"Adequacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... floating free in the air without a base to stand on, without a pillar to lean against. The consequent feeling of isolation inspires at times even the strongest and most independent self-taught man—and Chopin, as a pianist, may almost be called one—with distrust in the adequacy of his self-acquired attainments, and an exaggerated idea of the advantages of a school education. "I cannot create a new school, because I do not even know the old one." This may or may not be bad reasoning, but it ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the system of Adam Smith. Admitting that we have the sympathetic feeling that Smith proceeds upon, he questions its adequacy to constitute the moral sentiment, on the ground that it is not a perpetual accompaniment of our actions. There must be a certain vividness of feeling or of the display of feeling, or at least a sufficient cause of vivid feeling, to call the sympathy into action. In ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... chain of command, though providing the necessary linkage, does not of itself ensure that the command organization will be adequate, nor can it ensure that unity of effort will result. To meet the requirement of adequacy, there is needed in the person of each commander not only the ability to arrive at sound military decision, to plan, and to direct the operations of his command, but also an appreciation of the position which ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... while they were furnishing their flat, that she knew her own mind at least as well as he knew his, and a fear haunted his thoughts that perhaps this adequacy of knowledge might bring trouble to them. Gradually he found himself consulting her as an equal, even accepting her advice, and seldom instructing her as one instructs a beloved pupil. When she required advice, she asked for it. At Ballyards, he had seen his mother ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... mystery of the world beyond. All alike were controversial, and quick enough to ridicule their rivals; none was hopefully constructive, or (unless in the poetic enthusiasm of a Lucretius) very confident of the adequacy of its own conceptions. They all rather quickened the sense of emptiness in human existence, than satisfied it; {244} at the best they enabled men to "absent themselves a little while from the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... to the grave discussion of mere frivolities and the arduous pursuit of intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of a little modesty, a little impartial pondering over personal experience might suggest a doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy method of dealing with a large chapter of the history of the human mind. Even an acquaintance with popular literature which had extended so far as to include that part of the contributions of Sam Slick ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... profess to be sure of that, however, nor have I unqualified confidence in the adequacy of musical notation, no matter how skillfully employed, to convey a truthful idea ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... individuality applied to the organism is accordingly a logical fiction? And it is just upon this notion of the individuality of the organism that the teleological concept is based. The teleological view can perhaps not be completely refuted until the adequacy of materialistic explanations has been finally shown; but it is certain that the most promising method for research is the materialistic ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... an institution for teaching purposes, its school-room and class-rooms should be the most essential portion of its plant. Without discussing the adequacy of the definition, we will begin with these. We were not ill provided; with an exception or two, the rooms appropriated for class-rooms answered the purpose well. Some of them were spacious; the rest were large enough for the wants of the classes, limited to an average ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... then he makes him self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which is bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And what is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is the acceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequently the almost total lack either of the assurance of grace or of the appeal to the will. No wonder such exhortations cannot stem the tide of an ever increasing worldliness. Such preaching stimulates the mind; in both the better ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... manifestation of the life of feeling is what we call Sentiment. Sentiment is aroused in response to certain so-called ideal states of thought. The trend of mental growth toward constantly greater adequacy in its knowledge leads it to anticipate conditions when its attainments will be made complete. There are certain sorts of reality whose completeness, thus imagined, arouses in us emotional states of the greatest power and ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... duty for each class. Under the circumstances, to confine the findings of the commission to an increased duty on lower-priced hats is, in one important particular, to fall short of the statutory responsibility undertaken when the commission ordered an investigation of the adequacy of the present 60 per cent ad valorem duty as a measure of equalized costs in the United States and foreign countries. A partial conclusion from the commission's data, where, as here, a comprehensive conclusion is clearly warranted, would appear ...
— Men's Sewed Straw Hats - Report of the United Stated Tariff Commission to the - President of the United States (1926) • United States Tariff Commission
... suicide, since riff-raff can neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidder of bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty years' practical democratic experience who believes in the political adequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... this idea of the proper functions of government and the relative adequacy of existing governments to perform them that seems to be deeply questioned. Life has suddenly grown more complex. The individual is brought face to face with new demands upon him. He becomes, it may be, a member of new groups, having new functions. Government also, and correspondingly, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation. I quoted this opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too complex to be decided off-hand. I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... objective warrant, would thus be seen to have a subjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and, however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjective adequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence. It is and will be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of all attempts to solve the riddle of life,—some falling below it by defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every mental ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of instruction offered is best illustrated in the strongest American universities, some of which are tax-supported and some endowed. These universities maintain a great variety of courses of instruction in subjects none of which was taught with the faintest approach to adequacy in American universities sixty years ago; but in making these extensions the universities have not found it necessary to reduce the instruction offered in the classics and mathematics. The traditional cultural studies are still ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... must have before him the same materials as German scholars—has he not?" Dorothea's timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she was in the strange situation of consulting a third person about the adequacy of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... are made up of syntactic combinations found on almost every page of Old English prose. That they occur so rarely in poetry is strong presumptive evidence, if further evidence were needed, in favor of the adequacy of ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... problem of the twentieth century, in which no great country is so largely and directly interested as is the United States. For the reason given it is essentially a naval question, the third in which the United States finds its well-being staked upon naval adequacy. ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... investigation must belong to the psychical side of human life—whether they hold that man's ultimate end is to be found in the sphere of pleasure or maintain that his well-being lies in the realisation of virtue for its own sake. The problems as to the origin and adequacy of conscience, as to the meaning and validity of voluntary action; the questions concerning motives and desires, as to the historical evolution of moral customs, and man's relation at each stage of his history to the social, political ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the minute I was shown into the Editor's room, where again I was struck by the imaginative adequacy of the surroundings. Before coming to the man himself let me say something of these. The floor was not bare or even sprinkled with sawdust, as it might easily have been, but it was covered by a comfortable carpet, probably from Axminster. Comfort was indeed the note. The desk was neither ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... method of calculation and further data see "The Adequacy and Economy of Some City Dietaries" by H.C. Sherman and L.H. Gillett, published by The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 105 East Twenty-second Street, New York City, from which these figures ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... original, synthetic, and emotional) is a language, from its beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way so sure, leave ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... remarking that the subject of Colonial verse, and the immense future before the English-speaking poets, is allied to a question that is very great, the adequacy or inadequacy of English poetry—British, American, and Colonial—to the destiny of the race that produces it. The article enunciated the thesis that if the English language should not in the near future contain the finest ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... an unparalleled struggle between certain isolated forces of the Allies and all the combined resources of the Teutons ought to banish the notion that the results achieved are the fruits only of Germany's military and naval efficiency. In truth, the adequacy of her military and naval forces constitutes but an integral part of a much vaster system. It has hitherto been the fashion among British and French writers to dwell exclusively on the comprehensiveness of the measures adopted by the Germans to fashion their land and sea defences into ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... England and Western Europe. His ambition was in nothing less than Alexander's, but his conception of means adequate to campaigns was meager. A task he could see and a kingdom he could desire, but adequacy of preparation for world-conquest never crept into his thought. He was as niggardly in supplying his generals and armies as Queen Elizabeth, and all but as voluble in abuse of his servants in the field or cabinet, and as thankless to those who had wrought ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the coiner of apothegms himself, that of being content with a half truth when the whole truth cannot be conveniently crowded into narrow compass. Herein lies, I think, the chief source of Arnold's occasional failure to quite satisfy our sense of adequacy or of justice, as, for instance, in his celebrated handling of the four ways of regarding nature, or the passage in which he describes the sterner self of the working-class as liking "bawling, hustling, and smashing; ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... but without embarrassment and with full meaning; and as if conscious of the adequacy of her answer, she forbore to embroider on the theme. There was a momentary silence, while the French woman gazed contemplatively out of the open window of the limousine, at a skyscraping apartment building which jutted boldly into a curve of the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... moral investigation. No doubt my conclusions on this weighty question, which has hitherto been very unsatisfactorily examined, would receive much light from the application of the same principle to the whole system, and would be greatly confirmed by the adequacy which it exhibits throughout; but I must forego this advantage, which indeed would be after all more gratifying than useful, since the easy applicability of a principle and its apparent adequacy give no very certain ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant
... with the attempt to base Religion upon anything but honest enquiry into truth: and yet the professed Philosophers are just those who will most readily recognize that there are—if not what are technically called degrees of truth—still different levels of thought, different degrees of adequacy and systematic completeness, even within the limits of thoroughly philosophical thinking. I shall assume that you are not content to remain at the level of ordinary unreflecting Common-sense or of merely ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... have administered the following stinging rebuke to the skeptical critics who sneered about missionaries and declared the adequacy of civilization without them:— ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... my enthusiasm, reawakened by the felicitous adequacy of this device, he had seized his hat and was clattering ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... question, since, admitting the South's basal contention, the right in question depended upon sufficiency of grievance. As, in the South's view, the case was one of sovereigns one party of whom, without referee, was about to break a compact without the other's consent, the adequacy of the grievance should, to excuse the step, have been absolutely beyond question. On the contrary it was subject ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the substitutional adequacy of images. E. g., I imagine my absent dog, Bismarck's dog, whom I know only pictorially, and finally, the dog of Alcibiades, whose appearance is known only by the fact that he was pretty and that his master had cut off ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... work as a whole, and as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of these two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. To attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within the limits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprise which I think should claim, from all at least who are not ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... it were, in a musical concert, wherein the seeming discords are really meant to bring out a fundamental harmony. In short, all goes on in nature as in the works of human genius, where, though the result may be trifling, there is at least perfect adequacy between the object made and the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... had too much of anything is by FEELING that too much: so, by the same token, when we don't feel the excess (and I am contending, mind, that in "The Awkward Age" the multiplicity yields to the order) how do we know that the measure not recorded, the notch not reached, does represent adequacy or satiety? The mere feeling helps us for certain degrees of congestion, but for exact science, that is for the criticism of "fine" art, we want the notation. The notation, however, is what we lack, and the ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... no equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard, against finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed in the balance and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... advanced to the third of its natural stages by being submitted to the critical test of experience. Nothing short of this will ever satisfy the mass of mankind of the feasibility of the system proposed, or of its adequacy to meet the evils complained of; nothing less will set free the minds of many thousands of intelligent persons to inquire into other methods of reform than the fair trial of the single-tax system, and its failure to cure the evils which its author expected it to cure. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... cheerfulness of confidence and completeness of capability both unknown dangers and the perils by which he has been educated; seizing the useful in the lives of the beasts and men nearest him, and assimilating it with marvellous rapidity; he presents to the world a picture of complete adequacy which it would be difficult to match in any other walk of life. He is a strong man, with a strong man's virtues and a strong man's vices. In him the passions are elemental, the dramas epic, for he lives in the age when men are close to nature, and draw from her their forces. He ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... suffused his art and made it victorious. The same forms of expression, lacking this spirit, would have lacked the triumph. All of them, indeed, are not equally fine. Mr. Irving's 'Mathias' and 'Louis XI,' are higher performances than his 'Shylock' and 'Dorincourt,' higher in imaginative tone and in adequacy of feeling and treatment. But, throughout all these forms, the drift of his spirit, setting boldly away from conventions and formalities, has been manifested with delightful results. He has always seemed ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... need, there is no sort of experience in human life from which there does not come or has not come a contribution to men's religious ideas. At every challenge men have to put forth effort, feel doubt of adequacy, be thwarted, perceive the chill shadow of their mortality. At every challenge comes the possibility of help from without, the idea of eluding frustration, the aspiration towards immortality. It is possible to classify ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... their importance, its publication in a popular review was immediately seized upon as "an avowed and definite declaration against some of the leading ideas on which the Mechanical Philosophy depends," and as being "fatal to the adequacy of the Mechanical Philosophy as any explanation of organic evolution,"[198]—an expression of opinion which would be repudiated by every Darwinian. For, even admitting the interpretation which Mr. Spencer puts on the facts he adduces, they are all included in the causes which Darwin himself recognised ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... alone is decorated" [Footnote: Descent of Man, vol. i p. 421.] Such sentences are of continual occurrence, and do duty in the argument as if they expressed ascertained facts. And not only this, but in the very part of the work which is devoted to establishing the adequacy of sexual selection to produce certain effects, that adequacy is assumed from the very beginning. Thus, we read, "That these characters are the result of sexual selection is clear," [Footnote: Ibid. p. 258.] before we have got six pages into an argument which occupies ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life. There is, then, a real propriety in calling beauty a manifestation of God to the senses, since, in the region of sense, the perception of beauty exemplifies that adequacy and perfection which in general we objectify in ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... spirit if it had taken the trouble really to think out the problem of war finance on a long view instead of proceeding along a haphazard line, adjusting peace methods to war without any consideration as to their adequacy? If the problem had been really thought out beforehand the Government must have seen clearly that the real economic problem in war-time is not merely a question of raising money, since that can at any time be done easily by means of a printing-press, but of diverting ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... with which it was covered, the lights, the plate, then to the Vandykes behind the guests, and the great mirrors in between—came back to the table, and passed from face to face, till again it rested upon David. The conviction of her husband's handsome looks and natural adequacy to this or any world, with which her survey ended, brought with it a strange mixture of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 1663, who comforted him in his closing years; a man of fervent, impulsive temperament, and a lover of music, he was sincere in controversy, magnanimous in character, and of deep religious faith; the richness, melody, and simplicity of his poetry, the sublimity of his great theme, and the adequacy of its treatment, place him among the greatest poets of the world; in later years he leaned to Arianism, and broke away from the restraints of outward religious practice; his last prose work, a Latin treatise on "Christian Doctrines," was lost at the time ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood |
