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Potentially   Listen
adverb
Potentially  adv.  
1.
With power; potently. (Obs.)
2.
In a potential manner; possibly, not positively. "The duration of human souls is only potentially infinite."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Potentially" Quotes from Famous Books



... and fell to pelting the pea-hens and chicks mischievously, breaking up all their aristocratic reserve and making them jump and squeak to some purpose. For this precious, this very masterpiece of a drama was not only here potentially, but actually. It was alive. She had felt it move under her hand—or under her heart, which was it?—yesterday evening. Again this morning, just now, she had noted signs of its vitality, wholly convincing to one skilled in such matters. Impatience, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... machine work are also reflected in certain economies of measurement. The faculty of self-registering, which belongs potentially to all machinery, and which is more utilised every day, performs several services which may be summed up by saying that they enable us to know exactly what is going on. When to self-registration is applied the faculty of self-regulation, within certain limits a new economy of force and knowledge ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... humiliation attached to it, a greed for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding, by next morning he didn't mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the points of the compass of the Milburns' drawing-room to shake hands, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... society and opposed to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought, not discoverable anywhere, because not real. And, on the other hand, society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is potentially in every ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... much to say, and yet it is true—as really spend a half hour of his life in India for God as though he were there in person. Is that true? If it be true, surely you and I must get more half-hours for this secret service. Without any doubt he may turn his key and be for a bit of time as potentially in China by the power of prayer, as though there in actual bodily form. I say potentially present. Of course not consciously present. But in the power exerted upon men he may be truly present at the objective ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon

... starboard alleyway he carried with him a complete catalogue of those who had contributed to the conversation. With all, thanks to seven days' association, he stood on terms of shipboard acquaintance. Not one, in his esteem, was more potentially mischievous than any other—not even the Brazilian Velasco, though he had been the first to name ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... being in fact a Lake, or rather Pair of Lakes, with Castles (CASTILLO GRANDE, 'Castle Grand,' the chief of them), with War-Ships sunk or afloat, and miscellaneous obstructions: beyond all which, at the farther shore, some five miles off, Carthagena itself does at last lie potentially accessible; and we hope to get in upon Don Blas and it. There ensue five days of intricate sea-work; not much of broadsiding, mainly tugging out of sunk War-Ships, and the like, to get alongside of Castle Grand, which is the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... evolution. But this is no reason for your accepting these views. You are asked only to judge impartially of the tendencies of the theory. We take for granted, I repeat, that all man's mental faculties are germinally, potentially, present in protoplasm; we seek the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... light that I want," he said. "I want you to emerge from your background as if you had bloomed out of it that very moment. Oh! I've got you at your hour, you know! The prescient maternal—that's what I want. The conscious moment when a woman becomes aware that she is potentially a mother. Sheila's done that for you. She's brought it out in you. It was ready, it was waiting there before, but now it's ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... enlargement of this organized and criticized realm of the common human experience. Unless this unity of human experience is a genuine reality, unless all the workers are living a really common life, unless each man is, potentially at least, in a live spiritual unity with his fellows, science itself is a mere metaphor, its truth is an illusion, its results are myths. For science is conceived as true only by conceiving the experiences of countless observers as the sharing of a common realm of experience. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... In Chapter XVI it was pointed out that even in the mathematical sciences one may be forced to reflect upon the significance of one's symbols. As I write this, a pamphlet comes to hand which is concerned to prove that "every cause is potentially capable of producing several effects," and proves it by claiming that the square root of four ([square root symbol]4) is a cause which may have as effect either two (2) or minus ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... colour before my eyes. It changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (vide Coleridge and Eastlake's Goethe)—even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same (vide Coleridge, etc.) Is this aesthetic? is this exegetical? How glad I shall be if you can assure me that it is. But, nonsense apart and begged-pardon-for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... to be kept hanging about till 11 p.m. before it could get a fresh start. What with the darkness, the difficulty of getting the laden bullocks along, the practical absence of a road, the subsequent march proved very trying, and the position of the troops throughout the night was potentially one of great peril. If the Mohmands had come down the eastern slopes of the Rhotas Heights and fallen upon them as they stumbled and groped their way along the Lashora ravine, Macpherson would have had to choose between ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle

... vaguely and yet intensely longing spiritual expression to be noted by those who have the eyes to see it in the faces and attitudes now of the peasant laborer, now of the city pariah. All his peasant women are potentially Jeannes d'Arc—"Les Foins," "Tired," "Petite Fauvette," for example. The "note" is still more evident in the "London Bootblack" and the "London Flower-girl," in which the outcast "East End" spiritlessness ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... those who have not yet begun to live many are suspicious, violent, melancholy, with little instinct for making life more or fuller, for living and letting live; in business unenterprising and indisposed for work. The Serbs are potentially gifted for literature, art, and thought; they are sincere and real in temperament, but despite their efforts probably not gifted for modern ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... electro-motor, the motor generator, the electrical utilization of water power, the electric car, electric lighting, the telephone and telegraph, in short all that is comprised in modern electrical machinery came actually or potentially into being. The little rotating magnet which Faraday showed his wife was, in fact, the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... claims and go one better, forcing writers to prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work carries such a ...
— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow

... of infancy. This view receives justification from the study of the phenomenon of variations in symptoms. Mental faculties at birth are larval, and if such condition be artificially produced mental activity must be potentially present (as it would not be if we were dealing with coma). In Chapter IV phenomena of interruption of stupor symptoms were detailed. One case that was mentioned is now of particular importance as demonstrating that an appropriate stimulus may dispel the vacuity of complete stupor by raising ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... citing a portion intended to prove one point as if it were intended to prove another. He cites a passage from Mr. Mansel, in which it is said that "the Infinite, if it is to be conceived at all, must be conceived as potentially everything and actually nothing; for if there is anything in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... All five men of the rear guard fully understood its every detail and all had sworn to carry it out to the letter. Their morale remained perfect; their discipline, under the command of Grison—left alone as they were in the midst of potentially hostile territory and with overwhelming masses of Mohammedans close at hand—held them as firmly as did that of the advance guard now whirling up the wide, paved road to the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... bases compose the greater part of the food of man and animals, the blood in both man and animals under normal conditions being slightly alkaline or rather potentially alkaline; that is, although in circulating blood the concentration of the OH-ions— upon which the degree of alkalinity depends—is but little more than in distilled water, yet blood has the power ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... and larger content to that doctrine by its applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the van of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind and may appear irreclaimably barbarous—thus potentially including all humanity in the prospect of the future. Turgot had already conceived "the total mass of the human race moving always slowly forward"; he had declared that the human mind everywhere contains the germs of progress and that the inequality of peoples ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... virtues. But this experience did still more for him than prove his personal power of getting along with such lower types of men, for it revealed to him the human extremes of the American Nation. How vast it was, how varied, how intricate, and, potentially, how sublime! Lincoln, coming out of the Kentucky back woods, first to Springfield, Illinois, then to Chicago in its youth, and finally to Washington, similarly passed in review the American contrasts of his time. More specific was Roosevelt's training ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's natures—muttering under ground in one world, to be realized perhaps in some other. Upon the secret mirror of our ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... initiated by her. The first direful possibility is in the choice of material. It is very desirable that children should not be allowed to dramatize stories of a kind so poetic, so delicate, or so potentially valuable that the material is in danger of losing future beauty to the pupils through its present crude handling. Mother Goose is a hardy old lady, and will not suffer from the grasp of the seven-year-old; and the ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... colloidal matter, when exposed to certain conditions, presents the phenomena of life, and that it can be formed from crystalline matter, and thus that the prima materia of which these are diverse forms contains potentially all the multitudinous kinds of animal and vegetable existence. This theory moreover harmonizes well with the views here advocated, for just as crystalline matter builds itself, under suitable conditions, along certain definite lines, so analogously colloidal matter has its definite lines ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... panes diffused a dull blue glimmer which discovered a yawning door at her elbow, a pocket of black mystery beyond, and on the uppermost steps of the staircase her patient yellow shadow, his upturned eyes inscrutable but potentially revolting with their very concealment ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... As we should put it, Body is unthinkable except by reference to space which that body does not occupy, as well as to space which it does occupy; and conversely Space is unthinkable except by reference to body actually or potentially ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other THAT SHAPE AM I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... the subject, and in a book published by him in 1851, entitled "Dealings with the Inquisition," we find, (page 71) the following startling announcement. "We are now in the middle of the nineteenth century, and still the Inquisition is actually and potentially in existence. This disgrace to humanity, whose entire history is a mass of atrocious crimes, committed by the priests of the Church of Rome, in the name of God and of His Christ, whose vicar and representative, the pope, the head of the Inquisition, declares himself to be,—this ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson

... ourselves. If our demonetization were the only cause for the decline in the value of silver, then remonetization would be its proper and effectual cure. But other causes, quite beyond our control, have been far more potentially operative than the simple fact of Congress prohibiting its further coinage; and as legislators we are bound to take cognizance of these causes. The demonetization of silver in the great German Empire and the consequent partial, or well-nigh complete, suspension of coinage in the ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... and Austria were emphatically not, and their weight was too heavy to be borne pleasantly even by their friends. It was one thing for Bulgaria to be the connecting link of Mitteleuropa, with mighty Russia always potentially present to redress the balance. It was quite another matter to be just the link. That this was to be Bulgaria's future role in Mitteleuropa, Germany's new attitude made increasingly plain. The progressive disintegration of Russia through 1917 riveted Teutonic domination on the Balkans and even ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... control on the American continent and in American seas; and the concessions of principle over-eagerly made in 1850, in order to gain compensating advantages which our weakness could not extort otherwise, must needs cause us to chafe now, when we are potentially, though, it must be confessed sorrowfully, not actually, stronger by double than we were then. The interest of Great Britain still lies, as it then lay, in the maintenance of the treaty. So long as the United States jealously ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... furnished with the proper credentials and given instructions to proceed at once to New Orleans, Louisiana, and "locate," if it were humanly possible to do so, Charles F. Dodge, under indictment for perjury, and potentially the chief witness against Abraham H. Hummel, on a charge of conspiracy. He was told briefly and to the point that, in spite of the official reports from the police head-quarters of both New York City and New Orleans to the contrary, there was reason to believe that Dodge ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train

... sublimities, that the cosmical man was before the ethical man, in whom we discover very little evidence of these majestic laws of such universal and undeniable validity. The reply would be that the growth of them is only evidence of what was potentially present from the first, that just as the beating of brass was no obstacle to the ultimate evolution of the opera or the oratorio, or the first vague feelings of wonderment with which primitive man surveyed himself and his surroundings to the creation of the world of science and philosophy, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... author with the Shakspeares, Miltons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges of song; but we are nevertheless prepared, not only for the sake of these two satires, of his prologue, and of some other pieces in verse, but on account of the general spirit of much of his prose, to pronounce him potentially, if ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... see how Awonawilona could be developed out of the ghost of chief or conjurer. That in which all things potentially existed, yet who was more than all, is not the ghost of a conjurer or chief. He certainly is not due to missionary influence. No authority can be better than that of traditional sacred chants found among a populace which will not sing them ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... enough that an enemy was able to get the information," Mr. Swift remarked. "But, potentially at least, it's even more dangerous that he was able to imitate my voice so well. If he could fool you, Tom, ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton

... potentially subarctic, but comparatively mild because of moderating influence of the North Atlantic Current, Baltic Sea, ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... as a means of punishing England. In so far as the British North American colonies were but possessions of Great Britain, overseas plantations, the course of the United States could be justified. But potentially these colonies were more than mere possessions. They were a nation in the making, with a right to their own development; they were not simply a pawn in the game of Britain and the United States. Quite aside from the original rights or wrongs of the war, the invasion of Canada ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... second moment could not have belonged to the first; but merely a relative chaos, first because it probably carried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral and eulogistic sense, and secondly because it was potentially, by virtue of its momentum, a basis for the second moment's values ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... President of that world-corporation which potentially controls two thousand millions of human beings—and which will, tomorrow, absolutely control them, is no longer ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... To the composer potentially a writer of grand operas, but barred out by the absolute lack of opening here, the dramatic ballad should offer an attractive form. Such works as Schubert's "Erl-King" show what can be done. Henry Holden Huss has made some interesting experiments, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... from the hut in the wilderness to a Gothic cathedral, from the rude scratches recorded on the cave walls of prehistoric man to the sublimities of the Sistine Chapel, there is no break in the continuity of effort and aspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist, so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot be passed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization to-day that art has become specialized and the practice of it is limited to a few; in consequence artists ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... tongue. All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of all helps and helpers when he has learned to teach himself. His emancipation, once fairly purchased, confers on him potentially the freedom of the empire of thought; and, as evermore, the freeman toils harder than the slave. The strong stimulus of such a self-moved activity, thoroughly aroused, becomes in Choate or Gladstone the fountain of perpetual youth, and forms the solid basis of the titanic scholarship ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... were contagious. I had the feeling that he pitied me. I wonder, sometimes, whether he makes any real sense at all out of what is said to him. He's very slow to interpret the shades of expression possible in voice and face. I feel that potentially he has an exceptional mind, but the ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... Eternal Being to the work of creation was represented as a marriage, his first emanation being a universal mother, supposed to have potentially existed with him from Eternity, or, in metaphorical language, to have been "his sister and his spouse." She became eventually promoted to be the Mother of the Indian Trinity, of the Deity under His three Attributes, of Creation, Preservation, and Change ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... Greeks had their paideia, the Romans their humanitas, we have the more elastic and accommodating word culture. I use it in this address in the sense of drawing out and developing the nobler powers that are potentially in fallen humanity. It is not so much the development of all the faculties in man to their highest extent, as the directing and training of the better ones to their true end. We are dealing here with beginnings, not endings. The perfection of man in all his capacities ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... it would have been good for the human race had the model offered by the hive been followed, and had all the working part of the female community been neuters. Failing any thorough-going reform of this kind, we see nothing for it but the old division of humanity into men potentially, or actually, fathers, and women potentially, if not actually, mothers. And we fear that so long as this potential motherhood is her lot, woman will be found to be fearfully weighted in the race ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... less a mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery. Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a machine; but he cannot make a machine develop itself. That our harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless diffused matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... meshes of a few sweet words,—words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... recorded by which that condition is effected, the division of light and darkness is again noticed. The sun and the moon are set in the firmament of heaven to divide the light from the darkness. But that division was potentially effected when the motion of ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... for servile dependence in the same measure as the dog; but he ministers effectually to his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of the environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as such that he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the owner's sense of aggression and dominance to have his ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... their language, send their children to school in Denmark, and resist all attempts at social and racial incorporation. They are troublesome, as an independent and surly daughter-in-law might be troublesome. Alsace-Lorraine and Posen, on the contrary, are outspoken and potentially dangerous foes in ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... Settlements had resembled military camps and individual colonists had been commanded like soldiers. Rigorous administration of justice, fear of the Indians, and the strict economic regulations imposed by the London Company had served to restrain the potentially ...
— Virginia Under Charles I And Cromwell, 1625-1660 • Wilcomb E. Washburn

... instalment of applause, and the audience turned its back on the stage and began to take a renewed interest in itself. The authoress of "The Woman who wished it was Wednesday" had swept like a convalescent whirlwind, subdued but potentially tempestuous, into Lady ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... have been mated to the right husband for her—an open-minded clear-faced English gentleman. Her speculative ethereal mind clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day. She would have vowed that it was the sole potentially heroical. Even Brisby partook of the reflected rays, and he was very benevolently considered by her. She dismissed him only when his recounting of the stages of Bertha's journey began to fatigue her and deaden the medical efficacy of him and his like. Stretched ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... years, was potentially a woman physically and mentally, but not yet come into rounded conclusions as to life and her place in it. The great situation which had forced her into this anomalous position was from one point of view a tribute to her individual capacity. It proved her courage, the largeness of ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... Were man potentially omniscient, then might Balder's late deed be no crime, but a simple exercise of prerogative. But is knowledge of evil real knowledge? God is goodness and man is evil. God knows both good and evil. Man knows evil—knows himself—only; ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... strange to think that Edwin Clayhanger, scarcely older than the irresponsible Charlie, was the heir to an important business, was potentially a rich and influential man. Had not Mr. Orgreave said that old Mr. Clayhanger could buy up all the Orgreaves if he chose? It was strange to think that this wistful and apparently timid young man, this nice ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... days passed, practical life again caught Henry Rogers in its wholesome grip. Fairyland did not fade exactly, but it dipped a little below the horizon. Like hell and heaven, it was a state of mind, open potentially to all, but not to be enjoyed merely for the asking. Like other desirable things, it was to be 'attained.' Its remoteness and difficulty of access lent to it a haunting charm; for though its glory ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... into existence by impressions, made upon the sensitive faculty by a material world of real objects, of which our sensations are supposed to give us pictures; others, such as the memory and the reasoning faculty, are considered to be partly passive and partly active; while volition is held to be potentially, if not ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... it might have been, for the result of it was occasionally a vague irritation, which expressed itself in hostile criticism of several British institutions. Bessie Alden went to some entertainments at which she met Lord Lambeth; but she went to others at which his lordship was neither actually nor potentially present; and it was chiefly on these latter occasions that she encountered those literary and artistic celebrities of whom mention has been made. After a while she reduced the matter to a principle. If Lord Lambeth should appear anywhere, it was a symbol that ...
— An International Episode • Henry James

... have done in the world. It will occur to those inclined to speculation or philosophic analysis that by the word "neuter" we may mean any one or all of three things: (a) neither male nor female; (b) both male and female, as yet undifferentiated, or (c) potentially either male or female. Clearly, the above explanation assumes a certain germinal specialization of the female to reproduction, in addition to the body specialization for the ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... derived from the Roman pontiff as by a kind of feudal right, and could not he lawfully held without his permission. Innocent III, we have seen, describes himself as the Vicar of God or of Jesus Christ. Thus, although the Pope is potentially present everywhere in the Church, he cannot exercise the great power belonging to the office personally, so that he has called in his brethren, the co-bishops, to share in the care of the burden entrusted to himself; but in doing so he has subtracted in no whit ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

... progress from the lowest statical to the highest dynamical manifestation, then every possible, as well as conceivable, form of matter, must have existed somewhere, and at some time, in nature, even to its highest and most potentially endowed plasmic form in which there is life. And if this be true, and the materialists will not deny but rather affirm it, then the inter-uterine conditions of matter, in the case of all animals (the mastodon included), as well as the inter-cellular ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... himself, however, is the only begotten Son, the light of the world. He first fulfilled and illumined the divine idea which lies darkly in all men (see John viii. 12, xii. 35, 46), and made it possible for all men to become actually what they have always been potentially—sons ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... of coal heaved by brawny miners into the bituminous bin of the Nation; of oil gushers and gas flow; of vitrolite and chromium, plastics and neon, rayon and nylon; of glass stained for cathedrals of Europe; of billions of kilowatts from coal, and potentially more water power; of fluorescent bulbs at Fairmont, and poisonous red flakes in the Kanawha sky from metallurgical plants—fire poppies blooming in ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... being active in compost piles, but another class of microbes is. Called azobacteria, these free-living soil dwellers also make nitrate nitrogen. Their contribution is not potentially as great as rhizobia, but no special provision must be made to encourage azobacteria other than maintaining a decent level of humus for them to eat, a balanced mineral supply that includes adequate calcium, and a soil pH between 5.75 ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... it contains the starfish. We need not, of course, think of it as containing the structure of a starfish, but we are forced to conclude that in some way its structure is such that it contains the starfish potentially. The relation of its parts and the forces therein are such that, when placed under proper conditions, it develops into a starfish. Another egg placed under identical conditions will develop into a sea urchin, and ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... the situation? Events had outridden our national development. Whether it could have been avoided or not I do not know. Whether our education was at fault, or whether materialism had made us blind—these things I cannot tell you. I only know that this war found us potentially a nation, but actually a babel of tongues. Without philosophy and humanitarianism this nation could not go to war—and in those two things ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... loved. That was strange and yet true. When he had last seen her he had not yet grown to love her, or, if he had, he had granted himself no knowledge of it. But now he loved, and he had confessed his love, and what was potentially a return avowal had been made by her. And they were to meet just as friends. There was to be no word spoken of all the passion which thrilled and filled his heart and tingled ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... that all that it contains with respect to military despotism and martial law has reference especially to the fearful power conferred on the district commanders to displace the criminal courts and assume jurisdiction to try and to punish by military boards; that, potentially, the suspension of the habeas corpus was martial law and military despotism. The act now before me not only declares that the intent was to confer such military authority, but also to confer unlimited military ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson

... Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it; by those who themselves work and preside over work. Of all that can be enacted by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs must already lie potentially extant in those two Classes, who are to obey such enactment. A Human Chaos in which there is no light, you vainly attempt to irradiate by light shed on it: order never can ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... as follows:—The common ancestor of all segmented animals is a segmented worm-like form, not quite like any existing type, resembling the Turbellaria in having two nerve strands on the dorsal side and no oesophageal ring, potentially able to develop either the Vertebrate or the Annelid mouth, and so to give origin both to the Articulate and to the Vertebrate series. The common ancestor alike of unsegmented worms and of all segmented types is ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... Doncaster is right in holding that the soma is different in the two sexes is a question already mentioned, but it is obvious that in each individual the somatic sexual characters proper to its species are present potentially in its constitution by heredity—in other words, as factors or determinants in the chromosomes of the zygote from which it was developed; but the normal development of such characters in the individual ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... man, be he what he will, be he as unbookish as he pleases, so he is only eminent enough, so he holds a conspicuous place in the eyes of his countrymen, potentially belongs to us, and if not in life, then after he is gone, will be enrolled among us. The public insist on being admitted to his history, and their curiosity will not go unsatisfied. His letters are hunted up, his journals are sifted; his sayings in conversation, the doggerel ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... winter," he of the Easy Chair said, "but in an opera which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out of tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the decline of life, where ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... secured a legislative enactment which made it my official duty to visit and inspect these provinces at least once during each fiscal year. I shall always feel indebted to them for giving me this opportunity to become intimately acquainted with some of the most interesting, most progressive, and potentially most important ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... which can be shown to be essential to any one mind, must necessarily be also predicated of every other sound mind, even where the particular faculty or law is so feebly developed as apparently to amount to its absence, in which case it is inferred potentially,—we shall now assume, on the same grounds, that the originating cause, notwithstanding its apparent absence in the majority of men, is an essential reality in the condition of the Human Being; its potential existence in all being of necessity affirmed ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston

... this is in opposition to the usual Hindu practice, which forbids the marriage of a woman to her deceased husband's elder brother, on the ground that as successor to the headship of the joint family he stands to her, at least potentially, in the light of a father. If the widow prefers another man and runs away to him, the first husband's relatives claim compensation, and threaten, in the event of its being refused, to abduct a girl from this man's family in exchange for the widow. But no case of abduction ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... can only grasp one quite clear idea at once. All other ideas are for the time somewhat obscure. They are really existing, but only potentially for consciousness, i.e., they hover, as it were, on our horizon, or beneath the threshold of consciousness. The fact that former ideas suddenly return to consciousness is simply explained by the fact that they have continued psychic existence: and attention ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... Restraint, and that of greater Eminence than we imagine, and it is drawn from this very Passage, thus; 'tis not to be doubted but that Satan, who has much of the Element put into his Hands, as Prince of the Air, had a Power, or was able potentially speaking, to have answer'd Baal's Priests by Fire; Fire being in Vertue of his airy Principality a Part of his Dominion; but he was certainly withheld by the Superior Hand, which gave him that Dominion, I mean withheld for the Occasion only: So in another Case, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... processes of preparation for impregnation, the oestrus or heat period in animals, the menstrual period in the human being, the psychic reactions to danger and combat have all been thus determined. That man is bearded while woman is not,—that woman has potentially functional breasts while man has not,—the aggressive pugnacity of man contrasted with the more passive timidity of woman, have all been evolved in the sex struggle, surviving because most effective ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... against their oppressors. Unfurl the sacred banner of the Prophet, and millions of murderous fanatics would erase the raids of Goth and Visigoth from the memory of mankind. Turkey, jeered at even by Spain, flouted even by Italy , yet potentially the most powerful nation for evil upon the earth, would spread as by magic over Roumania and Austro-Hungary, and pour through the Alpine passes like a torrent of fire upon Germany and France. Back of the much contemned "Sick Man of the East"—whom combined Christendom has failed ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Bucharest, then threatened, the Rumanians were obliged to withdraw troops from their Transylvania advance, which up to this time had been highly successful. These withdrawals represented the difference between an offensive and a defensive, and the Transylvania campaign potentially failed when Bucharest was threatened ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various

... for the non-graduates the boys and girls are a little further apart. It may be remarked in this connection that no effort was made to include any of the 808 non-credited pupils among the ones who fail. The inclusion of 60 per cent of this number as potentially failing pupils, as was done in Chapter II, will raise the above percentage of failing non-graduates by ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien

... England—Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge—which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has not seen? There are, after all, few emotions of which one has less reason to be ashamed than the little lump in the throat which ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... horrors of Hell and the penance of Purgatory. Crowned and mitred over himself he came to Eden to meet her. And she has only reproaches for him. Particularly to the angels does she tell the story of his defection from the high ideals which she inspired in him. "This man was such in his new life potentially that every good talent would have made wondrous increase in him—(but) so low sank he that all means for his salvation were already short save showing him the lost people. For this I visited the portal of the dead and ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... suffered before now from Aunt Bessy, and he thought that if she made of him an offence to Miss Talbot-Lowry, he would straightway rush into the river and drown himself. Aunt Bessy, however, potentially Rabelaisian though she might be, was perfectly aware of the fact that there is a time to speak and a time to ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... consolidations of competitive or potentially competitive banks and trust companies which consolidations in turn have recently been brought under sympathetic ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... to some unimportant, negligible, even trivial. At any rate, it would be inevitable; since no one is wild enough to believe that Porto Rico can be turned back to Spain, or bartered away, or abandoned by the generation that took it. But make its people citizens now, and you have already made it, potentially, a State. Then behind Porto Rico stands Cuba, and behind Cuba, in time, stand the whole of the West Indies, on whom that law of political gravitation which John Quincy Adams described will be perpetually acting with redoubled force. And behind them—no, ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... transferring a large part of its powers throughout British India into the hands of representative assemblies which are to pave the way towards the democratic goal of responsible government, seems scarcely well chosen for the creation of a Chamber which must give greater cohesion, and potentially greater power to resist the spirit of the age, to a body of ruling Princes and Chiefs who all stand in varying degrees for archaic forms of despotic government and whose peoples have for the most part stood hitherto entirely outside the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... A more potentially robust aristocracy than that which was forming in New Netherlands could hardly be imagined. Resting upon gigantic gifts of land, with feudal accompaniments, it held a monopoly, or nearly one, of the land's resources. The old aristocracy ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... from the Santa Fe Railroad just west of Needles climbs an imperceptible grade across barren land to where the mesa changes and becomes potentially fertile. Up this road, going north, a cloud of yellow dust rolled swiftly. See at close range, the nose of a dingy Ford protruded slightly in front of the enveloping cloud—and behind it Casey Ryan, hard-eyed and with his jaw set to the fighting ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower

... They got exactly what was coming to them. Had they, as a class, been content to obey the existing laws, instead of conniving to break them; had they kept their meddling fingers out of local politics; had they realized more fully their responsibilities as manufacturers and purveyors of potentially dangerous products; had they been willing to cooperate with right-thinking men in a sane and orderly campaign for the cleaning-up and the proper regulation of the liquor traffic; had they seen that the common man's inarticulate but very ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... time to time, was never—even in the most favourable periods of colonial rule—a flourishing city, but rather a centre of trade for scattered settlements. The town could claim little literary or educational movement to mark it as the capital of a potentially rich country. It was concerned, moreover, with scarcely a trace of the social and erudite development that characterized Bogota almost from the time of its foundation by Quesada. In so far as it had to be, Caracas existed, but there ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... The suddenness was probably more apparent than real. A coral reef which just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the horizon than if it had never been begun, and the mere finishing stroke is what often appears to create an event which has long been potentially an ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... technically—excepting for the staginess of the three meetings in the cave—the second act is the most successful of the drama. It is, in fact, a little masterpiece. The action is impetuous, strong, and telling. The dramatic germs potentially present in the situation are developed here with a fine consistency. Thorolf's death is made the central fact on which hinges the whole action of the play, while by Brand's fatal vacillations and the insults offered to Helga by his henchmen important tributary ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various

... the political development of the colony. Nor did the disease admit of a readily applicable remedy. The experience of each decade had shown more and more clearly that the colony had nothing in reserve—no variety of pursuits to support the general balance of prosperity by alternations of success. Potentially its resources were almost incalculably great, but their development was impossible without capital or credit. The colony had neither. Under these circumstances took place the General Election of October, ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead

... Siebold, Van Beneden, Leuckart, Kuechenmeister, and other helminthologists, has succeeded in tracing every such parasite, often through the strangest wanderings and metamorphoses, to an egg derived from a parent, actually or potentially like itself; and the tendency of inquiries elsewhere has all been in the same direction. A plant may throw off bulbs, but these, sooner or later, give rise to seeds or spores, which develop into the original form. A polype may ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... despite a constitutional ban against religious-based parties, the technically illegal Muslim Brotherhood constitutes MUBARAK's potentially most significant political opposition; MUBARAK tolerated limited political activity by the Brotherhood for his first two terms, but moved more aggressively since then to block its influence; civic society groups are sanctioned, ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... and was thirty years old; and, lastly, your humble slave of the pen, being an American,—at the prospect of such a heterogeneous assembly of men and women, you will suppose, my dear lady, that I am about to embark upon the cerulean waters of a potentially platonic republic, humbly steering my craft by the charts of a recent voyager, who, after making a noble but ineffectual attempt to discover the Isles of the Blessed, appears to have stumbled into the drawing-rooms of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford



Words linked to "Potentially" :   potential



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