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Fundamental law   /fˌəndəmˈɛntəl lɔ/   Listen
Fundamental law

noun
1.
Law determining the fundamental political principles of a government.  Synonyms: constitution, organic law.






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"Fundamental law" Quotes from Famous Books



... facts that are stated in the first chapter of Genesis. They must have been revealed. Science cannot inquire into them for the purpose of checking their accuracy; it must accept them, as it accepts the fundamental law that governs its own working, without ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder

... they may be controlled by the intelligent few who understand their needs and may have their welfare at heart, is a mistake that other nations than Russia have made. The law of the survival of the fittest has wiped out races and nations who have ignored this fundamental law, that all ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... "is against the Gospel, as well as the fundamental law of England. We refused, as trustees, to make a law permitting such a horrid crime."—Memoirs of Sharpe, vol. i., p. 234; Stephen's Journal, quoted by Bancroft. In 1751, however, after Oglethorpe had finally left Georgia, his humane restrictions ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... constantly broken by degenerate and vicious men, women and children, very rarely is broken in a free wild herd or flock. In the observance of this fundamental law, born of ethics and expediency, mankind is far behind the wild animals. It would serve a good purpose if the criminologists and the alienists would figure out the approximate proportion of the human species now living ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... constitution in the American sense of the term is a written instrument defining the powers of government and distributing those powers among the branches or departments thereof. It is the fundamental law, the voice of the people granting or withholding power. A primary purpose of the instrument is to give form and authority to the government; another is to protect individuals and minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Each of the states has ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... and bears, with overwhelming force, on the theory of free trade as between an old and a young community. They demonstrate that that theory is not only practically pernicious, but on principle erroneous. It involves an oblivion of the fundamental law of nature as to the difference between the effect of wealth and civilization on the production of food and the raising of manufactures. It proceeds on insensibility to the difference in the age and advancement of nations, and the impossibility ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... which he is ready—each must bring something to a book, before he may expect to take anything away from it—to him that hath shall be given. Ever the same old mystic truth, manifest ever and ever, at all times and in all places. It is a fundamental law of the mind. ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... conservative than Congress. He had surprised every one with the Emancipation Proclamation, but he was so anxious for some arrangement to be made for compensating the Border States for their loss of slaves, that he did not at once recommend the utter destruction of the institution by an amendment to the Fundamental Law of the Republic. He left Congress ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... kind, by severely punishing any League club manager or player who should prove recreant in fealty to the laws of the National Agreement, or who should join in any attempt to organize any base ball association opposed to the reserve rule, which rule over ten years' experience had proved to be the fundamental law and corner-stone of the professional base ball business. Without such a repressive law it was evident that the League would be subject to periodical attempts on the part of unscrupulous managers or ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick

... wife of another with a lustful eye, is considered as if he had committed adultery'—(Kalah). 'With what measure we mete, we shall be measured again'—(Johanan). 'What thou wouldst not like to be done to thyself, do not to others; this is the fundamental law'—(Hillel). 'If he be admonished to take the splinter out of his eye, he would answer, Take the beam out of thine own'—(Tarphon). 'Imitate God in his goodness. Be towards thy fellow-creatures as he is towards the whole creation. Clothe the naked; heal the sick; comfort the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... was at once the fundamental law of Eden Vale. In the other parts of the world, where the struggle for existence finds its consummation not merely in exploiting and enslaving one another, but over and above this in a mutual industrial annihilation—where, in consequence of the universal over-production due to under-consumption, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... Boldrewood's usual treatment of character is furnished by the great bushranger chief who is the central figure in Robbery under Arms. The author here submits for the first and only time to that fundamental law of fiction which demands a certain judicious exaggeration in the characters of a story depending for its interest mainly on the charm of circumstance. Starlight is at once the most real and least possible personage ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... authorized me to consider as a real defect, what I thought, and still think one, the perpetual re-eligibility of the President. But three States out of eleven having declared against this, we must suppose we are wrong, according to the fundamental law of every society, the lex majoris partis, to which we are bound to submit. And should the majority change their opinion, and become sensible that this trait in their constitution is wrong, I would wish it to remain uncorrected, as long as we can avail ourselves of the services of our great ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... influence in decreasing invasion by reason of the intense and successful competition which all invaders must meet. Closed associations usually act as complete barriers, while more open ones restrict invasion in direct proportion to the degree of occupation. To this fact may be traced the fundamental law of succession (the law by which one type of community or formation is succeeded by another) that the number of stages is determined largely by the increasing difficulty of invasion as the area becomes stabilized. Man and animals affect invasion by ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... not on paper nor by the voice of public criers; but in all European hearts, then all Catholic Kings surrender the power of judging by themselves, and nations in return declare kings infallible and inviolable. Such is the fundamental law of the European monarchy, and it is the work ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... was a hard thing for men who had been reared in the South to realize that their principal property, guaranteed to them as it was, in the fundamental law of the land, was founded in injustice; and still harder was it to accept poverty on the strength of a sentiment. Human nature is selfish in all regions, and, that Southern men should have clung to their property is no more than what their opponents would have done had the circumstances ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore

... a notable fact that the United States of America was the first nation that ever embodied the principle of protection to the rights of authors in its fundamental law. "The Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Thus anchored in the Constitution itself, this principle has been further recognized by ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... a man can test the validity of his own opinion if he be not willing to support it by a bet? A man is bound to do so, or else to give way and apologise. For many years he had insisted upon this in commercial rooms as a fundamental law in the character and conduct of gentlemen, and never yet had anything been said to him to show that in such a theory he ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... fundamental law expressing the relations between current, electro-motive force and resistance in an active electric circuit. It may be ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, and honor, without injury or abuse done to any." [29] That government will seek the good of all is likely to be the case, because man has it as a fundamental law of his nature that he "maintain a sociableness with others."[30] "From the principles of sociableness it follows as a fundamental law of nature that man is not so wedded to his own interest but that he can make the common ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... thought of the weight of the argument, either as to constitutional power or as to policy, there is little doubt as to the result. The people who found authority in their fundamental law for treating paper currency as a legal tender in time of war, in spite of the constitutional requirement that no State should "make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts," will find there ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... the world may not be aware of the fact, yet there are even now certain Adepts who have preferred to remain in statu quo and refuse to take the higher degrees, for the benefit of the future generations of humanity. In short, as the Adepts work harmoniously, since unity is the fundamental law of their being, they have, as it were, made a division of labour, according to which each works on the plane appropriate to himself for the spiritual elevation of us all—and the process of longevity mentioned in the Elixir of Life is only the means ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... the Constitution, a vast extension of territory, and the varied relations arising there from, have presented problems which could not have been foreseen. It is just cause for admiration—even wonder, that the provisions of the fundamental law should have been found so fully adequate to all the wants of government, new in its organization, and new in many of the principles on which it was founded. Whatever fears may have once existed as to the consequences ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis

... 'incendiary,' and the offense would be heinous. The pro-slavery spirit has always demanded sycophancy where its strength was great enough to enforce it, and has ever been ready to invoke the law of force where its theories were contradicted. Even the fundamental law of the South, contained in Southern State Constitutions in favor of the 'freedom of speech, and freedom of the press,' is mere rhetorical flourish, where slavery is concerned. It means that you must adulate slavery if you speak of it; and woe to the man that gives this fundamental ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... of his day, that in architecture, as in all operative arts, "the end is to build well." Other writers have alluded to architecture as the "politeness of building," and as "the art of building with expression." The fundamental law which should govern the preparation of an architectural design is thus happily expressed by Roscoe: "Utility and beauty are bound together in an indissoluble chain; and what the great Author of nature has joined together ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... specifically the proportion according to which each State shall profit by the proceeds of the land sales, but they proceed to declare that they shall be "faithfully and bona fide disposed of for that purpose, and for no other use or purpose whatsoever." This is the fundamental law of the land at this moment, growing out of compacts which are older than the Constitution, and formed the corner stone on which ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson

... propounded to the Master of a lodge at the time of his installation, and which, from their universal adoption, without alteration, by the whole fraternity, are undoubtedly to be considered as a part of the fundamental law of Masonry. ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... asked—what are the laws which govern the action of these forces? This question is of fundamental importance, since it leads directly to those laws which regulate the chemical process. Besides the already mentioned fundamental law of chemical combination, that of constant and multiple proportions, there is the law of chemical mass-action, discovered by Guldberg and Waage in 1867, which we will now develop from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... part of the fundamental law which relates to the election of circuit judges, let us say. If I had your case to fight, I should try to ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... to struggle with fate, with the elements, and with the borrower; it is folly to claim immunity from a fundamental law, to boast of our brief exemption from the common lot. "Lend therefore cheerfully, O man ordained to lend. When thou seest the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were halfway." Resistance to an appointed force is but ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... family too often are injured and unhappy unless the efforts are called missionary and the religious zeal of the family carry them over their sense of abuse. When this zeal does not exist, the result is perplexing. It is a curious violation of what we would fain believe a fundamental law—that the final return of the deed is upon the head of the doer. The deed is that of exclusiveness and caution, but the return, instead of falling upon the head of the exclusive and cautious, falls upon a young head full of generous and unselfish plans. The girl loses ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... chief public question in this country will be woman's claim to the ballot. The Federal Constitution, as it now stands, leaves this question an open one for the several States to settle as they choose. Two bills, however, now lie before Congress proposing to array the fundamental law of the land against the multitude of American women by ordaining a denial of the political rights of a whole sex. To this injustice we object totally! Such an amendment is a snap judgment before discussion; it is an obstacle ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... in the free States. It is not my purpose to discuss the social or moral relations of slavery, but simply to consider under what circumstances the Constitution originated, and what was the clear intent of those who adopted it as the organic or fundamental law of the country. The last assumption taken by the seceding States grows out of the first four, and therefore it becomes a question of vital interest, what did the framers of the Constitution mean? We must remember that while ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... order the army to kill unless necessary in defense, nor determine for what purposes the army may be employed. The people of the United States are advancing, though slowly, in civilization. Their fundamental law has very wisely always provided that Congress alone should have power to "declare war"; but for many years any Indian agent, or any bloodthirsty white man on the frontier, who chose to kill an Indian in cold blood, could inaugurate a war without waiting to declare it, and that without the ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... to suppose that heresy, in the modern misuse of the word (as equivalent to false doctrine), was greatly dreaded in the Roman Catholic Church, or savagely punished by our ancient code. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the fundamental law was that of Theodosius and the empire, that every man must be a member of the Catholic Church, and submit to it. That law was indeed the original establishment of the Church, and for many centuries there had been in Scotland no penalty for breaking it except death. But ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes

... the advent of that first written constitution of civil government, that first attempt of a people in that form, by self-imposed fundamental law, to put it out of their own power to work injustice; that agreement, signed upon the sea, "to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal laws and ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices," as should ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... irresistibly raised of other points beyond it. When we try to imagine the last instant of time, we can not help conceiving another instant after it. Nor is there any necessity to assume, as is done by a modern school of metaphysicians, a peculiar fundamental law of the mind to account for the feeling of infinity inherent in our conceptions of space and time; that apparent infinity is sufficiently accounted for by simpler and ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... be the first picture that presents itself to the human soul, when ascending into the psycho-spiritual world. This double of the human being, in accordance with a law of the spiritual world, is bound to be his first impression in that world. It is easy to explain this fundamental law to ourselves, if we consider the following. In the life of the physical senses man is cognizant of himself only so far as he is inwardly conscious of himself in his thinking, feeling, and willing. ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... as regards the forms of its maxims; and thus it is at least not impossible to conceive that a law, which only applies to the subjective form of principles, yet serves as a principle of determination by means of the objective form of law in general. We may call the consciousness of this fundamental law a fact of reason, because we cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason, e.g., the consciousness of freedom (for this is not antecedently given), but it forces itself on us as a synthetic a ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant

... will either to men or women appear more incredible than the histories of the Amazons; of female nations of whose constitution it was the essential and fundamental law to exclude men from all participation, either of publick affairs or domestick business; where female armies marched under female captains, female farmers gathered the harvest, female partners danced together, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... which are secured to the citizens by the laws of the state. Some make no distinction between civil rights and political rights. In a proper sense—that in which the terms are here used—there is this difference: political rights are those secured by the political or fundamental law, called the constitution; civil rights are more properly those which are secured by the civil or municipal laws. The difference will more clearly appear from the definition elsewhere given of the political and civil ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young

... intoxicating liquors is no more of an encroachment on the prerogatives of the states than is its assumption of jurisdiction over child labor and the use of narcotic drugs. We come back, therefore, to the proposition that the Prohibition Amendment is to be regarded less as a departure in American fundamental law than as a spectacular manifestation of a change already ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson

... for a people to gain its liberty. It must secure it. It must not intrust it to the keeping, or hold it at the pleasure, of any one man. The keystone of the Royal Arch of the great Temple of Liberty is a fundamental law, charter, or constitution; the expression of the fixed habits of thought of the people, embodied in a written instrument, or the result of the slow accretions and the consolidation of centuries; the same in war as in peace; ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... declared such an intention, and so has exposed his life to the other's power to be taken away by him, or any one that joins with him in his defence, and espouses his quarrel; it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke

... Government for five years with another appeal to the people at the end of that term. More than that. They could impose a protective duty upon corn, or endow the Roman Catholic religion, making such protection or endowment a fundamental law (s. iv., n. 8, p. 323), and withholding from the government, which they proceed to set up, the power of meddling with that law. They are then not only a Constituent but likewise a Legislative Assembly. But this power of making laws and moulding the future constitution of the State, what else ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... obtained? No sooner was he installed in his humble abode in the Rue de la Victoire than he was assured that, on the retirement of Rewbell, the majority of suffrages would have devolved on him had he been in France, and had not the fundamental law required the age of forty; but that not even his warmest partisans were disposed to violate the yet infant Constitution ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... that men of eminent attainments in the profession should so far forget one of the most fundamental and universally recognized laws of organic life as to promulgate the fallacy here stated. The fundamental law to which we refer is, that all vital phenomena are accompanied by, and dependent upon, molecular or atomic changes; and whatever retards these retards the phenomena of life; whatever suspends these suspends life. Hence, to say that an agent which retards ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... the position that the hypocrisy is practised all day before her mistress, and that the mere momentum of habit carries it on at other times. This is plausible, but I suspect that such a case would rather come under the fundamental law that action and reaction are equal and opposite. Let us be charitable and look for better reasons. The mere milk of human kindness explains something, but not enough, and I am inclined to think that the Ayah is the subject of an indiscriminate maternal emotion, which runs where it can find a channel. ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... dixerunt, doth make them to be such? Certainly no. But this is true, that where natural reason hath built anything so strong against itself, as the same reason can hardly assail it, much less batter it down: the same in every question of nature, and infinite power, may be approved for a fundamental law of human knowledge. For saith Charron in his book of wisdom, "Toute proposition humaine a autant d'authorite quel'autre, si la raison n'on fait la difference;" "Every human proposition hath equal authority, if reason make not the difference," the rest being but the fables ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... on to speak of the approaching Hague Conference, and of the difficulty Germany would have if asked to alter the proportion of her army to her population—a proportion which rested on a fundamental law. For Germany alone to object to disarmament would be to put herself in a hole, and it would be a friendly act if we could devise some way out of a definite vote on reduction. Germany might well enter a conference ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane

... in consequence. It is to such exhaustion that Dr. Clarke especially attributes excessive uterine haemorrhage in young girls, and, as already said, he refers the exhaustion to a single cause, namely, to the attempt to impose on the nervous system two actions of equal intensity, contrary to the fundamental law that an intense evolution of nerve-force in one part of the organism ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... labor of the Negroes held to service. The proslavery party persistently struggled for some years to secure by the interpretation of the laws, by legislation and even by amending the constitution so to change the fundamental law as to provide for actual slavery. These States, however, gradually worked toward freedom in keeping with the spirit of the majority who framed the constitution, despite the fact that the indenture system in southern Illinois and ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson

... provisions of which he settled with the States, at the diet of Nuremberg, and which he solemnly promulgated at another grand diet held at Christmas, in the same year. This Magna Charta of the Germanic constitution continued to be the fundamental law of the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... "time-spirit" and that each age is a natural, even logical, development of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine of Ideas as the governing forces in human progress. History was but the development of spirit, or the realization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." The {720} Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some are free, the Germans that all are free. In this third, or Teutonic, stage of evolution, the Reformation was one ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... population of the South, and confesses that his deep sympathy with the Federal cause came from the conviction that the supremacy or overthrow of Slavery was intimately connected with the success or failure of Secession. In acknowledging the necessity that was upon loyal Americans of defending the fundamental law of their society, he is not disposed to adopt the lamentation of some of our foreign well-wishers who are troubled by the fear of a military despotism in the Free States. He has the sagacity to perceive that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... substances which were subordinated to them. That every thing predicable of the universal was predicable of the various individuals contained under it, was then no identical proposition, but a statement of what was conceived as a fundamental law of the universe. The assertion that the entire nature and properties of the substantia secunda formed part of the nature and properties of each of the individual substances called by the same name; that the properties of Man, for example, were properties ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... and criminal laws, and the principles of government; the Apostles did not once tread on this ground. Fancy what their work would have been, had they substituted a social for a spiritual revolution—had they touched, above all, the question of slavery, which formed part of the fundamental law of the ancient world. And here I wish my thought to be clearly comprehended: I do not pretend that the Apostles were conscious of the unlawfulness of slavery, and that they avoided pointing it out through policy, for fear of compromising their work. No, indeed, this happened ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... subjected by it to the duty, not only of determining finally the construction of and effect of all acts of Congress. but of comparing them with the Constitution of the United States and pronouncing them inoperative when found in conflict with that fundamental law which the people have enacted for the government of all their servants. And to these ends, first, that, through the action of the Senate of the United States, the absolute duty of the President to substitute some fit person in place of Mr. Stanton as one of his advisers, and as a principal ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... well as seaboard, to all the kingdom. All landholders were to be assessed in proportion to their property, and the tax, if not voluntarily paid, collected by force. The tax was unpopular, and clearly against the fundamental law of the kingdom. But if the government could not get the law on its side it could control its interpreters, for "every law hath its exposition." So the Judges of Assize were ordered in their circuits to tell the people to comply with the order and pay the money! The King ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... as a functionary is to secure respect for the fundamental law of the land, the constitution, which has just been ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... contract ties dearer than those of consanguinity, is a law as ancient as the first records of the history of our race, and as unchangeable as the constitution of the human body and mind. To repine against the nature of things, and against the great fundamental law of all society, because, in consequence of my own want of foresight, it happens to bear heavily on me, would be the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... Town of Stowe disappear from that locality (as towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there: then why should anybody travel the way?—Habit is our primal, fundamental law; Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... says: "It seems hardly possible that men of eminent attainments in the profession should so far forget one of the most fundamental and universally recognized laws of organic life as to promulgate the fallacy here stated. The fundamental law to which we allude is, that all vital phenomena are accompanied by, and dependent on, molecular or atomic changes; and whatever retards these retards the phenomena of life; whatever suspends these suspends life. Hence, to say that an agent which retards tissue metamorphosis is in any ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur

... scriptures declare that the physical world operates under one fundamental law of MAYA, the principle of relativity and duality. God, the Sole Life, is an Absolute Unity; He cannot appear as the separate and diverse manifestations of a creation except under a false or unreal veil. That cosmic illusion is MAYA. Every great scientific discovery of modern ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... scientific method must take account. When a review of all the cases in which compulsion has changed existing methods shows an almost invariable adaptation and a tendency toward better results after the level of competition is raised, a man of scientific training immediately asks the question, whether a fundamental law ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss

... these I expressed in the last words I uttered: That without which a science cannot exist is commensurate in use with the science itself; being the fundamental law, it will testify its own importance in the changes which it will impress on all the derivative laws. For the main use of Mr. Ricardo's principle, I refer you therefore to all Political Economy. Meantime, I will notice here the immediate ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... was a signal victory; but, apart from the interests of commerce, it was due rather to Pitt than to the government. The declaratory bill also passed; its chief opponents being Pitt and, in the upper house, Lord Camden, who on this question, as well as on that of repeal, talked much trash about a fundamental law of nature and the limits of the power of parliament, more in place in the mouth of an American demagogue than of an English judge. An address was also carried recommending that the colonial governors should be instructed to require compensation to ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... By a fundamental law of this realm, neither the king, nor either of his two eldest sons, are permitted to leave the island; nor the queen, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift

... rapidly growing portion of the human race in its widely separated homes there was at last a central government worthy the name. The old Articles of Confederation had been no fundamental law, not a foundation but a homely botch-work of superstructure, resembling more a treaty between several States than a ground-law for one. In the new Constitution a genuine foundation was laid, the Government now holding ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... puts a lock on every man's mouth, and a seal on every man's lips, who will not shout for and swear by the divinity of the system. It amuses the popular fancy with a few glittering generalities in the fundamental law about the liberty of the press, and forthwith usurps authority, even in times of peace, to send out its edict to every postmaster, whether in the village or at the cross-roads, clothing him with a despotic and absolute censorship over one of the dearest rights of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... He was a judicial Calhoun. His dogma was that the fundamental law guaranteed property in man. He declared that therefore Congress could not interfere with it in the Territories. Before he was judge, he admitted the right of sojourn. There was but one step more,—the sacred right of slave property in Free States. It was involved in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... Fechner had not alone verified the earlier results (with certain limitations not essential to the present consideration), but had invented new methods of making similar tests, and had reduced the whole question to mathematical treatment. He pronounced Weber's discovery the fundamental law of psycho-physics. In honor of the discoverer, he christened it Weber's Law. He clothed the law in words and in mathematical formulae, and, so to say, launched it full tilt at the heads of the psychological world. It made a fine commotion, be assured, for it was the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... the Oriental thought, although in different forms, and with various interpretations. The thought refers to the occult truth that there is in Cosmic Nature alternate periods of Activity and Inactivity—Days and Nights—In-breathings and Out-breathings—Wakefulness and Sleep. This fundamental law manifests in all Nature, from Universes to Atoms. Let us see it now in its application ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... changed their old Colonial Charters into definite written Constitutions, each of which contained a Preamble or Bill of Rights which affirmed the fundamental principles of democratic liberty (R. 251). These now became the fundamental law for each of the separate States, and the same idea was later worked out in the Constitution of the United States. These were the first written constitutions of history, and have since served as a type for the creation of constitutional government throughout ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... declared by our fathers in 1776 and made the fundamental law of Massachusetts in 1780, was Equality before the Law. Its object was to efface all political or civil distinctions, and to abolish all institutions founded upon birth. 'All men are created equal,' says the Declaration of Independence. ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams

... was by grant derived from the parental or general Government. It was their theory that the Government created the States, not that the States and people created the Government. Some of them had acquiesced in certain principles which were embodied in the fundamental law called the Constitution; but the Constitution was in their view the child of necessity, a mere crude attempt of the theorists of 1776, who made successful resistance against British authority, to limit the power of the new central Government which was substituted for ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... introducing for the first time these inquiries in the world of science, I should choose a starting point different from that of old (where we formerly began). It would be well to begin with Telepathy; with that fundamental law, as I believe it to be, that thoughts and images may be transferred from one mind to another without the agency of the recognized organs of sense—that knowledge may enter the human mind without being communicated in any hitherto known or recognized ways. * * * If Telepathy takes place we ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... that, if life must have a goal, it should be only to live in accordance with the sensibly arranged course of the world, and in harmony with one's own nature. He should have taught her to derive happiness from virtue. He should have stamped goodness upon the soul of the future Queen as the fundamental law of her being. He omitted to do this, because in his secluded life he had succeeded in finding the happiness which the master promises to his disciples. From Athens to Cyrene, from Epicurus to Aristippus, is but a short step, and Cleopatra took ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... 19. King Uzziah "loved husbandry." 2 Chron. xxvi. 10. Gideon was "threshing wheat" when called to lead the host against the Midianites. Judg. vi. 11. The superior honorableness of agriculture, is shown, in that it was protected and supported by the fundamental law of the theocracy—God indicating it as the chief prop of the government. The Israelites were like permanent fixtures on their soil, so did they cling to it. To be agriculturalists on their own inheritances, was with them the grand claim to honorable estimation. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... in Wonder Island were brought out of their crude state, the Professor and George knew that they could not change that fundamental law of nature, nor did they attempt to work a revolution in the minds and characters of the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay

... the influence of the legislation of its neighbour. A constitutional commission, appointed by the Dutch Government, reported in favour of amending the fundamental law so as to render possible the adoption of proportional representation. The recommendations of this Commission were embodied by the Government in Bills presented to the States General in 1907, and although the proposals were subsequently withdrawn, the reform ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys

... was to violate the fundamental law of the Bakufu, namely, that all interference in administrative affairs was forbidden to the Kyoto Court. The only dignified course for the shogun to take was to refuse compliance or to resign, and probably had he done so he would have recovered the power of which he ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... pure materialism. It is naturalism, as opposed to supernaturalism. All its arguments from Scripture interpret Scripture according to its letter, and not according to its spirit. While much stress is laid on the word "eternal," no real eternity is believed in, or even conceived of. The fundamental law of religious knowledge—namely, that a man must be born of the Spirit in order to see the kingdom of God, and that spiritual things must be spiritually discerned—is wholly lost sight of. The spiritual world, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... week of the session, Lincoln's new boldness brought the old relation between himself and Congress to a dramatic close. The Second Confiscation Bill had long been under discussion. Lincoln believed that some of its provisions were inconsistent with the spirit at least of our fundamental law. Though its passage was certain, he prepared a veto message. He then permitted the congressional leaders to know what he intended to do when the bill should reach him. Gall and wormwood are weak terms for the bitterness ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... happen to coincide or to drift apart, the fundamental law which justifies rhyme and stanza seems to be this: if rhythm is a primary fact in poetry, and metre is, as Aristotle called it, sections of rhythm, any device of repeating identical or nearly identical sounds at measured intervals is an aid to rhythmical effect. Rhyme is thus a ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... for this end, and no other, is the Parliament chosen. For the necessity for Common Preservation and Peace is the Fundamental Law both ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... consequently denounced the tariff as unjust and as hostile to our fundamental law. Most of them were, however, prudent enough to suggest no illegal remedies. Not so with fiery South Carolina, where a large party, inspired by Calhoun, proposed a bold nullification of the tariff act, virtually amounting to secession. At a dinner in this interest at Washington, April 13, 1830, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... death, they are terribly real to us. But let us see, now that we can reason from the basis of the mental nature of all things. We have agreed that the creative principle is mind, and we call it God. This infinite mind constantly expresses and manifests itself in ideas. Why, that is a fundamental law of mind! You express yourself in your ideas and thoughts, which you try to externalize materially. But the infinite mind expresses itself in an infinite number and variety of ideas, all, like itself, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... marriage, and the personal or civil rights of the community generally, had its origin, like all similar systems, in the Roman law, on which were engrafted, in the course of centuries, those customs and usages which were adapted to the social conditions of France. The customary law of Paris became the fundamental law of French Canada, and despite the changes that it has necessarily undergone in the course of many years, its principles can still be traced throughout the present system as it has been modified under the influences of the British regime. The superior ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... most inspiriting fact for the social reformer. If there are "inspiration points" on the mountain-tops of science, as well as on those of nature, this is one of them, and it is reached whenever a man discovers that in a highly imperfect society the fundamental law makes for justice, that it is impossible to prevent it from working and that it is entirely possible to remove the hindrances it encounters and let it have the first play. Nature is behind the reformer, often unseen, always efficient, and, in the end, resistless. To get a glimpse ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark

... whereas, in 1874 it had risen to 23. When, towards the close of the sixties, the English Government made the attempt to extend the Act of Inspection to all English cities, a storm of indignation arose from the women. The law was considered an affront to the whole sex. The Habeas Corpus Act,—that fundamental law, that protects the English citizen against police usurpation—would, such was the sentiment, be suspended for women: any brutal policeman, animated by revenge or any other base motive, would be free to ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... It is a fundamental law in Aheer, that the Sultan of Aghadez shall belong to a particular family, which is said to derive its origin from Constantinople. Therefore when, in consequence of some discontent, Abd-el-Kader was deposed last year, the malcontents chose a relative, Hamed-el-Argau; ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson

... the people's representatives, having by the most violent and unprecedented measure, taken a step with the view of breaking down those barriers to oppression, which had been erected by the wisdom and virtue of those who framed the fundamental law of the State, and which you and many of us considered, if not sacred, at least to have been permanently settled, it becomes us to be on the alert to defeat a measure, which if it should succeed, will not only be ruinous, and in the highest degree unjust to many of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... of incalculable benefit to them. They all learn some trade, and acquire the habits and the skill requisite to constitute them producers, and thus practically conform to this fundamental law, "that if any man would not work, neither should he eat." The other conditions that have been stated as essential to success are also complied with, the scholars being kept under the influence of good teachers, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... discussions of its most fundamental principles. The explanation of this fact is to be sought in the mode of the introduction of the constitution itself. The English constitution has been the growth of centuries; the Prussian, of a day. The latter, moreover, was not, like ours, the fundamental law of a new nation, but a constitution designed to introduce a radical change in the form of a government which, during many centuries, had been acquiring a fixed character. It undertook to remodel at one stroke the whole political system. Not indeed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... First, there is a fundamental law, from which no one—neither the great nor the small—is exempt. In substance it is: "Every 'Standard Oil' man must wear the 'Standard ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... events of that time he had much less to say than of the true interpretation of the Constitution, of the intent of its framers, and the circumstances that influenced their deliberations. His voluminous correspondence shows the bent of his mind as a legislator and a student of fundamental law; and on that, rather than on his ability and success as the chief magistrate of the nation, ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay

... public and the press, forbidden upon several penalties to write,[1] or discourse, or lay wagers against the Union, even before it was confirmed by parliament, because that was looked upon as a design, to oppose the current of the people, which, besides the folly of it, is a manifest breach of the fundamental law that makes this majority of opinion the voice of God. In like manner, and for the very same reasons, it may perhaps be neither safe nor prudent to argue against the abolishing of Christianity, at a juncture ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... especially tried to annul the paragraph 25 of Norway's fundamental law which limits the duty of its Union defence. According to this paragraph, the Yeomanry and other Norwegian troops, that cannot be reckoned as belonging to the line, may not be employed outside the boundaries of the Kingdom. This law has proved so much the more pernicous, as the Norwegians ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund

... falls to the ground; but not always, for under certain conditions cold, heavy air may actually rise, displacing warm, lighter air. But such conditions can be explained and there is no contradiction of the fundamental law that if acted on only by gravity, cold air, being denser, will settle to the ground and warm air, being lighter, will rise. And there must be a certain relation between the height of the level from which the cold air falls and the level to which the warm air rises. In other words, we have to apply ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... book on the fundamental law of intelligence in the animal kingdom, I attempted to show this great truth, and to formulate a principle common to all animals in the exercise of their psychical emotions, by setting forth the essential elements as they are ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... good soul to the agent for some Zoological Garden, where she would be appreciated and cared for. As for Carrots, his conduct was irreproachable, absolutely without blot or blemish, but MacPhairrson knew that he was quite unregenerate at heart. The astute little beast understood well enough the fundamental law of the Family, "Live and let live," and he knew that if he should break that law, doom would descend upon him in an eye-wink. But into his narrowed, inscrutable eyes, as he lay with muzzle on dainty, outstretched black ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts

... jealousy, nor sympathy, nor pity, nor self-gratification; to love something as our own is but a form of self-love; to love something in order to win it for ourselves is just a perpetration of the same mistake.' Dr. Karl Gerok wrote,—'Love is the fundamental law of the world. First, as written in heaven, for God is love; second, as written on the cross, for Christ is love; third, as written in our hearts, for Christianity is love,' And Drummond tells us that 'Love—is the rule ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black

... attempt to charge the Administration with every unusual happening in the eight years of Democratic control, had stated that the President was the real motive force that lay back of the movement to establish the Eighteenth Amendment as part of the fundamental law of the country. As a matter of fact, during the discussion of this amendment in the Senate and House, the President maintained toward it an attitude of absolute neutrality. While he was an ardent advocate of temperance, he felt that Congress in enforcing the amendment ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty

... so much inclined to speculate, to philosophize, and to reason on everything, it is not surprising that a fundamental law, as vaguely expressed as the charter, should leave ample room for discussion. We find that our own long experience in these written instruments does not protect us from violent differences of opinion, some of which are quite as ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... laws that are absolutely just and unchanging. Therefore all disaster and trouble in the life is the effect of certain causes. These causes are our own wrong doing in the past, which set in motion forces, against which the power and wit and wisdom of man are powerless. [4] However, because the fundamental law of the Universe is love, it follows that the working of the law of cause and effect is not vindictive. Its object is our highest good, viz., to bring us into union with the Divine or in tune with the Infinite. Therefore, by rising up to a higher plane and coming ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin

... sachems was required upon all public questions, and essential to the validity of every public act. It was a fundamental law of the confederacy. They adopted a method for ascertaining the opinions of the members of the council which dispensed with the necessity of casting votes. Moreover, they were entirely unacquainted with the principle of majorities and minorities in the action of councils. They voted in council ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan



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