"Primordial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Premier Antonio Salandra in his memorable speech from the Capitol, expressed the living and the fighting spirit of Italy, a spirit of strength and humanity, when he said: "I cannot answer in kind the insult that the German chancellor heaps upon us: the return to the primordial barbaric stage is so much harder for us, who are twenty centuries ahead of them in the history of civilization." To support his, came the quiet utterances of Sonnino (whose every word is a statement of Italian right and a crushing ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... revolving in this orbit and in the surrounding spaces. It was already floating along in a nebulous superheated form capable of condensation by the loss of heat, but in particular capable of growth and development by the fall of surrounding matter upon the forming globe. We must remember that in the primordial state the elements of a planet, as for instance our earth, were mixed together and held in a state of tenuity ranging all the way from solid to highly vaporized forms, and that these elements subsequently and by slow adjustment got themselves into something ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... shall explain all, after having bowed down to that Self-existent, Primordial Being, who is eternal and undeteriorating and inconceivable, and who is at once vested with and divested of attributes. O tiger among men, this Janardana attired in yellow robes is the grand Mover and Creator of all, the Soul and Framer of all things, and the lord of all! He ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... escaping the veto, may not be eventually contested and defeated? We know that in many of the states there are Bills of Rights, which are considered to have equal authority with their constitutions. Some, indeed, regard them as settling the principles of primordial law, which the constitution itself cannot countervail. These, then, may also be appealed to for the purpose of proving the unconstitutionality of a state law; and in the inferences which ingenuity, or even stupidity, may draw from such broad and indefinite principles, the clearest right ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of Nature here is as clear as Science can make it. In the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary from that primordial truth which, as we have seen, underlies all other truths, that whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without,"[82] ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... he protests that "analogy may be a deceitful guide," yet he follows its inexorable leading to the inference that "probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Giraud rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest removed, in nature's great family become conscious of the tie. Among those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses of men are precipitated as one chemical throws down a sediment from another. They moved reverently, as in a temple. Their souls were uplifted in unison with ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... his mastery over Nature man sometimes forgets his danger, oversteps the narrow margin of safety he has left between himself and the baffled forces of his ancient tyrants, Fire and Water, Earth and Air. Then indeed, in his moments of weakness, the primordial forces turn upon him and he becomes subject to tragic and terrific punishment. Of such character was the most prominent disaster of these years, the sinking of the ocean steamer Titanic. The best talent of England and America had united to produce this monster ship, which was hailed as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... drips; Where everlasting silence broods, with lips Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors. Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores, Laborious water carves; whence echo ships Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.— Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth, I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,— Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits, 'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,— An ancient causeway ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... of us the strain of primordial sexual emotion in our loves is very strong. Many men can love only women, many women only men, and some can scarcely love at all without bodily desire. But the love of fellowship is a strong one also, and for many, love is ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... an essay published in 1882 on "Europe before the Arrival of Man" (Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 1-40), I argued that if we are to find traces of the "missing link," or primordial stock of primates from which man has been derived, we must undoubtedly look for it in the Miocene (p. 36). I am pleased at finding the same opinion lately expressed by one of the highest living authorities. The case is thus stated by Alfred Russel Wallace: "The ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Hamlet, and Macbeth. But in considering his several impressions of these pieces, we have to make an important proviso. Only the first two of them did he witness in the authentic version. Macbeth underwent in his day a most liberal transformation, which carried it far from its primordial purity. The impressions he finally formed of Othello and Hamlet are not consistent one with the other, but are eminently characteristic of the variable moods of the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of imperfect sketches, for us to fill out and complete; it was for our skill and our labor patiently to induce the nourishing pulp which was the earliest form of capital, whose interest is always increasing in the primordial bank of ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... as she caught that phrase. That knot also would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... must content themselves with stingy little parks. It's the love of Nature that takes them to the parks, and compared with this they have a poor substitute. This is the world as God made it, with all its primordial beauty. We're fortunate that circumstances placed us here, Thomas, and we should ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... all men have experienced this primordial tristia post coitus; but this great moral pain, very serious in its significance and depth, passes very rapidly, remaining, however, with the majority for a long time—sometimes for all life—in the form of wearisomeness and awkwardness after certain moments. In a short while Kolya became ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... we have found certain definite facts,—that all known matter is formed out of one primordial Universal Substance,—that the ether spreading throughout limitless space is a Universal Medium, through which it is possible to convey force by means of vibrations,—and that vibrations can be started by the power of Sound. These we have found to be well established facts of ordinary ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... crowd of lionising women and time-wasters about him. Her "day" was a dread of mine; I could seldom remember which day it was, and when I did she had a way of shifting it so that I was fatally sure to run into it—to my misery, for, beginning with those primordial indignities suffered in youth, when I was scrubbed with a handkerchief outside the parlour door as a preliminary to polite usages, my childhood's, manhood's prayer has been: From all such ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... been developed from primordial germs by natural forces? Is the evidence sufficient to prove the origin of species by natural evolution? Is the theory of evolution an established truth of science? Matson, p. 390: Briefs ...
— Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Debate Index - Second Edition • Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
... being Yoga, the bhavanas, the four noble truths and the ten paramitas. The former explains the embodiment of Bhatara Visesha, that is to say the way in which Buddhas, gods and the world of phenomena are evolved from a primordial principle, called Advaya and apparently equivalent to the Nepalese Adibuddha.[432] Advaya is the father of Buddha and Advayajnana, also called Bharali Prajnaparamita, is his mother, but the Buddha principle at this stage is also called Divarupa. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... ontological aspects. Spinoza [24] starts with the idea of the Infinite, or the All-One, from which there is no logical deduction of the individual. And in Spinoza's system the individual does not exist except as a modality. But the existence of the individual is one of the primordial truths of the human mind, the foremost fact of consciousness. With this, therefore, Leibnitz begins, and arrives, by logical induction, to the Absolute and Supreme. Spinoza ends where he begins, in pantheism; the moral result ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... ceasing, energy borrowed from the sun, and on the other hand to expend it, in a discontinuous and explosive way, in movements of locomotion. Even to-day, perhaps, a chlorophyl-bearing Infusorian such as the Euglena may symbolize this primordial tendency of life, though in a mean form, incapable of evolving. Is the divergent development of the two kingdoms related to what one may call the oblivion of each kingdom as regards one of the two halves ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... a theory which the evolutionist must accept, and which can frighten none aware of the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous—nay, infinite—spiritual significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back to cyclonic ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... living tissues? Were animals and plants created as eggs or seed or as full grown? At each act of creation was one individual or were many produced? For himself, he came to the conclusion that all organic beings had descended from some one primordial form into ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... St. Louis and Chicago and St. Paul—Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words—in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia—a sort of ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... touches only the accumulative power of natural selection, which I look at as by far the most important element in the production of new forms. The laws governing the incipient or primordial variation (unimportant except as the groundwork for selection to act on, in which respect it is all important), I shall discuss under several heads, but I can come, as you may well believe, only to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... is generally agreed, and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness; that they neither feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution of the primordial living substance should have taken place only along the plant line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of vegetable life, as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though certainly widely different ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... that with each ascending step one of the veils falls away in which the hidden centre is wrapped. In that which fills the consciousness-soul, this hidden centre emerges unveiled into the temple of the soul. Yet it shows itself just here to be but a drop from the ocean of the all-pervading Primordial Essence; and it is here that man first has to grasp it,—this Primordial Essence. He must recognize it in himself before he is able to find ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... Shelley for the same reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the term,—the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought empty,—was his final test of any man. Unless there was something fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his time: practically none in the contemporary ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... nor can we expect that organisms so ancient should exhibit any very close resemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide rocks and skerries of our coasts at the present time. We do detect, however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least a noticeable likeness to families familiar to the modern algaeologist. The cord-like plant, Chorda filum, known to our children as "dead men's ropes," from its proving fatal at times to the too adventurous swimmer who gets ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... a good deal of the cave man about him. The heavy, slouching shoulders, the glare of savagery, the long, hairy arms, all had their primordial suggestion. Given a club and a stone ax, he might have been set back thousands of years with ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... there are, I find, very distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to bring about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though they were the universal Good and the universal Evil in which unthinking ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... India dispenses completely with gods, holding that the primordial stuff is eternal, but it also holds that souls have a separate existence and are eternal. Thus a species of dualism emerges. Buddhism goes a step further, ignoring the soul as well as gods. It is ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... more comprehensive sense than was justified by subsequent knowledge. Thus the Silurian rocks of Bohemia were divided into certain stages (A to H)—the two lowermost, A and B without fossils (Azoic), succeeded by the third stage, C, which included the primordial zone, since recognized as part of the Cambrian of Sedgwick. The fourth stage (Etage D), the true lower Silurian, was described by Barrande as including isolated patches of strata with organic remains like those of the Upper Silurian. These ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... croaked in a voice hardly more human than the grunts of horror from below, and he took the hand of another to help in the steep descent—while the tribe beneath them forgot their anticipated feast, forgot all but their primordial fear of the unknown, and, with startled cries, broke and ran for ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... most eloquent. It was not a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried. Another declared that without bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war, probably, they must at least have food—that was a need "primordial!" ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... popcorn balls and a gentle-voiced parson to tell Shacknasty James and Old Stand-up-and-Sit-down that the white father at Washington loved them and wanted them all to come and spend the summer at his house, and also that by sin death came into the world, and that we were all primordial germs at first, and that we should look up, not down, look out, not in, look forward, not backward, ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... individual just so long as he can keep afloat, but once fallen, how horribly quick it would crush him, annihilate him, how horribly quick, and with such horrible indifference! I suppose it's civilisation in the making, the thing that isn't meant to be seen, as though it were too elemental, too—primordial; like the first ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... itself in all ways, the whole universe is the expression of the Divine, but "man is the highest and most perfect earthly being in whom the primordial force is spiritualised so that man feels, understands and knows his own power." Conscious development of one's own power is the triumph of spirit over matter, therefore human development is spiritual development. So while man is the most perfect earthly being, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... however, a thoroughly free spirit, save as regards Kafirs and Roman Catholics, recognizing the people as a source of power, laying down the old distinction between the three departments of government,—legislative, executive, and judicial,—and guaranteeing some of the primordial rights of the citizen. By it the government was vested in a President, head of the executive, and elected for five years, an Executive Council of five members (three elected and two ex officio), and a Legislature called the Volksraad, elected by the citizens on a very extended ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... held that the rival gods, Ahriman and Ormuzd, evolved themselves out of primordial matter and then through the long ages created their attendant hierarchies of angels. The philosophers of India anticipated in some respects our modern evolutionary theory. Brahma is thought of as self-existent ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... labor, as the reader will see. The field he has traversed is vast and varied, and the facts he has gathered are numerous and from many and diversified sources—all bearing more or less conclusively on the one vital point he seeks to establish, viz: That the primordial germs (meaning germinal principles of life) of all living things, man alone excepted, are in themselves upon the earth, and that they severally make their appearance, each after its kind, whenever and wherever ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... fossil forms. Fossil shells are found, it is true, in the upper Cambrian beds. In the lower they have all but disappeared. Whether their traces have been obliterated by heat and pressure, and chemical action, during long ages; or whether, in these lower beds, we are actually reaching that "Primordial Zone" conceived of by M. Barrande, namely, rocks which existed before living things had begun to people this planet, is a question not yet answered. I believe the former theory to be the true one. That ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... would gradually move further apart, rotate more slowly on their axes, and assume the shapes they have now. In cooling down, new chemical compounds, and probably elements would be formed, since the so-called elements are perhaps mere combinations of a primordial substance which have been produced at various temperatures. The heavier elements, such as platinum, gold, and iron, would sink towards the core; and the lighter, such as carbon, silicon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, would rise towards the surface. A crust would form, and portions of it ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... and a primitive adze[sic]. These, with a rice header, a small knife, a hunting spear, a special arrow for hunting, a fish spear, and perhaps a few fishhooks, serve all the purposes of his primitive life. With one or the other of these he fells the mighty trees of the primordial forest, performs all the operations of agriculture, of hunting and fishing, builds himself a house, in certain districts hews out shapely canoes, whittles out handsome bolo sheaths, and makes a variety of ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... method, we ask, What is the affirmative factor in the whole creation, and in ourselves as included in the creation, and, as we found in the first lecture, this factor is Spirit—that invisible power which concentrates-the primordial ether into forms, and endows those forms with various modes of motion, from the simply mechanical motion of the planet up to the volitional motion in man. And, since this is so, the primary affirmative factor ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... itself behind us in a long string, jingling and clanging with horse and camel bells. But they turned northward to pass through the famed Circassian Gates, whereas we followed the plain that paralleled the mountain range—our mules' feet hidden by eight inches of primordial ooze. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... arranged by occult forces, and must, like opportunity, be taken when it comes. We are educated to accept oratory, but we need no education in the matter of a dog fight. This red corpuscle was transmitted to us from the Stone Age, and the primordial pleasures ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... to time descend to the river, to draw water also, but in their case in the vases of potters' clay which they carry—this fetching and carrying of the life-giving water is the one primordial occupation in this Egypt, which has no rain, nor any living spring, and subsists only by its river—these women walk and posture with an inimitable grace, draped in black veils, which even the poorest allow to trail behind them, like the train of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... up in me for this lost egg, this dead end in the tree of life, George. One thinks of the humble but deserving amoeba, the primordial metazoon, the first fish, the remote reptile ancestor, the countless generations of forefathers that, so far as this egg went, have lived and learnt and suffered in vain. The torrent of life had split and rushed by on either side of it. And you might," cried ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... primordial slime subtly intruded upon the sensory nerves of the visitor. The place breathed out decay; the decay of humanity, of cleanliness, of the honest decencies of life turned foul. Something lethal exhaled from that dim doorway. There was a stab of pestilence, reaching for the brain. But the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... their very fear accelerating their development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day, drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year- long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery, until they left their skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and their ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... method, not quite so learned, to convey an idea of the generation of colors, and the decomposition of the solar ray. Instead of examining them in a prism of glass, we shall consider them in the heavens, and there we shall behold the five primordial colours unfold themselves in the order which ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... how we can tell which is superior. The primordial cell in differentiating out of homogeneity into heterogeneity developed different qualities in different beings, and of the organs integrated from the heterogeneous elements each has its use and many are essential ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... of impression. They are inwardly as incoherent as they are outwardly wayward and fitful. If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges of that primordial irrationality, from which all our ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... been, from the first, dragged hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So, one day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting his "Principles" ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... had the look of a "manufactured article." It was increasingly felt, as the nineteenth century wore on, that the atoms had themselves been evolved out of some simpler material, and that ether might turn out to be the primordial chaos. There were even those who felt that ether would prove to be the one source of all matter and energy. And just before the century closed a light began to shine in those deeper abysses of the submaterial world, and the foundations of the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. She vanished round the corner. His effort was ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... as, for example, differences in food and climate, and domestication, a species may be split into varieties, or breeds, all of which, however, retain the more important characteristics of the primordial type. There appears to be no limit to the varieties of dogs, yet one can perceive by a glance that there is no specific difference between the huge Mont St. Bernard dog and the diminutive poodle, or between the sparse greyhound and the burly mastiff. All the varieties of our domestic fowl have ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... well-developed series of Cambrian deposits, representing both the lower and upper parts of the formation. In Bohemia, the Upper Cambrian, in particular, is largely developed, and constitutes the so-called "Primordial zone" of Barrande. Lastly, in North America, whilst the Lower Cambrian is only imperfectly developed, or is represented by the Huronian, the Upper Cambrian formation has a wide extension, containing fossils similar in character to the analogous strata in Europe, and known as the "Potsdam Sandstone." ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... subdivision, and is apparently the primordial and simplest condition of the class. My observations will be best given by taking a few special cases. When the shoot of a Hop (Humulus lupulus) rises from the ground, the two or three first-formed ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... or lesser number.... Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from one prototype.... All the organic beings, which have ever lived on the earth, may be descended from some one primordial form." Darwin, because of his great scholarship, fairness, and candor, won for his theory more favor than it inherently deserves. Darwin taught that, "The lower impulses of vegetable life pass, by insensible gradations, into the instinct of animals and the higher intelligence of ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit" (p. 317); and in another place he claims that "we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... arabes, and then, if the game goes against them, they invoke their rights of French citizenship in the grand manner. The Frenchman knows it all; he regrets that such creatures should be his own compatriots—regrets, maybe, that he is not possessed of the same primordial pushfulness and insensibility; and shrugs his shoulders in ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... odds were with the defensive. Moreover, Parker, having an athlete's confidence in his fists, suddenly responded to the instincts of primordial man. He leaped lightly to one side, caught the rushing giant's foot across his instep, and as Connick's moccasined feet went out from under him, the young engineer struck him behind the ear. He fell with a dismal thump of his head on the ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... manifold ideas, ceased in the end to enslave, though they still captivated Carlyle's mind; and he turns from him to the thinkers who deal with God's geometry, and penetrate into the abysses of being,—to primordial Kant, and his behemoth brother, Fichte. Nor does Hegel, or Schelling, or Schlegel, or Novalis escape his pursuit, but he hunts them all down, and takes what is needful to him, out of them, as his trophy. Schiller is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the cards, reshuffle the cards, resume, recommence. Adj. beginning &c v.; initial, initiatory, initiative; inceptive, introductory, incipient; proemial^, inaugural; inchoate, inchoative^; embryonic, rudimental; primogenial^; primeval, primitive, primordial &c (old) 124; aboriginal; natal, nascent. first, foremost, leading; maiden. begun &c v.; just begun &c v.. Adv. at the beginning, in the beginning, &c n.; first, in the first place, imprimis [Lat.], first and foremost; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... you have touched the spot. I can't possibly tell Norris myself. My natural pride is too enormous. Descended from a primordial atomic globule, you know, like Pooh Bah. And I shook hands with a duke once. The man Norris and I, I regret to say, had something of a row on the subject last term. We parted with mutual expressions of hate, and haven't spoken since. What I should like would be for somebody else to tell him ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... sequence of events, to seemingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world with invisible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception, like himself in their thought and action, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... hands became full of emphasis; his body grew less and less clumsy, more and more leonine. It has taken centuries and centuries to make the white man what he is to-day; yet, a single year of misfortune may throw him back into the primordial. For it is far easier to retrograde than to go forward, easier to let the world go by than to march along with it. Had he been less interested in Elsa and more concerned about his rehabilitation, self-analysis would have astonished Warrington. The blunt speech, the irritability ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... I suppose, is combined with several particles of b, it seems to me that this molecule ought to be divided into as many particles; but, if it is divided, it ceases to be unity, the primordial molecule. In short, I do ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... if, as we now believe, all animals and plants are descended from a single cell, they must be considered as cousins to one another, and as forming a single tree-like animal, every individual plant or animal of which is as truly one and the same person with the primordial cell as the oak a thousand years old is one and the same plant with the acorn out of which it has grown. This is easily understood, but will, I trust, be made ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... he had not been able even to satisfy himself as to whether they had no fingers, although that also was commonly said to be the fact. One of the miners, indeed, who had had more schooling than the rest, was wont to argue that such must have been the primordial condition of humanity, and that education and handicraft had developed both toes and fingers—with which proposition Curdie had once heard his father sarcastically agree, alleging in support of it ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... efforts to spread this understanding among the people. Their efforts are gravely hindered by two obstacles; one the professional tradition known as "the medical secret," the other the universal prevalence of that primordial ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... language of Burdach: "There is for me but one miracle, that of infinite existence, and but one mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from the infinite. So soon as we recognize this incomprehensible act as the general and primordial miracle, of which our reason perceives the necessity, but the manner of which our intelligence cannot grasp, so soon as we contemplate the nature known to us by experience in this light, there is for us no ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and his great shock of long, black hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward the ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the Epicurean psychology, is prior in order of time to the mental element; the former was primordial, while the latter was derivative from it by repeated processes of memory and association. But though such was the order of sequence and generation, yet when we compare the two as constituents of happiness to ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Infusoria differ but little from the living. The parent monad form might perfectly well survive unaltered and fitted for its simple conditions, whilst the offspring of this very monad might become fitted for more complex conditions. The one primordial prototype of all living and extinct creatures may, it is possible, be now alive! Moreover, as you say, higher forms might be occasionally degraded, the snake Typhlops SEEMS (?!) to have the habits of earth-worms. So that fresh ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... think how she has waited in serene loneliness while the deltas of Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges expanded, inch by inch, to spacious provinces, and the Yellow Sea shallowed up with the silt of winters innumerable—waited while the primordial civilisations of Copt, Accadian, Aryan and Mongol crept out, step by step, from paleolithic silence into the uncertain record of Tradition's earliest fable—waited still through the long eras of successive empires, while ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... sarcode of the zoologist, must be, if not identical, yet in a high degree analogous substances. Hence, from this point of view, the difference between animals and plants consists in this; that, in the latter, the contractile substance, as a primordial utricle, is enclosed within an inert cellulose membrane, which permits it only to exhibit an internal motion, expressed by the phenomena of rotation and circulation, while, in the former, it is not so enclosed. The protoplasm in the form of the primordial utricle is, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... misapprehension, of a kind directly contrary to the preceding. M. Comte, among other occasions on which he has condemned, with some asperity, any attempt to explain phenomena which are "evidently primordial" (meaning, apparently, no more than that every peculiar phenomenon must have at least one peculiar and therefore inexplicable law), has spoken of the attempt to furnish any explanation of the color belonging to each substance, "la couleur elementaire propre a ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... manufacture under the noses of the guards. They had examined everything he brought from the worksite, since he had been working in the evenings in his room, but ignored everything he manufactured as being beyond their comprehension. This primordial mental attitude had been of immense value for in addition to the sword he carried a sack of molotails, a simple weapon of assault whose origins were lost in pre-history. Small crocks were filled with the most ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... Of heads, and coins, and silver medals, And organ works, and broken pedals; (For I was once a-building music, Though soon of that employ I grew sick); And skeletons of laws which shoot All out of one primordial root; That you, at such a sight, would swear Confusion's self had settled there. There stands, just by a broken sphere, A Cicero without an ear, A neck, on which, by logic good, I know for sure a head once stood; But who it was the able master Had moulded ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... is inherent in the weakness (which at times doubtless surprises even the strongest ...) of desiring to set up its sorrowful view of the world as a theory, and treat it as absolutely true and fundamentally valid for all. Sorrow, as such, is no more a diseased state than is joy; both are alike primordial, necessary, indispensable elements and halves of human life. Who would venture to assert that the day might dispense with the night? And does not the latter's glorious starry sky rival in majesty (though different in kind) the former's bright ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... had been traversed from west to east and they had crossed the fierce bosom of Unaga's plateau. The reality of it was no better and only little worse than had been anticipated. It had been a journey of hills, everlasting hills, and interminable primordial forests, with dreary breaks of open plains. Each season had brought its own troubles, with always lying ahead the deadly anticipation of the winter yet ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... insists that man as a physical being is clearly of the same order as the gorilla and ape; and he does not shrink from accepting the possibility that they all may have sprung by successive stages or 'leaps' from the same primordial form. His concluding words are, that 'so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive periods of life—sensation, instinct, the intelligence of the higher mammalia, bordering on reason—and lastly the improvable reason of man himself, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... its significance, did it not carry with it the implication that the book was also the origin of English novel writing. The importance, therefore, of Euphues is not so much that it was primary, as that it was primordial; and, to be such, it must have laid its spell in some way or other upon succeeding writers. Our first task is therefore to enquire what this spell was, and to discover whether the attraction of Euphues must be ascribed to Lyly's own ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... comes out through the suffering and abuse, the starvation and the unremitting toil, the hardship and the fighting and the bitter cold. He wins his way to the mastership of his team. He becomes the best sledge dog in Alaska. And all the while there is coming out in him "the dominant primordial beast." ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without me. I should not exist without it." To see, in short, only the divine unity of laws, which could ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... sudden that seconds had already elapsed before Marion Grimston uttered the cry that rent her like the wail of some strong, primordial creature without ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... principle as well as from necessity, when he came to formulate a political constitution for his colony, he laid it down as the primordial principle: "I do, for me and mine, declare and establish for the first fundamental of the government of my province that every person that doth and shall reside therein shall have and enjoy the free possession of his or her faith and exercise of worship toward God, in such way and manner as ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... seemed sliding towards the turf. His fingers were twisted into the shock of mane, and the rough hair of the horse saved him. The gradient he was on lowered again, and then—"Whup!" said Ugh-lomi astonished, and the slant was the other way up. But Ugh-lomi was a thousand generations nearer the primordial than man: no monkey could have held on better. And the lion had been training the horse for countless generations against the tactics of rolling and rearing back. But he kicked like a master, and buck-jumped rather neatly. In five minutes Ugh-lomi lived a ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... and a primordial scene, such as might have been in the savage youth of the world. An open space in a dark forest, a ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two beasts, locked in combat, snapping and snarling ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The crowd is more partisan than the individual; ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... of this truth, have endeavored to simplify matters to the level of our ignorance, by reducing all primordial elements to one, or at most two, simple elements, and all forces to the form of one universal and irrational law; but the progress of science utterly blasts the effort. No scientific man now dreams of one primordial element. Chemistry reveals ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... rather believe that which I hold to be the correct explanation, viz. that He has given to a certain fundamental and primordial medium, certain qualities and properties, by, and through which are originated and perpetuated, all the motions of the heavenly bodies already existent in the universe, or that are ever likely to be existent ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... Teutons—for the most part—was to blame for this. Certainly when Walhall had succumbed to the flames and the primordial Ash-Tree sunk in the lapping waters of the treacherous Rhine, I felt that the end of the universe was at hand and it was with a sob I saw outside in the soft, summer-sky, riding gallantly in the blue, the full moon. It was the ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... primordial. To an eye looking down it would have seemed that man had never come there, and that this was the dawn of time. The deep waters lapped the silent shore until a gentle sighing sound arose, a sound that may have gone on unheard for ages. Close to the water ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... there were no full-swelling muscles, no wide-spreading shoulders, no clean-limbed straightness, no generous symmetry of outline. It represented strength, that body of my father's, strength without beauty; ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... precipitated itself into the cove below. These were the two things in Nature he had demanded to make his work possible. For the rest, the rugged immensity of scenery, the mighty contours of the aged land about him, the vastness of the harsh primordial world, so inhospitable, so forbidding under the fierce climate which Nature had imposed, made no appeal. It served, and so it was sufficient. The lights and shades under the summer sunlight were full of splendour. No artist eye could have gazed upon it all and missed ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum |
