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Complex   /kˈɑmplɛks/  /kəmplˈɛks/   Listen
Complex

noun
1.
A conceptual whole made up of complicated and related parts.  Synonym: composite.
2.
A compound described in terms of the central atom to which other atoms are bound or coordinated.  Synonym: coordination compound.
3.
(psychoanalysis) a combination of emotions and impulses that have been rejected from awareness but still influence a person's behavior.
4.
A whole structure (as a building) made up of interconnected or related structures.  Synonym: building complex.



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"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books



... first upon the bride; the sight of her filled him with a curious stir of emotion. Alarm, desire, affection, respect—and a queer element of reluctant dislike all played their part in that complex eddy. The grey dress made her a stranger to him, made her stiff and commonplace, she was not even the rather drooping form that had caught his facile sense of beauty when he had proposed to her in the Recreation Ground. There was something too that did not please him in the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... strength is uniform throughout a magnetic shell is called simple; if its strength varies it is termed complex. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... house in the town was infinitely slight—his common sense told him that. But supposing—just supposing that they actually had chosen his aunt's abode for their prey!... Conceivably they had learnt that Mrs. Maldon was to have a large sum of money under her roof. Conceivably a complex plan had been carefully laid. Conceivably one of the great burglaries of criminal history might be in progress. It was not impossible. No wonder that, with bank-notes loose all over the place, his shockingly negligent auntie should have special qualms concerning burglars ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... The red, sullen lips stamped the delicate, fanatical face with cruelty and barbaric indulgence, while yet there was an intensity in the eyes that showed the man was possessed of an idea which mastered him —a root-thought. David was at once conscious of a complex personality, of a man in whom two natures fought. He understood it. By instinct the man was a Mahdi, by heredity he was a voluptuary, that strange commingling of the religious and the evil found in so many criminals. In some far corner of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... with India; bilateral negotiations are under way to resolve disputed sections of the boundary with the USSR; a short section of the boundary with North Korea is indefinite; sporadic border clashes with Vietnam; involved in a complex dispute over the Spratly Islands with Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam; maritime boundary dispute with Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin; Paracel Islands occupied by China, but claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan; claims Japanese-administered Senkaku-shoto ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the cause of Suzanna's listlessness, spoke no word. She wondered why the child had lost interest in the festival, indeed in all things pertaining to the occasion. It was difficult, she finally decided, to know how to cope with a child so complex, so changeable. She determined to treat the new mood with indifference, as being the most potent method. So she asked of Suzanna the performance of daily duties just as usual. When she discovered Suzanna gazing at her, Maizie close beside her with the same degree of reflection in ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake

... so like and yet so different as they are? How do they come to be so strangely broken up? The triple synopsis, which has to do more with narrative, presents less difficulty, but the problem raised by these fragmentary parallelisms in discourse is dark and complex in the extreme; yet if it were only solved it would in all probability give us the key to a wide class of phenomena. The differences in these extra-canonical quotations do not exceed the differences between the Synoptic Gospels themselves; yet by far the larger proportion of critics ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... the best, but really the best. Dark clouds will be fringed with mercy. What we call now "baffling dispensations," will be seen to be wondrous parts of a great connected whole,—the wheel within wheel of that complex machinery, by which "all things" (yes, ALL things) are now ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff

... for its fruit, so a man for his work. A fruitless plant, an idle animal, is not found in the universe. They are all toiling, however secretly or slowly, in the province assigned them, and to a use in the economy of the world,—the higher and more complex organizations to higher and more catholic service; and man seems to play a certain part that tells on the general face of the planet,—as if dressing the globe for happier races of his own kind, or, as we sometimes fancy, for beings of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... consideration, or I thought of the business explosion which would follow any open breach between Jim and Cornish (though this seemed too remote for serious consideration), I began to ponder on the enormously complex system of credits we had ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... only by a careful and elaborate study of the behaviour of the animal cell and the body fluids vis-a-vis with the infecting bacterium that it becomes possible to throw light upon the complex problem whereby the cell opposes successful resistance to the diffusion of the invading microbe, or succeeds in driving out the microbe subsequently to ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... a shade more complex when we come to the Creeks. They told of four men who came from the four corners of the earth, who brought them the sacred fire, and pointed out the seven sacred plants. They were called the Hi-you-yul-gee. Having ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... altogether innocent of rouge or her eyebrows of pencil, what did he care; he delighted in her very faults; he would not have her different in the very slightest detail; everything was part of that complex, elusive fascination. And James thought of the skin which had the even softness of fine velvet, and the little hands. He called himself a fool for his shyness. What could have been the harm if he had taken those hands and kissed them? ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... of manufacture as the woollen stuffs of which nomad tribes make their tents. The Termites who construct vast dwellings of clay, the Beavers who build huts of wood and of mud, have in this industry reached the same point as Man. They do not build so well, no doubt, nor in so complex a fashion as modern architects and engineers, but they work in the same way. All these ingenious artisans operate without organs specially adapted to accomplish the effect which they reach. It is with such genuine industries ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... Maid? In the first place they wouldn't know how to obey her or anybody else, and in the second place it was of course not possible for them to take her military character seriously—that country-girl of seventeen who had been trained for the complex and terrible business ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... free, light step of the highborn maidens who, in primal times, pressed the flowers as they passed without crushing them. But all her true grace seemed to be concentrated in her eyes, which were deep and of a dark blue. The impression she made upon a beholder was very complex. And it would have been difficult to say whether the calm which pervaded every manifestation of her beauty was the result of conscious control or the ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... single argument, to contain, compressed into a short compass, a chain of several distinct arguments. But if each of these be fully developed, and the whole of what the author intended to imply be stated expressly, it will be found that all the steps, even of the longest and most complex train of reasoning, may be reduced into the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... receiverships again became common. Naturally the railroad managers attributed these calamities to the fact that they were so constantly being regulated; but they probably pushed this claim too far, for the causes of their troubles were more complex. ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... impossibility in this; it is only the natural process of evolution. In the beginning, the instincts of animals are confined to alimentation, self-protection, and the multiplication of their species. As time goes on and the needs of life become more complex, power follows need. We have been long accustomed to consider growth as applied almost exclusively to size in its various aspects. But Nature, who has no doctrinaire ideas, may equally apply it to concentration. A developing thing may expand in any given way or form. Now, it is ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... the experience of sixty years, still needs improvement, and that it was at first far more defective than it now is. But whoever seriously considers what it is to construct from the beginning the whole of a machine so vast and complex as a government, will allow that what Hastings effected deserves high admiration. To compare the most celebrated European ministers to him seems to us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe, who, before he could bake a single loaf, had to make his ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen these structures, and have ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... affected with a frivolous sense of humor which plunges him at the most inopportune moments into paroxysms of imperfectly suppressed laughter. Cusins is a spectacled student, slight, thin haired, and sweet voiced, with a more complex form of Lomax's complaint. His sense of humor is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... The complex polytheism of the monuments and the literature was not, however, the practical religion of many Egyptians. Local cults held possession of most of the nomes, and the ordinary Egyptian, instead of dissipating his ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... complex as Mr. Gladstone's requires the grasp of genius. We speak of "the duality of the human mind," but here are half a dozen spirits in one. They rule in turn, and occasionally several of them ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... pas? This time I'll act honestly and explain to you. Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... consideration, he was of opinion that their firing was intended as a response to the ineffectual fire of the few guns mounted on the fortifications of the place. Turning to the north he looked down from his position upon the extended and complex system of defenses of the citadel, the frowning curtains black with age, the green expanses of the turfed glacis, the stern bastions that reared their heads at geometrically accurate angles, prominent among them the three cyclopean salients, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... to ask why, if this free hybridization takes place in nature among the hickories, you do not have a perfect complex of trees showing all ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... instance. In Australia and California there is an intense dislike and fear toward the yellow races. The causes of this are complex; the chief among them are two, labor competition and instinctive race-hatred. It is probable that, if race- hatred did not exist, the difficulties of labor competition could be overcome. European immigrants also compete, but they are not excluded. In a sparsely populated ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... office as president of the council after the first summer spent in Jamestown. The sickness that caused much tension during his tenure was probably the malady loosely described by early Virginians as the "seasoning." The complex of symptoms ascribed to the seasoning bothered the settlers throughout the seventeenth century. Even as late as 1723 a recent arrival in Virginia wrote that "all that come to this country have ordinarily sickness at first which they ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes

... as that children are charming, or that twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is a fine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude; they are not even simple. The charm of children is very subtle; it is even complex, to the extent of being almost contradictory. It is, at its very plainest, mingled of a regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment of twilight, in the vulgarest drawing-room song ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... a simple organization of society prevailed, the school was not called upon to take up the practical work; but now society has become so complex that the use of practical activity is absolutely essential. Society to-day makes a greater demand than ever before upon each and all of its members for special skill and knowledge, as well as for breadth of view. These demands can be met only by such an improvement ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

... desired. This is a rough and a poor simile, when we consider how wonderful an instrument a human being is, with the body that burns with thought, and the spirit that quivers and cries with pain, and when we think how its innumerable, complex chords may be injured and untuned by suffering. The will may be ours, but something, we know not what, interposes to defeat our best efforts. That you have succeeded in producing so blessed a result, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... progressed sufficiently to round out the theory of Christianity, she had grasped a new standard. The contrast between the old and the new made itself instantly felt. On one hand was the simple and logical; on the other the complex and dogmatic. The Christian was able to measure proportionately how much should be laid upon her mind for study at once and while she still waited, ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... myself, I find developed and fulfilled in Shakespeare's writings. It seems as if he cleared up every one of our enigmas to us, tho we can not say, Here or there is the word of solution. His men appear like natural men, and yet they are not. These, the most mysterious and complex productions of creation, here act before us as if they were watches, whose dial-plates and cases were of crystal, which pointed out according to their use their course of the hours and minutes; while at the same time you could discern ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... investigation is to find unit values for strength and stiffness, etc. These, because of the complex structure of wood, cannot have a constant value which will be exactly repeated in each test, even though no error be made. The most that can be accomplished is to find average values, the amount of variation ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record

... the phratriac nomenclature are complex and probably insoluble. They are in part bound up with the problem of the origin of the organisation itself; of this nature, for example, is the question whether the names correspond to anything existing in the pre-phratriac stage, or whether the organisation was ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... machinery of modern society is so infinitely more complex than in ancient times, that the subdivision of human faculty is the result. The great men of the days of old were perforce universal geniuses, appearing at rare intervals like lighted torches in an antique world. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... as herself. He crumbled his bread to powder on the cloth, and when he raised his glass to drink, which he did often enough to fill up the time, his hand shook so as almost to spill his wine. Seeing him so nervous, she began to experience a kind of pity for him—some such complex feeling as a very humane person might have for a reptile he has been taught to loathe and fear when seeing it in pain—and at length surprised him by asking if he lived in Kingston. He replied that he usually spent the summer months there for the sake of the boating; and then, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... decidedly complex, costs and commissions," stammered the judge, becoming more turkey-red than he naturally was. "We won't retrospect. To ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster

... impulse he gave it, into a national encyclopaedia, possessing an irresistible momentum. Indeed, is not the very existence of that book in its current form a witness to the same Americanism which Webster displayed, only now in a firmer, finer, and more complex form? ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder

... Verlaine, "c'est d'etre absolument soi-meme." Of course if one concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's word "life," but with the word ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... filled the shelves to right and to left of it. Within was a small and cosy study. In contrast with the museum-like room out of which it opened, it was furnished in a severely simple fashion, and one more experienced in the study of complex humanity than Detective Sergeant Stokes must have perceived that here the real Nicol Brinn spent his leisure hours. Above the mantel was a life-sized oil painting of Mrs. Nicolas Brinn; and whereas the great room overlooking ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer

... genius, that had been in her, thrust away with the greatest possible despatch, buried out of sight in the hideously hard, cold earth. Snuffed out like a candle, and with as little ceremony, was all the warm, complex life that had made up this one, throbbing bit of humanity: for what it had been, not a soul alive now cared. And what a night, too, for one's first night underground! Brr!—At the thought of it, he drank another cup of coffee, and a fiery, stirring ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... from the Manuals! He felt at once ashamed and awed as he viewed at first hand the unfolding schematic structure. He was thrilled at sight of the selectors and analyzers of processed beryllium, the logic-and-semantic circuits in complex little bundles, the sensitized variant-tapes waiting for transferral impress, all revealed by a flick of Arnold's fingers that threw open entire sheathed sections to bare the inner secrets. The thousands of tiny transistors amazed ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse

... negative that we think it well to explain the philosophy of the etiquette of weddings, which is remotely founded on the early savage history of mankind, and which bears fruit in our later and more complex civilization, still reminding us of the past. In early and in savage days the man sought his bride heroically, and carried her off by force. The Tartar still does this, and the idea only was improved in patriarchal days ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... the big businesses are businesslike. They are not. Any housekeeper in a truthful mood, that is to say, any housekeeper in a bad temper, will tell you that they are not. But housekeepers, too, are human, and therefore inconsistent and complex; and they do not always stick to truth and bad temper. They are also affected by this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate; and cannot help feeling that anything so complicated must go like clockwork. But complexity is ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... meanwhile, anger gradually gave place to far more complex emotions. She sat well back in her chair, and clasped her hands firmly in her flowered Pompadour-muslin lap. Her eyes looked enormous as she kept them fixed gravely and steadily upon the speaker. For extraordinary ideas and perceptions ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... creative American spirit, and how large a part of the historic American ideals are to be carried over into that new age which is replacing the era of free lands and of measurable isolation by consolidated and complex industrial development and by increasing resemblances and connections between the New World and ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... insisted Mrs. Osborne. "I am not often mistaken, and I know she is not a common thief. Marcia and Phyllis, you may refund the ticket money privately, and I will consult with father about following up the child." This was the verdict in the Osborne home upon the complex discovery of stolen tickets and missing maid; but in spite of the mother's warning, some one must have trusted some one else with the story, for a brief account was used in the ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis

... into the reasons, real or fancied, for those prejudices of race and colour which we still retain, for it is only by removing the misconceptions and false notions that obscure our view that we can come to a clear understanding of the many complex issues that make up the great Native ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... rollers to allow for contraction and expansion. The ceiling of the audience room was of iron. The ornamental work of the proscenium, the tier balustrades, and the frames of the partitions between the boxes were all of metal. The stage was supported by a complex iron system of about four thousand light pieces so adjusted as to be removable in sections when it was desired to open the stage floor. Theater fires almost invariably originate on the stage, and, as an additional safeguard, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... science in collecting and analysing facts may be extended in two directions: by an examination (a) of the earlier and simpler forms of aesthetic experience, and (b) of the fuller and more complex experiences of those specially trained in the perception and enjoyment of beauty. (a) The former would be illustrated by a more methodical investigation into the rudimentary aesthetic likings of children and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... sober-hued damsel of the species, and weave about her aerial true lovers' knots, living chains, festoons, and intricate spirals, displaying each his bravest feathers, and seeking to dazzle the idol of the moment with audacious agility, and the beauty of complex curves and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... but in point of fact this was not so, for the lad had an extraordinary natural faculty for calculation, and his schoolmaster was often astonished by the rapidity with which he could prepare in his brain long and complex calculations, and that in a space of time little beyond that which it would take to write the question ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty

... poet—will discover that the system of credit by means of which our civilisation works, deserves an epic. Neither the wanderings of Ulysses nor the discoveries of a traveller through Paradise and Purgatory make so splendid an appeal to the imagination as this vastly complex machine which Ascher and men like him guide. The oceans of the world are covered thick with ships. Long freight trains wind like serpents across continents. Kings build navies. Ploughmen turn up the clay. The wheels of factories go round. The minds of men bend nature to their purposes by ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... develop the actual consequences of any system of policy, or, indeed, of any change in human relationship, man being so infinitely complex, and the interaction of ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... if any, belongs to nature, not to the individual agent; and of the remaining number of good works, nine are derived from vices for one that has its origin in virtue. I have often in looking at the water-works, and complex machinery of our manufactories, indulged a humorous mood by fancying that the hammers, cogs, fly-wheels, &c. were each actuated by some appetite, or passion—hate, rage, revenge, vanity, cupidity, &c. while the general result ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... is extremely complex, and several other writers have written upon it. Mr Borlase, for instance, has argued in his big book on the Dolmens that the cromlechs, and presumably the Diarmuid and Crania legend, is connected with old religious rites of an erotic ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory

... theatrical remorse. If Guion was really contrite, if he really wanted to relieve the world of his presence, he could blow his brains out. Ashley had known, or known of, so many who had resorted to this ready remedy for a desperate plight that it seemed simple. His thoughts were too complex, however, for immediate expression, and, before he could decide what to respond, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... have put canary-birds within; and so made an aviary of it. It is surprising what a different air may be imparted to the meanest thing by the dainty hand of taste. Nor must I omit the helm itself, which was one of a new construction, and a particular favorite of the captain. It was a complex system of cogs and wheels and spindles, all of polished brass, and looked something like a printing-press, or power-loom. The sailors, however, did not like it much, owing to the casualties that happened to their imprudent fingers, by catching ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... somewhere), I hope you will like things in it at least. It seems to me full of power. Two hundred copies went off in the first fortnight, which is a good beginning in these days. So I am to confess to a satisfaction in the American piracies. Well, I confess, then. Only it is rather a complex smile with which one hears: 'Sir or Madam, we are selling your book at half price, as well printed as in England.' 'Those apples we stole from your garden, we sell at a halfpenny, instead of a penny as you do; they are much appreciated.' Very gratifying indeed. It's worth while to rob us, that's ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... following studies are taken from the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think are the chief points in that complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote only that revival of classical ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... the famous Westminster Assembly, called together by the Parliament of England to consider the entire state of the country in matters of religion. The business intrusted to it was vast and complex. It was to revise and redefine the national creed, after its long lapse into so-called Arminianism and semi-popish error, and to advise also as to the new system of church government and the new forms of worship that should come ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... where I had left him by the edge of the lake, staring as if hypnotized at the slowly moving swans. But I would have been prepared to wager that he saw neither swans nor lake, but mentally was far from the spot, deep in some complex maze of reflection through which no ordinary mind ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... our words in a dictionary under twenty-four letters, so do they arrange all their words, or characters, under two hundred and fourteen radical signs; the simplest radicals being the first and the more complex the last.' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... words the sense of unlawful and immense forces impending—"I need for a stupendous experiment with sound, an experiment which will lead in turn towards a yet greater and final one. There is no harm in your knowing that. To produce a certain transcendent result I want a complex sound—a chord, but a complete and perfect chord in which each note is sure of itself and ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... to the Paying Teller. This was to stop at every post-office. We had received but one mail while in camp, which had been brought in a sail-boat from an office twenty miles away. But the Paying Teller had given and written the most intricate and complex directions for the retention or forwarding of his mail to every postmaster in the country we had passed through, and these directions, as we afterward found, had so puzzled and unsettled the minds of these postmasters that ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... the extended and rather complex procedure just related, it is interesting to note that the Tinguian woman is one of those mythical beings whom careless or uninformed writers have been wont to describe as giving birth to her children without bodily discomfort. ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... takes the place of the sexual object. Analysis of extreme cases of masochistic perversions show that there is a cooeperation of a large series of factors which exaggerate and fix the original passive sexual attitude (castration complex, conscience). ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... of peace, members of the Armed Services are expected to respond to situations that are more extensive, more complex, and take longer to reach fulfillment than the situations to which the majority of men instinctively respond. Even the length of the enlistment period looks like a slow march up a 60-mile grade. Promotion is slow, duty frequently monotonous. It is all too easy for the individual to ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... history of Russian letters, Ivan Turgenef is the most complex figure. Nay, with the exception of Shakespeare he is perhaps the most complex figure in all literature. He is universal, he is provincial; he is pathetic, he is sneering; he is tender, he is merciless; he is sentimental, he is frigid. He can be as compact as Tacitus, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... a few minutes, then wandered into the empty Orion shed, abandoned now that its crew and rocket had moved to the firing pad and blockhouse. As he stood looking at the complex test equipment a sedan pulled up and Gee-Gee Gould got out. The electronics chief waved at him and trotted by into the project office. He returned in a moment with a portable tube and circuit tester under his arm and paused to ask, ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... unit at any one time may be measured by taking it away and seeing how much the output of the establishment is reduced. The law, however, applies to all the mills, shops, mines, etc., considered as a social complex of working establishments. As the working society grows larger without growing richer in the aggregate, the power of labor to produce goods of all kinds grows less. At any one time this producing power is measured by taking away ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... or to insulated groups of events. Before there could spring up the idea of universal history, it was necessary that there should be a broader view of mankind as a whole. The ancient Stoics had a glimpse of the race as a family, and of the nations as forming one complex unity. The conquests and extended dominion of Rome first suggested the idea of universal history. Polybius, a Greek in the second century B.C., had watched the progress of Rome, in its career of conquest, until "the affairs ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... imagination which he would on the spot have flourished into space. This perhaps in some sort arose from Mr Podsnap's blushing young person being, so to speak, all cheek; whereas there is a possibility that there may be young persons of a rather more complex organization. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... another fancy, which suspects it not, a mixture of fantastic independence and blind obedience, something indescribable, intermediate between slavery and liberty, which pleased Gringoire,—a spirit essentially compound, undecided, and complex, holding the extremities of all extremes, incessantly suspended between all human propensities, and neutralizing one by the other. He was fond of comparing himself to Mahomet's coffin, attracted in two different directions by two ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... degree. The uterus, nearly as large as in the adult female, lay between the bladder and rectum, and was enclosed between two layers of peritoneum, to which, on either side of the uterus, were attached the testes. There was also shown in London the pelvic organs from a case of complex or vertical hermaphroditism occurring in a child of nine months who died from the effects of an operation for the radical cure of a right inguinal hernia. The external organs were those of a male with undescended testes. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... material must be promptly removed if the individual would enjoy health. Nature has provided adequate means for the removal of these substances which are valueless to the economy, the retention of which obstructs and irritates the complex mechanism of the system, the principal avenues for its expulsion being the lungs, the skin and the intestinal canal. The latter is infinitely more important than the others, since by it the waste products of digestion are expelled. If it fails to promptly fulfil its office, every vital function ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... anything more than experimental. The first purchase consisted of ten thousand acres. On the other hand, a single company in one part of the country visited by Doctor Speek is making a fine settlement of sixty thousand acres. Land settlement is extremely complex and thousands of honest men have developed skill and knowledge in the solution of its problems. We need their services and we must use every effort to protect them, as well as the settler, against dishonest and incompetent individuals, agents ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek

... sympathetically the whole range of human passion within himself. He was the first of the world's dramatists that exhibited the passions in their evolutions, and in their subtlest complications. And the moral proportion he preserved in exhibiting the complex and often wild play of the passions must have been largely due to the harmony of his soul with the constitution of things. What the Restoration dramatists regarded or understood as moral proportion, was not moral proportion at all, but a proportion ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... words, and do not need it, since they can only be isolated in thought from each other by a distance greater than that which any vocal sound can traverse; but their organs of voice and hearing are far more complex and perfect than ours, and their atmosphere infinitely more ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... universal dials required adjusting before use, and for this a mariner's compass and a spirit-level were necessary. But it would be tedious and useless to enumerate the various forms designed, and, as a rule, the more complex ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... leaves, and the shadow by which to express them. There was work enough in that short piece of hedge by the potato-field for a good pencil every day the whole summer. And when done, you would not have been satisfied with it, but only have learned how complex and how thoughtful and far reaching Nature is in the simplest of things. But with a straight-edge or ruler, any one could draw the iron railings in half an hour, and a surveyor's pupil could make them look as well as Millais himself. Stupidity to stupidity, genius to genius; any hard ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... may not flinch, but pulse and heart, colour and articulation, are always cowards. No philosophy will teach them bravery in the stern presence. And yet there are considerations which rob death of its ghastliness, and help to reconcile us to it. The thoughtful happiness of a human being is complex, and in certain moved moments, which, after they have gone, we can recognise to have been our happiest, some subtle thought of death has been curiously intermixed. And this subtle intermixture it is which gives the happy moment its character—which makes the difference ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... little, leaving silences between them full of wonder. The details of life, the ordinary personalities, were blotted out. Without explanation or speech of any kind, they understood each other. They were not, in this hour, members of a complex and artificial society; they were not even man and woman; they were two souls stripped of everything but the need for ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... we have been able to measure and to weigh. The telescope has enabled us also to penetrate deep into outer space; we have learnt of other systems besides that of our own sun and its dependents, many of them far more complex; clusters and clouds of stars have been revealed to us, and mysterious nebulae, which suggest by their forms that they are systems of suns in the making. More lately the invention of the spectroscope has informed us of the very elements which ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder

... which eclipsed anything in the history of the world. It was unquestionably his aim and intention to make the event an illustration of the power of the British Empire, the loyalty of its people and the unity of its complex races. The pride of the King in his great position, the knowledge which he had acquired of the Empire in his innumerable travels, the statecraft which he had inherited and developed, were all factors in the determination to make this occasion memorable. ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought. The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those of sins ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... the waterbag, is concerned in the macerating, kneading, and mixing, as well as in regurgitation for rumination or the chewing of the cud. The action of the first three stomachs is merely preparatory to digestion. Thus it would seem that as a result of their complex anatomical and functional arrangement the feed of the ox, when of good quality and wholesome, is in the most favorable condition possible for the digestive process when it reaches the fourth stomach, where true digestion first ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... relaxation, in a week of such a life!" continued Mr. Britton. "Re-creation, in the true sense of the word. The simplest joys are the sweetest, but our lives have grown too complex for us to appreciate them. Our amusements and recreations, as we call them, are often more wearing ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... roof, simple as that of a country barn, and of which only the horizontal beams catch the eye, connects an entirely plain outside wall with an interior one, pierced by round-headed openings; in which are inserted pieces of complex tracery, as foreign in conception to the rest of the work as if the Pisan armata had gone up the Rhine instead of to Crete, pillaged South Germany, and cut these pieces of tracery out of the windows of some church in an ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... of nature, thus stated, the evolutionists go on to infer genealogy, the birth descent of the larger from the smaller, and of the more complex from the simpler forms, as the only scientific explanation. But it is by no means the only scientific explanation of the order of nature. The best naturalists, from Moses to Agassiz, have regarded the order of nature ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... Cressy's letters, and had thrown them down without reading them when he had found out his mistake, seemed natural. For if he had read them he would undoubtedly have kept them to show to Cressy. The complex emotions that had disturbed the master on the discovery of Uncle Ben's relationship to the writer of the letters were resolving themselves into a furious rage at Seth. But before he dared revenge himself he must ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... is somewhat complex. It will suffice to say that within the meter box are thin disks which are moved by the stream of gas that passes them. This movement of the disks is recorded by clockwork devices on a dial face. In this way, the number of cubic ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... was now flushed and indignant. Yet the very manner of her indignation showed the truth of the new psychology of dreams, for, as I learned afterward, people often become indignant when the Freudists strike what is called the "main complex." ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... rough ore in its receptacle, and suddenly it seemed seized by a vice within, and vanished. He proceeded then, while dexterously attending to the complex movements, to open door after door, to show the astonished spectators the rapid transitions the metal underwent, and suddenly, in the midst of his pride, he stopped short, for, like a lightning-flash, came across his mind the remembrance of the fatal papers. Within ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... a medium for the display of individual linguistic dexterity; giving no thing its proper name, it delighted in paraphrase, allusion, word play, unexpected comparisons and abundance of metaphors, and revelled in the elusive, delicate, subtle, and complex. Hence conversation turned constantly to love and gallantry; thus woman developed to a wonderful degree, unattainable to but few, the art of conversation, politeness and courtesy of manners, and social relations, at the same time purifying language ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... set in a somewhat antique and biblical phraseology. Some of them were curious reveries, dwelling much upon the perception of natural things through scent. He complained, I remember, that life was so much less interesting in winter because scents were so much less sweet and less complex than in summer. But the whole of the writings showed a serene exaltation of mind. There was not a touch of repining or resignation about them. He spoke much of the aesthetic pleasure that he received ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... her struggle to fill in the gaps—gaps she was only just beginning to realize existed—was a difficult one. The stronger emotions of hate and fear were no strangers to her; but for the first time she was discovering how difficult and complex was this unusual feeling of love. She let Jason go because she was incapable of any other action. Of course she could stop him by force, but if she had learned anything in the past few weeks, it was the discovery that this was one area where he was ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey

... toolmakers by the end of the 18th century gave buyers a wide choice. The catalogue of Sheffield's Castle Hill Works offered 20 combinations of ready-stocked tool chests; the simplest contained 12 carpenter's tools and the most complex, 39, plus, if desired, an additional assortment of gardening implements (fig. 11). In 1857, the Arrowmammett Works of Middletown, Connecticut, producers of bench and molding planes, published an illustrated catalogue that offered 34 distinct types that included everything from ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh

... the Salmon River lies just above the twin glaciers. Scenically, these are by far the more impressive, and they present a more complex engineering problem; yet the canon itself was the real strategic point in the struggle between the railroad-builders. The floor of the valley immediately above Garfield glacier, though several miles wide, was partly filled with detritus ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... who were invested with complex functions, and with very extensive power, travelled through the empire exercising legal jurisdiction over all matters of importance. They assembled all the placites, or provincial authorities, and inquired particularly ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... adventure, of guitars and latticed windows, of warm brilliant days and gorgeous silent nights, under purple heavens and white stars. And he was to have her all to himself, with no one near to interrupt, no other friends, even, and no possible rival. She was not guarded now by a complex social system, with its responsibilities. He was the most lucky of men. Others had only seen her in her drawing-room or in an opera-box, but he was free to ford mountain-streams at her side, or ride with her under arches ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... centrolenids, both of which have generally more delicate (except for casque-headed hylids, such as Corythomantis, Diaglena, Osteocephalus, Triprion) and generalized skulls. Allophryne on the other hand has a strongly ossified central region (cranial roofing bones and sphenethmoid complex) and a weak peripheral zone. The peripheral elements are reduced (maxilla, pterygoid, and squamosal) or absent (quadratojugal), whereas the frontoparietals, nasals, sphenethmoid, prooetics, and exoccipitals form a compact ...
— Systematic Status of a South American Frog, Allophryne ruthveni Gaige • John D. Lynch

... was still, and must always be, the high vocation of the poet; on this ground of universal humanity, of ancient and now almost forgotten nobleness, to take his stand, even in these trivial, jeering, withered, unbelieving days; and through all their complex, dispiriting, mean, yet tumultuous influences, to 'make his light shine before them,' that it might beautify even our 'rag- gathering age' with some beams of that mild, divine splendour, which had long left us, the very possibility of which was denied; heartily and in earnest ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... mannerism. It was a very notable and gracious piece of work. He has the player's first gift, an arresting personality. His elocution has distinction. He conveys the beauty of the words and the richness of the packed thought thoughtfully. The complex play of action and motive—the purpose blunted by overmuch thinking, the spurs to dull revenge, the self-contempt, the assumed antic disposition, at times the real mental disturbance—all this was set before ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various

... The easiest relations to apprehend are those which hold between the different parts of a single complex sense-datum. For example, I can see at a glance the whole of the page on which I am writing; thus the whole page is included in one sense-datum. But I perceive that some parts of the page are to the ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... adaptation of means to ends which shows an infinite knowledge and infinite benevolence at work; but no one of the instances in which they found their argument, from the watch, which affords the primal illustration, to the human body, which furnishes the most complex confirmations, is a more astonishing or exquisite proof of pre-arrangement than is the adaptedness of gold and silver to the purposes of currency. Your standard or measure, for instance, must, in the first place, possess a certain uniformity; if it be a measure of capacity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... we perform certain mental operations on the symbols of number or of quantity, and, by proceeding step by step from more simple to more complex operations, we are enabled to express the same thing in many different forms. The equivalence of these different forms, though a necessary consequence of self-evident axioms, is not always, to our minds, self-evident; but the mathematician, ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell

... a position should be held by a girl like you, who can have no scientific knowledge of the many complex problems.... However," he said, a ray of brightness lightening his displeasure, "your State is notoriously backward in this field. Your department, I fancy, can hardly be ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... the politics of Canada are as complex and as difficult to be understood as those of the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... disappointment and distrust. The secret of the unsatisfactoriness of Spencer is to be found in his method, which is an elaborate and plausible attempt to explain the evolution of the universe by referring the complex to the simple, the more highly organized to the less organized. His principle of Evolution never freed itself from bondage ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn



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