"Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like that accorded cut glass, and soft abrasive powders, such as pumice, suffice to polish them. Probably hardly two lapidaries would work exactly alike in their treatment of precious stones, and each guards his secrets, yet all use approximately similar general methods. Some have devised mechanical holders which permit the repeated cutting of stones to exactly the same angles, and that, too, with an accurate knowledge of the angles used. These angles can be definitely altered for different materials, according to their refractive ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... research to his comrade and allow Willie to furnish the inspiration for further creative ventures. Nevertheless his retirement from the spheres of discovery did not prevent him from zealously assisting in the mechanical details that rendered Willie's schemes material. Jan not only possessed a far more practical type of mind than did his friend but he was also a more skilful workman and therefore in the carrying out of any plan his aid was indispensable. He was, moreover, content to be ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... of truth and beauty. But in Plato this feeling has no expression; he nowhere says that beauty is the object of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form (Phaedrus); he does not distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts. Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than he expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that the greatest perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost entire silence about them. In one very striking passage he tells us that a work of art, like the State, is a whole; ...
— The Republic • Plato
... stared at me askance, I had reason to believe that neither words, actions, nor looks were out of the way. Yet what I said and did was said and done with no more guidance of the mind than the gestures and speech of a mechanical doll. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... pitch, and he knew that he lacked this energy. So he continued along in sullen resignation until, accepting the hint of his instincts, he closed his eyes. This brought relief, and after a time, his movements becoming ever more mechanical, he found himself adrift upon a peaceful sea of semi-coma, oblivious to all trouble—hunger pangs, thirst, weariness. When he returned to full consciousness, somewhat refreshed and fit for farther distances, he found the sun well ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... had lost their semblance to mechanical man-driven machines. They were now the eagles of the air. They were rising, circling, diving in maneuvers that Dorn knew meant pursuit. But he could not understand these movements. To him the air-battle looked as it must have looked to an Indian. Birds of prey in ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... declamation. Every word was cut clear of disreputable alliances with its neighbors. The whole thing was clean as a row of pewter mugs. The influence of indignation upon the voice caused me to reflect that we might devise a mechanical means of inflaming some in that constellation of mummers which is the heritage ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... be any where, while he had no settled plan of life, and very scanty means of subsistence. He made some valuable acquaintances there, amongst whom were Mr. Porter, a mercer, whose widow he afterwards married, and Mr. Taylor, who by his ingenuity in mechanical inventions, and his success in trade, acquired an immense fortune. But the comfort of being near Mr. Hector, his old school-fellow and intimate friend, was Johnson's chief inducement ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... adding wings to my speed, I leaped out of bed, and, scantily robed as I was, rushed out of the chamber, downstairs, and into the open air. I can hardly recollect the process of turning keys and withdrawing bolts. My terrors urged me forward with almost a mechanical impulse. I stopped not till I reached my brother's door. I had not gained the threshold, when, exhausted by the violence of my emotions and by my speed, I sunk down ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... possession were mounted upon the Fort, and in many instances were manned by these aborigines. Hides were sent to Yerba Buena, a trade in furs and supplies was established with the Hudson Bay Company, and considerable attention was given to mechanical ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... than the old structure, and lay the floor of the loft, build bunks to sleep in, make a new meal chest and dresser, and construct other articles of furniture which were needed to replace the stuff burned in the fire. Enoch had a mechanical turn of mind and Bryce made an able assistant. Between them they turned out a new table, several chairs with hide backs and seats, and even essayed a "rocker" for their mother which, although rudely built and with its rockers not exactly even, was declared by Mrs. Harding to be ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... robust energy, and became consequently, in my eyes, an object of tenderest commiseration. From the first he clung to me with strange tenacity, for our tastes were congenial. He brought with him from his Southern home stores of books and shells and curious playthings and mechanical toys, such as I had never seen before, and to spread these out and explain them for my amusement was his ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... existing thesaurus of up-to-date facts and opinions on modern agricultural methods. It is safe to say that many years must pass before it can be surpassed in comprehensiveness, accuracy, practical value, and mechanical excellence. It ought to be in every library ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... origin in a preceding motion, and so on ad infinitum. For the Love and Hate of Empedocles and the Nous (Intelligence) of Anaxagoras, Democritus substituted fixed and necessary laws (not chance; that is a misrepresentation due chiefly to Cicero). Everything can be explained by a purely mechanical (but not fortuitous) system, in which there is no room for the idea of a providence or an intelligent cause working with a view to an end. The origin of the universe was explained as follows. An infinite number of atoms was carried downwards through infinite space. The larger (and heavier), falling ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... singly. I never meant to give in, and never will so long as my strength serves for the fight. Whoever else yields, I will submit to nothing but physical compulsion. If the Freethinker should ever cease to appear, the Freethought party will know that the fault is not mine. Certain parts of the mechanical process of production are dependent on the firmness of others. One man cannot do everything. But I pledge myself to keep this Freethought flag flying at every hazard, and if I am temporarily disabled I pledge myself to unfurl it ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... sets the soul free to rise on the wings of religious faith. But reason breaks the spell; and the world of poetry, and religion—a world which to them is always beautiful and good with God's presence—becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead, mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly changing ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... new energies, new liberties, and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the practice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigid and tame again, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... we can do, and when we are set, neither an economic law drawn from political science nor experience seems a very formidable objection. We are a successful people in machinery, and so we take our analogy for political reforms from machinery. We found that by uniting various mechanical elements we could make machines which would do as much as one hundred or one thousand men in the same time. So we think that if we are only acute enough to devise a governmental machine which will work without effort on the part of the people, we can ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... of the soil are made up of a great variety of substances. The larger part of these act simply as a mechanical support for the plants and also serve to bring about certain physical conditions. Only a very small portion of these substances serve as the direct food of plants and the chemical conditions of these substances ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... accustomed to expect a new rhyme in every couplet; but is on a sudden surprised with three rhymes together, to which the reader could not accommodate his voice, did he not obtain notice of the change from the braces of the margins. Surely there is something unskilful in the necessity of such mechanical direction. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... The game of giving quotations that no one else in the class has given is always a delight. Don't be misled by the fun poked at the "memory gem method" of studying poetry. The error is not in memorizing complete poems and fine poetic passages, but in doing this in a mechanical fashion. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... magic, even if it be not, as Dr. Frazer thinks, magic in a negative form. We have now to see what traces are to be found of magic in the proper or usual sense of the word—active or positive magic, as we may call it. By this we are to understand the exercise of a mysterious mechanical power by an individual on man, spirit, or deity, to enforce a certain result. In magic there is no propitiation, no prayer. "He who performs a purely magical act," says Dr. Westermarck,[81] "utilises such mechanical power without making any appeal at all to the will of a supernatural being." ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of the 'old duets with her mother. She saw her mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell to. Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the girl, overcoming wonderment at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet it may serve as a document. But what will not serve as a document to the modern historian? The historian is no longer the poor creature described by Aristotle. He is no annalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along by the mechanical sequence of events. "The master of them that know" did not know everything. He did not know that history was to become as plastic as poetry, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... and as vivid as he used in talking to the Georgia farmers. He urged them, just as he did the farmers, to stop moving about and to settle down—"to stop staying here and there and everywhere and begin to live somewhere." He urged them to leave the little mechanical job of window washing, or what not, and go into business for themselves, even if they could only afford a few newspapers or peanuts to start with. He told of a certain New York street where he had found all the people ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... voice before speaking, and then he said, very nearly choking the baby in his mechanical attempt to pull a lock of his hair ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... with a sort of disgust. "An ounce of civet, good apothecary!" Why it should be so with me I cannot say. I am as indifferent to the facts or fancies of spiritualism as I am, for instance, to the latest mechanical application of electricity. Edisons and Marconis may thrill the world with astounding novelties; they astound me, as every one else, but straightway I forget my astonishment, and am in every respect the man I was before. The thing ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... In the mechanical construction of his work Mr. Weber has followed the last edition of Massinger, with a servility which appears, in his mind, to have obviated all necessity of acknowledging the obligation: we will not stop to enquire whether he might not have found a better model; but proceed to the body of the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and without proportion, it may have been either compiled clumsily after the poet's death, or put together carelessly by himself amid the indolence which grows sometimes upon old age. It declares the essentials of poetry to be unity of conception and ingenuity of diction, urges that mechanical correctness must be inspired by depth of feeling, gives technical rules of dramatic action, of the chorus, of metre. For matter such as this a Horace was not needed, but the felicity of its handling has made it to many Horatian students ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Churton; it is so—pleasant to be here!" she replied. But she spoke in a slow mechanical way, and seemed to the other strangely cold and irresponsive; she shivered a little, too, when the caressing hand touched her neck, as if the warm fingers had seemed ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... length, to be vested in one such officer. This was James Berry, one of the captains of Fairfax's own horse-regiment, in which Desborough was Major. He had been a clerk in some iron-works in the west of England, and was "of very good natural parts, especially mathematical and mechanical." Before the war he and Richard Baxter had been bosom friends; but, since he had come into the Army and been much in the society of Cromwell, he had become, says Baxter, a man of new lights in religion, regarding the old Puritans of his acquaintance as "dull, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of music now remained. This was mechanical, and might be taken up at any time; the object of it was entirely pecuniary. I reserved to myself the liberty of laying it aside, or of finishing it at my ease, according as my other resources collected should render this necessary or superfluous. With respect to the 'Morale Sensitive', ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... dominates the whole city. It was erected a century and more ago, and designed for a commercial exchange, but it has since been greatly altered, and served as a fortification in the civil wars. It is to-day occupied for the purposes of a prison, where convicts are judiciously taught various mechanical trades. The view from the summit of this rude old building takes in the town, the long, narrow gulch, the gray and rugged hills which reach upward towards the deep blue sky, dotted here and there by the yellow dome of some ancient church, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... once got out an advertising novelty and had samples distributed by the salesmen as gifts to their principal customers. The novelty was an ingenious mechanical device. It attracted so much attention to itself that when a salesman put it on the desk of a prospect before beginning his sales talk, the attention of the other man was drawn from what the salesman was saying and was given to the novelty. The prospect ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... the pilgrims' tales, she was so stimulated by their simple speech, mechanical to them but to her so full of deep meaning, that several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and running away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself by Theodosia's side, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in many points: still, I fancy that you and I have much in common. We belong to those who have learnt to 'look upwards'—there goes the ball, up again!—and who find comfort in doing so. Do you know that many men believe that the universe was formed by concurrence of mechanical processes and is still slowly developing, that there is no divinity whose love and power guard, guide and lend grace to the lives ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... not mechanical; from any in which the mind, not the hand, has been the creating power. I saw you very much interested the other day in the Eddystone lighthouse; did it help you to form ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... eyes—ah, so like our mother's!—averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage—the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand—galls us and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... obeyed the orders to set sail in a sullen, mechanical way, which did not grow more hearty as they saw that every officer carried his pistol in his belt, and watched the execution of every command with ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... influences of the poorhouse. Where a specially strong arm was required, the curate himself was at all times to be relied upon. He was not only a hewer of wood, but often a bearer of wood as well as of water. He was, too, an embodied guild of all mechanical trades, and might have been warranted to use skilfully at ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... upon with no very great favour; for he had been silent and melancholy throughout the drive from Maudesley Abbey to Lisford Church, and had stared at them with vacant indifference, while handing them out of the carriage with a mechanical kind of politeness that ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... suspend the likenesses of his mother and brother on his wall. He generally, you will find, tries to improve on you—which, of course, is not always hard to do. But sometimes he comes to grief in the attempt, as happened in the case of his wonderful "hanging shelves." Ted Hammer, quite a mechanical genius, had made to himself a set of these shelves, which for neatness, simplicity, and usefulness were the marvel of the school. Of course Ebby got to know of it, and was unhappy till he could cap ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... wind is getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to have somebody's head off. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... it for himself. A text-book can point out what constitutes good form, what is pleasing and impressive to the eye and to the ear, and, in a word, what make up the externals of a good delivery; but beyond these mechanical directions it cannot go. A student should observe the following fundamental directions as his first step toward becoming a successful speaker. Afterwards, he should cultivate earnestness, enthusiasm, perception, a sense of humor, and all other such qualities as go to ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the Government. But there are some things that, with the entire concentrated skill and ability of the nation, her citizens can not accomplish; and one of these is the maintenance of steamship mail lines upon the ocean. In ordinary enterprises competition necessitates improvement; and mechanical improvement and skill, in due course of time, enable individuals to compass ends otherwise deemed impracticable and unattainable. These attempts have all been made, in every form, with ocean steam navigation. It was supposed, as elsewhere stated, that, by superior engines and ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... continuous succession of marvels in railway-work, of which the Tray Run viaduct is a dream of lightness and grace, yet so firm in its welded strength that thousands of tons of merchandise pass over it daily without causing, the slightest oscillation of its airy arches. Here, too, the wonders of mechanical skill are placed in striking juxtaposition with the wonders of Nature, whose obduracy has been so signally overcome. The sense of security was heightened in our case by a furious storm which burst upon us. We were seated on the fender or' cow-catcher,' watching ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... agitating the heart and mind with harassing emotions; while the immortal soul thirsts for eternal happiness. Can it be doubted that such dim, vague, unsatisfied longings are the source of much immorality? Mechanical operations, business speculations, commercial transactions, important as they may appear to the utilitarian, are far from responding to the requirements of the intellect, the imperious exactions of the heart. Such men pine unconsciously for a draught of higher life, they grow weary of existence. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... outwardly very calm, but he was changed. His friends said that his vitality and earnestness were bound to suffer in the struggle for self-repression. His sermons were becoming mechanical tasks and the confessional a weariness. He made his protest, as Canon Nicholls wished, but after the talk with his rector he knew it was useless. He wrapped himself in silence, even with Father Jack Marny. He began, half consciously, ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... had some respect for the callant even before I kenned what was in him. But now I honour him for his contempt of weavers and spinners, and sic-like mechanical persons." ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery—the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in Tristram is one of those dubious pieces ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... staring heavily before him for a space, then turned with a mechanical movement and dropped into a chair. He was sitting so, bent forward, his hands clasped in front of him when Saltash returned. He had the worn, grey look of a man tired out ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... later he found himself shown into a smartly furnished office where Mr. Gavin Ramsay sat at a handsome desk surrounded by shelves and cabinets whereon and wherein were set out the products of the brains of many inventors—models of machines, mechanical toys, labour-saving notions, things plainly useful, things obviously extravagant. The occupant of this museum glanced at Allerdyke and the box which he carried with an amused smile, and Allerdyke said to himself that Appleyard was right in his description—if the man was ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... railways, after as well as during construction. In this country, as soon as the engineer has made out his "final estimate," he is dismissed with as little ceremony as a daylaborer. We employ the best mechanical engineers that we can find to look after the repairs of our engines and cars; while the road, which is more important, and upon the good condition of which we have seen that the success or failure of a railway as a commercial enterprise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... which always impends over the sea-power of any country is that, after being long unused, it may lose touch of the sea. The revolution in the constructive arts during the last half-century, which has also been a period of but little-interrupted naval peace, and the universal adoption of mechanical appliances, both for ship-propulsion and for many minor services—mere materiel being thereby raised in the general estimation far above really more important matters—makes the danger mentioned more menacing in the present age than it has ever ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... hydrophone, used by some of the smaller and slower vessels of the auxiliary fleet, consisted of a microphone, or delicate mechanical ear, carefully guarded by metal discs from accidental damage, and connected to ear-pieces or ordinary telephone receivers by an electric wire which passed through a battery. Where the wire came in contact with the sea water it was heavily ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... household duties, while this desultory discussion was going on. Suddenly there appeared at the corner of the house old Uncle Billy. In his hand he carried a small package wrapped in newspaper. He bowed and bowed, wagging his head like a mechanical toy. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... said all this in a dull, mechanical way, as if she were accustomed to be called on to render an account ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... fray, in order that they might have more cool and accurate opportunity to form a judgment upon the whole, and transmit their orders, without being disturbed by any thoughts of personal safety. Even so, brave barbarian, in the art of embroidery, (marvel not that we are a proficient in that mechanical process, since it is patronized by Minerva, whose studies we affect to follow,) we reserve to ourselves the superintendence of the entire web, and commit to our maidens and others the execution of particular parts. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... first year after their removal; to encourage and assist them in education, and in being taught to cultivate their lands, in erecting mills and other necessary houses; in purchasing domestic animals and farming utensils, and acquiring a knowledge of the mechanical arts." ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... nearly identical with Goethe's remark that man is properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed, understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope's interpretation strikes the present generation as narrow and mechanical. He would place such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude, perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with Pope's condemnation ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and how for lack of support on his flank, for lack of bombs, for lack of men, he had been forced back; and how for eight hours he had disputed every inch of ground till now his men could only cling to these mounds with the dumb mechanical tenacity of utter exhaustion. "You might go to H.Q.," he said at last, "and tell them where I am, and that I can't hold on without ammunition ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... retrospective view at four-score, I have noted many heart-cheering tokens of social and religious progress, and many splendid mechanical and material inventions to make the world better and happier. Yet I have also seen some painful symptoms of decline and deterioration. All the changes have not been for the better; some have been decidedly ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... green before a village meeting-house, and now in a paved square of the metropolis. How often must his heart have been gladdened by the delight of children, as they viewed these animated figures! or his pride indulged, by haranguing learnedly to grown men on the mechanical powers which produced such wonderful effects! or his gallantry brought into play (for this is an attribute which such grave men do not lack) by the visits of pretty maidens! And then with how fresh a feeling must he return, at intervals, to his own ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said nervously, as she made mechanical preparations with pot and kettle. "It would only make matters worse if ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... shapes which seemed to be operated by some kind of clumsy mechanical motors rather than animated by sentient spirits were playing a game of chance and slapping the greasy cards down upon the table to the accompaniment of coarse ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... reassured. Madame seated herself in the armchair by the table well within the light. She smoothed her dress with a mechanical hand. If, as it would seem, her hopes had been futile, so had her momentary fears. A man on any but an errand of peace would have brought some following with him, as ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... at the depth of humiliation to which you have brought the country"—such was the chorus of reproach that was ever ringing in their ears—"with your red tape, your Chinese formalism, and your principle of lifeless, unreasoning, mechanical obedience! You asserted constantly that you were the only true patriots, and branded with the name of traitor those who warned you of the insane folly of your conduct. You see now what it has all come to. The men whom you helped to send to the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... different now," she said; "sentiment dies under the scalpel. In the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atrophied—or at least a reflex habit; sympathy, sorrow, remain as mechanical reactions, not spontaneous emotions.... You can understand ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... building constantly. Complete staffs of engineers, carpenters, painters, etc., are almost constantly employed in looking after additions, alterations, and repairs, thus keeping the whole building in perfect condition. All are under the direct management of experts, whose mechanical skill is utilized to assist in rendering the store service complete, and whose services are recognised on an equality with those occupying the most responsible positions in connection ...
— How Department Stores Are Carried On • W. B. Phillips
... sofa and watched the two figures as they passed down the long corridor. The mechanical smile of welcome with which she had greeted half the county this evening had not died away from her face; she sat upright on the satin-covered sofa. There was about her an air of strength, of eminence almost, which seemed to place her genuine ugliness above criticism. ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... his treasures, and they included some very childish toys, a number of them showing the mechanical skill of his grandfather's blunt fingers. But among them, too, were treasures from the swamp and woods that were both very wonderful ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... But the loss of the direct intercourse with China had more fatal effects; it prevented large bodies of annual emigrants from China settling upon her shores; it deprived them of an opportunity of visiting the Borneon ports, and exercising their mechanical arts and productive industry; and of thus keeping up the prosperity of the country in the tillage of the ground, as well as in the commerce of her ports. The old Chinese settlers by degrees deserted these shores; and to fill ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... become visible, the cheeks had fallen, the eyes sunk, the features grown prominent, and the auburn curls were streaked with silver threads never previously perceptible to a casual eye. While languid, mechanical talk was passing, Phoebe had been mourning over the change; but she found her own Miss Charlecote restored in the freer manner, the long sigh, the tender grasp of the arm, as soon as they were in the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... light gemmed hand, flashing on him in addition to those other things the perfect polish of the prettiest pink finger-nails in the world, had touched a spring, the most ingenious of ecent devices for instant ease, which dropped half across the scene a soft-coloured mechanical blind, a fluttered, fringed awning of charmingly toned silk, such as would make a bath of cool shade for the favoured friend leaning with her there—that is for the happy couple itself—on the balcony. The great view would be the prospect and privilege ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... countenance almost lapses into a smile as "Kellner" approaches with the beverage. The tutor, it is pleasant to see, has at last put his "Classic" in his pocket, and gives himself up to the undivided enjoyment of the scene, while his "young charge" is wrapped in contemplation of mechanical science as exemplified in the structure of the wheel. And that must surely be the gent who has such a low opinion of the beauty of the Rhine-land, seated at the stern of the boat with his legs dangling over the river. Let us hope ...
— The Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones and Robinson • Richard Doyle
... in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part. ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... one she'll none of me." Nay, the odds were probably even longer. Ah, CECILIA, if these lines meet thine eyes, thou wilt know that one heart still is true. In another life, less begirt by material difficulties, we may meet amongst the asphodel, where there is no opportunity for the display of mere mechanical accomplishments. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... of pottery. He was sickly, thin, and short, with wrists like a boy of ten. But from that debile body there issued a bullying voice, tremendously loud, harsh and resonant, as if produced by some powerful mechanical contrivance in the nature of a fog-horn. I do not know what he did with it in the private life of his home, but in the larger sphere of business it presented the advantage of overcoming arguments without the slightest mental effort, by the mere volume of sound. We had ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... believe Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire to please the great, and bring them to the universities, causes a compliance with fashionable manners, a relaxation ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... common table-turning there was contact, and Faraday easily demonstrated that there was conscious or unconscious pushing and muscular exertion. In 1871 Mr. Crookes made laboratory experiments with Home, using mechanical tests. {107b} He demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, that in the presence of Home, even when he was not in physical contact with the object, the object moved: e pur si muove. He published a reply to Dr. Carpenter's criticism, and the common-sense of ordinary ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... by the spectroscope and the photographic camera. Now, this really involves a whole world of change. It means that astronomy has left the place where she dwelt apart in rapt union with mathematics, indifferent to all things on earth save only to those mechanical improvements which should aid her to penetrate further into the heavens, and has descended into the forum of human knowledge, at once a suppliant and a patron, alternately invoking help from and promising it to each of the sciences, and patiently waiting upon the advances of all. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... have been said, of synagogue worship, with its mechanical dulness and its mistaken interpretations of God's word, its shallow and superficial and tedious traditional commentaries, its formalism and vain repetitions; all this, whatever might have been its value for the ordinary unenlightened Jew, how could it have been necessary and what ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... skirts—skirts a quarter of a yard long!—how sweet!—and heaps and heaps of muslin, you see, for her summer dresses. Won't she look an angel? Oh, and you told me to get some things to keep Archie quiet in the train.' She produced a drum, a trumpet, and a mechanical ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... draperies, and broken columns, in all stages of sculpture. Herein two journeymen incessantly chip, while other two journeymen, who face each other, incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical figures ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... rather than the exception in the United States, and neither cost nor pains are spared to set it forth to the best advantage. The American women dress well, dance well, and in all that relates to what may be called the mechanical part of social intercourse, they appear to great advantage. Nothing can exceed the self-possession of these pretty creatures, whose confidence is never checked by the discipline of society, or the restraints of an education which is terminated almost as soon as it is begun. There is no childhood ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... shaken in that period of fourteen years. Localization, and reference to centres would not, it was found, explain things sufficiently.[Footnote: The work of Pierre Janet was largely influential also in bringing about this change of view.] This involved a too rigid and mechanical conception of the brain as a mere "box," and Bergson attacks it very forcibly under the name of "the box theory." "All the arguments," he says, "from fact which may be invoked in favour of a probable accumulation of memories in the cortical substance, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... is the case in the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord, a loss in which tissue is never repaired by the formation of new cells; and in the muscles the same is true. The least differentiation is seen in those cells which serve the purpose of mechanical protection only, as the cells of the skin, and in these the formative activity is very great. Not only must the usual loss be supplied, but we are all conscious of slight injuries of the surface which are ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... majority submitted to the tyranny of the minority. And thus debating impracticable proposals, barely listening to long speeches, doing absolutely nothing, the days succeeded each other; and legislators who wanted work, longed for the steady and mechanical regularity of their well-ordered offices, their vast factories, their sanely-conducted communications with all parts of the world, to which English genius, sense, and industry have brought the goods of England. The contrast ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... related point of view, which the authors have tried to make clear in recounting the story of the sea. In regard to naval principles, also, this general survey should reveal those unchanging truths of warfare which have been demonstrated from Salamis to Jutland. The tendency of our modern era of mechanical development has been to forget the value of history. It is true that the 16" gun is a great advance over the 32-pounder of Trafalgar, but it is equally true that the naval officer of to-day must still sit at the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Mr. Henry Winstanley, of Littlebury, Essex, whose mechanical abilities had previously been known rather by a series of eccentric contrivances than by any remarkable proof of skill. For instance:—in his house at Littlebury, if a visitor entered an apartment ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... to outlining on the ground that it is too mechanical—that it destroys spontaneity and the flow of the Spirit of the Lord. It has always seemed to the writer that the Spirit of the Lord is quite as pleased to follow a straight path as it is to follow a crooked one. Outlining is not in any sense a substitute for ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... the pace he went off just now, I should think he'll smash up your precious old car before he goes far. And no loss either," said Alice, who was engaged to a soldier in a cavalry regiment, and therefore disdained all purely mechanical ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the paying-out ceased, and nice management was required to keep the ship steady, as she had now no steerage-way; and oh! with what intense interest and curiosity and wonder did Robin Wright regard the varied and wonderful mechanical appliances, with which the whole affair ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... orders. There is in England a certain charmed spectacle which imposes on the many, and guides their fancies as it will. As a rustic on coming to London finds himself in presence of a great show and vast exhibition of inconceivable mechanical things, so by the structure of our society, he finds himself face to face with a great exhibition of political things which he could not have imagined, which he could not make—to which he feels in ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... and Mr. Spenlow gave me some hints in reference to my profession. He said it was the genteelest profession in the world, and must on no account be confounded with the profession of a solicitor: being quite another sort of thing, infinitely more exclusive, less mechanical, and more profitable. We took things much more easily in the Commons than they could be taken anywhere else, he observed, and that set us, as a privileged class, apart. He said it was impossible to conceal the disagreeable fact, that we were chiefly employed ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... stall for mechanical toys and parts of clocks. He has a great many parts of clocks, but the only mechanical toy was his clockwork engine, that was broken ages ago, so he had to give it up, and he couldn't think of anything else. So he settled to help Oswald, and keep an ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... possibly I do not in my heart overrate their importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught, it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part—the art of structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a man to choose or invent a good story, and much ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... organization along Soviet lines. In my view, the revolution will follow the same general channels it has taken in Russia, with alterations of detail, of course. Should France overthrow capitalism, for instance, she will at first establish Sovietism, and subsequently combine with us. To foresee the mechanical angles of such combination, however, is ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... death-devoted, and freed from all the ills that flesh is heir to! I go my way—do what I please—hammer on and on, and let happen what will. What, old head!—wilt ache? I guess I can stop thy aching before long! And all ye mechanical miscellaneities—stomachs and what not! Thou wilt trouble me too? Do thy pleasure, go ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... of training naturally divides itself into two departments:—first that which is mechanical; and, secondly, that which relates to the expression of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... what have you been doing—writing?" Lady de Vaux asked anxiously. Then, as though warned by his strange appearance, she checked his mechanical answer. "Never mind, never mind! You are tired, I can see. Won't you go and lie down for awhile? Come, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ground even an argument to his negation. The phenomena of a material world are subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same invariable succession, and manifest only the blind force of mechanical necessity." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the man's evident surprise, he laughed again, throwing his head back so that the muscles of his throat showed under his beard, working, as it were, automatically. It really seemed as if the man's mechanical merriment were no part of himself. He was, in fact, gaining time to propound an explanation which he did not believe in the least, but which happened to be almost the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Europe—navvies, with the beast-like, sunken face, different from any Kaffer's—I know what brought that look into their eyes; and if I have only one inch of tobacco I give them half. It is work, grinding, mechanical work, that they or their ancestors have done, that has made them into beasts. You may work a man's body so that his soul dies. Work is good. I have worked at the old farm from the sun's rising till its setting, but I have had time to think, and time to feel. You ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... a sword into a pruning hook is a matter for a skilled smith, but to change a bayonet into a poker is within the capacity of the least mechanical. All that is needed is to cause the bayonet to forsake the murderous rifle barrel and cleave to a short wooden handle. Henceforth its function is not to thrust itself into the vitals of men, but to ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... M.T. Mechanical Transport. The members of which are ex-taxi drivers. No wonder Tommy's rations melt away when the M. T. ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... his post could be scarcely deemed one of trust,—there was no property for him to abscond with but the telescope; he was removed from temptation and evil company in his lonely waste; his duties were as mechanical as the instrument he worked, and interruption of them would be instantly known at San Francisco. For this he would receive his board and lodging and seventy-five dollars a month,—a sum to be ridiculed in those "flush days," but which seemed ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the problem which we shall try to solve in our future meditations. But first we must submit two preliminary observations. They will furnish us with two other theories concerning the application of all the mechanical means which we propose you should employ. An instance from life will refresh these arid and dry dissertations: the hearing of such a story will be like laying down a book, to work in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... life, not being able to break the mainspring themselves, frequently hire teachers to help them. The teacher who can break a mainspring first and keep it from getting mended, is often the most esteemed in the community. Those who have broken the most, "secure results." The spectacle of the mechanical, barren, conventional society so common in the present day to all who love their kind is a sign there is no withstanding. It is a spectacle we can only stand and watch—some of us,—the huge, dreary kinetoscope ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and pensive, was then seated on a bench near the basin, regarding with a kind of mechanical interest the gambols of two daring birds that came to sport on the curbstone. She ceased for a moment to work on a little child's frock which she was hemming. It is necessary to say that this belonged to the generous offering made to Mont Saint Jean by the prisoners, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... done my utmost to make him understand how I wanted it done, I was surprised to find how very difficult this particular rendering of the music appeared to him. He was absolutely incapable of repeating it after me, and with each renewed effort his singing became so commonplace and so mechanical that I realised clearly that he had not understood this piece to be anything more than a phrase in recitative form, which he might render with any inflections of the voice that happened to be prescribed, or which might be sung either this way or that, according to fancy, as was usual in operatic ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Winds they carried the man to a room where Emily and Alan worked over him, while Lynde heated water and hunted out stimulants in a mechanical fashion. When Alan came down she asked no questions but looked at him with the same strained horror on her face which it had borne ever since Alan had dropped his burden at ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... building where a prominent publishing firm had its office was a negro of more than ordinary intelligence. The firm had just published a subscription book on mechanical engineering, a chapter of which was devoted to the construction and operation of passenger elevators. One of the agents selling the book thought he might find a ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... one knew. Poor Isabella Angelica! Her tragic love affair had indeed transformed her from the appealing girl of yesterday to the recklessly unhappy woman of to-day, forced on to the path of cruelty and vice by unlooked-for circumstances. She performed this deed and that with almost mechanical diabolicism; some say she knew not one day from another. In 1597 she was offered an exceedingly good position by the Inquisition, which she immediately accepted. It was, she felt, her only chance of happiness—to have the opportunity of inventing a few good tortures would ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the new bookkeeping machine of a large Midwestern coffin manufacturer slipped a cog, or blew a transistor, or something. It was fantastic that the error—one of two decimal places—should enjoy a straight run of okays, human and mechanical, clear down the line; but when the figures clacked out at the last clacking-out station, there it was. The figures were now sacred; immutable; and it is doubtful whether the President of the concern or the Chairman of the Board would ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... Relating to the mechanical features of printing types; their sizes, font schemes, etc., with a brief description of their manufacture. 44 pp.; ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... evening prayers to the servants. He felt that he was growing weaker; his brain wandered; the agony did not seem so great. Not all Gino's care could indefinitely postpone the end. His yells and gurgles became mechanical—functions of the tortured flesh rather than true notes of indignation and despair. He was conscious of a horrid tumbling. Then his arm was pulled a little too roughly, and everything was quiet ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... convents, especially in Italian convents? A few mechanical acts of devotion and outward forms, very little real religion, a good deal of deceit, often profligate habits, a little reading and writing, many useless accomplishments, small music and less drawing, no history, no geography or mythology, hardly any mathematics, and nothing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... hear through all the shifting gloom the sound of axes and hammers and saws at work upon that bridge. These army engineers could throw a bridge across a river in half a day. He recognized at all times the great resources and the mechanical genius of the North. The South had good bridge builders herself, but she had bent all her powers to the development of public men and soldiers. Harry felt more intensely all the time the one-sided character of ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... converting the two school-rooms, big and little, into a ball-room, and decorating it richly with green leaves and roses, real and artificial. I congratulated them on the prospect. 'Yes,' said Miss Landon, 'the mechanical getting-up is all very well; I wish all that is termed "dashing" did not lie in the tomb of the Duchess of Gordon. A quadrille is but still life put into motion. Our faces, like our summers, want sunshine. Old Froissart complained in his day, that the English, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... are actually fit for anything. Even he allows this peculiarity of the country does much good, but he maintains that it also does much harm, by causing pretenders to start up in all directions. Of this class he describes Mr. Dodge to be. This person, instead of working at the mechanical part of a press, to which he was educated, has the ambition to control its intellectual, and thus ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... fancy-work, drawing and painting of a utilitarian character, and sometimes book keeping and dress-making. Most of them are free, but for some special subjects a small payment is required. Drawing seems to be a favourite subject, and in most of these technical schools there are classes for mechanical drawing as well as for some kind of artistic work connected with industry. In addition there are numerous art schools, some of them being devoted to the encouragement of fine art, while in others the object kept in view is the application of art ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... this time a sombre excitement burnt in their eyes and quivered in their fingers. Never for an instant did their glances leave the cards. Ellis was drinking whisky again, mixed with soda, his hand continually groping for the glass with a mechanical gesture; the Dummy was so excited he could not keep his cigar alight, and contented himself with chewing the end with an hysterical motion of his jaws. The perspiration stood in beads on the back of Vandover's ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... know there is no unity and no emotion in the excited sea; each wave is composed of hundreds of thousands of single drops of water, and each drop composed of billions of atoms, and every movement results from mechanical laws under the influence of the pressing water and air. There is hydrogen and there is oxygen, and there is chloride of sodium, and the dark blue color is nothing but the reflection of billions of ether ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... was so fortunate as to procure the situation of amanuensis to a literary gentleman, who was employed upon a work of great extent, but of little interest. My labour was entirely mechanical. The confinement and the sedentary nature of my employment wrought still greater change on me; for hours I have sat, like an automaton, copying passages I felt no interest in, held only to my task by the consciousness ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... swamped by London, for it needs a strong head to live among many people. The too vast orb of her fate had crushed her; and she had seen too many seasons, too many cities, too many men, for her abilities, and even with Cecil she was mechanical, and behaved as if he was not one son, but, so to speak, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... stood in such close relations, is doubtful, but he certainly taught us to understand and love him; and this love, though I have also listened to the views of those who attribute the creation and life of the world to mechanical causes, and believe the Deity to be a product of the human intellect, has never grown cold up to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of imagination stood him in good stead then. He simply did what he was told, did it in perfectly mechanical fashion, without asking any questions. With the girl leaning heavily upon his arm, he stepped into the street and almost immediately into a passing taxicab which he had hailed from the threshold of the shop. As he closed the door, he glanced behind him. ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but more likely four thousand living, moving, and having their being as a single individual. Dispersed for an instant as the boat-hook or paddle was driven through it, the mass coalesced automatically and instantly as if controlled by mechanical force, or composed of some resilient substance, and swayed again on its course, while the dead and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield |
