"Reducible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Association has nothing to do with this. It knows its function to be the investigation of facts, and of facts only; and, as was said, no sect was ever yet framed on undoubted facts. Now what are the facts of Spiritualism up to this date? They are reducible to two:—1st. The continued life and individuality of the spirit body of man after it has quitted its body of flesh; and, 2nd. Its communion with spirits still in the flesh, under certain conditions, by physical exhibition and ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... to Jeremiah. The text of the first, verses 17-18, is uncertain. If with the help of the Greek we render it as follows it implies not an actual, but an inevitable and possibly imminent, siege of Jerusalem. The couplet in 17 may alone be original and 18, the text of which is reducible neither to metre nor wholly to sense, ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... which has been the source of all improvement, has been the parent of no small progeny of follies and absurdities; to trace these latter is the object of the present volume. Vast as the subject appears, it is easily reducible within such limits as will make it comprehensive without being wearisome, and render its study both ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... original or primary shape is represented by Akasa. (Really every form of matter is finally reducible to Akasa.)* ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... cases, the fusion of the metal is accompanied by reduction from the state of oxide; in these the slag should be basic. It is not easy to reduce the whole of a reducible oxide (say oxide of copper or of iron) from a slag in which it exists as a borate or silicate; there should be at least enough soda present to liberate it. When the object is to separate one metal, say copper, without reducing an unnecessary amount of another ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... with resounding galleries, and dismal state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and encounter any number of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little originality, and "walk" in a beaten track. Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... you may, this globe of ours remains quite a bulky affair. The world in little is not reducible to a microscopic point. The nations collected to show their riches, crude and wrought, bring with them also their wants. For the display, for its comfort and good order, not only space, but a carefully-planned organization and a multiplicity of appliances are needed. Separate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... secure the due preparation, development, and culmination, without wasteful prodigality or confusing want of symmetry, constitute Composition, which is to the structure of a treatise what Style—in the narrower sense—is to the structure of sentences. How far Style is reducible to law will be ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... original plans upon similar rules." White's Classical Essay on Architecture compares the Norman with the Gothic, where he says: "In what is usually called the Norman period, the general proportions and outlines of the Churches are reducible to certain rules of setting out by the plain Square. As Architecture progressed the Square gradually disappeared, and the proportion of general outline, as well as of detail, fell in more and more with applications of the Equilateral Triangle, till the art, having arrived at its culminating point, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... Disclosures," are reducible to three classes: intolerable sensuality; diversified murder; and most scandalous mendacity: comprehending flagrant, and obdurate, and unceasing violations of the sixth, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day? If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in modern times; if they ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... expression In her brow's undisturbed self-possession Amid the Court's scoffing and merriment, As if from no pleasing experiment She rose, yet of pain not much heedful So long as the process was needful,— 110 As if she had tried in a crucible, To what "speeches like gold" were reducible, And, finding the finest prove copper, Felt the smoke in her face was but proper; To know what she had not to trust to, Was worth all the ashes and dust too. She went out 'mid hooting and laughter; Clement Marot stayed; I followed after, And asked, as a grace, what it all meant? If she wished not ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... position in respect to which is held by himself, and by others, to raise him to the level of Descartes or Leibnitz. Of course the first step was to approach the phenomena of human character and social existence with the expectation of finding them as reducible to general laws as the other phenomena of the universe, and with the hope of exploring these laws by the same instruments of observation and verification as had done such triumphant work in the case of the latter. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... should appear, that the most comprehensive formula to which life is reducible, would be that of the internal copula of bodies, or (if we may venture to borrow a phrase from the Platonic school) the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many. But that there is a physiognomy in words, which, without ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... adopt Sir Roger de Coverley's conciliatory view, that there is much to be said on both sides. But this logical rule supposes that, in point of fact, the two principles apply to the same case, and are mutually exclusive. I also think that the habit of taking for granted that social problems are reducible to such an alternative, is the source of innumerable fallacies. I hold that, as a rule, any absolute solution of such problems is impossible; and that a man who boasts of being logical, is generally announcing his deliberate intention to be one-sided. He is confusing the undeniable ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... you, who are feelingly alive to each fine Sensation that Beauty or Harmony gives the Soul, should so often assert, contrary to what you daily experience, that TASTE is governed by Caprice, and that BEAUTY is reducible to no Criterion? I am afraid your Generosity in this Instance is greater than your Sincerity, and that you are willing to compliment the circle of your Friends, in giving up by this Concession that envied Superiority you might claim over them, should it be acknowledged that those uncommon ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... immense experience. He succeeded in carrying on a large practice because he wasted no time in listening to preliminary explanations of his clients. Most legal actions in the West of Ireland are reducible to trespass ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... the latter to undertake a comparative study of the two.] The opening and the closing note stand often to each other in the relation of a second, sometimes also of a seventh. The numerous peculiarities to be met with in Polish folkmusic with regard to melodic progression are not likely to be reducible to one tonality or a simple system of tonalities. Time and district of origin have much to do with the formal character of the melodies. And besides political, social, and local influences direct musical ones—the mediaeval church music, eastern secular music, &c.—have ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... constituents of objects to which we attribute beauty shows that there are at least three distinct modes of this attribute, namely (1) sensuous beauty, (2) beauty of form and (3) beauty of meaning or expression, nor do these appear to be reducible to any higher or more comprehensive principle. It requires a certain boldness to attempt to effect a rapprochement between the formal and the expressional factor.3 An apparent unification of the three seems at present only possible by substituting for beauty another concept at least equally ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... nauseam (and they still tell me so) that beautiful verse is inimical to music, or rather that music is inimical to good verse; that music demands ordinary verse, rhymed prose, rather than verse, which is malleable and reducible as the composer wishes. This generalization is assuredly true, if the music is written first and then adapted to the words, but that is not the ideal harmony between two arts which are made to supplement each other. Do not the rhythmic and sonorous passages of verse naturally ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens |
