"Indeterminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with most men, it continues to be to the end of life, a reflex knowledge, acquired through those pleasant miscellanies, half gossip, half criticism—such as Warton's Essay on Pope, Boswell's Johnson, Mathias' Pursuits of Literature, and many scores beside of the same indeterminate class; a class, however, which do a real service to literature, by diffusing an indirect knowledge of fine writers in their most effective passages, where else, in a direct shape, it would ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... consists of language rapidly vibrating or oscillating between two persons. The object of any conversation is always accusative, e.g., "Mrs. Edwards has no taste in hats." Most conversations consist of an indeterminate number of sentences, but sometimes it is difficult to tell where one sentence ends and the next begins. It is even possible for two sentences to overlap. When this occurs the conversation is known as a dialogue. A sentence may be of any length, and is concluded ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... up suddenly, for without any further warning there had come a tiny indeterminate tapping against his panel. He held his breath and listened. It came again. Then fearlessly he drew back the bolts, slid the panel open and shut his ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Jason's-crew, who landed from the Argo-Mayflower, usually bearing a name thus significant, and manifesting, even at her age, traits of character justifying the compellation. What that age precisely was, could not always be known; indeed, a lady's age is generally among indeterminate things; and it has, very properly, come to be considered ungallant, if not impertinent, to be curious upon so delicate a subject. A man has no more right to know how many years a woman has, than how many skirts she wears; ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... it by natural similitude; he that lays his hand on his breast, when he expresses pity, enforces his words by a customary allusion. But theology has few topicks to which action can be appropriated; that action which is vague and indeterminate will at last settle into habit, and habitual peculiarities ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... of foods is the vitamin, a nitrogenous substance of indeterminate nature. Without it we would starve, though eating plenty of proteins, carbo-hydrates, fats, salts and water. Nothing will sustain life if the vitamins are absent from the diet. Goat's milk contains these important substances in greater abundance ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... white patches of alkali, vague brown areas of brush, showed indeterminate for a little distance. But only for a little distance. Almost at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness of atmosphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay palpable and brown like a shimmering changing veil, hiding the distance in ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... participation of visibility. But to act, which is nothing else than to make something to be in act, is essentially proper to an act as such; wherefore every agent produces its like. So therefore to the fact of its being a form not determined by matter subject to quantity, a thing owes its being an agent indeterminate and universal: but to the fact that it is determined to this matter, it owes its being an agent limited and particular. Wherefore if the form of fire were separate, as the Platonists supposed, it would be, in a fashion, the cause of every ignition. But this form of fire which is in this corporeal ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... pleasure; it might also be called pleasure tempting pain. The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really very subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it does not express them at all, except on those occasions (now only too rare) when it ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... carburettor. The illuminating power and the calorific value of air-gas, unless the manufacture is very precisely controlled, are apt to be variable, and the amount of light, emitted, either in self-luminous or in incandescent burners, is somewhat indeterminate. The generating plant must be so constructed that the air cannot at any time be mixed with as much hydrocarbon vapour as constitutes an explosive mixture with it, otherwise the pipes and apparatus will contain a gas which will forthwith explode if it is ignited, ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... together with a protector, had been established in order to provide further securities for the freedom of the constitution; but that by experience the remedy had been found insufficient, even dangerous and pernicious; since every indeterminate power, such as that of a protector, must be arbitrary; and the more arbitrary, as it was contrary to the genius ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... you on some job in a few days; it's the first days that go hardest with most men, but you'll get used to it; you might get out on parole, too—but don't count on it; of all the frauds in this prison, parole is the worst! And if they ever pass that 'Indeterminate Sentence' law—good-by! Imagine Bill with that thing to use as a club over us! He'd make every ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... that he would begin to fish the first thing tomorrow morning. He was one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, and at twelve or thirteen years of age look as much alike as goslings,—a lad with light-brown hair, cheeks of cream and roses, full lips, indeterminate nose and eyebrows,—face in which it seems impossible to see anything but boyhood; as different as possible from poor Maggie's phiz, which Nature seemed to have moulded and colored with the most decided intention. But that same Nature has the deep cunning ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... after my own heart, Mr. Furneaux," he said. "I had no idea that the Criminal Investigation Department employed philosophers of your caliber. I suppose that you and I are about to swallow coffee containing indeterminate percentages of the chief ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... to resolve for himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely moral sentiment which has been thus created. And step by step with the development of this change, yet another is developed: the moral tends to become more indeterminate and large. It ceases to be possible to append it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as one might write the name below a caricature; and the fable begins to take rank with all other forms of creative literature, as something ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were they all asleep, than a figure none of them had noticed, yet all perhaps had vaguely felt, rose out of the little ditch this side of the laurel shrubberies, and advanced slowly towards the old Mill House. The shape was shadowy and indeterminate at first; it might have been a bush, a sheaf of straw, a clump of high-grown weeds, for birds fluttered just above it, and the swallows darted down without alarm. A shaggy thing, it seemed part ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... information as I have had has been quite untrustworthy, leaving me in entire incredulity in regard to it except on this point, that you and yours must be suffering deeply. Naturally I thought most of you in the matter (its public aspects being indeterminate), and many times before our friend's letter came I had said to Mr. Lewes: "What must Mrs. Stowe be feeling!" I remember Mrs. Fields once told me of the wonderful courage and cheerfulness which belonged to you, enabling you to bear up under exceptional trials, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... pertinaciously enough. This world is good, we must say, since it is what we make it,—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? M has its character indeterminate, susceptible of forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the other. All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... her former $12 a week. Hers was one of the thirteen factories that did not settle. Of their one hundred and fifty girls, they wished about twenty of their more skilled operators to return to them under Union conditions, leaving the rest under the old long hours of overtime and indeterminate, unregulated wages. Anna was one of the workers the firm wished to retain on Union terms, but she felt she could not separate her chances in her trade from the fortunes of her one hundred and thirty companions. She refused to return under conditions so unjust for them. ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... for the superior endowment. It is here that the imperfection of our nature resides. Causality and conscientiousness are, it is true, guides over all; but even these are only faculties of the same indeterminate constitution as the rest, and partake accordingly of the same inequality of action. Man is therefore a piece of mechanism, which never can act so as to satisfy his own ideas of what he might be—for he can imagine a state of moral ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... to time been suggested to ward off this danger. In my judgment one of the most effective has yet to be tried in the Colony—the system of indeterminate sentences. Nothing can be more futile than the present method of criminal procedure. After a certain stated period in gaol, we allow Criminals—even of the most dangerous character—to go out free without ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... established an arbitrary standard for that dignity which Parliament had defined and limited to a legal standard. They gave themselves, under the lax and indeterminate idea of the honour of the Crown, a full loose for all manner of dissipation, and all manner of corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and inoperative Act of Parliament, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... old man made an indeterminate motion of his head, without otherwise replying at once. Then he took a cake of dark, hard-looking tobacco from the starboard pocket of his trousers and a clasp knife from the port side. He shaved off a fresh pipeful, rolled it in his palms, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... Munch, and Gauguin should be read in the light of my artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets; it is an authentic one, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... excavated caverns. On the plans, they were marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shrouded objects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... and leaving the door moved resolutely to the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown she looked almost ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... most women of her age. She was one of the blue-eyed women who looks well in lavender. Her blue eyes, now looking at her son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms. A deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the color of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... mental adjustments. Only to the mind of a Caliban could it be other than terrifying. Things grew to a size out of all reason. The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists, fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things. Strange and indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... again; she was out of the taxi in a twinkling—with the man paid and her eyes on the back of a Balmacaan coat and plush hat disappearing through a doorway. She could not follow it as fast as she had reckoned. She balanced corners with a stout, indeterminate old gentleman who blocked her way and insisted on wavering in her direction each time she tried to dodge him. In her haste to make up for those precious lost seconds she upset a pair of twins belonging to an already overburdened mother. These she righted and went dashing on her way. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... with a year step between each of them, stood up to receive Lady Beach-Mandarin's invasion; an indeterminate baby sprawled regardless of its dignity on a rug. "Aah!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin, advancing in open order. "Come and be hugged, you dears! Come and be hugged!" Before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking little persons ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... be acting on the opposite view. Howard with the bulk of the fleet was at the base in the Medway within supporting distance of the light squadron that was blockading the Flemish ports in concert with the Dutch. Drake himself with another light squadron had been sent to the westward with some indeterminate idea of his serving as an observation squadron, or being used in the mediaeval fashion for an eccentric counterstroke. Being invited to give his opinion on this disposition, he pronounced it vicious. In his eyes, what was demanded was an offensive movement against the enemy's main fleet. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... very uncertain and confused notion of the ego—is reduced to a few elementary actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from the whole of the circumambient life and they still possess a number of those more general and indeterminate senses whereof we have been deprived by the gradual encroachment of a narrow and intolerant special faculty, our intelligence. Among these senses which up to the present we have described as instincts, for want—and ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... affair it was, the world of Homer, with its indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances. The Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste over which years could be spent in endless wandering. On their mysterious shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples. The Great Sea, the Broad Sea, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... be seen generally in the case of Yiddish alone. Yiddish, as you know, is a German dialect; it is middle high German in its base, and German is an inflected language; its rhythms are essentially long, periodic, indeterminate, radically different from the rhythms of Hebrew, involving a different kind of co-ordination and mode. But compare Yiddish with German, and you find quite an antagonistic literary quality. Yiddish reads ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... saline stretch shone pale-blue, under the rising sun. The legs of our five mehara cast on it their moving shadows of a darker blue. For a moment the only inhabitant of these solitudes, a bird, a kind of indeterminate heron, rose and hung in the air, as if suspended from a thread, only to sink back to rest as soon ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... second,[1446] or quicker, in proportion as its orbit is more inclined to the line of sight, round a centre at a minimum distance of three millions of miles. But the position of the second star being unknown, the mass of the system remains indeterminate. The lesser component of the splendid, slowly revolving binary, Castor, is also closely double. Its spectral lines were found by Belopolsky in 1896[1447] to oscillate once in nearly three days, the secondary globe being apparently quite obscure. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... unnatural. Also, the elliptical oval is generally an unsatisfactory form, because it gives the idea of useless trouble in building it, though it occurs quaintly and pleasantly in the former windows of France: I believe it is also objectionable because it has an indeterminate, slippery look, like that of a bubble rising through a fluid. It, and all elongated forms, are still more objectionable placed horizontally, because this is the weakest position they can structurally have; that is to say, less light is admitted, with ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... for figurative flying were not wanting. There were no vessels in the port which might be engaged for an indeterminate voyage in pursuit of a British man-of-war, but there was a goodly sloop about to sail in ballast for Belize. Before sunset three passages were ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... world, bit by bit, part by part, in many a mood and manner. And at the end, after gliding past all the numerous landing steps of ever-changing impermanence, it will reach the infinite,—not the vagueness of indeterminate possibility, but the consummation of perfect fulness ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... a large, clean-shaven, dark-haired man of indeterminate age. By his profession at large he was little known, but in the Guardian office he was very well known indeed and excellently understood, and an appreciation of his character and qualities truthfully set down by the observant ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... successful action at law. The number of cases of repudiation of such agreements is almost negligible. To plead the Statute of Frauds in an action for non-delivery or non-acceptance of goods under such informal agreements might be a defence in the law courts, but would not save the defendant from the indeterminate but effective penalties due to the feeling of his fellows that he was acting dishonourably. It is instructive to notice that in dealing with the question of industrial disputes, which are in many ways analogous to international, at least where they arise between organised bodies of employers and ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... vessels en route for China, India, and the seas circumflowing; and foreign trade, therefore, as much concerned in the guilt of its expense as colonial traffic. The amount of charge, therefore, although remaining to be deducted from the colonial head, may be left as a neutral indeterminate item. But the military expenses for Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, about L.80,000, cannot be for colonial account at all, because stations merely for carrying on foreign trade, against which chargeable, with the civil establishments ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the form of an oil which solidifies rapidly and may be crystallized from hot water after the addition of a little hydrochloric acid. This clouds in cooling, and after a certain time it separates in small crystals of indeterminate form which unite in warty concretions. After drying the salt forms a dull powder, melting between 275 deg. F. and 280 deg. F. It also melts in boiling water, and its aqueous solution exposed to the light is partially reduced, 100 grammes of water acidulated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken. To separate from these confused conceptions those most likely to advance the lady on her way, was Lily's ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... at his reception; for the servant merely bowed and departed, without relieving him of hat and coat. Indeterminate, he stood, vaguely conscious of misgiving and questioning the stillness of the great house. But almost immediately a young man entered whose face expressed the utmost concern. He was clean-shaven, except ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... woman suffrage may be summed up as follows: Equal guardianship of children; raising the "age of protection" for girls from 16 to 18 years; establishment of a State Home for Dependent Children; a State Industrial School for Girls; indeterminate sentence for criminals; a State Arbitration Board; open meetings of school boards; the removal of emblems from ballots; placing drinking fountains on the corners of most of the down-town streets ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... of indeterminate age, hollow- chested, thin-faced, gravely benignant. It was not alone his glasses that lent him a scholarly appearance; he had the stooped shoulders, the thoughtful intensity of gaze, the gentle, hesitating backwardness of a book-raised man. ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... agent of a factory: out of this comes a variety of training which is very valuable, but a wise man must have strength to call in his resources before middle-life, prune off divergent activities, and concentrate himself on the main work, be it what it may. It is shameful to see the indeterminate lives of many of our gifted men, unable to resist the temptations of a busy land, and so losing themselves in an aimless and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... likewise been much increased by a class of verbs too frequent in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use so vague and indeterminate, and the senses detorted so widely from the first idea, that it is hard to trace them through the maze of variation, to catch them on the brink of utter inanity, to circumscribe them by any limitations, or ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Devotion.—The form in Fig. 15 bears much the same relation to that of Fig. 14 as did the clearly outlined projectile of Fig. 10 to the indeterminate cloud of Fig. 8. We could hardly have a more marked contrast than that between the inchoate flaccidity of the nebulosity in Fig. 14 and the virile vigour of the splendid spire of highly developed devotion which leaps into being before us in Fig. 15. This is no uncertain ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... was true. They were huge and ran up for fifty or sixty feet without a bough. Moreover, it was probable that the god climbed better than we could. The Kalubi began to move inland in an indeterminate fashion, and I asked him where ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... may be projected a considerable distance and remain floating in the air for some time. These particles are so fine as to be invisible; they may be inspired, and their presence in the air forms an area of indeterminate extent around the infected person within which such infection is possible. Such spray formation is also an important means of the extension of infection in the sick individual, for it is continually formed ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... expression as "full score," but would require the insertion of the particle "a," which cannot be, on account of the metre. And this is another great artifice of the Poet: by leaving the quantity of beating indeterminate, he gives every reader the liberty to administer it, in exact proportion to the sum of indignation which he may have conceived against his Hero; that by thus amply satisfying their resentment, they may be the more ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... case a man would no more pay for and support his wife than she would do so for him. They would be two friends, differing in kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves in a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as we have discussed it, is indeterminate between ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... which is, in its halts, accelerations and retardations, emphases and concessions, the apotheosis of conversation. But this clearness,—in the sublime sense, including the ornate and the subtle,—this luminous lucidity,— is it not quite indeterminate? Clearness is said of a medium. WHAT is it ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... coolness and repose. He seemed to sink from trance to trance of utter rest, and yet was dimly aware that either something in his own condition, or some supernatural accession of tone, was changing the music from its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It was still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre dirge, incommunicably mournful, and filled with a dark significance that touched him in his depth of rest with a secret tremor and awe. As he listened, rapt and vaguely wondering, ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... everything up at once from a bare foundation, and he was sometimes tempted to leave something alone so as to accomplish the rest the more quickly. As it was now, he was really nothing! Neither the old Pelle nor the new, but something indeterminate, in process of formation, something that was greatly in need of indulgence! A removing van full of furniture on its way ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Italy, Lorraine, The Deccan, Poland, Hungary, Catalonia, Corsica, Finland, Switzerland, and in Basque, Spain. The earliest form in which the pure type occurs is in Basile's Pentamerone, 1634, and of the indeterminate type in Bonaventure des Periers Nouvelles Recreations, 1557, though the latter seems more cognate to ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... again the same blank windows whose scrutiny was so indeterminate. Burke let down the trap-door in the closet floor, and I paused a while to admire how cunningly it had been designed. Although knowing it to be there, I could discern no trace of the aperture. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... His mass each morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and heard a mass after. He then took His coffee, after changing into the tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business. He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years ago. He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... Ransom it came like balm and a renewed life. Bounding across the room, he strove to seize her hand and draw her to himself. But Hazen would not have it. His anger, indeterminate before, was concentrated now, and not the white pleading of her face, nor the warning gesture of ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... course, a son. Unfortunately he employed a word of indeterminate gender: hence the lamentable denouement. For in ancient India, as in ancient Rome, the spoken word, the letter, ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... a clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of God was no more and no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs were worn off ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the room dim. He caught a glimpse of a most singular thing, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a face of three huge indeterminate spots on white, very like the face of a pale pansy. Then he was struck violently in the chest, hurled back, and the door slammed in his face and locked. It was so rapid that it gave him no time to observe. A ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... indeterminate chords came to their ears. There followed a jangling disharmony. They waited, but there was nothing ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... far from level. After two hours of riding on a small and wiry horse with no built-in springs, Hoddan hurt in a great many places he'd never known he owned. He and Thal rode in an indeterminate direction with an irregular scarp of low mountains silhouetted against the unfamiliar stars. A vagrant night-wind blew. Thal had said it was a three-hour ride to Don Loris' castle. After something over two of ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... the Poet drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, was arranging to have his ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Such an intention, strange as it may appear to us with our rigid creeds, we shall see to be natural enough to the Greek mind, when we remember that the material of their religion was not a set of propositions, but a more or less indeterminate body of traditions capable of being presented in the most various forms as the genius and taste of individual poets might direct. And we find, in fact, that the most religious poets of Greece, those even who were most innocent of any intention ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Maltravers received confirmed all his expectations,—the suit of Legard had replaced his own. It was then that Maltravers began to consider how far the fortune of Evelyn and her destined husband was such as to preclude all anxiety for their future lot. Fortune is so indeterminate in its gauge and measurement. Money, the most elastic of materials, falls short or exceeds, according to the extent of our wants and desires. With all Legard's good qualities he was constitutionally ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... (Jug. 43. 1) is indeterminate, but suggests the use of the lot—Metellus et Silanus consules designati provincias inter se partiverant, Metelloque Numidia evenerat. There are instances in later times of a manipulation of the sortitio. See Cic. ad Fam. v. 2. 3; ad Att. i. 16. 8. This assignment of the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... the big tea-room began to fill with its usual late afternoon crowd of patrons,—young, old and indeterminate in age. Women of maturely years, young misses from "finishing" schools, demimondaine, social "bounders" deluded by the glitter of their own jewelry and the thrill of their wasted money that they were climbing into New York society—these and other curious types rubbed elbows in this ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... in this and some of the neighbouring counties for such a series of years, should so long have escaped particular attention. Finding the prevailing notions on the subject, both among men of our profession and others, extremely vague and indeterminate, and conceiving that facts might appear at once both curious and useful, I have instituted as strict an inquiry into the causes and effects of this singular malady as local circumstances ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... thought. His pretended re-investigation of the foundations of the moral sentiments reminds one of the mud geysers of the Yellowstone, which break out periodically and envelop everything within reach in an indeterminate shower of mud. To me there is more of vanity than of philosophic acumen in his onslaught on well-nigh all human institutions. He would, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... shawl and seated herself on the old, high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into nothingness, like ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... illustrated the general methods of solving equations up to those of the fourth degree (and believed that his method could go beyond), stated the law which connects the positive and negative roots of an equation with the changes of sign in the consecutive terms, and introduced the method of indeterminate coefficients for the solution of equations.[28] These innovations have been attributed on inadequate evidence to other algebraists, e.g. William Oughtred ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... was helpless before this clear-eyed, supple athlete who walked like a god from Olympus. One can't lap up half a dozen highballs a day for an indeterminate number of years, without getting flabby, nor can he spend himself in feeble dissipations and have reserves of strength to call upon when needed. The tongue went dry in his mouth. He began to swallow ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... to be sure, but before all accessible to complete and unreserved study. This would mean a substantial participation of law in the promotion of knowledge of facts and constructive activity, and a conception of indeterminate sentence not merely in the service of leniency but in the service of the best protection of the public, and, if necessary, lasting detention of those who cannot be reformed, before they have had to do their worst. ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... other hand, particular propositions are regarded as implying the existence of their terms, and the corresponding equations are so framed as to express existence. With this end in view, the symbol v is adopted to represent 'something,' or indeterminate reality, or more than nothing. Then, taking any particular affirmative, such as Some metaphysicians are obscure, and writing x for 'metaphysicians,' and y for 'obscure,' we may express ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... from its very nature, vague, arbitrary, indeterminate. It rests, in truth, on an essentially subjective and fleeting conception, that of contrariety, which it is almost impossible to delimit scientifically; for, most often, contraries exist only by and for us. We know that this form of association is not primary ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... while the tenderest harmony hummed in my cars, was too rare to be placidly enjoyed. Frail excitement foreign to the tranquil pages could not be evaded. The most feeble and indeterminate of sounds, those which merely give a voice to the air ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... offer amorous possibilities or not. An attitude that had no half lights in it, no delicate tints of chivalry nor romance. LaChaise would do nothing for the sake of her blue eyes. He had no interest whatever in that indeterminate, unstable emotional compound that goes, between men and women, by ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... defined. The House of Lords was but a small body. It comprised simply those lords, temporal and spiritual, who were entitled to receive from the king, when a parliament was to be held, a special writ, i.e., an individual summons. The number of these was indeterminate. The right of the archbishops, the bishops, and the abbots to be summoned was immemorial and indisputable, although the abbots in practice evaded their obligation of attendance, save in cases in which it could be shown that as military tenants of the crown they were obligated to perform parliamentary ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... his eyes, has spread, so to speak, over all his face, over the whole of him and into all his movements. He is organised; unified. In repose now, he would not be simply lazy; he would be being lazy. His features, rather indeterminate of old, have become curiously refined, almost delicate, almost supercilious (in the pride of young strength), but not quite either. It is noticeable generally that an orderly mental existence has great power to ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... vanity of the blind groping that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... these testamentary dispositions was that one house, although it chanced to be large, proved too small to hold Mrs. Humphreys and her stepdaughter, Dorcas. The latter was a mild and timid little creature with a turned-up nose, light-coloured fluffy hair and an indeterminate mouth. Still there was a degree of annoyance and fashionable scorn at which her spirit rose. The end of it was that she went to live on her three hundred a year and to practise good works in the East End, being laudably determined to make a career for herself, which ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... and indiscriminating change was abroad. Meetings, petitions, and addresses were got up on every hand, advocating extensive alterations in our representative system, all of which, however vague and indeterminate in their respective conditions, tended to confer the elective rights on a much larger proportion of the people than had hitherto enjoyed them. Threats were even uttered that a refusal of these rights would lead to a general convulsion, in which the privileged orders might possibly be forced to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... scared-to-touch reluctance in her motion. This changed as her hand came forward. It was the same sort of reluctance that you feel when you start out to visit the dentist for a roaring tooth. The closer you get to the dentist's office the less inclined you are to finish the job. Then at some indeterminate point you cross the place of no return and from that moment you ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... single characteristic of which she could say: "He may be common; he may be vulgar; but he strikes the note of greatness here—and here—and here." With such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... unpopular but controlled the navy and part of the army. Given such conditions—with the added absurdity that the troops on both sides were most unwilling to face long-range rifle fire but would cheerfully hack each other to mince-meat with knives—and a tedious, indeterminate campaign is the certain outcome. De Sylva had said that local conflicts were usually "short and fierce." Applied to such upheavals as had taken place in the capital during recent years, the phrase was strictly accurate. He himself had been bundled ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... instance. Here's a little thing I can't quite see the end of. Listen! 'Of the domain which Britannia rules by sufferance, my gross captain, knew nothing, and his Navigator, if possible, less. From the bestial recriminations and the indeterminate chaos of the grand deck, I ascended—always with a whisky-and-soda in my hands—to a scene truly grotesque. Behold my captain in plain sea, at issue with his Navigator! A crisis of nerves due to the enormous quantity of alcohol which he had swallowed up to then, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... so alarmed that she fetched her brother in, and he slept on the sofa. The limping began again, and she asked him if he heard anything, and he at once agreed that somebody was walking round the bed. In his own room—I forget which—he twice saw the ghost, once in the shape of an indeterminate mist, once in the shape of a man, who came in by the door and vanished in the wall. Mrs. 'G.'[B] now appears on the scene, and slept in No. 1 (I think). She heard only the bangings, which she declares ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... of white linen untidily protruded. Her mother! The upper part was filled with sliding trays, each having a raised edge to keep the contents from falling out. These trays were heaped pell-mell with her mother's personal belongings—small garments, odd indeterminate trifles, a muff, a bundle of whalebone, veils, bags, and especially cardboard boxes. Quantities of various cardboard boxes! Her mother kept everything, could not bear that anything which had once been useful should be abandoned or destroyed; whereas Hilda's ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... property, are the creation of the State. A man is a man first and a citizen afterwards. As a man, he has certain rights actual and potential (c. v., s. i., p. 244): these the State exists, not to create, for they are prior to it in the order of nature, but to determine them, where indeterminate, to ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... reassuring shadow; it seemed to spring from an indeterminate personality. Mr. Kerry Mackintosh repeated his question more bruskly; the shadow (obviously not a customer,—no one ever sought Mr. Mackintosh's wares!) started; his face showed signs of a ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Oxford and its teachers, I was regarded in common fame as tarred with their brush; and I was not so blind as to be unaware that for the clergy this meant not yet indeed prosecution, but proscription and exclusion from advancement by either party in the state, and for laymen a vague and indeterminate prejudice with serious doubts how far persons infected in this particular manner could have any real capacity for affairs. Sir Robert Peel must, I think, have exercised much self-denial when he put me in his cabinet in 1843.' The movement that began in 1833 ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... represented algebraically by the symbol t, would remain as an unknown quantity to the end. What the mathematician sought to do was to present the astronomer with a series of algebraic expressions containing t as an indeterminate quantity, and so, by simply substituting for t any year and fraction of a year whatever—1600, 1700, 1800, for example, the result would give the latitude, longitude, or radius-vector ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... dress of these Southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and detractors. It was charged against him that he was more anxious to make than to use a splendid army, and possibly his ideals of efficiency were too high for those early days. Yet "Little Mac" was idolized by his soldiers, with whom he fought and won bloody battles, and even the indeterminate ones are held in doubt as to his responsibility. Had Hooker obeyed his command, and crossed the bridge at Antietam and occupied the heights beyond, soldiers think to-day that Lee would have been crushed. Another fact was against him. The North was not ready ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Pneuma, and Form being all evolved out of the primordial chaotic mass, this material world as it lies before us came into existence." And that which made it possible for Chaos to evolve was the Solitary Indeterminate (i tu or the tao), which is not created, but is able to create everlastingly. And being both Solitary and Indeterminate it tells ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... has included "Tattercoats" in her exhaustive collection of parallels of Cinderella (Folk-Lore Society Publications, 1892), No. 274 from the MS. which I had lent her. Miss Cox rightly classes it as "Indeterminate," and it has only the Menial Heroine and Happy Marriage episodes in common with stories ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... were open, and there was a sense of help coming to the motor-car from that direction. There was an unoccupied muddy space for fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheels and head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude semicircle of people that hung as yet indeterminate ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... of conflict I fall back into the fluid, vague, indeterminate state, which feels all form to be a mere violence and disfigurement. All ideas, principles, acquirements, and habits are effaced in me like the ripples on a wave, like the convolutions of a cloud. My personality has the least possible admixture ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... merely call attention to the fact, that if nature and the sacred text are fixed elements, this is not the case with the interpretations of theologians, and the results of geology. It is difficult to pronounce upon the exact relation of two quantities more or less indeterminate. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Kitty! Rich young men with characters yet indeterminate were not to be lightly brought in contact with Madame d'Estrees. Kitty could not be ignorant of it—poor child! It had been one of her reckless strokes, and Ashe was conscious of ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or picturesque, or delicate, or overflowing with vitality; but none had struck upon the really characteristically French note. They lacked form, and those fine qualities of strength and clarity which form alone can give. Their sentences were indeterminate—long, complex, drifting, and connected together by conjunctions into a loose aggregate. The 'Precious' writers had dimly realized the importance of form, but they had not realized at all the importance of simplicity. This was Pascal's great discovery. His sentences are clear, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... analogy of the method commonly pursued in ranking other organic beings as species. But it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point, until some definition of the term "species" is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an indeterminate element such as an act of creation. We might as well attempt without any definition to decide whether a certain number of houses should be called a village, town, or city. We have a practical illustration of the difficulty in the never-ending doubts whether many closely-allied ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... when thou and Grief were first acquainted Thou wrotest, "Come, for I have lookt on death." Piteous I held my indeterminate breath And sought thee out, and saw how he had painted Thine eyes with rings of black; yet never fainted Thy radiant immortality underneath Such stress of dark; but then, as one that saith, "I know Love liveth," ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... us were able to work together. It's just one of those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... being one of the few allusions to be found in the Zu-Vendi ritual to a vague divine essence independent of the material splendour of the orb they worship. 'Taia', the word used here, has a very indeterminate meaning, and signifies essence, vital principle, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... recommended, is no better than a vain fervor, which dwells only in the disordered mind of the enthusiast. That Religion is of a more steady nature; of a more sober and manly quality; and that she rejects with scorn, the support of a mere feeling, so volatile and indeterminate, so trivial and useless, as that with which we would associate her; a feeling varying in different men, and even in the same man at different times, according to the accidental flow of the animal spirits; a feeling, lastly, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... stained with dark stains and smelling very strongly of whisky. He noticed also that his father seemed to find it difficult to balance himself on both his legs at the same time, and that he was continually shifting his feet in an indeterminate kind of way, as though he would like to dance but felt that it might not be quite ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... public office, a man sitting at the large desk in the centre of the room turned and faced him. He was a fair man of an indeterminate age, for you could not tell whether those were streaks of grey shining in his light hair, or only the glint which it took on in the sun. His face was dry, lean and intellectual. He smiled now and then, and his smile was ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... ultimately a derivative of the Absolute Cause, though indirectly. Matter is two-fold, intelligible and sensible. The matter of the lower world is the non-existent and the cause of evil. Matter in a more general sense is the indeterminate, the indefinite and the potential. Matter of this nature is found also in the intelligible world. The Reason as the second hypostasis, being an activity, passes from potentiality to actuality, its indeterminateness being made determinate by the One or the Good. This potentiality ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik |
