"Insoluble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the wrapper of each vial. As nearly as can be ascertained, M'Munn's Elixir is simply an aqueous infusion of opium—procured by the ordinary maceration—and preserved from decomposing by the subsequent addition of a small portion of alcohol. Narcotin being absolutely insoluble in water is eliminated as the circular says. This fact alone would not account for the difference between its action and that of laudanum. This is explained by the fact that all the other alkaloids possess diverse rates of solubility ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... the back of the animal, the second from the sides, the third from the belly. I confide to you these trade secrets because you are men of honor. But whether a man has hare's-skin or silk on his head, fifteen or thirty francs in short, the problem is always insoluble. Hats must be paid for in cash, and that is why the hat remains what it is. The honor of vestural France will be saved on the day that gray hats with round crowns can be made to cost a hundred francs. We could then, like the tailors, give credit. To reach that ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... became quiet when their emotions had exhausted them. Yet no ill-feeling resulted from these disputes. Virginia had a rooted faith in her sister's innocence; when angry, she only tried to provoke Monica into a full explanation of the mystery, so insoluble by unaided conjecture. And Monica, say what she might, repaid this confidence with profound gratitude. Strangely, she had come to view herself as not only innocent of the specific charge brought against her, but as a woman in every sense maligned. So utterly void of ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... waiter boys took our shoes and we disposed ourselves on the sofas, Tanno in the place of honor, I rejoicing again that his presence had solved, acceptably to all the rest, the otherwise insoluble problem of to whom ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... with it all possibility of growth or of liberty. This is dualism, which cuts us off from our Source of Life; and so long as we take this false conception for the true law of Being, we shall find ourselves hampered by limitations and insoluble problems of every description: We have lost the Key of Life and are consequently unable to open ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of one of the numerous and useful inventions for which photography is indebted to A. Poitevin. In 1863 he discovered that certain organic substances were rendered insoluble by ferric chloride, and that they again became soluble; when under the influence of light the ferric chloride has been reduced to a ferrous salt. This curious phenomenon is the base of the process now to be described. ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... feeble soul of Twemlow in confusion. This he was used to, and could take soundings of. The abyss to which he could find no bottom, and from which started forth the engrossing and ever-swelling difficulty of his life, was the insoluble question whether he was Veneering's oldest friend, or newest friend. To the excogitation of this problem, the harmless gentleman had devoted many anxious hours, both in his lodgings over the livery stable-yard, and in the cold gloom, favourable to meditation, of Saint James's Square. Thus. Twemlow ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Hamar interposed; "we don't want to take your money, all we wanted to do was to prove to you we could perform the tricks you believed to be insoluble. ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... first, had supposed that the resulting change could not be other than favourable. She had been on too formal terms with her father-in-law—a remote and ceremonious old gentleman to whom her own personality was evidently an insoluble enigma—to feel more than the merest conventional pang at his death; and it was certainly "more fun" to be a marchioness than a countess, and to know that one's husband was the head of the house. Besides, now they would have the chateau to themselves—or at ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... your Chief Man-at-Arms. We find that well-trained county police, in by far the majority of cases, can solve the mystery easily—and in most cases there is very little mystery. But, by His Imperial Majesty's law, the Chief Man-at-Arms must call in a Duke's Investigator if the crime is insoluble or if it involves a member of the aristocracy. For that reason, you were perfectly correct to call His Highness the Duke as soon as murder had been discovered." He leaned back in his chair. "And it has been clear from the first that my lord ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to be truths at all. It is his office to determine how much can be known in each province of thought; when we must be contented not to know; in what direction inquiry is hopeless, or on the other hand full of promise; where it gathers into coils insoluble by reason, where it is absorbed in mysteries, or runs into the abyss. It will be his care to be familiar with the signs of real and apparent difficulties, with the methods proper to particular subject-matters, what in each particular case are the limits of a rational scepticism, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... of sandarac and shellac will result in an extremely hard and almost insoluble varnish, a very undesirable covering for a musical instrument of any kind as it wears badly, that is, suddenly and harshly with a rough fractured edge, instead of the gentle thinning-away under usage, seen with ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... life. And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,—the unanswering primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions, and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. They are close to idiocy: both states drop the lower jaw and open the mouth; and assuming the idiotic physique tends, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the problem of determining the original orbit of any given set of shooting-stars before it struck us would seem nearly insoluble, it has been solved, and solved with some approach to accuracy; being done by the help of observations of certain other bodies. The bodies by whose help this difficult problem has been attacked and resolved are ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not Allonby have deceived ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... consists of urates; this is uric acid in combination with alkalies. In man, in addition to the urea excreted, there is also a little hippuric and uric acid or compounds of these. Uric acid is a transparent colourless crystalline body almost insoluble in water but soluble as urates in the presence of alkalies. As deposited from urine it is of a dull red sand-like appearance, as it has a great affinity for any colouring matter ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... approaches closely to it in "Fanshawe." There is some dark secret between the two villains of the piece, which he leaves to the reader as an exercise for the imagination. This is a characteristic of all his longer stories. There is an unknown quantity, an insoluble point, in them, which tantalizes ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... needful to cure our young students of their present ludicrous impression that what is simple, in English, is knowing, in Greek; and that terms constructed out of a dead language will explain difficulties which remained insoluble in a living one. But Greek is not yet dead: while if we carry our unscholarly nomenclature much further, English soon will be; and then doubtless botanical gentlemen at Athens will for some time think it fine to describe what we used to call ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Inseparable sendisigxa. Inside interne. Inside out returnite. Insidious insida. Insight elsciado. Insignificant sensignifa. Insincere nesincera. Insinuate proponeti. Insipid sengusta. Insist insisti. Insnare allogi, kapti. Insobriety malsobreco. Insolent insultema. Insoluble nesolvebla. Insolvent nepagokapabla. Insomnia sendormo. Insomuch tial ke. Inspect ekzameni. Inspector inspektoro. Inspiration inspiro. Inspiration (breath) enspiro. Inspire enspiri. Inspire inspiri. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... set no store by his observation of real life, which was excellent. It was his crank to fancy himself as a philosopher, and he wished to write sociological plays and novels of ideas. He had no difficulty in solving all sorts of insoluble questions, and at every turn he discovered America. When in due course he found that America was already discovered, he was disappointed, humiliated, and rather bitter: he was never far from scenting injustice and intrigue. He was consumed by a thirst for fame and a burning ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... sometimes wondered whether it was accident or intention which made Balzac so frequently combine early and late work in the same volume. The question is certainly insoluble, and perhaps not worth solving, but it presents itself once more in the present instance. L'Illustre Gaudissart is a story of 1832, the very heyday of Balzac's creative period, when even his pen could hardly keep up with the abundance of his fancy and the gathered stores of his minute observation. ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... gave in less readily to this intense need for sleep. Too many thoughts had piled up in my mind, too many insoluble questions had arisen, too many images were keeping my eyelids open! Where were we? What strange power was carrying us along? I felt—or at least I thought I did—the submersible sinking toward the sea's lower strata. Intense nightmares besieged me. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... to solve an insoluble problem, if you begin by taking the insoluble elements out of it. That is how a great many modern attempts to account for Christianity go to work. Knock out the miracles, waive Christ's own claims as mistaken reports, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... as Renan calls it, has in many ways more affinity with the modern mind than any other in the Old Testament. It is weary with the weight of an insoluble problem. With a cold-blooded frankness, which is not cynical, only because it is so earnest, it faces the stern facts of human life, without being able to bring to their interpretation the sublime inspirations ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... problems of antiquity, the duplication of the cube, the quadrature of the circle, and the trisection of the angle, have all been proved by modern mathematics to be insoluble by the rule and compass, which are the instruments assumed in the postulates of Euclid. Yet the problem of the trisection is frequently attacked by men of some mathematical education. I think it was about 1870 that I received from Professor Henry a communication coming from some institution ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... under any rays of hope. His initiation into the elements of mathematics had pointed out the road along which he should travel, but had simultaneously revealed all its obstacles, insurmountable for him solitary and unequipped. In those days his mind was constantly fumbling at some insoluble problem with the sense of frustration that one has who gropes vainly in the dark, well knowing how a single unattainable match-flare would put what he is seeking into his hands. And no brighter prospect seemed to lie before ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... upon earth at that distance." [424] If therefore we are to see the settlement of the matter in the speculum of a telescope, it may be some time before we have done with what Guillemin calls "the interesting, almost insoluble question, of the existence of living and organized beings on the surface of the satellite of our little earth." [425] Some cynic may ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... she has not the means of working them into a universal history. Is such a universal history, then, to be regarded as unattainable? Are all the grandest and most interesting problems which offer themselves to the geological student essentially insoluble? Is he in the position of a scientific Tantalus—doomed always to thirst for a knowledge which he cannot obtain? The reverse is to be hoped; nay, it may not be impossible to indicate the source ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... it in the very act of making us what we are. Human nature is an insoluble enigma, if this world is its only field. Amidst all the waste, the mysterious waste, of creation, there is no more profligate expenditure of powers than that which is involved in giving a man such faculties and capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... nothing about it. What of the mind of the amoeba? A host of questions throng upon us and we can answer no one of them. All the great questions concerning life confront us here in the lowest term of the animal series, and appear as insoluble ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... admiring envy. It was he who carried to a successful issue that difficult case in the family of the Sultan of Mingrelia (you will observe that I use a fictitious name). I can assure you, Lord Embleton, that polygamy presents problems almost insoluble; problems of ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... their conclusions so agreeable or so easy to understand. There was never a time, in our opinion, even during the most embarrassing and darkest phases of the Napoleonic struggle, in which our differences with France were insoluble. Napoleon, as I have said, never ceased to avow his willingness to make vital sacrifices in order that peace between the two peoples should be consummated. The stereotyped cant of maintaining the "Balance of Power" is no excuse for plunging ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... believed to be produced by the decomposition of vegetable matters, and it is there crystallized and remarkably transparent; but when produced by artificial processes, carbon is always black, more or less porous, and soils the fingers. It is insoluble in water, burns readily, and is converted into carbonic acid. Carbon is the largest constituent of plants, and forms, in round numbers, about 50 per cent of their ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... case of the oyster the radical home cure for the living irritant or insoluble substance which had gained entrance between its valves is an encasement of pearl-film. If this encasement is globular or pear-shaped, or takes the form of a button and is lucid, lustrous, flawless, and of large size, it may be of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... however mighty, a power, resistless and often inscrutable, determined their lives. The younger men, their hearts beating with conscious power and freedom, resented this control, or accepting it, refused to assume the responsibility for the outcome of their lives. It was the old, old strife, the insoluble mystery; and the minister's wife, far from making light of it, allowed its full weight to press in upon the members of her class, and wisely left the question as the apostle leaves it, with a statement of the two great truths of Sovereignty and Free Will without ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... to the other side. Some, indeed, have wished to imagine that our satellite is shaped like an egg, the more pointed end being directed away from us. We are here, of course, faced with a riddle, which is all the more tantalising from its appearing for ever insoluble to men, chained as they are to the earth. However, it seems going too far to suppose that any abnormal conditions necessarily exist at the other side of the moon. As a matter of fact, indeed, small portions of that side are brought into our view from time to time ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... a score of times every day that she could not understand how this dreadful affair had come to pass. The most complete explanation from her daughter availed nothing; she deemed the event an insoluble mystery, and, in familiar talk with Mrs. Mumford, breathed singular charges against Louise's lover. 'She's shielding him, my dear. I've no doubt of it. I never had a very good opinion of him, but now she shall never marry him with my consent.' To this kind of remark Emmeline ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... start out decomposition. Many compostable materials come with bits of soil already attached and few are sterile in themselves. But extra soil ensures that there will initially be a sufficient number and variety of these valuable organisms. Soil also contains insoluble minerals that are made soluble by biological activity. Some of these minerals may be in short supply in the organic matter itself and their addition may improve the health and vigor of the whole decomposition ecology. A generous ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... success. How it was possible for Moses, with the assistance he had at command, to marshal and move a column of a million or a million and a half of men, women, and children, without discipline or cohesion, and encumbered with their baggage, beside their cattle, is an insoluble mystery. "And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: ... And they spoiled the Egyptians. And the children ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... in some courageous Magazine that offered. Whereby now, to certain idly curious readers, and even to myself till I make study, the insignificant but at last irritating question, What its real history and chronology are, is, if not insoluble, considerably involved in haze. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... stronger and better built than the average Hindu. Similarly, the Kasais or Muhammadan butchers are proverbially strong and lusty. But no evidence is forthcoming in support of such conjectures, and the problem is likely to remain insoluble. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... favorable as possible for growth and for the development of the buds and by all means control insects and diseases. If you do not have a good leaf surface good crops will not be set the next year. It's a complex problem, but I don't think it is insoluble. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... assumed the name of State; and the union changed its name of "The United Colonies" to the proud title of "The United States of America." Were the new States essentially different from the colonies? This is one of the insoluble questions connected with the formation of the Union. Calhoun later declared that the Declaration of Independence changed the colonies from provinces subject to Great Britain to States subject to nobody. Lincoln in his message of July 4, 1861, said that "The Union gave ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... appears to me at least the most consistent way of proceeding,) to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men—such as Niebuhr, or O. Mueller, or Dr Thirlwall—will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested facts are now present to us—none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides even in their age, on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the anti-Hellenic Pelasgians; and where such is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... The Mystery of Mary Stewart, a most ingenious examination of a practically insoluble problem: performed in the true spirit of historical investigation. The conclusions, with a less exhaustive treatment of the evidence, are presented in the History of Scotland—which is also a running criticism on English affairs as they affected, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... mysterious, the moored, ice-blocked barges silent and deserted, and here and there a lit window shone warm. The sun sank right out of sight into a bank of blue, and the Surrey side dissolved in mist save for a few insoluble, spots of yellow light, that presently became many. And after our lovers had come under Charing Cross Bridge the Houses of Parliament rose before them at the end of a great crescent of golden lamps, blue and faint, halfway between the earth ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, and also as pebbles in the river beds. They are the fossil remains of animals. After being dug from the mines the rock is kiln dried and then ground to a very fine powder called "floats" which is used on the soil. The phosphoric acid in the floats is insoluble and becomes available only as the phosphate decays. This is too slow for most plants so it is treated with oil of vitriol or sulphuric acid to make it available. The phosphoric acid in the ground rock is combined with lime, forming a phosphate of lime which is insoluble. When treated with the oil ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... tamed sphinx looked up at him with her great tearful, laughing eyes, whose enigma was no longer insoluble. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... affairs, and, though O'Connell was defeated on a motion against the union by a crushing majority of 523 to 38, the disturbed state of Ireland continued to distract the ministerial councils. The ingenious devices of Stanley and Littleton for solving the insoluble Irish tithe question had proved almost abortive; the government officials employed to collect tithe were almost as powerless to do so as the old tithe-proctors, and a new proposal to convert tithe into a land tax was naturally ridiculed by O'Connell ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... experiment further since Julius had given up his attempts to locate the right box in the first choice and was apparently satisfied to discover it by a process of trial and error. He had, it would seem, satisfied himself that the problem was insoluble. These results obtained in problem 1a constitute a most interesting comment on the effects of problem 2 on the orang utan. Behavior similar to that which he developed well might have been obtained from a child of three to four years placed ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... moment Bobbie Holland's eyes were dreamy and her tongue unguarded. "I don't know what I'm going to do with him," said she with a gesture as of one who despairingly gives over an insoluble problem. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that has proved a weakness and a strength to it: a weakness because embarrassed with subtle, complicated, insoluble questions wherein mankind will always be involved, it was forced to engage in endless discussions wherein the bad or feeble reasons advanced by this or that votary compromised the whole work; a strength because whoever brings a rule of life is ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... The problem is probably insoluble. No decisive data are available, for the mere absence of traces of matrilineal descent does not necessarily prove more than that it had long been superseded by reckoning of kinship through males. All that can be said is that in the kinship organisations ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... Lambeth and Westminster, or by the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble, Caesar himself giving ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... butyric-acid, and to which is owing the disagreeable flavour of rancid butter. The usual washing of butter rids it but very imperfectly of this cause of alteration, for the water does not wet the butter, and cannot dissolve the caseum, which has become insoluble under the influence of the acids that develop themselves in the cream. A more complete separation would be obtained if these acids were saturated; the caseum would again be soluble, and consequently the quantity retained ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... brewing, where there was vegetable fermentation, were composed of it. To prove this, he collected the contents of these bubbles in a bottle containing lime-water. When this bottle was shaken violently, so that the lime-water and the carbonic acid became thoroughly mixed, an insoluble white powder was precipitated from the solution, the carbonic acid having combined chemically with the lime to form the insoluble calcium carbonate, or chalk. This experiment suggested another. Fixing a piece ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... when we endeavour to harmonise the antinomy of man's moral freedom and the doctrine of grace. However insoluble the mystery, it is not lessened by denying one side in the interest of unity. Scripture boldly affirms both truths. No writer insists more strenuously than the Apostle Paul on the sovereign election of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... lay with as much precision as if man had "consciously selected" it by the aid of a sieve. Physical Geology is full of such selections—of the picking out of the soft from the hard, of the soluble from the insoluble, of the fusible from the infusible, by natural agencies to which we are certainly not in the ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... of this vast empire, however, none too surely held, were already involving it in insoluble difficulties and imminent dangers. On the one hand, in Asia, it had been found impossible to establish military fiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, or anywhere east of it, on the system which had secured the Osmanli tenure elsewhere. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... rights in Bering Sea for a money payment, and to arrange for a measure of reciprocity in natural products and in a limited list of manufactures. But the question of the Alaskan boundary proved insoluble, and the Commission broke up in ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... rice, they form an admirable meal and one that is nutritious and easily digested. The white of eggs, almost pure albumin, is nutritious, and, when cooked in water at 170 degrees Fahrenheit, requires less time for perfect digestion than a raw egg. The white of a hard-boiled egg is tough and quite insoluble. The yolk, however, if the boiling has been done carefully for twenty minutes, is mealy and easily digested. Fried eggs, no matter what fat is used, are hard, tough and insoluble. The yolk of an egg cooks at ...
— Many Ways for Cooking Eggs • Mrs. S.T. Rorer
... of them vanished. At no station along the line could we gain any news of them. Their maid had left the inn the same morning with their luggage, and we tracked her to Inverness; but there the trail stopped short, no spoor lay farther. It was a most singular and insoluble mystery. ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... impossibility of such a thing? I greatly feared that to convince her of this would be wholly beyond my power. Yet what was to become of her? I could not abandon her, alone and unprotected, to her fate; nor could I take her with me. The problem seemed absolutely insoluble; and at length I came to the conclusion that the only thing to be done was to leave the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... account for it all. His mind (the average mind) was weary with trying to solve an insoluble problem. His neighbors, who had got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and suggestion as to the cause of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... question (pp. 324, etc.) is more closely coherent than his treatment of the wider one, for the simple reason that the special limitation of experience in the born-blind cannot fairly be made to yield any decisive evidence on the great, the insoluble enigma. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... without the other, because the moral doctrine of Paul is partly a reaction against, the violent folly for which Nero stood the symbol; but it certainly was not philosophical considerations of this kind that led the Roman authorities to rage against the Christians. The problem, I repeat, is insoluble. However this may be, the Christians were declared responsible for the fire; a great number were taken into custody, sentenced to death, executed in different ways, during the festivals that Nero offered to the people to appease them. ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... day. As I had planned to do, I later endeavoured to explain to him that in North America persons were almost quite equal to one another—being born so—but at this he told me not to be silly and continued to regard my rise as an insoluble part of the strangeness he everywhere encountered, even after I added that Demosthenes was the son of a cutler, that Cardinal Wolsey's father had been a pork butcher, and that Garfield had worked on a canal-boat. I found him quite hopeless. "Chaps go ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... mattress if she had been told that there was a match underneath it. Why did the voice that urged her to perform the necessary action not add the one word that was capable of ensuring that action? The problem moreover is equally perturbing and perhaps equally insoluble whether it concerns our own subconscious faculties, or spirits, or strange intelligences. Those who give these warnings must know that they will be useless, because they manifestly foresee the event as a whole; but they must also know that one last word, which they do not pronounce, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... previously raised by volcanic fires, a second set of volcanic fires were produced by the fermentation of this new mass, by which after the salts or acids and iron had been washed away in part by elutriation, dissipated the sulphurous parts which were insoluble in water; whence argillaceous and siliceous earths were left in some places; in others, bitumen became sublimed to the upper part of the stratum, producing coals ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... of the Greeks may appear to be, especially by contrast with the Christian view, it would be a mistake to suppose that it was the only one with which they were acquainted, or that they had put aside altogether, as indifferent or insoluble, the whole problem of a future world. As we have seen, they did believe in the survival of the spirit, and in a world of shades ruled by Pluto and Persephone. They had legends of a place of bliss for the good and ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... has no bearing at all on any moral or religious question. It is insoluble. It leaves us not in ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... localities. Border States little by little gave up the hope of becoming free, the old anti-slavery convictions of their best men faltering, and the practical problem of emancipation, really difficult, being too easily decided insoluble. More significant, owing to a variety of circumstances, the abolition spirit itself greatly subsided early in the present century. Completion of the emancipation process in the North was assured by the action of New York in 1817, proclaiming a total end to slavery there from July 4, 1827. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Progress. The ancient philosophy disdained to be useful, and was content to be stationary. It dealt largely in theories of moral perfection, which were so sublime that they never could be more than theories; in attempts to solve insoluble enigmas; in exhortations to the attainment of unattainable frames of mind. It could not condescend to the humble office of ministering to the comfort of human beings. All the schools contemned that office as degrading; some censured it as immoral. Once ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... last, the Mother Lode, the virginity of the essence of creation, the beginning and the end. The curve of the circle which is unchanging, insoluble, omniscient; which shall return to that which created it; which is ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... also adopts Comte's "profound aphorism" that "Atheism is the most irrational form of metaphysics," and proves this by a fresh definition involved in the charge that "it propounds as the solution of an insoluble enigma the hypothesis which of all others is the least capable of proof, the least simple, the least plausible, and the least useful." Of all others is what Cobbett would have called a beastly phrase. It shows Mr. Harrison was in a hurry ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... neutralize the effects of poisons by a chemical union, forming an insoluble compound, or a mild, harmless one. Alkaline solutions are antidotes for the mineral acids; as soap in solution, a simple remedy, and always at hand. Lard, magnesia, and oil are antidotes for poisoning by arsenic; albumen,—in ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... ideas was perhaps that which gave to Kant's philosophy its immediate and immense effect upon the minds of men wearied with the endless strife and insoluble contradiction of the dogmatic and sceptical spirits. We may disagree with much else in the Kantian system. Even here we may say that we have not two reasons, but only two functionings of one. We have not two worlds. The philosophical ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... solution in the cytoblastem or may crystallise out as the beginning of a new cell; another part, the cell-substance, crystallises round the nucleolus. The cell-substance is either soluble in the cytoblastem and crystallises out only when the latter is saturated with it, or it is insoluble and crystallises as soon as it is formed, according to the aforementioned laws of the crystallisation of imbibition-bodies; it forms thus one or more layers round the nucleolus, etc. If one imagines cell-formation to take place in this way, ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... the very voice of Faith. Walton was, indeed, an assured believer, and to his mind, the world offered no insoluble problem. But we may say of him, in the words of ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... of Philippe. Philippe, he half thought, had perhaps not done his utmost. Philippe perhaps had still one stage to travel. But how was Le Corbier to find out? How was he to fathom that mysterious soul and read its insoluble riddle? Le Corbier knew those men endowed with the missionary spirit and capable, in furtherance of their cause, of admirable devotion, of almost superhuman sacrifice, but also of hypocrisy, of craft, sometimes of crime. What was this Philippe ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... fat sandwiches are two feet square, and being piled one upon the other to a height of about six feet in an hydraulic press, are subjected to a pressure of some hundred tons. This disengages the pure oleaginous parts from the more insoluble portions, and the fat residue, being increased in hardness by its extra density, is mixed with stearine, and by a variety of preparations is converted into candles. The pure oil thus expressed is that known in the shops as ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... elements are due to the influence of light; for example, a sulphur soluble in carbon disulphide is converted into sulphur which is insoluble, and the rate of change of yellow phosphorus into the red variety is greatly accelerated by light. Hydrogen and chlorine combine under the action of light with explosive rapidity to form hydrochloric acid and there are many other examples of the synthesizing action of light. ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... only be measured by space, space by time; they are true universals and contraries; their synthesis is motion, a conception which requires them both and is completed by them. Or again, the philosophical extremes of downright materialism and idealism are each wholly true, yet but half the truth. The insoluble enigmas that either meets in standing alone are kindred to those which puzzled the old philosophers in the sophisms relating to motion, as, for instance, that as a body cannot move where it is and still less where it is not, therefore it cannot move ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... leisurely overhauling of the mail sack. Ma Pettengill slit envelopes and read letters to an accompanying rumble of protest. She several times wished to know what certain parties took her for—and they'd be fooled if they did; and now and again she dwelt upon the insoluble mystery of her not being in the poorhouse at that moment; yes, and she'd of been there long ago if she had let these parties run her business like they thought they could. But what could a lone defenceless woman expect? She'd show them, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... formed when they are heated on charcoal in the oxidizing flame of the blowpipe; and also by the yellow precipitate formed when sulphuretted hydrogen is passed though their acidified solutions. This precipitate is insoluble in cold dilute acids, in ammonium sulphide, and in solutions of the caustic alkalis, a behaviour which distinguishes it from the yellow sulphides of arsenic and tin. Cadmium is estimated quantitatively by conversion into the oxide, being precipitated from boiling solutions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Automatically their eyes rolled towards my bonnet; the Vicar smiled, and bent his head in a courtly little bow, which said much without the banality of words. The Squire had no expression! Whether he approved, disapproved, or furiously disliked, he remained insoluble as the Sphinx. Oh, some day—somehow—some one—I hope, will wake him into life, and whoever she is, may she shake him well up, and ride rough-shod over him for a long, long time before she gives in! He needs ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... affectation, charmed Henri for one reason, yet, on the other hand, redoubled his perplexity. How could he conciliate his scruples of conscience with the aspirations of his heart? The problem seemed then as insoluble as when it had been presented the first time. But Valentine was saved. For the moment that was the essential point, the only one in question. The involuntary revelation of her secret had brought the color to her cheeks, ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... matter, and the unexpected revelations in plant life, have opened out very extended regions of inquiry in physics, in physiology, in medicine, in agriculture, and even in psychology. Problems hitherto regarded as insoluble have now been brought within the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the fact of human misery without perplexing himself with the resulting problem as to the final cause of human existence. If the question had been explicitly brought before him, he would, doubtless, have replied that the mystery was insoluble. To answer either in the sceptical or the optimistic sense was equally presumptuous. Johnson's religious beliefs in fact were not such as to suggest that kind of comfort which is to be obtained by explaining away the existence of evil. If ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... effective against the young aphides only. Arsenate of lead alone, as was to be expected, had little or no effect upon the aphides. The combination of arsenate of calcium with kerosene emulsions is not a desirable one, since an insoluble calcium soap is formed, thereby releasing some free kerosene.—U.S. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... should be completely dissolved before they are given; insoluble ones should be finely divided by powdering or by shaking, and should be well agitated and mixed immediately before they are given. In the latter case a menstruum with considerable body, such as molasses or flaxseed tea or milk, will help ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... the man, who, in a few years, had unravelled more apparently insoluble mysteries, and caused the arrest of more hitherto evasive scoundrels, than his predecessors had managed to secure in a decade. The name of Gimblet was known and detested wherever a coiner carried on his forbidden craft, or ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... among them, but many approach the condition of jasper and onyx." "The chemistry of the process of petrifaction or silicification," writes Doctor George P. Merrill, Curator of Geology in the National Museum, "is not quite clear. Silica is ordinarily looked upon as one of the most insoluble of substances. It is nevertheless readily soluble in alkaline solutions—i.e., solutions containing soda or potash. It is probable that the solutions permeating these buried logs were thus alkaline, and as ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... Aegean Sea, on the coast of Thrace and opposite the mouth of the Hebrus; the Mysteries are said to have found their first home in this island, where the Cabirian gods were worshipped; this cult, shrouded in deep mystery to even the initiates themselves, has remained an almost insoluble problem for the modern critic. It was said that the wishes of the initiates were always granted, and they were feared as to-day the 'jettatori' (spell-throwers, casters of the evil eye) ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... temperatures in grains per U. S. gallon (58,381 grains). It will be seen from this table that the carbonates of lime and magnesium are not soluble above 212 degrees, and calcium sulphate while somewhat insoluble above 212 degrees becomes more greatly ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... Almighty God. The case of man shows us the possibility of a being existing in a holy but mutable state, and lapsing, under certain inducements, into sin. What the inducements were in the instance of the prince of darkness we are not told; and thus the question of the origin of evil seems to be insoluble by us. But the identification of it with the personal defection of Satan is far more intelligible and reasonable than the attempt to treat it as a metaphysical abstraction. All the representations of the Bible on the subject are instinct ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... language, and the question of late so frequently discussed as to the origin of the Aryans can only mean, if it means anything, a discussion of the ethnic affinities of those numerous races which have acquired Aryan speech; with the further question, which is perhaps insoluble, among which of these races did Aryan speech arise and where was the cradle of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... people—very clever, very true, very unaesthetic, but amusing. I have not seen Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell. I hear it much admired—and blamed. It is one of the many proofs of the desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser insoluble moral problems. George Sand has turned their heads in that direction. I think a few broad scenes or hearty jokes a la Fielding were very harmless in comparison. They ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... thus in the silence. The answer to my silent question may come to me in the most commonplace way days or weeks after it is asked. Some person may say something that will be the very clue I am seeking. We are not to be anxious or troubled if many questions perplex us, or many problems seem insoluble, but wait, trusting that 'he is faithful who promised.' We must not be wishing for the same signs or powers that others have, but appreciate what is given to us, for faithfulness shall receive its full reward in due time 'if ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... incredible. The case, taken apart from the person, would not (unless through its mysteriousness and imperfect circumstantiation) have attracted the interest which has given it, and will in all time coming continue to give it, a root in history amongst insoluble or doubtfully soluble historical problems. The case, being painful and shocking, would by readers generally have long since been dismissed to darkness. But the person, too critically connected ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... are, in fact, the gist of the War; the insoluble problem for Don Philip and the French. By detours, by circuitous effort and happy accident, your troops may occasionally squeeze through: but without one secure road open behind them for supplies and recruitments, what good is it? Battles ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that the Japanese builders of the past had to face in the erection of a few of the great temples which still adorn the country have proved insoluble to many European engineers and architects. The erection and support of the magnificent pagoda at Nikko is an example in point. Dr. Dresser has referred to this and pointed out what he deemed a great ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... representatives. In the early summer of 1849 a constitution embodying these arrangements was drawn up; and June 5, after having been adopted by the new Rigsdag, the instrument was approved by the crown. For the moment the question of the duchies seemed insoluble, and this second constitution was extended to Jutland and the Islands only, i.e., to Denmark proper. Its adoption, however, is a landmark in Danish constitutional history. Under its terms the autocracy of the Kongelov was formally abandoned and in its place was ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... could have come about. As he grew older and his mind became more cautious he came to think the matter deeper than the human mind could ever fathom. He gave up the hope and believed the problem of animal origin and derivation would forever remain insoluble. He feared there was not in man the power ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... more truly man in proportion to what he knows, and one of the most striking and characteristic features of this great century is the advance of man through increase of knowledge out of childishness towards maturity. The insoluble problems which had been discussed with astonishing acuteness by the schoolmen of the preceding generation were giving place to a philosophy of more immediate application to the conduct and discipline of life. The 'Summa Theologica' of St. Thomas Aquinas not only ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... man-illuminating, comprehensiveness, have justly, therefore, become objects of suspicion. The utmost that man can do, placed as he is at obvious disadvantages for obtaining a complete survey of the whole, is to whet his intelligence upon confessedly insoluble problems, to extend the sphere of his practical experience, to improve his dominion over matter, to study the elevation of his moral nature, and to encourage himself for positive achievements by the indulgence in those glorious dreams from which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... same National Assembly of hers, has got something, nay something great, momentous, indispensable, cannot be doubted; yet still the question were: Specially what? A question hard to solve, even for calm onlookers at this distance; wholly insoluble to actors in the middle of it. The States-General, created and conflated by the passionate effort of the whole nation, is there as a thing high and lifted up. Hope, jubilating, cries aloud that it will prove a miraculous Brazen Serpent in the Wilderness; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... already occurred to us on the spiritual side of life, and that they occur here because they have occurred there. Maeterlinck says further (in this paper entitled "The Foretelling of the Future"): "But I do not intend, in the wake of so many others, to lose myself in the most insoluble of enigmas. Let us say no more about it, except this alone,—that Time is a mystery which we have arbitrarily divided into a past and a future, in order to try to understand something of it. In itself, it is almost ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... you,' he began: 'nature does not always urge us... towards love.' (He could not at once pronounce the word.) 'Nature threatens us, too; she reminds us of dreadful... yes, insoluble mysteries. Is she not destined to swallow us up, is she not swallowing us up unceasingly? She holds life and death as well; and death speaks in her as ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... sealing in Bering Sea for a money compensation; and a reciprocity treaty covering natural products and some manufactures was sketched out. Yet no agreement followed. One issue, the Alaska boundary, proved insoluble, and as no agreement was acceptable which did not cover every difference, the Commission never again assembled after its ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... ascertainable date. Even the career of the lawgiver Lykourgos, which seems to belong to the commencement of the eighth century B. C., presents us, from lack of anything like contemporary records, with many insoluble problems. The Helleno-Dorian conquest, as we have seen, must have occurred at some time or other; but it evidently did not occur within two centuries of the earliest known inscription, and it is therefore folly to imagine that we can determine its date or ascertain the circumstances ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... second child back of that iridescent and enigmatic girl with the dead fowl. And the dog that barks as Jan Van Koort ruffles his drum, what a spectre dog! No, the mystery of The Night Watch is insoluble, because it is the dream of a poet. Its light is morning light, yet it is the mystic light of Rembrandt, never seen on sea or land. In The Syndics, that group of six linen-drapers, Rembrandt shows with what supreme ease he can beat Hals at the game of make-believe actuality. Now, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... tears; that there are trivialities which might deserve (here is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some maiden's locks, that there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a linnet, singing "because it must," now dares to approach questions insoluble, and again declines their solution. What is all this but the changeful mood of grief? The singing linnet, like the bird in the old English heathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against the walls of the chamber into which ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... gold. Festoons of fruit and flowers finely carved in wood on some of the panels. These also not smothered with gilding, but as it were gold speckled here and there like tongues of flame winding among insoluble snows.... Midway from the candle to the distant door its twilight deepened, and all became shapeless and sombre. The prospect ended half-way, sharp and black, as in those out-o'-door closets imagined and painted by Mr. Turner, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... when placed in acid effervesces vigorously, but when allowed to stand the effervescence ceases in a few minutes and the insoluble white ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... unsatisfactory manner while publicly professing an impossible virtue; for the woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. There are probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases of bitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases, practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward that in the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among the middling class of people, at any rate, has sufficed, there comes the great development of associations and tendernesses that arises out of intimate ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the desirable information is already included in the biology of our best high schools. The remaining tenth is that which connects all life with human life; and this requires tact and exceptional skill. However, the high schools no longer offer an insoluble problem, for many teachers have succeeded in giving the desirable instruction to the satisfaction of critical ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... that they will permit us to study the physical and chemical factors of life under much simpler conditions than heretofore, and it is toward this end that I am directing my researches. They will enable us to approach much nearer the solution of the old insoluble problem of life and death. What indeed is the death of an organism all of whose parts may yet survive ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... point of ignorance as we, after the labours of Darwin and of Spencer, of Helmholtz and of Huxley, still do. Ontological speculation is as barren now as then, and the problems of existence still remain insoluble. The chief difference indeed between him and modern investigators is that they have been lessoned by the experience of the last two thousand years to know better the depths of human ignorance, and the directions in which it is possible ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... taken fear for a counselor. They have never taken doubt for a guide. They have obeyed the impulses of their blood. They have hearkened to the voice of our God. They have surmounted insuperable obstacles on the wings of a mighty faith; they have solved insoluble problems by the sovereign rule of liberty; they have made the bosom of the ocean and the heart of the wilderness their home; they have subdued nature and told history a new tale. Let American statesmanship listen to the heart-beats of the American ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... been described above as consisting of a multitude of little cells or vesicles, having an envelope, insoluble in water, formed of a kind of organized membrane, and containing within it a substance which is soluble in water, termed amidin. This soluble material is the nutritive element on which the young shoot, proceeding from every eye or bud of the potatoes, is to subsist, till it has developed roots, ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... PROBLEMS: such as the problem of the origin of evil, the problem of the Trinity, the problem of the relation of human will and predestination, and so on—problems which have been investigated for thousands of years without result—ask them to set those problems aside as insoluble. In the meantime, just as a man who is studying mathematics may be asked to set aside the problem of squaring the circle, let him go on with what can be done, and what has been done, and leave ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... led me about with a mixture of the impatient and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... your last book—I know you don't believe in heroes,—at any rate, the leading man—was an innocent child walking with his nurse along Easy Street, when compared with Cavour. Cavour had fifty problems at the same time, and all of them were insoluble to every ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of national defense, and the cooperation between this committee and the department has been most cordial and effective, and but for some such arrangement the great transportation problem would have been insoluble. I am happy, therefore, to join the Quartermaster General in pointing out the extraordinary service rendered by the transportation agencies of the country, and I concur also in his statement that "of those who are now serving the Nation in this ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... dead person is on the same level, is not a space-filling 'ghost,' but merely an hallucination. Such an appearance can, prima facie, suggest no reasonable inference as to the continued existence of the dead. On the other hand, the new studies have raised the perhaps insoluble question, 'Do not hallucinations of the sane, representing the living, coincide more frequently than mere luck can account for, with the death or other crisis of the person apparently seen?' If this could be proved, then there would seem to be a causal nexus, a relation of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... chief attractions; if she were to turn into an echo their delicious duet ran the risk of becoming the dullest of monologues. He forgot that five minutes earlier he had resented her being glad to see their friends, and for a moment he found himself leaning dizzily over that insoluble riddle of the sentimental life: that to be differed with is exasperating, and to ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... of lime; the natives, in order to render it palatable and wholesome, mix the salt with the juice of a gummy plant, then place it in the sand and bake it by making a fire over it; the lime then becomes insoluble and tasteless. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... field of philosophical inquiry; but maintaining that such problems must necessarily arise, and must necessarily be taken into account in every adequate survey of human nature and human thought, and that philosophy, if it cannot solve them, is bound to show why they are insoluble. ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... features about it," said the inspector. "But I do not regard them as insoluble. Nothing is insoluble," he added, in a ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience with the necessarily insoluble problem. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... been asked again and again, in reference to these two solutions, can a man overstep the limits of himself—of his own consciousness? If he can, then says the querist, the reality of the external world is indeed guaranteed; but what an insoluble, inextricable contradiction is here: that a man should overstep the limits of the very nature which is his, just because he cannot overstep it! And if he cannot, then says the same querist, then is the external universe an empty name—a mere unmeaning sound; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... strange pettinesses and curious contradictions; but one can scarcely grudge to his sickly sensitive nature the anodyne of feminine sympathy. Why so close and tender a friendship never ripened into marriage is an inquiry that may be consigned to the limbo of questions insoluble. It is enough that in the checkered chronicle of the loves of the poets, "blue-eyed Patty Blount" has an immortality almost as secure as that of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... discoveries made before and in Albrecht Duerer's day, in the book, the chart, the lever, the crystal, the crucible, the plane, the hammer. The intention of this picture has been disputed, but the best explanation of it is that which regards the woman as pondering on the humanly unsolved and insoluble mystery of the ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri (two dim ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... overreached himself. He has given you a choice of two problems, both of which he deems insoluble. Neither of them is insoluble. The only gleam of intelligence Old Cotangent showed was when he said that squaring the circle was too easy. He was right. It would have given you your Liebchen in five minutes. I squared the circle before I discarded pantalets. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... What mystery is insoluble in the sharp light of modern research? Yet until the defenders of the view that the Basques came from Atlantis can make truce with the advocates of their Phoenician origin,—until the well-attested theory of their affinity with certain South American races can ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... patriotisms and politics, and their obsession has always been international trade. Here in Utopia the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all trading finally involves individual preferences which are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really defined standards, every economic dissertation and discussion ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... of human thought; elaborate ceremonial institutions being shown to have come after the ruder beginnings of religious development instead of before them. Thus came a new impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older theological interpretation, with its insoluble puzzles, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... center of gravitational force, would not result in the formation of a ring of small bodies, but rather of a dispersed mass of them. But back of any speculation of this kind lies the problem, at present insoluble: How could the explosion be produced? (See the question of explosions in Chapters 6 ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... differently under similar pressure. "History is only able to grasp the conditions of their existence." And what M. Seignobos calls the final problem—Is evolution produced merely by changed conditions?—must according to him remain insoluble by the legitimate processes of history. The student may accept or reject this view as his notions of evidence prompt him to do. M. Seignobos has at all events laid down a basis for discussion in ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... Providence over-ruling the present and the future, we regard the problems before us, though great, not insoluble to faithful, wise and patient Christian effort along the lines upon which this ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... appliances, innumerable as might be their impalpable emanations, insoluble as seemed the mystery of their power of catching and transmitting sounds by the agency of ether, they were still physical appliances producing physical effects in obedience to the laws of nature. But what he sought lay beyond ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... that the problem is necessarily insoluble (VII) does not deserve to be regarded as an hypothesis at all; for to suppose that the problem is necessarily insoluble is merely to exclude the supposition of there being ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes |
