"Formative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Western Union. The longer he remained, the less he liked its atmosphere. And the closer his contact with Jay Gould the more doubtful he became of the wisdom of such an association and perhaps its unconscious influence upon his own life in its formative period. ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... variety had been grafted, threw out a variegated leaved shoot below the graft. This can easily be explained. The growth of the trunk or stem of all exogenous plants, or those which increase in size on the outside of the stem, is brought about by the descent of certain formative tissue called cambium, elaborated by the leaves and descending between the old wood and the bark, where it is formed into alburnum or woody matter. Some think that it is also formed by the roots and ascends from them as well as descending from the leaves. Be this ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... teaching, including his own voluminous writings, and the innumerable controversies in which he was engaged throughout his life. I have not discovered in all this mass of material a single trace of Jewish influence. He had no Jewish friends or associates during the formative years, the period in which the Socialist ideas and ideals shaped themselves. His Socialism was the direct outcome of his experience as a successful manufacturer. He was not in any sense a man of books. From time to time he ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There {258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... during the formative state of the army, and when the colonies were in a state of anarchy. Congress had not yet assumed control of the army, although on the very eve of it. With an empire to found and defend, the continental Congress had ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... men whose object it was to introduce slavery into California. These were fiery, fearless, eloquent and quick at stratagem. There was also Broderick's Tammany organization, an almost perfect political machine, though as yet in the formative stage. There was the tacit union of the underworld; gamblers, thieves, plug-uglies, servitors of or parasites upon the stronger factions. Each and all they feared and hated this new order of ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... than Phratries. Anomalous Phratry Areas. Four-class Systems. Borrowing of Names. Eight-class System. Resemblances and Differences of Names. Place of Origin. Formative Elements of the Names: Suffixes, Prefixes. Meanings of the Class ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... actor in the drama. The cases of older swindlers at first sight seem to offer much for the student of criminalistics, if only for purely descriptive purposes, but in the literature we have failed to find any satisfactory studies of the formative years of such careers. By taking instances of younger pathological liars, such as we have studied, the natural progress into ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck—the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... to any book, contained for him a large share of Great Britain's greatness. His brave heart beat for Tennyson; I think my father's did not, though his head applauded. My mother, for her part, was entranced by the goldsmith's work of the noble poet, and by the gems enclasped in its perfection of formative art,—perfections within the pale of convention and fashion and romantic beauty which make lovely Tennyson's baronial domain. Henry Bright wrote verses, too; and he was beginning to be successful in a certain profound interest which customarily absorbs young men of genuine ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... original consent of the universities to the establishment of Art Professorships. Nothing can be made an element of education of which it is impossible to determine whether it is ill done or well; and the clear assertion that there is a canon law in formative Art is, at this time, a more important function of each University than the instruction of its younger members in any branch of practical skill. It matters comparatively little whether few or many of our students learn to draw; but it matters much that all who learn ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... with portfolio and portable inkstand, your favorite stationery, the books that delighted your childhood or exerted a formative influence upon your character in youth. Deny yourself and leave at home the gold or silver toilet set, photograph album, family Bibles, heavy fancy work, gilded horseshoe for luck, etc. I know of bright people who actually carried their ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... Presley was but a poet by training, there developed in him a great sensitiveness to beauty and an almost abnormal capacity for great happiness and great sorrow; he felt things intensely, deeply. He never forgot. It was when he was eighteen or nineteen, at the formative and most impressionable period of his life, that he had met Angele Varian. Presley barely remembered her as a girl of sixteen, beautiful almost beyond expression, who lived with an aged aunt on the Seed ranch back ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... and with uncertain hands that scholars are trying to separate the racial strains in the folk-traditions of Europe, and here I can hardly do more than point out three formative elements in Christian customs: the ecclesiastical, the classical (Greek and Roman), and the barbarian, taking the last broadly and without a minute racial analysis. So far, indeed, as ritual, apart from mythology, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... the Continental Congress, Mr. Adams did work in it which identified him in an enduring way with the formative period of republican institutions in America. This must be remembered in passing upon his acts when as President, succeeding Washington, he is brought into strong contrast with the extreme republicans of the French school. In the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism which has left none of them whole, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... ideas through reading had become in his case a curious phenomenon," so Honore de Balzac has recorded in Louis Lambert, in which he has painted in the person of his hero his own formative years in the college school of Vendome. "His eye would take in seven or eight lines at once, and his mind would grasp the meaning with a velocity equal to that of his glance; sometimes even a single word in a phrase was enough ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... The formative period of the two older organizations furnished opportunities for a study of the disability benefit and showed its usefulness in strengthening the national unions. These organizations, however, experienced grave difficulties in their attempts to administer disability insurance. ...
— Beneficiary Features of American Trade Unions • James B. Kennedy
... final triumph of Christianity, all the formative elements of Anglo-Saxon Britain are complete. We see it, a rough conglomeration of loosely-aggregated principalities, composed of a fighting aristocracy and a body of unvalued serfs; while interspersed through its ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... must carefully weigh all these formative agents, and assign each its value. They are all present in every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a myth and these ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... formative period in Huxley's life. He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal shows him busy with all the subjects of the London ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... was formerly assumed that the reproductive glands exercised a direct determining influence in this direction, more recently another view has been put forward, among others by Halban.[47] According to this theory, the stimulus proceeding from the glands is protective merely, not formative, nor directly stimulating the growth of organs. In the fertilised ovum, it is supposed, the rudiment of sex already exists, likewise the rudiment of the reproductive gland, and the rudiments of the appropriate sexual ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... when this secrecy is maintained for a long time during pregnancy, at least toward children and the younger people. Nor can it be denied that the custom which demands more self-control in women must exercise a formative influence on their natures. Our views do not permit the woman to show without great indirection whom she hates or whom she likes; nor may she indicate clearly whom she loves, nor must she appear solicitous. Everything must happen indirectly, secretly, and approximately, and if this need ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... reasonably be expected of him, and that he must depend upon his family for everything, he will grow up helpless, selfish and awkward, and no amount of later training will entirely counteract the pernicious effect produced in these early, formative years. When placed in school with other children, he will be very sensitive to correction, and may become morbid and unhappy, thus giving a wrong impression of the blind in general. If, on the other hand, the child is taught to be self-helpful, permitted to join in the work and play of other children, ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... case must of necessity be likewise. I shall therefore conclude this chapter by observing that although a strong imagination of the mother may often determine the sex, yet the main agent in this case is the plastic or formative principle, according to those rules and laws given us by the great Creator, who makes and fashions it, and therein determines the sex, according to the council of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... another matter which entered the picture in these formative years. This began as a device, a good one it proved to be, used by the Company to stimulate immigration and settlement in Virginia. It allowed any person who paid his own way to the Colony to receive fifty acres for his own "personal ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... so-called schools are really homes, often very excellent homes, with which schools, often very inefficient schools, are united. All this we must lump together— it is, indeed, woven together almost inextricably—when we speak of home as a formative factor. The home, so far as its hygienic conditions go, we have already dealt with, and we have dealt, too, with the great neglected necessity, the absolute necessity if our peoples are to keep together, of making and keeping the language of the home uniform throughout our world-wide community. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... movement that exists to-day. Yet the present world-wide movement, so harmonious in its principles and methods and so united in doctrines, could not have been all that it is had there not come to its aid in its most critical and formative period several of the ablest and best-schooled minds of Europe. At the period when the workers were finding their feet and beginning their task of organization on a large scale, there was also in Europe much ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... listen to the business of the Sessions, and to show the Chinese as soon as possible that we were one with them, and he succeeded. There was an enthusiasm and warmth distinguishing these early days of the Amoy church that were formative in a very high degree, and that ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... with regard to accomplished things may be ascertained in the way of our inferring either the meaning of one word from the known meaning of other words, or the meaning of the radical part of a word from the known meaning of a formative element; for the fact is that we are only able to infer on the basis of a group of words known to denote a certain thing to be done, what the meaning of some particular constituent of that group may be.—Nor, again, when ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... different from what it actually was. Herder's general views were already incipient in him; and what Herder did was to deepen and intensify them.[82] Nevertheless the collision for the first time with a mind that revealed to him his own immaturity was for Goethe, as for every youth, a formative influence of the highest import and an epoch in his mental history. Yet in his association with Herder one fact has to be noted: Goethe was not subjugated by him. He frankly recognised Herder's superiority to himself in knowledge and ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Clazomenae, in Ionia, removed to Athens and took philosophy along with him, i. e. transplanted it there, but being banished thence for impiety to the gods, settled in Lampsacus, was the first to assign to the nous, conceived of "as a purely immaterial principle, a formative power in the origin and organisation of things"; d. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... approved in 1920, provides for an incorporated board of nine directors, the first members of which were appointed by the Board of Directors of the Alumni Association. This project, while still in its formative stage, has great possibilities for the future of the University, judged by the success of similar funds in other institutions. This is particularly true at Yale, where the alumni fund amounts to nearly $2,000,000 in addition to some $1,500,000 given ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... I would state it more broadly as the agency of the cell in all living processes. It seems at present necessary to abandon the original idea of Schwann, that we can observe the building up of a cell from the simple granules of a blastema, or formative fluid. The evidence points rather towards the axiom, Omnis cellula a cellula; that is, the germ of a new cell is always derived from a preexisting cell. The doctrine of Schwann, as I remarked long ago (1844), runs ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... representing the Spirit, the Trinity of Life, and the woman as representing the Matter, the Trinity of formative material. One gives life, the other receives and nourishes it. They are complementary to each other, two inseparable halves of one whole, neither existing apart from the other. As Spirit implies Matter and Matter Spirit, so husband implies wife and wife husband. As ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... with which the Ars Poetica was mainly concerned. The persuasive and authoritative counsels of the Roman poet have entered, so to speak, into the circulatory system of literary effort and become part of the life-blood of modern enlightenment. Their great effect has been formative: the cultivation of ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing anxiety to "act on Brooke," once brought close to his constant belief in Dorothea's capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a little plan; namely, to plead Celia's indisposition as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of the situation concerning ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... like a bridge over this problem—a deeper and more original power than that of every single creative individual was said to have become active; the happiest people, in the happiest period of its existence, in the highest activity of fantasy and formative power, was said to have created those immeasurable poems. In this universality there is something almost intoxicating in the thought of a popular poem: we feel, with artistic pleasure, the broad, overpowering liberation of a popular gift, and we delight in this natural phenomenon as we do in ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... In this formative period, the soul is unsoiled by warfare with the world. It lies, like a block of pure, uncut Parian marble, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... knowledge of him of the Chiltern she had married—was still wofully incomplete, and that in proportion to the lack of perfection of that knowledge her danger was great. Perhaps the Chiltern she had married was as yet in a formative state. Be this as it may, what she saw depicted on his face to-night corresponded to no ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... been brought up to such dissimulation. But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did no harm to Jenkin; and whether he got harm or benefit from a so early acquaintance with violent and hateful scenes, is more than I can guess. The experience, at least, was formative; and in judging his character it should not be forgotten. But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in their gates; the Captain's sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, lived with them until her death; she had all the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though she was unhappily deformed in body and of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending—the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... her hand firmly and said: "Lucinda, error and illness and disorder are man-made perversions. Let the past week be wiped from our memories. Once we are in the mountains we will turn the formative power of our thoughts upon things invisible, and yield ourselves to the ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... conception, in miniature, of the westward movement. But certain basic elements in the grand procession, revealed to the sociologist and the economist, would perhaps escape his scrutiny. Back of the individual, back of the family, even, lurk the creative and formative impulses of colonization, expansion, and government. In the recognition of these social and economic tendencies the individual merges into the group; the group into the community; the community into a new society. In this clear perspective of historic development the spectacular hero at first ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... found a few Manska conquistas. The inhabitants of these towns, however, are of such a heterogeneous blend that it is difficult to assign any tribal place to them. It may be said, in general, that these towns are still passing through a formative period, the result of which will probably be their complete adoption of Mandya culture and language, if they are left free to follow their ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... function was to protest against its fashions by his own intellectual practice, and now and then to take it to task and to call it to order. He was not particularly original, but he had in an eminent degree the formative capacity, the genius of shaping and developing, which is a chief quality of the French mind and which is not so common among us English as our kindest critics would have us believe. He would take a handful of golden sentences—things wisely ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... love; for love is the creative power, and as the maternal influx may determine the noble development of humanity or the ignoble development of monsters and animalized beings, it is obvious that the formative stage of all beings is a plasmic condition in which the most subtle or spiritual influences may totally change their ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... of character, and next a place for learning and study, as a means for the attainment of this higher end. Discipline and guidance were in his view still more prominently the business of a schoolmaster than the impartation of knowledge. His influence was stimulative rather than formative, the secret of his power consisting not so much in the novelty of his ideas or methods as in his commanding and magnetic personality. —From Thomas ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... elements. In this case we remain in the world of sensation and of nature. Further, if with certain associationists we speak of an association which is neither memory nor flux of sensations, but is a productive association (formative, constructive, distinguishing); then we admit the thing itself and deny only its name. In truth, productive association is no longer association in the sense of the sensualists, but synthesis, that is to say, spiritual activity. Synthesis may be called association; but ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Marriage" of Fortuny outclass his "Academicians Choosing a Model," which besides lacking the reserve force of the former has its source in flippant imagination; and so may the many other shifts of time and tide in the graphic arts be measured and chronicled upon the basis of the emotions and the formative touch of the poetic, upon the sequence of the artist's regard for the ideal and the real, and the degree of his approach toward either. The concensus of the ages regarding finish, dexterity, cleverness, and chic is that in the scale of art they weigh less than the simple breadth of effect ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Letters of James Kent" (Boston, 1898). Everett P. Wheeler's "Daniel Webster the Expounder of the Constitution" (1905) is instructive, but claims far too much for Webster's influence upon Marshall's views. New England has never yet quite forgiven Virginia for having had the temerity to take the formative hand in shaping our Constitutional Law. The vast amount of material brought together in Gustavus Myers's "History of the Supreme Court" (Chicago, 1912) is based on purely ex parte statements and is so poorly authenticated as to be valueless. He writes from ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... significance of great world changes, before Time has fully done his work, is difficult. While mighty events are still in their formative period the future is obscure. But our inability to outline the future cannot blind us to the unmistakable trend of the evolutionary forces at work. One thing that is clear is that our boasted Christian civilization is the theater in which has been staged the most un-Christian war of recorded ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... formative years of life, it gives the young girl no contact with the feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suffering, or the needs of old age. It gathers together crude youth in contact only with each other and with mature men and women who are there for the purpose of their mental direction. ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... days in Hartford began a new era in Harriet's life. It was the formative period, and it is therefore important to say a few words concerning her sister Catherine, under whose immediate supervision she was to continue her education. In fact, no one can comprehend either Mrs. Stowe or her writings without some knowledge of the life and character of this ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... "The formative stage of inebriety continues for a longer or shorter period, when, as is well known, more frequent repetitions of the practice of drinking are to be observed. The impulse to drink grows stronger and stronger, the will-power is overthrown and the entire ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... well rounded voice which, of course, necessitates the opening of the mouth and free movement of the lips. It is remarkable how many excellent men suffer from this handicap, and how almost impossible it is to correct this after the formative years of life." ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... forgotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the creative, formative ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... how it is that the many can arise from the one, and in this particular he reconciled the apparent contradictions of the Ionians and Eleatics. The theory of chemistry, as it now exists, essentially includes his views. The general formative principle of Nature he regarded as being Destiny or Fate; but there are indications that by this he meant nothing more than ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... for some time, I found it desirable to limit it to events which had a distinctly formative influence on the development of European States. On questions of motive and policy I have generally refrained from expressing a decided verdict, seeing that these are always the most difficult to probe; and facile dogmatism on them is ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... is lessened: the hope disappears: were they too much of pearls to cast before 'barren spectators'? The manuscript could never have been meant for any eye but his own, seeing it was possible to print from it such a chaos—over which yet broods the presence of the formative spirit of ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... glances. If a great lady entertaining a penniless young man can be demure, then demure was the Princess Sophie Zobraska. Paul, who prided himself on his knowledge of feminine subtlety, was at fault; but who was he to appreciate the repressive influence of a practical-minded convent friend, quickly formative and loudly assertive of opinions, on an impressionable lady awakening to curiosities? He was just a dunderhead, like any one of us—just as much as the most eminent feminine psychologist alive—which is ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... by motion, growth, acquisition, loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is by living men, a vital formative energy is still at work. It is one which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... parents have besought us for years, past to open a missionary school, through which their children might be saved to morality and integrity of character during the formative periods of their lives, we have at last seen our way to answer their pathetic appeal in part. A day school with an industrial department is ready for the opening, the building having been constructed during ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various
... under conditions which appear to be nearly uniform." Nietzsche, recognising this same truth, would ascribe practically all the importance to the "highest functionaries in the organism, in which the life-will appears as an active and formative principle," and except in certain cases (where passive organisms alone are concerned) would not give such a prominent place to the influence of environment. Adaptation, according to him, is merely a secondary activity, a mere re-activity, and he is therefore quite opposed to Spencer's ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... been ascertained that the legend of Arthur was familiar among the Normans before Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his books, and it certainly had an incalculable formative influence on European literature, much of which can be "traced back directly or indirectly to these legends." It was also a vehicle for that element which we call chivalry, which the church infused into it to fashion and mould the rude soldiers of feudal times into Christian ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... subdued the victorious Normans to the conquered Saxon's conception of justice, rejected the claims of divine right by the Stewarts, established capacity for self-government upon the independence of individual character that knows no superior but the law, and supplied the amazing formative power which has molded, according to the course and practice of the common law, the thought and custom of the hundred millions of men drawn from all lands and all races who inhabit this continent ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... mind. Quite sane now," said Pennington. "But don't you think, Dick, we ought to take that exciting book away from him? The mind of youth in its tender formative state can be inflamed ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the famous Greek myths of Dionysus, and the Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and the ploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the healthfully excited brain.—"It ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... anthropoid ancestor, the process of evolution has not ceased, but has gone on in him rapidly and immensely. The strain has simply been transferred from the body to the mind, and to the extent that the mental characteristics are more flexible and yield more readily to formative influences, the mind has surpassed the body in rapidity of evolutionary variation. Within a period during which the lower animals have remained almost unchanged, man has varied enormously in mental conditions, and to-day may be looked upon, not merely as a distinct species, but practically as a ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... Giuseppe Antonini and is entitled "The German Madness." Its subject, full of quotations from Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi, is not new to Americans. For Italians it may come as a revelation. It demonstrates the formative influences which have found expression in what is called "Prussian Militarism," as an attitude of mind which believes in the supremacy of force over all things—over goodness, virtue, kindness, and all else ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... 8. Contemplate the formative principles [forms] of things bare of their coverings; the purposes of actions; consider what pain is, what pleasure is, and death, and fame; who is to himself the cause of his uneasiness; how no man is hindered by another; that ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... the mysterious "I," live with a body woven around me. The Bible hints that this stage is of untold importance. In fact, all the future stages depend largely on how it is lived. That is what makes this first stage so awfully important. It is the formative time whose influence spreads out into eternity. In this stage Acts make habits. Habits ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... progenerate[obs3], propagate; engender; bring into being, call into being, bring into existence; breed, hatch, develop, bring up. induce, superinduce; suscitate|; cause &c. 153; acquire &c. 775. Adj. produced, producing &c. v.; productive of; prolific &c. 168; creative; formative, genetic, genial, genital; pregnant; enceinte, big with, fraught with; in the family way, teeming, parturient, in the straw, brought to bed of; puerperal, puerperous[obs3]. digenetic[obs3], heterogenetic[obs3], oogenetic, xenogenetic[obs3]; ectogenous[obs3], gamic[obs3], haematobious[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... these two lists we shall see that the first covers various aspects of what is conceived as the ordering, defining, formative principle in nature; and that the second in like manner comprises various {25} aspects of the unordered, neutral, passive, or disorganised element or principle; the first, to adopt a later method ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... either orally or in writing. Only difficult definitions are appended: in the case of words not defined, pupils may be required to form the definition by reference to the signification of the radicals and the formative elements, thus, acr id acrid, being bitter, acr id ity state ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... the Territory of New Mexico comes to be written, the name of Colonel Albert J. Fountain deserves and should have first place in it. Throughout the formative epoch of her evolution from semi-savagery to civilization, an epoch spanning the years from 1866 to 1896, Colonel Fountain was far and away her most distinguished and most useful citizen. As soldier, scholar, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... was the first open breach between the king and the Romans, who now began to remind themselves that there was an Augustus at Constantinople. This memory, which had slumbered while pope and emperor were in conflict—such is the creative and formative power of religion—was stirred and strengthened by the reconciliation between the emperor Justin and the Holy See. It is curious that the man who was to lead the Catholic party and to suffer in the national cause had translated thirty books of Aristotle into Latin; his name was Boethius and ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... teachers, especially the pale young professor of mental and moral philosophy, referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the new world. This was the "formative influence" of the school,—the quality that the Institute prided itself on ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... surface is constantly being renewed. Although the great formative movements occurred ages ago, yet earthquakes, volcanic action, wind, frost and water are working continual changes. Hills and mountains have been thrown up, and nature has gone to work at once to shave down the mountains and fill up the valleys. ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... all to His own perfect purposes. Let us bring the highest and largest principles to bear on the smallest events and circumstances, for you can never tell which of these is going to turn out a revolutionary and formative influence in your life. And if the highest Christian principle is not brought to bear upon the trifles, depend upon it, it will never be brought to bear upon the mighty things. The most part of every life is made up of trifles, and unless these are ruled by the highest motives, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Those formative years might have proved a much drearier period but for the circumstance that his uncle's house was provided with a library, made up of books of all grades and qualities. To these volumes young Jonathan was at liberty to help himself without let or hindrance, ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... short in the midst by his dismission for some sort of a college frolic, and even while he was at Yale he confesses that he played the first year and did not work much the rest of the time. The discipline he received, however, from his English master at Albany seems to have been one of the formative factors of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such vitality that their ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity. Certainly it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and a necessary step in the great process; and certainly it was opaque and brutish, but it is through the opaque ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... under the form of a fight between Michael and the Dragon. In Christian literature Michael has been replaced by St. George. The old Babylonian conception has been fruitful of poetry, representing, as it does, in grand form the struggle between the chaotic and the formative forces of the universe. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... neighbours to worship cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement of her influence on the archaic theology of Greece. But that influence, if any, was formative and delineative: not ritual: so that in no case, and in no country, was Egypt the parent of Superstition: while she was beyond all dispute, for all people and to all time, the parent of Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture, and Chivalry. She was, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... 4. While the One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, &c. The function ascribed in these lines to the One Spirit is a formative or animating function: the Spirit constitutes the life of 'trees and beasts and men.' This view is strictly ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... enjoyment. Various habits of life had to be adopted in various parts of the world, and these produced various habits of thought. Consequently, we find that behind all systems of primitive religion lies the formative background of natural phenomena. A mythology reflects the geography, the fauna and flora, and the climatic conditions of the area in which it ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... unquestioned throughout the ages—a policy upon which human discernment, in Church and State, has relied with unfailing effect; "for the thoughts of a child are long, long thoughts"—those well-remembered words, how true; for those "long thoughts"—the mental environment of the formative period of child-life—do inevitably determine the future character of the individual, and the immediate result of neglect in these vitally important stages is painfully and promptly apparent in the aggressive and unchildlike deportment ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... that the ill humors of the body politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant. Books were beyond her interest—knowledge ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Semitic tongues, and included it in the Turanian group. It is said to possess all the characteristics of the Turanian family being agglutinated, that is to say, maintaining its roots in their integrity without formative prefixes, poor in conjunctions, and copious in the use of participles. It is uncertain when alphabetical characters were introduced into Japan, but it is believed to have happened when intercourse with ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Washington's second term drew near, he left no doubt as to his intentions. Though some of his best friends urged him to stand for reelection, he firmly declined. He felt that he had done enough for his country in sacrificing the last eight years to it. He had seen it through its formative period, and had, he thought, steered it into clear, quiet water, so that there was no threatening danger to demand his continuance at the helm. Many persons thought that he was more than glad to be relieved of the ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... been, perforce, relaxed lately, and almost all the working time had been devoted to writing the "Quest of Happiness," and an article on "Formative Influences" for the "Forum," besides the concluding articles for ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... swelled by the addition of a little girl, the daughter of John Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman of small property and fewer friends. He had met Joseph only once, at a lecture-hall in Holloway; but from that formative experience he returned home to make a new will, and consign his daughter and her fortune to the lecturer. Joseph had a kindly disposition; and yet it was not without reluctance that he accepted this new responsibility, advertised ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... were the influences, formative and impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp and clear, and the conjoint effect ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... and reasoning. Reflection on processes of nature, guided sometimes by fortunate or unfortunate accidents, may have led to the establishment of methods of procedure for gaining social and individual ends; and, as at this formative period the whole life of the community was permeated by religious conceptions, the procedures either were originally religious or speedily took ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... offer the argumentum ad hominem in rebuttal. Fight the conclusion as I may, I cannot resist the convincement that ill winds have never blown me any good; that, on the contrary, the steady pressure of hardship and misfortune, during a period when my life was still in a great measure in the formative state, exerted an influence which was altogether evil, weakening the impulses which should have been growing stronger, and giving free rein to those which, under more favoring conditions, might never have ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... the begetting of man, the mother supplies the formless matter of the body; and the latter receives its form through the formative power that is in the semen of the father. And though this power cannot create the rational soul, yet it disposes the matter of the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... that is not known to the average student, either from personal inspection at our museums and loan exhibitions, or from excellent photographic reproductions. Not only European art, but the art of the East, China and Japan, is part of the formative influence by which he is surrounded; not to mention the modern science of light and colour that has had such an influence on technique. It is no wonder that a period of artistic indigestion is upon us. Hence the student has need of sound ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquirements; it is a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a familiar word, it is a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of our previous ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... so early a developmental stage as that of yelk division, but there is every reason to conclude that the changes it undergoes are identical with those exhibited by the ova of other vertebrated animals; for the formative materials of which the rudimentary human body is composed, in the earliest conditions in which it has been observed, are the same as those of other animals. Some of these earliest stages are figured below, and, as will be seen, they are strictly comparable to the very early states of ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... in the capacity of assistant to his father. That these were years of introspection and remorse to one of his spirit, however, there can be little doubt; there can be still less doubt that they were also years of formative growth, and that in this interval the irresponsible youth, who had given hostages to fortune by marrying at the age of eighteen, steadied by the responsibility of a growing family, quickly developed into some promise ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... something more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic, begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy distance, obscure and incomprehensible—granting all this, and yet any one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process, that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the actually existing indifference about questions as to the method or methods by which the work can most fully and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... looking over the comic supplements of the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with this matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that despite the narrowness of our outlook, the primitive conditions ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... were spent at Westward Ho, in Devon, where, though he failed to distinguish himself in his studies, he established a reputation as a clever writer of verse and prose. He also enjoyed in these formative years the friendship and counsel of Burne-Jones, and he had the use of several fine private libraries. His wide reading probably injured his school standing, but it was of enormous benefit to him in his future literary work. At seventeen young Kipling returned ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... "Do you mean to imply," said he, with raised eyebrows, "that any woman would admit the possibility of acquaintanceship with any particular man's having had a formative influence on her character? After school-days, I ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond |
