"Arbitrarily" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent and comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments and aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author is described in that sentence in which he says: "I have laid too many eggs in the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... dentistry is usually divided arbitrarily into operative dentistry, the purpose of which is to preserve as far as possible the teeth and associated tissues, and prosthetic dentistry, the purpose of which is to supply the loss of teeth by artificial substitutes. The filling of carious cavities was probably first performed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... nearly all the vegetables useful to man, except forest trees, bud and blossom and ripen, and in which a vast majority of the ordinary operations of material life are performed. They give the rise and fall of the mercury at heights arbitrarily taken, without reference to the relations of temperature to human interests, or to any other scientific consideration than a somewhat less liability to accidental disturbance.] and when we are told that the annual ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... the apostles. The ancient Church had settled the matter summarily; in it the sacrament of holy orders gave such enlightenment. Indeed, the Holy Father even laid claim to divine authority to decide arbitrarily what should be right, even when his will was contrary to the Scriptures. The reformer had nothing but his feeble ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Anyone who reads the stories will find an infinity of questions suggesting themselves to him, and he will doubtless get no little pleasure and profit from attempting to answer them. As will be seen, some of the questions are not simple. If Swift has been wise he has not reduced everything arbitrarily on a horizontal scale to one-twelfth of its apparent size, capacity, weight, or strength, but has properly apportioned all. The reader may find that he will be called upon for some nice discrimination, before he can judge ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... throughout this little volume are mainly for those who dwell within the broad zone of the average heretofore referred to. In this republican land no one can say that the bounds of good society lie arbitrarily here and there; certainly they are not marked by a line drawn between occupation and leisure. The same young girl—after leaving school, at the period when society life begins—may be "in society" during leisure ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... islands, that is to say, less than a degree to the northwest of them; that their inhabitants speak the Marquesan dialect, and that their laws, religion, and general customs are identical. The only reason why they were ever thus arbitrarily distinguished may be attributed to the singular fact, that their existence was altogether unknown to the world until the year 1791, when they were discovered by Captain Ingraham, of Boston, Massachusetts, nearly two centuries after the discovery of the adjacent islands by the agent of the Spanish ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... the march to Cadiz, was compelled to publish an ordinance forbidding arrests to be made without the consent of a French commanding officer, and ordering his generals to release the persons who had been arbitrarily imprisoned. The council of ambassadors, blind in their jealousy of France to the danger of an uncontrolled restoration, drew up a protest against his ordinance, and desired that the officers of the Regency should be left to ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... August 17th there occurred the Ministerial fish dinner at Greenwich, which was then a yearly institution. Rosebery was in the chair—for on these occasions the Chairman is arbitrarily chosen, generally from among the very youngest members of the Government, and is a sort of lord of misrule. [Footnote: Lord Rosebery was Under- ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... imagination, which was eager to find an excuse for the appropriation of a neighbour's property. On the contrary, capital punishment was only inflicted when the laws had been infringed; and there is no instance of the Khan having arbitrarily put ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... that's by the way.... You have only to look at all these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the Gutsch and looking down on the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne that would, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and the Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the beauty, the simple cleanliness and balance of this world, you have only to see the free carriage, the unaffected graciousness ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... and what their relative rewards should be are debatable questions. But however views may differ on these questions it is clear that the common interest cannot be advanced by the effort of any one party to dominate the other, to dictate arbitrarily the terms on which alone it will cooperate, to threaten to withdraw if any attempt is made to thwart the enforcement of its will. Such a position is as un-American ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... life, and knew that Eros never mingles more arbitrarily in the intercourse of a young couple than when, after a long separation, there is ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of Clouds was Omega's finest vacation resort. Upon entering the district, all weapons had to be checked at the main gate. No duels were allowed under any circumstances. Quarrels were arbitrarily decided by the nearest barman, and murder was punished by immediate ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... punctuation and no verse divisions; these were all arbitrarily supplied by the translators later on. It is also a well-established fact on the part of leading Biblical scholars that through the centuries there have been various interpolations in the New Testament scriptures, both by way ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... dalliance with us fleeting individual creatures, fit it to cope with that which in mankind is permanent and universal. It can through the symbol give us incomparably the type. Wise is that sculptor who, when portray an individual he must, treats arbitrarily the mere actual husk, and strives but to show the soul. Of course, he must first catch that soul. What M. Rodin knew about the character and career of Mr. George Wyndham, or about the character and career of Mr. Bernard Shaw, was not, I hazard, worth ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... we conclude that the things directly perceptible to the sense of touch are to be regarded as appearances, as signs of the presence of these minuter things, do we draw such a conclusion arbitrarily? By no means. The distinction between appearance and reality is drawn here just as it is drawn in the world of our common everyday experiences. The great majority of the touch things about us we are not actually touching at any given moment. We only see the things, i.e. we have ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... befell the overpowered portions of the Eleventh Greek Division at Saloniki. Free communication with Athens was interrupted and intercourse with the home authorities was controlled by the Entente and refused arbitrarily by the Entente. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... to the defence of that system of oppression under which the whole land is groaning. The memorial of the citizens of Augusta County, bearing the signatures of many slave- holders, placed the evils of slavery in a strong light before the convention. Its facts and arguments could only be arbitrarily thrust aside and wantonly disregarded; they could not ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... disposed to consider other exceptions to this assertion exceedingly rare. 'In all languages whatever,' to quote Bentley's words, 'a word of a moral or of a political significance, containing several complex ideas arbitrarily joined together, has seldom any correspondent word in any other language which extends to all these ideas.' Nor is it hard to trace reasons sufficient why this should be so. For what, after all, is a word, but the enclosure for human use of a certain district, larger or smaller, from the vast ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... cannot be chosen arbitrarily. They should be taken from the printed set of them worked out by Mr Cutter, and called the Cutter author-tables. ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... of the deaf, and on the eyes of the blind; sometimes by a vehicle without a word, without a touch, without His presence, as when He said, 'Go wash in the pool of Siloam, and he washed and was clean.' So the divine worker varies infinitely and at pleasure, yet not arbitrarily but for profound, even if not always discoverable, reasons, the methods of His miracle-working power, in order that we may learn by these varieties of ways that He is tied to no way; and that His hand, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... was essentially the same as in the Augustana. Still it was not what it pretended to be. It was no serious attempt at refuting the Lutheran Confession, but rather an accumulation of Bible-texts, arbitrarily expounded, in support of false doctrines and scholastic theories. These efforts led to exegetical feats that made the Confutators butts of scorn and derision. At any rate, the Lutherans were charged with having failed, at the public reading, to control their risibilities sufficiently. Cochlaeus ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... of Speech, I say, are expressions, or voluntary significations of our Passions: but certain signes they be not; because they may be used arbitrarily, whether they that use them, have such Passions or not. The best signes of Passions present, are either in the countenance, motions of the body, actions, and ends, or aims, which we otherwise ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... when the words do not exactly fit the register of the line has always been a source of trouble. In the days of the manuscript makers devices such as crowding letters, reducing their size, or omitting them altogether were freely used and words were arbitrarily divided when the scribes so desired. During the greater part of the time every scribe divided as he pleased, often in ways which seem very strange to us, like the Greek custom of dividing always after a vowel and even dividing words of one syllable. With the invention of printing, ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the "crowds of people," and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is supposed to be regu- lated by the Bank of England, and the "bank rate," which is arbitrarily fixed by the directors, is moved up and down (sometimes for other reasons than the value of money), and is sup- posed to be the rate of discount for bills of the best description. It is found in practice, however, that when there is an abundance of ...
— Everybody's Guide to Money Matters • William Cotton, F.S.A.
... Friar Thomas, in the first act, might be changed, without any harm, to Friar Peter; for why should the Duke unnecessarily trust two in an affair which required only one. The none of Friar Thomas is never mentioned in the dialogue, and therefore seems arbitrarily placed at the head ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... hell, and described it as he had seen it, with the keen eyes of imagination and faith. With all its weird unearthliness, there is hardly another book in the whole range of human literature which is marked with such unswerving veracity as the "Divine Comedy." Nothing is there set down arbitrarily, out of wanton caprice or for the sake of poetic effect, but because to Dante's imagination it had so imposingly shown itself that he could not but describe it as he saw it. In reading his cantos we forget the poet, and have before us only the veracious traveller in strange ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... it extended over seventeen years, the period between the last two revolutions. His papers seem to have averaged five or six a year. They form, with those which had been previously inserted in the Revue de Paris, a series of Portraits, now embraced in seven volumes, and divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into Portraits litteraires, Portraits contemporains, and Portraits de Femmes. The names included, which with few exceptions are those of French writers, belong to different epochs, different schools, and different departments of literature. Many are famous; some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... horror. Faugh!—I tell you I'm sick of such cowardly cant. A pretty example the Almighty's set me of justice and mercy! Handsome encouragement He has given me to be virtuous and sober! Much I have for which to praise His holy name! Arbitrarily, without excuse, or faintest show of antecedent reason, He has elected to curse. And the curse will cling forever and ever, till they lay me in a coffin nearly half as short again as that of any other man, and leave the hideousness of my deformity to be obliterated and purged at last—eaten away ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... emerge in completely contradictory functions. In the form of mathematical logic, for instance, it can dispose most drastically of that living organic world which in the form of experimental science it assumes to be the only truth. Again it may happen that reason will arbitrarily ally itself with one or the other of the other attributes and on the strength of such an alliance seek to obliterate all the rest. Thus while it is impossible to avoid the admission that of all these basic attributes ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... there was nothing but a blank wall. The blind stairway went up in a kind of dark well, and once up it was a difficult matter to get down without a plunge from top to bottom, since the undefended opening was just where no one would expect to find it. Sometimes an angle was so arbitrarily walled up that you felt sure there must be a secret chamber there and furtively rapped on the wall to catch the hollow echo within. Then again you opened a door, expecting to step into the wilderness of a garden, and found yourself in a set of little rooms running off on a tangent, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... rules of right and property to secure their peace and quiet. It cannot be supposed that they should intend, had they a power so to do, to give to any one, or more, an absolute arbitrary power over their persons and estates, and put a force into the magistrate's hand to execute his unlimited will arbitrarily upon them. This were to put themselves into a worse condition than the state of nature, wherein they had a liberty to defend their right against the injuries of others, and were upon equal terms of ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... Miss Beswick, arbitrarily. "Step along, boys, step along. Hold up yer head, Taddy, for ye a'n't goin' to be hurt while I'm around. Take yer fists out o' yer eyes, and stop blubberin'. Mr. Ducklow, that boy knows somethin' about ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Mr. Gladstone would have governments propagate their opinions by excluding all dissenters from all civil offices. That is to say, he would have governments propagate their opinions by a process which has no reference whatever to the truth or falsehood of those opinions, by arbitrarily uniting certain worldly advantages with one set of doctrines, and certain worldly inconveniences with another set. It is of the very nature of argument to serve the interests of truth; but if rewards and punishments serve ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... "sin." When Paul calls the law the strength of sin, or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man's mind, acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on this side or that, as right and wrong. True, even ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... original native name was to be given the preference, if it were short enough and easily pronounced by Americans. If not, a translation or abbreviation might be used, while retaining as much as possible of the distinctive racial flavor. No English surname might be arbitrarily given, but such as were already well established might be retained if the owner so desired. Many such had been unwisely given to children by teachers and missionaries, and in one family I found a George Washington, a Daniel Webster, and a Patrick ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... in thwarting Keene's supposed designs. "He had thought it right," he said, "to make Miss Tresilyan and others aware of the real state of the case; but he did not conceive that farther interference lay within the sphere of his duty." It was odd how that same once arbitrarily elastic sphere had contracted since the prophet met the lion in the pathway! Dick Tresilyan—the only other person much interested in the progress of affairs—did not seem to trouble himself much about them. He was perpetually absent on shooting expeditions; ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... system at its own expense, and its financial organization and methods must be adapted to the necessity of raising a liberal supply of funds for such essential purposes. Its borrowing capacity must not be arbitrarily restricted as in the case of so many American cities at the present time; and, of course, any particular lease must be arranged so as to provide not only the interest on the money raised for all work of construction, but ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... financial experts was delegated the power and authority to perfect a fair, impartial monetary system. First of all, they arbitrarily declared the dollar, the peso and the shilling to be without value. "Time" script was to be issued by the governing board, and as this substitute would automatically become useless on the day the castaways, were discovered and taken ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... the other hand, no one but myself could act in Court for my clients. It is true that some of my associates expressed to me their apprehension that the minority might appeal to the Convention, and that the Convention might arbitrarily overrule the delegation; but I answered them as I repeat now, that neither the minority of the delegation nor the Convention itself had any right to interpose. We were not asking a favor, but exercising a right. Whether a person ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... institutions of ownership have taken such a turn that the working system of industry and business no longer runs on national lines and, indeed, no longer takes account of national frontiers,—except in so far as the national policies and legislation, arbitrarily and partially, impose these frontiers on the workings of trade and industry. The effect of such regulation for political ends is, with wholly negligible exceptions, detrimental to the efficient working of the industrial system under modern conditions; ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... constant apprehension that underlies all maturity, a sense of the proximity of blind accident, evil chance, disaster. At last he was opposed to life itself, with an immense stake to gain, to hold; in the midst of a seething, treacherous conflict arbitrarily ended by death. There was no cringing, absolutely no cowardice, in him. He was glad that it was all immediately about him; he was arrogant in pressing forward to take what he wanted from existence. He forgot all premonitions, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... seasons and countless forms of life upon it, and remember that you are looking upon a great cosmic organism, pulsing with the vital currents of the universe, and that what it holds of living forms were not arbitrarily imposed upon it from without, but vitally evolved from within and that man himself is one of its products as literally as are the trees that stand rooted to the soil. Revert to the time when life was not, when the globe was a half-incandescent ball, or when it was a ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... workmen haven't anything at all to do with it," he pronounced emphatically. It was a direct charge. I distinctly felt called upon to refute it. But while I was striving to collect my thoughts he went on, somewhat arbitrarily, I thought: "You don't think we're all blind, do you, Mr. Smart?" "We?" I murmured, a curious ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Renaissance." Like all attempts to cut history into sections these divisions are more or less arbitrary, but their convenience sufficiently justifies their creation. They must be thought of however not as representing independent blocks, arbitrarily arranged in a certain consecutive order, not as five successive religious consciousnesses, but merely as marking the entrance of certain new ideas into the continuous religious consciousness of the Roman people. The history of each of these periods is simply the record of the ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... been considered that a foreigner has little chance of obtaining justice at Canton. The import and export duties, which by the law of the country ought to be levied ad valorem, are arbitrarily fixed according to the fancy of the collector. And although the court is at all times ready to punish, by confiscation of their property, such as have been guilty of corruption and oppression, yet by accepting their presents, it seems to lend ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... Progress. It falls upon a cobbler in Kettering, and he founds modern Christian missions. It blows 'where it listeth,' sovereignly indifferent to the expectations and limitations and the externalisms, even of organised Christianity, and touching this man and that man, not arbitrarily but according to 'the good pleasure' that is a law to itself, because it is perfect in wisdom and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... supra. An assembly of notables was, as the term imports, a body consisting, not of representatives of the three orders, regularly summoned under the forms observed in the holding of the States General, but of the most prominent men of the kingdom, arbitrarily selected and invited by the crown to act as its advisers on some extraordinary emergency. "Telles assemblees," says Agrippa d'Aubigne, "ont este appelees petits ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... modern ideas, which have had their origin in Europe, and which can only be realised among peoples of a high political development; that the sense of nationhood is but slowly created, and must not be arbitrarily defined in terms of race or language; and that the capacity for self-government is only formed by a long process of training, and has never existed except among peoples who were unified by a strongly felt community of sentiment, and had acquired the habit and instinct ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... compare moral judgments, to arrange existing codes in a certain order as lower and higher, to frame some notion of what constitutes progress. He may hold before himself, in outline, at least, an ideal of conduct, and not one taken up arbitrarily but based upon the phenomena of the moral consciousness as he has observed them. And in the light of this ideal he may judge of conduct; his appeal is to an ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Christian era the theory of the roundness of the earth began to be denied; and as knowledge and learning became gathered into the hands of the Church they lost something of their clarity and singleness, and began to be used arbitrarily as evidence for or against other and less material theories. St. Chrysostom opposed the theory of the earth's roundness; St. Isidore taught it; and so also did St. Augustine, as we might expect from a man of his wisdom who lived so long in ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... human is reached in a different way from that of Smith by MM. Hubert and Mauss, and receives in their hands a peculiar coloring.[1900] They hold that the numerous forms of sacrifice cannot be reduced to "the unity of a single arbitrarily chosen principle"; and in view of the paucity of accurate accounts of early ritual (in which they include the Greek and the Roman) they reject the "genealogical" (that is, the evolutionary) method, and devote themselves to an analysis of the two ancient rituals, the Hindu and ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... completely than the Greek style, the same principle of correct and truthful expression of the construction of the building, and that all the main features which give to the style its most striking and picturesque effects are not arbitrarily adopted forms, but are the result of a continuous architectural development based on the development of the construction. The decorative details of the Gothic style, though differing exceedingly from those of the Greek, are, like the latter, conventional adaptations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... city, living by handicraft, and a port city, handling weighty materials and feeding freely on commerce! His livers by their finger-ends are especially "those within the land." Just so the great capital of France, arbitrarily concentred amongst her provinces, and deprived of a port, can only thrive by her exceptional genius in fine and easily-moved articles de Paris. The site now under our consideration, however, means to have no such one-sided success. If her horoscope be not cast amiss, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... I can testify from personal observation, the British merchant is very frequently dealt with not less arbitrarily. The Dutch Authorities are not content with prohibiting the importation into their Colonies of warlike stores and opium, (which they have an undoubted right to do,) but their regulations render a ship seizable, that enters their ports with either ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... [Hebrew: iqrav]. And when Jerome, in opposition to the Alex., remarks that, according to the Hebrew, the translation ought to be: Nomen ejus vocabunt, he does not contend against their use of the Singular per se, but only against their arbitrarily supplying "Jehovah" as the subject; against their explaining "The Lord shall call," instead of "one" shall call. The manner in which the false reading [Hebrew: iqrav] first arose, is clearly seen from the reasons by which its later defenders ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... rarely harsh to any suppliant or servant, and she took no special interest in humiliating the rich or the learned or the wise. For them, law was made; by them, law was administered; and with their doings Mary never arbitrarily interfered; but occasionally she could not resist the temptation to intimate her opinion of the manner in which the Trinity allowed their—the regular—Church to be administered. She was a queen, and never for an instant forgot it, but she took ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the Lord's Supper. The North Carolina Synod made the entry into their minutes. "He [David Henkel] is therefore no preacher of the Lutheran Church of North Carolina and adjacent States." (G., 696.) A source of additional ill will was the autocratic procedure of the officers in arbitrarily convening the Synod of 1819, five weeks before the constitutional time (whence known as the "Untimely Synod"), and that without sending out notices sufficiently early, and for a purpose most odious to the Henkels and their adherents, viz., to elect a delegate (Shober ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... heart, not head; and so it seems to me that the work of these men whose names I have somewhat arbitrarily linked, will live. Each sowed in sorrow and reaped in grief. They were tender, kind, gentle, with a capacity for love that passes the love of woman. They were each indifferent to the proprieties, very much as children are. They lived in cloister-like retirement, hidden from the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... impolitic to try to do. Nothing could possibly compensate her for antagonizing Felipe. Nothing could so deeply wound her, as to have him in a resentful mood towards her; or so weaken her real control of him, as to have him feel that she arbitrarily overruled his preference or his purpose. In presence of her imperious will, even her wrath capitulated and surrendered. There would be no hot words between her and her son. He should believe that he determined the policy ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... paramount article in his creed; and it is devoutly to be hoped that not many of those whom he first taught to seize before all things fact and reality, will follow him into this torrid air, where only forces and never principles are facts, and where nothing is reality but the violent triumph of arbitrarily imposed will. There was once a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek and cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste energy and hope in seeking lights which it is not given to man ever ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... "Cabal," by compelling a Catholic nobleman, who was one of its leading members, to resign. Lather, Parliament further showed its power by compelling the King to sign the Act of Habeas Corpus, 1679 (S482), which put an end to his arbitrarily throwing men into prison, and keeping them there, in order to stop their free discussion of his ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... was summoned, but instead of its members being elected in accordance with the customs of England, they were selected and nominated by Cromwell himself. The history of England contains no instance of such a defiance of the constitutional rights of the people. But although he had grasped power arbitrarily and by force, Cromwell used it well and wisely, and many wise laws and great social reforms were passed by the Parliament under his orders. Still the fanatical party were in the majority in this body, and as Cromwell saw that these persons would push matters further than he wished, ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... reach the same end by establishing self-compensatory fluctuations in the solar atmospheric circulation; Dr. Schuster resorts to changes in the electrical conductivity of space near the sun.[501] In all these theories, however, the course of transition is arbitrarily arranged to suit a period, which imposes itself as a fact peremptorily claiming admittance, while obstinately ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... by the added clause, "in every place where I cause my name to be honoured." But this means nothing more than that the spots where intercourse between earth and heaven took place were not willingly regarded as arbitrarily chosen, but, on the contrary, were considered as having been somehow or other selected by the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... point of departure for the work of the Creative Spirit; and in proportion as we see this more and more clearly, the more we shall find ourselves entering into a new order of life in which we become less and less subject to the old limitations. This is not a reward arbitrarily bestowed upon us for holding dogmatically to certain mere verbal statements, but it is the natural result of understanding the supreme law of our own being. On its own plane it is as purely scientific as the law of chemical reaction; only here we are not dealing with ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... attempt of some historians of a philosophical turn of mind to fit each race into a category and to give each race a sharply defined sphere of influence has been carried too far, and has discredited the effort to interpret arbitrarily the genius of the different races and to assign arbitrarily their functions. It remains true, however, that, in a broad sense, each race has had a peculiar quality of mind and spirit which may be called its ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... over. He had no use for trumpet-blowing, and no confidence in those who did the blowing. And yet he consented, for he did not feel justified in arbitrarily ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... becomes fragmentary, and the particulars outweigh and obscure the general spirit and intention of the piece. Even Shakspeare, with his gigantic genius, was not free from this defect. His Merry Wives of Windsor, for instance, is rich in comic situations and figures, but they are arbitrarily put together, and every scene has the character of an episode; the action does not go forward in a true and consistent course. Now-a-days the evil is worse, because it is the fashion to substitute reflection for natural feeling. Taylor is like ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... years past their ships have not only frequently been stopped and searched, but also forcibly and arbitrarily seized upon the high seas, by Spanish ships fitted out to cruise, under the plausible pretext of guarding their own coasts; that the commanders thereof, with their crews, have been inhumanly treated, and their ships carried into ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... impression has two equally good loop formations. As it has but one delta, it cannot be classified as a whorl of the double loop type nor as a loop since it would be difficult to make a preferential choice between the two looping ridges. It is arbitrarily given the classification of ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... inasmuch as they stand for articulate sounds expressing root-ideas, but they are unlike our words in that they are not composed of alphabetical elements or letters. Clearly, if each character were a distinct and arbitrarily constructed symbol, only those gifted with exceptional powers of memory could ever hope to read or write with fluency. This, however, is far from being the case. If we go to work synthetically ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... merely telling what the people will require and compel. And he could have added—which would be perfectly true—that the people will not be moved to it by speculation and cogitation and planning, but by Circumstance—that power which arbitrarily compels all their actions, and over which they have not the ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... an acre of it and grows what he wants there, and has never seen the broad lands that yet belong to him? Nothing hinders a man from indefinitely increased possession of a growing measure of God, except his own arbitrarily narrowed measure of desire and capacity. Therefore it becomes a solemn question for each of us, Am I day by day becoming more and more fit to possess more of God, and enjoy more of the God whom I possess? In Him we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... necessary to its embodying, even though occasionally they may seem to disguise and distort it. There is no monopoly of poetry for particular ages and nations; and consequently that despotism in taste, which would seek to invest with universal authority the rules which at first, perhaps, were but arbitrarily advanced, is but a vain and empty pretension. Poetry, taken in its widest acceptation, as the power of creating what is beautiful, and representing it to the eye or the ear, is a universal gift of Heaven, being shared to a certain extent even by those whom we call barbarians and savages. Internal ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... tax, inasmuch as it is a rate levied ostensibly on the wealth of individuals; but, instead of being a per centage on the income, it has resolved itself into a mere capitation tax, and is ill-adapted, as such a tax must always be, to the relative wealth of individuals. A certain sum was arbitrarily fixed upon to be paid by the province. The government appears to have omitted to enquire whether the wealth of the country would enable it to pay so large a sum as that demanded. In 1853, the tax was divided into three portions, according to the numbers of ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... is disorder, and self-will, and changeableness; instead of trying to be conformed to his image and his likeness, which is order and law eternal: and, therefore, whenever God seems (for he only seems to our ignorance) to be making things suddenly, as we make, or working arbitrarily as we work, then we acknowledge his greatness and wisdom. Whereas his greatness, his wisdom, are rather shown in not making as we make, not working as we work: but in this is the greatness of God manifest, in that he ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Publicum devoluta est"; a little later Rabennonus, for having killed a man, "medietas omnis illius substantiae ad Publicum devoluta est." In consequence, in poetic justice and for the good of his soul and the king's, Hildeprandus quite arbitrarily presents "omnem praedictam illorum substantiam, qualiter secundum legem juste et rationabiliter, ad Publicum devoluta est," to the Monastery of Farfa "pro mercede Domnorum nostrorum Regum et nostra." Here, as in many other cases, we see the dux making gifts of property belonging ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... Cunnel send dis with his compliments. Merry Christmas, sa!' Such was the salutation arousing me on the anniversary of the birth of Him who came on earth to preach the Gospel of love and fraternity to all men—or the date which pious tradition has arbitrarily assigned to it. And Pomp appeared by the bedside of the ponderous, old-fashioned four-poster, in which I had slept, bearing a tumbler containing that very favorite Southern 'eye-opener,' a mixture of peach brandy and honey. I sipped, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They fail to do justice to Jesus' consciousness of Himself, of His unique relation to God, of His all-important mission to men, as the critically investigated documents disclose it. Historically, they ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... weeks, viz. the reading of Robinson Crusoe in Arabic. It is to me often difficult from several causes: (1) It is not pointed, nor even the Teshdied added; (2) I could not bring Golin's with me, and the dictionaries which I have are very imperfect; (3) the writer has most arbitrarily changed the details of Robinson's story, and makes it often incoherent and stupidly impossible; so that neither does the original help me much, nor can I rest on internal congruity ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... surely be needless pedantry in the translator of a satirist to talk of sestertia rather than pounds. I fear I have not always been at the pains to make the English sum even roughly equivalent to the Roman, but have from time to time introduced a particular English sum arbitrarily, if it appeared to suit the context or even the metre. Thus, where Philip gives or lends Mena fourteen sestertia that he may buy a farm, I have not startled the modern agricultural reader by talking about a hundred and twenty pounds, but have ventured to turn ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... intolerably, he can take sanctuary at the Temple of Theseus, and claim the privilege of being sold to some new owner. A slave, too, has still another grievance which may be no less galling because it is sentimental. His name (given him arbitrarily perhaps by his master) is of a peculiar category, which at once brands him as a bondsman: Geta, Manes, Dromon, Sosias, Xanthias, Pyrrhias,—such names would be repudiated as ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... with a stamp upside down. Well, what's wrong with that? Certainly there is no affront to nature in a stamp upside down. Neither is there in a man's looking through the large end of a telescope if he wants to. You can't arbitrarily say at the top of the page, "Mark the thing that is wrong," and then have a picture of a house with one window larger than all the others and expect any one to agree with you that it is necessarily wrong. It may look queer, but so does the whole picture. You can't tell; the big window ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... who combine, by [arbitrarily fixing] an improper price, to impede [the traffic in] any commodity, or to make [an injurious] sale of it,[341] the highest fine ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... legend regarding the origin of the rainbow, supposed to have been dictated immediately by the Holy Spirit; and, according to that, the "bow in the cloud" was not the result of natural laws, but a "sign" arbitrarily placed in the heavens for the simple purpose of assuring mankind that there was not to be another ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... these gigantic contracts, involving an amount of more than $6,000,000, were distributed with a view to influence votes in the House of Representatives upon the Lecompton Bill. Some of the lesser ones, such as those for furnishing mules, dragoon horses, and forage, were granted arbitrarily to relatives or friends of members who were ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Came about on Second Reading of London Tramways Bill; promoters want to bring tramway over Westminster Bridge, and along Embankment. DEMOS desires to go about his business on the tramway, and does not see why he should be arbitrarily stopped before he has accomplished his journey. Carriage folk say, No; let DEMOS and his penny tram stop at other side of the water, leaving the broad thoroughfare of the Embankment for what RADCLIFFE COOKE called ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... herein discussed have been quite arbitrarily chosen, being those which have been needed in various research laboratories in the last years and for which the directions happen now to be ready for publication. The methods are in only a few cases new ones; they are in general the ...
— Organic Syntheses • James Bryant Conant
... should have been had no bearing whatsoever upon the efficiency of those same fingers. Washing not only took time from other important pursuits, but also was mildly unpleasant. Nevertheless, my mother was not even open to reasonable argument on the matter. Arbitrarily, with the despotism of an early Roman Emperor, she rendered a dictum to the effect that I must wash, and soapy and submissive I had to be before I could come to the table. Again, any reasonable child can tell you that ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... art and skill in conducting delicate negotiations, we have probably never had his equal in diplomatic initiative, or in the thorough preparation and presentation of cases. He did not meet occasions merely but made them, not arbitrarily but for the world's good. Settling the Alaskan boundary favorably to the United States at every point save one, crumbling with the single stroke of his Pauncefote treaty that Clayton-Bulwer rock on which Evarts, Blaine, and Frelinghuysen in turn had tried dynamite in vain, were deeds seldom matched ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... discomfort, and oppression, or walk. Railroad systems absorb short lines and control traffic over great districts; unless they are under government regulation they may adjust their time schedules and freight charges arbitrarily and impose as large a burden as the traffic will bear; the public is helpless, because there is no other suitable conveyance for passengers or freight. It is for these reasons that the United States has ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... on the west side of New Street, or Chancery Lane, had been granted to, or acquired by, the Knights Templars. Henry III.'s Chancellor, Ralph Nevill, Bishop of Chichester, died at his house there in 1244, and the King arbitrarily authorised his Treasurer, William de Haverhill, to secure the property upon the Chancellor's death, so that neither the Templars nor any other person should lay hands on it.[123] To the north of it was a garden once held by William Cottrell, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... earth is arbitrarily taken as of zero electrostatic potential. Surfaces in such condition that their potential is unchanged when connected to the earth are said to be of zero potential. All other surfaces are discharged when connected ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... injuries to person and property were slight, was somewhat similar to the penalties of the Mosaic code. The idea of property was associated with estate in slaves and cattle, and all property passed freely from hand to hand; but it was not in the power of the father arbitrarily to deprive his children of their hereditary rights. Contracts between the State and a citizen were valid without formalities, but those between private persons were difficult to be enforced. A purchase only founded an action in the event ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... money, as well as debtors to divers of his Majesty's subjects to escape; hath been guilty of the most notorious breaches of his trust; great extortions, and the highest crimes and misdemeanors in the execution of his said office; and hath arbitrarily and unlawfully loaded with irons, put into dungeons, and destroyed prisoners for debt under his charge, treating them in the most barbarous and cruel manner, in high violation and contempt of the laws ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... and especially here in our own United States, we find evidence of the extensive employ of "birth control" measures to prevent that normal development of family life which underlies the vigor and racial power of every nation. These preventive measures which arbitrarily control human birth had long been in use in France with results which, especially since the war, have been frequently and publicly deplored in the press, and have led the French Government to offer substantial ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... defeated at Chiquimula. A blockade of the ports of San Salvador has been ordered by Mr. Chatfield, who threatens Honduras and Nicaragua with a similar blow, unless they accede to certain demands. In a letter to the Nicaraguan Minister of Foreign Affairs, he arbitrarily lays down the boundary line between Honduras, Nicaragua and Musquitia—an assumed kingdom, under cover of which the British authorities have taken possession of the port of San Juan. Mr. Chatfield states ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... trouble to bring a "document;" but the whole party spent three days under the protection of this ex-serf. Of course, we bespoke his attendance for ourselves, and remembered that little circumstance in his "tea-money." This practice of detaining passports arbitrarily, from which the ex-serf was protecting us, prevails in some localities, judging from the uproar about it in the Russian newspapers. It is contrary to the law, and can be resisted by travelers who have time, courage, and determination. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... established, namely, either that such a paralysis of the nervous system as would render the subject insensible to pain during the process of extracting teeth, would not embrace the principle of it, or on the other hand, that nitrous oxyd gas is arbitrarily to be excluded from its proper place in a class of agents, all of which are nearly identical in their operation. And even if this difficult task could be accomplished, there would still remain another equally difficult to be encountered; because it has already been shown that Dr. Wells went ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... atmosphere, deepening as I went. After many windings, the path began to branch, and soon I was lost in a labyrinth of passages, of which I knew not why I should choose one rather than another. It was useless now to think of returning. Arbitrarily I chose the narrowest way, and ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case, in order that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has given her royal sanction; secondly, having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister. Such an act she must consider as failing in sincerity towards the Crown, and justly to be visited by the exercise of her constitutional right of dismissing that Minister. She expects to be kept informed of what passes between him and Foreign Ministers ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... over again we are impressed with the fact that most disagreements between people—whether between adults or between children, or between children and adults—are due to misunderstandings. As soon as parents resolve not to treat their children arbitrarily,— that is, on the basis of their superior strength and authority,—they adopt a plan of "reasoning" with them. This plan might work very well, if the parents only understood the children's way of reasoning, if they but realized that the child does not reason ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... love one when fortune had enabled her to do so much for him." So she had simply approved of his declaration, down by the run, of affection for which she was not yet ready, and she approved of him all the more fondly because he did not passionately and arbitrarily demand or expect that she should feel as he did, in return. "I didn't," she had said to herself a score of times, "and that was enough ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... be understood in reference to Kathay; as it is perfectly obvious, that the entrance here spoken of must be in the north-east of Mangi. Supposing the C aspirated, Coigan-zu and Hoaingan-fu, both certainly arbitrarily orthographized from the Chinese pronunciation, are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... life we know three; two have already been passed through by humanity, and the third is that we are passing through now in Christianity. These philosophies of life are three in number, and only three, not because we have arbitrarily brought the various theories of life together under these three heads, but because all men's actions are always based on one of these three views of life—because we cannot view life otherwise than ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... by a previous marriage, and clearly one of them should have succeeded to the throne. Nevertheless, the prime minister, Takenouchi-no-Sukune, contrived to have the unborn child recognized as Prince Imperial.** Naturally the deceased Emperor's two elder sons refused to be arbitrarily set aside in favour of a baby step-brother. The principle of primogeniture did not possess binding force in those days, but it had never previously been violated except by the deliberate and ostensibly reasonable choice of an Emperor. The two princes, therefore, called ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... sanction to a measure, the Minister who, in the execution of such measure alters or modifies it arbitrarily, commits an act of dishonesty towards the Crown, which the Queen has an undoubted constitutional right to visit with the dismissal ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... Psychologically, the mentally defective child does not belong to a distinct type, nor does the genius. There is no line of demarcation between either of these extremes and the so-called "normal" child. The number of mentally defective individuals in a population will depend upon the standard arbitrarily set up as to what constitutes mental deficiency. Similarly for genius. It is exactly as we should undertake to classify all people into the three groups: abnormally tall, normally ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... means of increasing an army on short notice, the main point to be attended to in a constitutional and democratic country like England. As to the second, a system of organisation will always be easier defended than mere numbers arbitrarily fixed, and Parliament ought to have the possibility of voting more or voting fewer men, according to their views of the exigencies of the country, or the pressure of finance at different times, and to be able to do ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... alpaca blouse and coloured kerchief, doing duty for bonnet, being conspicuous at their Sunday receptions. Not even a Zola can charge French village-life with the snobbishness so conspicuous in England. It will be amply shown from the foregoing examples that peasant property is no fixed condition to be arbitrarily dealt with after the manner of certain economists. On the contrary, it is many-phased; the fullest and widest development of modern France is indeed modern France itself. The peasant owner of the soil has attained the highest position in his own country. No other class ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... between English landlords and tenants for generations, is utterly unwarranted. In several respects indeed he has been treated by the Act as if the land did not belong to him, while freedom of contract, until recent years one of the most cherished principles of our law, is arbitrarily interfered with. The chief alterations made by the Act of ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... its sagacity, and punish by its firmness, all delinquency against its power, whenever delinquency exists in the overt acts,—and then it will be as safe as ever God and Nature intended it should be. Crimes are the acts of individuals, and not of denominations: and therefore arbitrarily to class men under general descriptions, in order to proscribe and punish them in the lump for a presumed delinquency, of which perhaps but a part, perhaps none at all, are guilty, is indeed a compendious method, and saves a world of trouble about proof; but such a method, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Christ is in us, in that proportion is the power in us which shall carry us upward towards him. He wishes that those who believe in him shall be where he is. We shall belong to him and to his higher world, not arbitrarily, but naturally; not by any positive decree of God, but ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... deriving their whole significance from their attachment or alligation to the rewards and punishments, even as this diversely shaped and ink colored paper has its value wholly from the words or meanings, which have been arbitrarily connected therewith; or as a ladder, or flight of stairs, of a provision-loft, or treasury. If the architect or master of the house had chosen to place the store-room or treasury on the ground floor, the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... immaterial,—like the store of guineas in his pocket, too insignificant for mention when contrasted with his needs. And his base of supplies, the American city of his nativity, whence—and not without a glow of pride in his secret heart—he was wont to register at foreign hostelries, had been arbitrarily cut off from him by one of those accidents sardonically classified by insurance and express corporations as ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... destroyer of kings! In this moment he once more put the creature's full name upon him. The dog found the name alarming; perceived that he had committed some one of those offences for which he was arbitrarily punished. He relaxed the stout jaws, crawled slinkingly to the couch, and leaped upon it. Once there, he whimpered protestingly. One of the few clear beliefs he had about a perplexing social system was that nothing hurtful ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... natural piety,' and unifies our atoms dispersed to the four corners of the earth as nothing else could. From a theoretical, it is but an extension of the principle I tried to show you. Eating, drinking, every act of life is holy, is sanctified by some relation to heaven. We will not arbitrarily divorce some portions of life from religion, and say these are of the world, the flesh, or the devil, any more than we will save up our religion for Sundays. There is no devil, no original sin, no need of salvation from it, no need of a mediator. Every Jew is ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was Tamerlane, in which, under the name of Tamerlane, he intended to characterise King William, and Louis the Fourteenth under Bajazet. The virtues of Tamerlane seem to have been arbitrarily assigned him by his poet, for I know not that history gives any other qualities than those which make a conqueror. The fashion, however, of the time was to accumulate upon Louis all that can raise horror and detestation; and whatever good was withheld from him, that it might not be thrown away ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... father had fixed his affections; he accordingly was supposed to be the one intended, and the others were therefore excluded from the patrimony. The disappointed ones went straight to the government and denounced the Rabbi. "Here is a man," said they, "who arbitrarily deprives people of their rights, without proof or witnesses." The consequence was that the Rabbi was sent to prison, but he gave the authorities such evidence of his shrewdness and sense of justice, that he was ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... garment and the linen embroidery with the priestly office and the furniture of the tabernacle, and consider how the rush has been to all time the first natural carpet thrown under the human foot. Then next observe the three virtues definitely set forth by the three families of plants—not arbitrarily or fancifully associated with them, but in all the three cases marked for us by Scriptural words: 1st. Cheerfulness, or joyful serenity; in the grass for food and beauty—"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... Elizabeth, than whom "few sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character comes out unscathed after the closest examination." History indeed resolved itself into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily grouped under the names of persons who had to be identified with the assistance of numbers. Neither of the development of national life, nor of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not inessential ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of difference is in regard to the power of instant removal, many of the most pronounced reformers of the civil service holding that power to be essential, and believing that it will not be abused so long as the removing power cannot arbitrarily appoint the successor. The matured opinion of others is that a tenure of office definitely fixed for a term of years, during which the incumbent cannot be disturbed except upon substantial written charges, will secure a better class of officials. They hold that a subordinate ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... "I wonder what the residents of each of these planets call their worlds. Hardly the same names we have arbitrarily bestowed." ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... imagine that all these similar characters are mere coincidences. Do they not rather go to show that the Creator in making the pea vine and locust tree had the same idea in mind, and that plants are not classified arbitrarily? Man has nothing to do with their classification. Nature has attended to all that, giving essential unity with boundless variety, so that the botanist has only to examine plants to learn the harmony ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... sake of convenience let the period represented by the first group be called the classic; the second the classic-romantic; the third the romantic, and the last the bravura. I beg the reader, however, not to extend these designations beyond the boundaries of the present study; they have been chosen arbitrarily, and confusion might result if the attempt were made to apply them to any particular concert scheme. I have chosen the composers because of their broadly representative capacity. And they must stand for a numerous ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... seems every way satisfactory. The Jacobinical and precipitous assaults of the Non-intrusionists upon the rights of property are summarily put down. A great danger is surmounted. For if the rights of patrons were to be arbitrarily trampled under foot on a pretence of consulting for the service of religion; on the next day, with the same unprincipled levity, another party might have trampled on the patrimonial rights of hereditary descent, on primogeniture, or any institution whatever, opposed to the democratic fanaticism ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... of the counties in America has considerable analogy with that of the arrondissements of France. The limits of the counties are arbitrarily laid down, and the various districts which they contain have no necessary connexion, no common traditional or natural sympathy; their object is simply to facilitate the administration ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... she alludes only in a single sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government." She had the insight to perceive that the first task of the pioneer was to raise the whole broad issue of the subjection of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... each of these three verses contains not four but five lines. Cornill, by using the introduction Thus saith the Lord, omitting the remnant of Israel, combining two pairs of lines and including the following couplet, effects the arrangement of octastichs to which he has throughout the book arbitrarily committed himself. ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... their claims merely from the point of view of Prussian interests. Both his sympathy and his reason led him in fact rather to take the Danish side. "The maintenance of Denmark is in our interest," he wrote in 1857, but Denmark could only continue to exist if it were ruled, more or less arbitrarily, with provincial Estates as it has been for the last hundred years; and in another letter: "We have no reason to desire that the Holsteiners should live very happily under their Duke, for if they do they will no longer be interested in Prussia, and under certain ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the University Building. The infants were sometimes cross, and cried in their weary mothers' or little sisters' arms; but they did not disturb the dotards, who slept, some with their heads fallen forward, and some with their heads fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguished those with the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public. The small Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths, playing American games of tag and hide and-whoop; larger boys passed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and while thou art busy at it, it will rise of its own accord." And so it came to pass. Hardly had Moses put his hand upon the Tabernacle, when it stood erect, and the rumors among the people that Moses had arbitrarily put up the Tabernacle without the command of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... year peace being restored between England and Holland, New Amsterdam became New York again. Thus ended the Dutch rule in the colonies. Andros, who twelve years after played the tyrant in New England, was the next governor, but he ruled so arbitrarily that he was called home. Under his successor, Dongan, an assembly of the representatives of the people was called, by permission of the Duke of York. This was but a transient gleam of civil freedom, for two years ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... since qualified members had been excluded from the sittings of both houses, although they were good Englishmen: the later proclamations of summons were held to be null, because in them the formula 'Supreme Head of the English Church' had been arbitrarily omitted, without a previous resolution of Parliament, though on this title so much depended for the commonwealth and people: but no one could give up a right which concerned a third person or the public interest; through ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... the expressional power of color,—not the conventional significance whereby certain colors have been associated arbitrarily with mental conditions. This last has often violated all the principles of natural relation; yet no fact is more generally accepted than this,—that colors, from the intensity of the primitives to the last faint tints derived therefrom, bear fixed and demonstrable relations to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... 1870, on the neighbouring Santorin (Thera), by representatives of the French School at Athens, much pottery of a class now known immediately to precede the typical late Aegean ware, and many stone and metal objects, were found and dated by the geologist Fouque, somewhat arbitrarily, to 2000 B.C., by consideration of the superincumbent eruptive stratum. Meanwhile, in 1868, tombs at Ialysus in Rhodes had yielded to M. A. Biliotti many fine painted vases of styles which were called ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is a bounteous crop or a short one, the Trust still controls the wheat and flour and arbitrarily ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... received by the individuals coperating with the entrepreneur are not, however, arbitrarily determined. The entrepreneur must bow to economic law, and give these individuals what free competition in industry sets as a proper reward for their respective services. Let us examine into this conformity to ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... and to point out to her that a girl in her position—in short, the duties of a girl in her position?" Mrs. Wilson's come-down at this point was an example of a solemn warning to the elocutionist who breaks out of bounds. She was obliged to fall back arbitrarily on her key-note in the middle of the performance. "Have I said this to you, Mr. Wilson, or ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the same kind, and used in the same relations, always represent one class of objects; and when the office of a symbol has been once shown, the same symbol, similarly used, always fills a like office. They are never used arbitrarily. ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... with the twisted mouth was, more probably than not, none other than that same Bayard Shaynon whom the young lady was reported to have jilted so arbitrarily. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... this matter, and had decided to impose English bodily and arbitrarily upon the colonists. Every evening Beatrice gathered a class of the younger men and women, always including the children, and for an hour or two drilled them in ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England |
