can, if he will, go to God, and live beside Him. And our faith is our personal laying hold of that great sacrifice and treading on that path. It turns the 'potentiality' into an actuality, the possibility into a fact. If we believe on Him who died on the cross for us all, then by that way we come to God, than which there is none other given under heaven ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... is a negation of power, and contrariwise the potentiality of existence is a power, as is obvious. If, then, that which necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings are more powerful than a being absolutely infinite, which is obviously ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... soul to soul like an epidemic, breaking all the fetters of authority, despising tradition and rejecting discipline in its eagerness to get rid of formalism and unreality; a lawless, turbulent, unmanageable spirit, in which, notwithstanding, is a potentiality for good far higher than any to which the lukewarm "religion of all sensible men" can ever attain. For mysticism is the raw material of all religion; and it is easier to discipline the enthusiast than to breathe enthusiasm into ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... brimstone and painted the Devil hideous. But Satan is not such a fool. Champagne and Martinis do not taste like Gregory powder, nor was St. Anthony tempted by shrivelled hags. Paganism can be gay, and passion look like love. Moreover, still more truly, Christ could see the potentiality of virtue in Mary Magdalene and of strength in Simon called Peter. The conventional ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... heart, signify the innumerable individuals and species of things, in which shine the splendour of Divine Beauty, according to their degrees, and whence the affection for the good, well proposed and well apprehended warms us. The which through the causes of potentiality and actuality, of possibility and of effect, crucify and console, give the sense of sweetness and also make the bitter to be felt. But where the entire affection is all turned towards God, that is towards the Idea of Ideas, from the light of intelligible ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... that much violence will result from the strike. Then we have the potentiality of other unions to consider, for many of them, including the miners, who have a crisis coming within a short time themselves, as well as the railroad men of the country, who have already made demands—these workers and others may be drawn into ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... of Contract notice. He would have to ask her later.) "On the other hand, just as the mere possession of functioning eyes does not automatically give one the ability to read, neither does the genetic inheritance of Guesser potentialities enable one to make accurate, useful Guesses. To make this potentiality into an ability requires years of hard ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... she had called him by name after the light had fallen on the face of the lookout. It was possible that she might not know who Marie was. Although it was no more than just possible, he cuddled the potentiality to him as if it had been ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... not speaking without book in this matter. Some of my best Officers to-day have been even such as they. There is an infinite potentiality of capacity lying latent in our Provincial Tap-rooms and the City Gin Palaces if you can but get them soundly saved, and even short of that, if you can place them in conditions where they would no longer be liable ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... Woodhouse, she knew, it elevated her in the common esteem tremendously. But she was no longer in Woodhouse. She was in Lancaster. And in Lancaster her engagement pigeonholed her. Apart from Dr. Mitchell she had a magic potentiality. Connected with him, she was a known and ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... theatre our European problems of war and religion, and to interpret through art the "years of the modern, years of the unperformed," it remains to be acknowledged with gratitude that this play, designed to bring home to America both its comparative rawness and emptiness and its true significance and potentiality for history and civilisation, has been universally acclaimed by Americans as a revelation of Americanism, despite that it contains only one native-born American character, and that a bad one. Played throughout the length and breadth of the States since ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in few other words but 'la fatigue,' there might surely come a cry from the vast mass of common humanity from the beginning 'et nous?' It is this potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's 'Much Ado about Nothing' is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole pressure of that love of love which is the youth ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... attitude of all parties concerned, and free as, from beginning to end, the proceedings were from any startling incidents, no one can have watched them without being conscious of the presence of new forces of vast potentiality which must tend to modify very profoundly the relations between the governors and the governed in India itself, and possibly even between India and the Mother Country. They are the forces, largely still unknown, which have been brought into play by Lord Morley's Constitutional reforms, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... turn from even the best of these, in its best and highest embodiment, to the picture that is put before us in the Gospels, how small does it seem! We feel that they all fall short of their ideal, and that there is a greater promise and potentiality of perfection in the root than has ever yet appeared in ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... line Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,[2] doesn't the sound of running horses strike your ears? But this effect, as I said, is uncommon, and hardly to be found in any other poet than Vergil. Thus the chief potentiality of sound, and the most common, lies in charming the ear. It is a slight beauty, yet it is of nature, and for this reason especially agreeable to all classes of people. For there is scarcely any person so uneducated as not to be naturally ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust ourselves to his condition. Our minds revolted. To us he was full of potentiality. We knew not what to expect of him next, what fearful thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do. Our experience warranted this state of mind, and we went about our work with anxiety always ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... different. To put the matter in modern mathematical form, one might say, The universe is to be conceived as a sphere (Parmenides) of infinite radius (Melissus). Aristotle is not blaming Melissus or praising Parmenides. As for Xenophanes, Aristotle after his manner finds in him the potentiality of both. He is prior both to the process of thought from universal to particular, and to that from particular to universal. He does not argue at all; his function is Intuition. "He looks out on the mighty sky, and says, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... reddishness of complexion that was presently to purple, at this stage his chin was undoubted and as square as a spade, and, as so often happens to chins of this potentiality, punctuated absurdly with a dimple, and he wore a little clipped edge of black mustache which he ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... "personality;" something elusive and evasive, that cannot easily be defined or explained, but nevertheless remains the essential quality that distinguishes its possessor from every other human being. But while all may have the potentiality for some distinct and special attribute, unfortunately for by far the greater number this is never developed or expressed, and they pass through their uneventful, monotonous existence, without even realizing their capacity for being or ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... unconscious of its excellence and rarity as one of the grand Greek women of the Parthenon. She had, however, a sensuous fulness and bloom, a queenly carriage of head and neck, a clearness of feature, and a liquid kindness of eye that suggested a deep potentiality of passion. ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... is the seed, and environment the soil. The whole structure and pattern and inherent tendencies and potentiality are in the seed and cannot be changed. The child has nothing to do with its early environment during the period when impressions sink the deepest and when habits are formed. It is then that the meaning of facts is interpreted. At this time the child is fashioned ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... Not, of course, that this bundle of words really explains anything, but that like other formulae of the kind, it prescinds from the question of ends and origins, by making a statement of what happens serve as a cause of what happens, and calling it a Law or a Tendency, or a Latent Potentiality—thus filling the gap which mere agnosticism creates ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... now called the infinite ability to be (inactive will, subject), pure being (being without potentiality, object), and spirit, which is free from the one-sidednesses of mere potentiality and of mere being, and master of itself (subject-object); to these is added, further—not as a fourth, but as that which has the three predicates and is wholly ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... an authority which never fails, never dies—an authority which willy-nilly we obey and in which we place unbounded trust. In any one of these Registers is a potentiality which can always worst the quibbles and quiddities of lawyers and ward off the miserable technicalities of the law. Any of them, when called upon, can go into court and dictate to the litigants and the attorneys, the jury and the judge. They are the deceased witnesses come to life. And without ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... government process. The lowest of despised castes, deprived of rights to the protection of property and even life, will still be found to be a factor in the government, if only we can sweep the whole field and measure the caste in its true degree of power, direct or represented, in its potentiality of harm to the higher castes, and in its identification with them for some important purposes, however deeply hidden from ordinary view. No slaves, not the worst abused of all, but help to form the government. They are an ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... current which is ever receiving new waters. The declamation is managed with extraordinary skill, and though it frequently grows out of the instrumental part, it has yet independent melodic value as the vocal parts of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger" have. Through this Verdi has acquired a comic potentiality for his voice parts which goes hand in hand with that of his ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... half-death overtake me, still so much the better, for so the path of success is closed to me only that I may find opening before me the path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation. Every life has its potentiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mankind,' which by our institutions a minority is at present enabled to monopolize, and which it does monopolize and use in order to extort thereby an unearned increment; and this inheritance is true capital. We mean thereby the principle, potentiality, embodied in the axe, the spade, the plough, the steam-engine, tools of all kinds, books or pictures, bequeathed by thinkers, writers, inventors, discoverers, and other labourers of the past, a social growth to which all individual claims have lapsed by death, but from the ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... In the living leaf the prakriti, ether, and prana are sounding the threefold silver chord of life. In the animal, the manasa is sounding the same note with them, making the fourfold golden chord of mind. Even in the plant there may be a faint manasic overtone, for the potentiality of life and mind is in everything. This unity of the physical universe with the physical atom, and with all things created—earth, animal, or crystal—is the physical backbone of Oriental metaphysics. Prakriti, ether, prana, and manasa are in our vernacular ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... from its random, but multitudinous summonses of the efferent activity, which at its vague challenges stirs unceasingly in faintly tumultuous irrelevancy. In this way, music arouses aimlessly, but splendidly, the sheer, as yet unfulfilled, potentiality within us." (W. Copies, The Process of Human ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... outline, because of the indistinct nature of the thoughts and feelings which cause it; flecked too often with brown and grey, because ignorant devotion absorbs with deplorable facility the dismal tincture of selfishness or fear; but none the less adumbrating a mighty potentiality of the future, manifesting to our eyes the first faint flutter of one at least of the twin wings of devotion and wisdom, by the use of which the soul flies upward to God ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... suspended any chances of its realisation for at least two years. There is a consciousness in the unsuccessful applicant of somehow being worth less than she was before, since she is now an assistant mistress without potentiality for head teachership. This feeling does not promote good work. The issue of a promotion list is from every point of view bad policy, and although its direct action is confined to London, its sphere of indirect influence is very far-reaching, since London County Council applicants for country ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing. But again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and potentially nothing: for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a limitation. If the infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as incomplete and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic feature by which ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... never really comes to youth. One of the few things which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is all that is left to age, and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Bradley that the good is self-realisation; but what is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good for him, and ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without finding suggestion of either ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the sense ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... potentiality in this respect can be easily stated. Barbara Comber, his sister (and so "one of us"), had married an extremely wealthy American, who, in Lord Ashbridge's view, could not be considered one of anybody at ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... But our bones and muscles and blood-vessels all come from the mesoderm by folding, plaiting, and channelling, and division of labor resulting in differentiation of structure. Of all true mesodermal structures the hydra has actually none, but in the ectodermal and entodermal cells he has the potentiality of them all. We must now try to discover how these potentialities became actualities in ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... between "the Godhead" and "God." The Godhead is the abiding potentiality of Being, containing within Himself all distinctions, as yet undeveloped. He therefore cannot be the object of knowledge, nor of worship, being "Darkness" and "Formlessness.[238]" The Triune God is evolved from the Godhead. The Son is the Word of the Father, His uttered thought; and the Holy Ghost ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... a body at rest mass is patent, energy latent and potentiality of conscious manifestation sublatent. In a moving body, the rajas is predominant (kinetic) and the mass is partially overcome. All these transformations of the groupings of the gu@nas in different proportions presuppose the state ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... because he was an American, was fit for any job in the gift of state or city or government, from sheriff to Ambassador to Great Britain. Krebs substituted for this fallacy what may be called the doctrine of potentiality. If we inaugurated and developed a system of democratic education, based on scientific principles, and caught the dog-catcher, young enough, he might become a statesman or thinker or scientist and make his contribution to the welfare and progress of the nation: again, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the same time he were entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... depend on an hour, that hour is not to be given. Whereby, indeed, it comes that these same would-have-beens are mostly a vanity; and the World's History could never in the least be what it would, or might, or should, by any manner of potentiality, but simply ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... were somewhat more and less than they now are. The tourist sleeper, with its comfortable berths, its clean linen, its kitchen range, and its dusky attendant, restrained to an attitude of agreeable deference by his anticipation of a gratuity, was a grey atom of potentiality in the brain of an unknown genius. Even the colonist car, which has done noble service in later days in the peopling of the Prairie West, was only in the early stages of its evolution. The purpose of immigrant trains was to move people. To supply comforts as well as locomotion was an extravagance ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... Galileo made may now be bought at a toy-shop for I suppose half a crown, and yet what a potentiality lay in that "glazed optic tube," as Milton called it. Away he went with it to Venice and showed it to the Signoria, to their great astonishment. "Many noblemen and senators," says Galileo, "though of advanced age, mounted to the top of one of the highest towers to watch the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... potentiality even, it may be, of becoming the abode of rational beings. But something went wrong. It broke up into a ring of little bodies, circulating ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... is a gleam of man's potentiality, that makes him truly sublime. There are many Scripture statements that make man pitifully little; but this is because of his present sinful condition. Bye and bye he will rise into his true condition, and then "The holy spirit of man" will be not only a possibility, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... colonising power. Nationalism, then, with its eagerness for dominion, may be regarded as the chief source of imperialism; and if its effects are unhappy when it tries to express itself at the expense of peoples in whom the potentiality of nationhood exists, they are not necessarily unhappy in other cases. When it takes the form of the settlement of unpeopled lands, or the organisation and development of primitive barbaric peoples, or the reinvigoration and strengthening of old and decadent societies, it may ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... explain the mystery of that magnetic affinity called love, which so unaccountably exercises its attracting influences over the whole animal creation, and most probably over plants? If it is a latent potentiality of matter, how did it get there? Now for a ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... beings in terms of {105} limited capacities; in assigning to some the degraded status of the appetites, and to others a limited faculty of understanding, while arrogating to a few the full power and title of Reason. The resentment of this arrogance is no more than the assertion of that potentiality of reason which distinguishes the animal man; it is his inevitable coming of age, his determination to play ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... that this one is a something called Matter—self-existent—eternal—infinite—containing within itself the potentiality of Matter, Energy and Mind. Another school, closely allied to the materialists, claim that this One is a something called Energy, of which Matter and Mind are but modes of motion. The Idealists claim that the One is a something called Mind, and that ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Indian Ocean we shall be in Bombay. I must close now, for there is really nothing to say, and, besides, I am wanted on deck. My engagement is with a Rev. Mr. Barrows, who is bound as missionary to Hong Kong. This worthy Methodist gentleman is very much exercised because I insist that potentiality is necessity and rebut his arguments on free-will. He got quite excited yesterday, and said to me severely: "Do you mean to say, young man, that I can't do as I please?" I must say I don't think his warmth was much ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... it. Many noble Romans had no doubt joined besides those who had fallen fighting, or who had been executed in the dungeons. Accusations became very rife. One Vettius accused Caesar, the Praetor; but Caesar, with that potentiality which was peculiar to him, caused Vettius to be put into prison instead of going to prison himself. Many were convicted and banished; among them Porcius Laeca, Vargunteius, Servius Sulla, the brother of him of whom we are now speaking, and Autronius his ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... of his subsequent poetic system, shoots in rapid succession waves of almost consuming energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest light and heat, swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time of sane and beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of the others is there the building-up of a fair verbal structure, a symmetrical piece of mechanism, whose last stone is implied and necessitated in ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... member lives, not by the preaching of the Word, not even by and through the fellowship in living and worship, but through the ordained channels of grace known as the Sacraments. In accordance with the sacramental system, every material thing is proclaimed as possessing in varying degree sacramental potentiality, while seven great Sacraments were instituted to be, each after its own fashion, a special channel for the inflowing of the power of the Divine Actuality. Each is a symbol, just as so many other created things are, or may become, symbols, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... America"; he would be one of the master criminals of the earth. I fancy he must have felt this intoxicating new access of power, for there emanated from him something of a fierce and exalted delight. A potentiality, as yet neither good nor evil, he suggested a ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... I have said, little appreciation of the invisible or what does not appeal strongly to his senses; he cannot understand, for instance, that a small bag of chemical fertilizer, in the form of a grey, inoffensive powder, can contain as great a potentiality for the nutrition of crops as a cartload of evil-smelling material from the farmyard; nor is he aware that, in the case of the latter, he has to load and unload 90 pounds or thereabouts of worthless water in every 100 ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... forming a completely closed canal. As Gegenbaur very properly observes, "this gradual imbedding in the inner part of the body is a process acquired with the progressive differentiation and the higher potentiality that this secures; by this process the organ of greater value to the organism is buried within the frame." (Cf. Figures 1.143 ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... In spite of himself he could not entirely take Bennett's point of view. Several of the men at Eureka headquarters looked interesting—he would like to know them—perhaps more than interesting, the potentiality of a ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... either case, it is something which the producer has had the use of and can part with. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... light was more or less worshiped and thus artificial lights became woven in many religious ceremonies. Some of these have persisted to the present time. The great pageants of peace celebrations and world's expositions appropriately feature artificial light. In drawing upon the potentiality of the expressiveness and impressiveness of light and color, artificial light is playing a major part. Doubtless the future generations will be entertained by gorgeous symphonies of light. Experiments are performed in this direction now and then, and it is reasonable ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... for writers of a certain class, when they want to produce the feeling of wonder in their readers, to introduce some frantic action, and then to account for it by letting out the secret that the actor was mad. The trick is not so necessary as it seems, for the strength of human passions is a potentiality only limited by experience; and so it is that a sane person may under certain stimulants do the maddest thing in the world. The passion itself is always true—it is only the motive that may be false; and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... generated (sc., cosmos) took, were from that Fire. And the Roots, he says, were generated from the Fire in pairs,[18] and he calls these Roots Mind and Thought, Voice and Name, Reason and Reflection, and in these six Roots there was the whole of the Boundless Power together, in potentiality, but not in actuality. And this Boundless Power he says is He who has stood, stands and will stand; who, if his imaging is perfected while in the six Powers, will be, in essence, power, greatness and completeness, one and the same with the ingenerable and Boundless Power, ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... up. He had been going through a strange searching of soul while his gaze wandered from the glistening rock at his feet to Clark's keen face. He began to perceive clearly for the first time the prodigious potentiality of this man who was equally masterful in Philadelphia and the back woods. He saw to what wide scope this enterprise could expand if only this restless and prophetic spirit might be wisely steered by men of colder brains and more ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... the great man's honouring with his presence such an ordinary affair as the sale of a brewery. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson, turning with crushing deliberation on the unhappy speaker, "this is not the sale of a mere brewery, but of the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." This story seems to me well worth remembering, both because it is so characteristic of the Doctor, and because it is applicable to so many things. It is so easy to go through ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... wicked, is soon lost to them. Destiny does not help the man that is steeped in spiritual ignorance and avarice. Even as a fire of small proportions, when fanned by the wind, becomes of mighty power, so does Destiny, when joined with individual Exertion, increase greatly (in potentiality). As with the diminution of oil in the lamp its light is extinguished so does the influence of Destiny is lost if one's acts stop. Having obtained vast wealth, and women and all the enjoyments of this world, the man, without action is unable to enjoy them long, but the high-souled man, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the most favourable specimens of Swift's controversial method and trenchant satire. The style is excellent—forcible and pithy; while the arguments are like most of Swift's arguments, aptly to the point with yet a potentiality of application which fits them for the most general statement of the principles under discussion. Scott considers the pamphlet "as having materially contributed to the loss of the bill for repeal of the Test Act during the Earl of Pembroke's vice-royalty." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... to the same identical species, which have either full-sized and perfect wings, or mere rudiments of membrane, which not rarely lie under wing-covers firmly soldered together; and in these cases it is impossible to doubt, that the rudiments represent wings. Rudimentary organs sometimes retain their potentiality: this occasionally occurs with the mammae of male mammals, which have been known to become well developed and to secrete milk. So again in the udders of the genus Bos, there are normally four developed and two rudimentary teats; but the latter in our domestic cows sometimes become well ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... consummation which, it will be urged, is ex hypothesi an accomplished fact at the time that we ask for it? We reply that the Divine indwelling in man is of the nature of a capacity for striving rather than of an attainment, a potentiality rather than an actuality, a prophecy rather than a fulfilment. Man's longing for communion with God, as for an unrealised good, is the longing of like for Like, but it is only through struggle and effort that the goal can be reached. The Eternal is indeed the Life of all life, and to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... itself—is not completely real. Aims, principles, etc., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only, but not as yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only is a possibility, a potentiality, but it has not emerged into existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality—viz., actuation, realization; and its motive power is the will—the activity of man in the widest sense. It is only by this activity that that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of her own home; that it was a blow at domesticity and an actual menace to the home life of America—these did not weight with him. There was only one question for him to settle: Was the ballot something which, in its demonstrated value or in its potentiality, would serve the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... takes things for granted and asks no questions, so that with the Bantu as with the illiterate European, the primitive thoughts and ways of their forefathers are held good enough by their sons, but this does not preclude the latent potentiality in both for the understanding and acquisition of new thoughts and ways once the shackles of conservatism have been loosened ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... infinite potentiality in us all, when young, which makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint ourselves with all sorts of things which we are now neglecting by studying them out hereafter in the intervals of leisure ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... most basic of all. A sound stomach is more necessary than a highly developed brain, and good reproductive faculties are essential; because the first demand of evolution is plenty of material. It does not follow that our typical poor man is more of an animal, is less evolved, or has a smaller potentiality to evolve, because he has preserved better the animal faculties which lie at the basis ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... was heroic, native, positive and equal," wrote Belloc, "always at the highest potentiality ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... seems to prove that Ieyasu, in taking the field on this occasion, aimed simply at asserting his own potentiality and had no thought of plunging the empire into a new civil war. In March, 1584, he set out from Hamamatsu and joined Nobukatsu at Kiyosu, in Owari. The scheme of campaign was extensive. Ieyasu placed himself in communication with Sasa Narimasa, in Echizen; with Chosokabe Motochika, in Shikoku, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the same species) resembling each other most closely in all respects, one of which will have full-sized wings, and another mere rudiments of membrane; and here it is impossible to doubt, that the {451} rudiments represent wings. Rudimentary organs sometimes retain their potentiality, and are merely not developed: this seems to be the case with the mammae of male mammals, for many instances are on record of these organs having become well developed in full-grown males, and having secreted milk. So again there ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... ejaculated, his face contracting with sudden pain; "your love, then, is but a potentiality. Very well, Amabel, keep it so and you will be spared much misery. As for me, who have not ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... quicker discernment than their fellows, did not fail to perceive the material advantages to be reaped from a religious system, quite apart from the religion itself, in the power of union and its pecuniary potentiality. As a result thereof there came into existence, at the close of Spanish rule, the Philippine Independent Church, more popularly known as the Aglipayan Church. Some eight or nine years before the Philippine Rebellion a young Filipino went to Spain, where ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... for his books than 'Henry S. Knight,' and he decided to adopt it in his next work. Further, it had enormously quickened in him the sense of his mission in the world, of his duty to his colossal public, and his potentiality for good. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all the characters of all the forms that have existed, pterodactyls, dinosaurs, butterflies, birds, etc. etc., including the characters of all the varieties of the human race and of human individuals, must have been present in the primordial ancestral protoplasm, ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... past ministry in the field I rang out these great truths and rang a great lie in by representing that the salvation of the world depends upon a potentiality which is in the sky and not in man, that heaven is above the earth and hell ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... weight? Is not the weight inherent in atoms the real, eternal, and spontaneous motion of matter? And that which we chance to regard as rest,—may it not be equilibrium rather? Why, then, suppose now an inertia which definitions contradict, now an external potentiality ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... in a certain deep and true sense, more instinct with the mystery of existence than any definite image or any definite thought can possibly be. It seems to contain in it the potentiality of all thoughts, and to stream in upon us from some Platonic "beyond-world" where the high secret archetypes of all created forms sleep ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... common-sense. He thought the unity of nature to consist in its periodic evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (to apeiron), which, much in the manner of the "nebula" of modern science, is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar commonplace of science, begins to be recognizable. It has here reached the point of signifying a common substance for all tangible things, a substance that in its own general ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... is what Aristotle calls "in potentiality" and "in actuality," and Plato the "intelligible" ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... sphere he had boundless reverence. Wilfrid's gain by him was not only of a pleasant personal acquaintance; the intercourse extended his views, and in particular gave direction to much that had hitherto been vague potentiality in his character. In more than one sense this visit to Dunfield was to prove a turning point ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... someone I know. My Welsh Divinity I call her, hovering bright-winged above the dust-clouds of old literature, with clear grey eyes and nervous mouth. Not "the heir of all the ages," I fear, though the potentiality in her must be infinite and beyond my ken. "What do you, oh, young man?" So I seem to read the query in her eyes. "Are you only a hodman in this book-yard, then? Where is she? What is she? Who is she?" As I stand and thumb the serried ranks of corpses, I feel ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... finished works of nature or of man.** The faith which is born of knowledge, finds its object in an eternal order, bringing forth ceaseless change, through endless time, in endless space; the manifestations of the cosmic energy alternating between phases of potentiality and phases of explication. It may be that, as Kant suggests,*** every cosmic [9] magma predestined to evolve into a new world, has been the no less predestined end of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... great educational light, had closed his remarks, and had asked for questions, one lady timidly arose and inquired: "Can an atom be said to be outside or inside of potentiality?" ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... chalk, not any loose and friable material, does Phidias or Michel Angelo choose, but ivory, bronze, basalt, marble. It is quite the same whether we seek expression or uses. The stream must be dammed before it will drive wheels; the steam compressed ere it will compel the piston. In fine, Potentiality combines with Hindrance to constitute active Power. Man, in order to obtain instrumentalities and uses, blends his will and intelligence with a force that vigorously seeks to pursue its own separate free course; and while this resists ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... which the will of one part of the community is forced upon another part. In their view, the democratic form of government is not very enormously preferable to other forms so long as minorities are compelled by force or its potentiality to submit to the will of majorities. Liberty is the supreme good in the Anarchist creed, and liberty is sought by the direct road of abolishing all forcible control over ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... that he who rejoiceth in his faith is, in so doing, in unity with the Highest. For true faith is the seed of light, and the seed of true light is in itself the potentiality of ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... more cramped in a new artificial language than others. French, incomparably neat and clear within its limits, but possessing the narrowest "margin for effect," is less alien in its genius from Esperanto than is English, with its twofold harmony, its potentiality (too rarely exploited) of Romance clarity, and its double portion of Germanic vigour and feeling. Yet all languages must probably witness the obliteration of some finer native ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... possibilities connected with the investigation of past events, which are independent of fallible evidence transmitted to us by ancient writers. The world at large is thus at present so imperfectly alive to the resources of human faculty, that by most people as yet, the very existence, even as a potentiality, of psychic powers, which some of us all the while are consciously exercising every day, is scornfully denied and derided. The situation is sadly ludicrous from the point of view of those who appreciate the prospects of evolution, ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... conservatism kept invention within the strictest limits, so that to the end these liturgical responses were little more than slight modifications of the words of the Vulgate. But the dramatic element was there, with what potentiality ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said, "he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anybody."[68] But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day, and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such an one ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... one another, the first be removed, the others must, of necessity, be removed also. Now the first of all causes is the final cause. The reason of which is that matter does not receive form, save in so far as it is moved by an agent; for nothing reduces itself from potentiality to act. But an agent does not move except out of intention for an end. For if the agent were not determinate to some particular effect, it would not do one thing rather than another: consequently in order that it produce a determinate effect, it must, of necessity, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... potentiality of the gold was known to the Rhine-god; three of his daughters had been instructed by him, and detailed to guard the treasure. Some faculty of divination warned him of danger to it, and of the quarter from whence this danger threatened. But nixies—even when ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... undoubtedly the case. But to register this criticism does not by any means exhaust the situation. For these so-called inalienable rights are not something that the individual is born heir to as he is to his father's fortune. They are his inalienably only by virtue of his potentiality for realizing them and as such they exist only as possible forms of self-activity, functions which by common consensus of opinion are conceded to each individual. In a very real sense, therefore, they must be won or created by each for himself. The individual or the group, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the real basis of his character, his health, and longevity is to be found, for the primitive germ or protoplasm of man cannot be distinguished from that of a quadruped or bird. It is the invisible and incalculable life element that contains the potentiality or possibility of existence as a quadruped or a man, as a virtuous or vicious, and as a long lived or short lived, being. The life element of the germ limits the destiny of the being. That ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... syllabification to what superficially corresponds with | | English free-verse, that is, a substitution of prose for | | verse; but only superficially, since the French language is | | phonetically different from English, and its ordinary prose | | has a naturally greater song potentiality. Since the | | phenomena differ they should not be called by the same name. | | The English term 'free-verse' is ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... potentiality of non—existence is a negation of power, and contrariwise the potentiality of existence is a power, as is obvious. If, then, that which necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... into the business. Open shops will be established, either by the present employers or by new ones. There will be much to be gained by an independent shop manned by non-union labor, and the danger of this makes a trade union more conservative than it would otherwise be. The chief potentiality in the case is that of the new and independent shop, and if the way is open for this to appear, the range of difference between the pay of favored laborers and that of others is greatly reduced. The trade union may be able to carry its point and keep free labor from its field, ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... so young that his strength, she knew, was largely potential; only she, as far as she knew, had ever observed its potentiality; to others he was a handsome, merry, young animal, "keen on girls," as he himself called it, and as innocent of any comprehension of the deeper meanings of life as a ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... learn to write is to write. But young men will not write of their own free will; the literary first-mate in way of a Managing Editor with a loaded club of expletives is necessary. Or, stay! there is another way to stimulate the ganglionic cells and become dexterous in the cosmic potentiality—the Daily Theme sent to a woman who thinks and feels. That is the way that Goethe acquired his style. There were love-letters that crossed each other daily, and after years of this practise—the sparks a-flying—Goethe found himself the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... one. My funds ran out, as you know, rather unexpectedly. When I had paid my examination and registration fees the coffer was absolutely empty, and though, no doubt, a medical diploma contains—to use Johnson's phrase—the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, there is a vast difference in practice between the potential and the actual. I have, in fact, been earning a subsistence, sometimes as an assistant, sometimes as a locum tenens. Just now I've got no work ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... said, "The kingdom of heaven is within you," which signified that within us was the potentiality to have entrance to, and to know, the mystery of the Divine Secret, and to participate whilst still living here, in the early degrees or manifestations of Divine Love—that Power which glorifies ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... made to depend on forgiveness from God to man? It is the duty of some one to reclaim an evident prodigal; and why should it not be her duty to reclaim this prodigal? Clearly, the very fact that she loved the prodigal would give her a potentiality that way which she would have with no other prodigal. It was at any rate her duty to try. It would at least be her duty if they would allow her to be near enough to him to make the attempt. Then she filled her mind with ideas of a long period of ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... animated, human fluor-spar? Had the latent capacity, the potentiality of tenderness in his character been suddenly actualized, by the touch of that girl's gentle hands, the violet splendour of her large soft eyes, which lifted for ever the detent of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... ladies of the present, certainly give a surprising foretaste of the fiery potion of Zarathustra. The creator of the Duchesse de Sanseverina had caught more than a glimpse of the transvaluation of all values. Characteristically enough, the appearance of this new potentiality was only observed by two contemporary forces in European society—Goethe and the Austrian police. It is clear that Goethe alone among the critics of the time understood that Beyle was something more than a novelist, and discerned ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... forward, Johnson appeared bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property which was to be disposed of, answered, 'We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... exuberant complacence which was becoming a more and more ominous element in the national character. Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense potentiality in it. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... mystery to me now than when I wrote that essay! But I still think that we are fighting a real being, one whom {174} we can best describe as personal. His will, it seems to me, must be given to him by God. He has identified it with a hitherto unrealised potentiality for disobedience. In plain language, his will is free, and therefore capable of resisting God. I should like to have a talk with you some day about it. But, as you see, the problem is beyond me. . ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... of nature. His psychological differentiations present too many and constantly-shifting divergencies and re-divergences—exceptional branchings in one direction, and still more exceptional in another—to admit of any sufficiently potentiated potentiality for bridge timber. The arch to such a bridge would have to abut, according to Professor Tyndall, on a vital foundation at one end, and spring from undifferentiated ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... after stage of labour and experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed: he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came to nothing more than this—that art exists, not for the hundreds of people who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... applying the Aristotelian distinction between the potential and the actual. The obedience of the Son of God, existing as it did in all possible perfection from the first moment of His human consciousness, yet existed, prior to His complete identification of Himself with all our human experience, as a potentiality. It became actual, in the same way as our obedience can alone become actual, as a result of that experience, and, above all, in consequence of those sufferings which were part of that experience. In this sense He "learnt obedience," ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... hues by resorting to the spectrum of light. It is impossible to obtain pure hues by means of pigments or of other reflecting media. These advantages of light are very evident on turning to spectacular lighting effects, and even the lighting of interiors illustrates a potentiality in light superior to other media. For example, in a modern interior in which concealed lighting produces brilliantly illuminated areas above a cornice and dark shadows on the under side, the range in values is often much greater than that represented ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... very "work and glory" of the Father. Man is born into the world a child of divinity—born for the purpose of development and perfection. Life is the great laboratory in which he works out his experiment of eternity. In potentiality, a God—in actuality, a creature of heredity, environment, and teaching. "Why do I teach?" To help someone else realize his divinity—to assist him to become all that he might become—to make of him what he might not be but for ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... material life, and occult dynamics came welling forth from the undiscovered springs of consciousness. His mortal statics lost their equilibrium in a general flux of soul. A cyclone raged round his mesmeric aura. He began to apprehend an epiphany of electro-biological potentiality. The fierce light that never was in kerosine or tallow dawned round him; matter melted like mist; souls were carousing about him; the great soul of nature brooded like an aurora of clairvoyance above ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... corresponding to its four Matras; the four Avasthas indicated by Jagrata (waking) Avastha, Swapna (dreaming) Avastha, Sushupti (deep sleep) Avastha, and Turiya (the last stage, i.e., Nirvana) Avastha (as yet in potentiality); the four states of Brahma called Vaiswanara, Taijasa (or Hiranyagarbha), Pragna, and Iswara, and represented by Brahma, Vishna, Maheswara, and Sadasiva; the four aspects of Parabrahma, as Sthula (gross), Sukshma ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various |
