"Calculable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however faded and feeble. The trouble appears to have been that while I on the one hand exorcised the baleful association, I succeeded in rousing on nobody's part a sense of any other association whatever, or of my having cast myself into any conceivable or calculable form. My private inspiration had been in the Gyp plan (artfully dissimulated, for dear life, and applied with the very subtlest consistency, but none the less kept in secret view); yet I was to fail to make out in the event that the book succeeded in producing the impression of ANY plan ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... circumstances would be, that there was some fault in the microscope. But even if this conclusion were rejected, we presume Mr. Mill would allow that, under the supposed circumstances, the exact magnitude of the minimum of extension would be calculable. We have only to measure the minimum visibile, and know what is the magnifying power of our microscope, to determine the exact dimensions. Suppose, then, that we assign to it some definite magnitude—say ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... school which has by this time turned its mechanical system almost into a commonplace upon our lips, and talks of that most perilous thing, the fortunes of a fleet, as though it were a merely numerical and calculable thing! The greatest of Armadas may set out and ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... its product amounts to the absolute point, viz., to time. Conceive the synthesis of both, and you have matter as a fluxional antecedent, which, in the very act of formation, passes into body by its gravity, and yet in all bodies it still remains as their mass, which, being exclusively calculable under the law of gravitation, gives rise, as we before observed, to the science of statics, most improperly ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be told of Yale or any other college. Considered as what are called popular institutions—that is, institutions from which everybody can or does derive some calculable, palpable benefit—the universities of this and every other country are useless, and there ought on this theory to be a prodigious "outcry" against them, and they ought, on the principle of equality, if allowed to exist at all, to be allowed to exist only on condition ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... recognised, and carried out. He has his place, his office, and his destiny; he is no enigma but as an individual; "in the mass," as the author emphatically remarks, "he is a mathematical problem." His conduct is uniform and consistent; the result of known and ascertainable causes—causes calculable and predicable in their consequences, as the statistics of ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... different individuals, the beautiful to that which functions alike in all; the former addresses itself to the passive sensibility, the latter to the active judgment. The agreeable—because of the non-calculable differences in our sensuous inclinations, which are in part conditioned by bodily states—possesses no universality whatever, the good possesses an objective, and the beautiful a subjective universality. The judgment concerning the agreeable has an empirical, that concerning the beautiful ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... regular, sound, calculable, literal, real, sensible, sure, calculated, ordinary, reasonable, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... arena of mere personal partialities it is confessedly difficult to predict the future, on the wider field of the world's great interests, the well-known uniformity of human passions and interests render their results calculable to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl might or might ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... moment, the cigar-boxes under his arm, uncertain whether he ought not to enlighten her as to the reprehensibility of her late conduct in regard to her aunt and Klutz. Evidently her conscience was cloudless, and yet she had done more harm than was quite calculable. Axel was fairly certain that Klutz had set fire to the stables. Absolutely certain he could not be, but the first blaze had occurred so nearly at the moment when Klutz must have reached them on his way home, that he had ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... quality, and a strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches. There was also the impression—was it too fantastic?—of words carried over a medium, an invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to one's idea. But the comparison was irritating, and after a time she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... and sensations, and to breathe the Roman atmosphere began to seem a needful condition of being. He could not have defined and explained the nature of his great love, nor have made up the sum of it by the addition of his calculable pleasures. It was a large, vague, idle, half-profitless emotion, of which perhaps the most pertinent thing that may be said is that it enforced a sort of oppressive reconciliation to the present, the actual, the sensuous—to life on the terms that there offered themselves. It was perhaps ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... schoolmen; his great defect is that he set before his mind as a premise an abstract "political man" as far divorced from living, breathing, complex reality as the "economic man" of Ricardo. Men, he thought, are always the same, governed by calculable motives of self-interest. In general, he thought, men are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly and covetous, to be ruled partly by an appeal to their greed, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... enemy, it is the airman's greatest friend and protection. It not only preserves him against visual discovery from below, but is an excellent insulator of sound, so that his whereabouts is not betrayed by the noise of his motor. It is of in calculable value in another way. When a fog prevails the sea is generally as smooth as the pro verbial mirror, enabling the waterplanes to be brought up under cover to a suitable point from which they may be dispatched. Upon their release ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... persisted, showing in her persistence a temper of which Peter had already caught some sharp gleams. It was plain that through her career she would expect to carry things with a high hand. Her managers and agents wouldn't find her an easy victim or a calculable force; but the public would adore her, surround her with the popularity that attaches to a good-natured and free-spoken princess, and her comrades would have a kindness for her because she wouldn't be selfish. They too would, besides ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... of fairness well developed in their minds, they were careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science, but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... stones and fire squibs by an alleged unction of the Spirit. The miracle becomes perpetual, still beginning, never ending. Now on the Church doctrine, the original miracle provides for the future recurrence to the ordinary and calculable laws of the human understanding and moral sense; instead of leaving every man a judge of his own gifts, and of his right to act publicly on that judgment. The initiative alone is supernatural; but all beginning is necessarily miraculous, that is, hath either no antecedent, or one [Greek: ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... The Americans northward are perfectly furious on the subject; and Motley the historian (a very sensible man, strongly English in his sympathies) assured me the other day that he thought the harm done very serious indeed, and the dangerous nature of the daily widening breach scarcely calculable. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... platitudes on the "benefits of affliction" are usually about as vague as our theories of Christian Experience. "Somehow" we believe affliction does us good. But it is not a question of "Somehow." The result is definite, calculable, necessary. It is under the strictest law of cause and effect. The first effect of losing one's fortune, for instance, is humiliation; and the effect of humiliation, as we have just seen, is to make one humble; and the effect of being humble is to produce Rest. It is a roundabout ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... constancy—they are too weak to be constant even in evil; their minds are all impressions; their actions are all the issue of immediate promptings. Swayed by the fleeting impulses of the hour, they have only one persistent, calculable motive on which reliance can always be placed—that motive is vanity; you are always sure of them there. It is from vanity they are good—from vanity they are evil; their devotion and their desertion equally vanity. I know them. To me they have disclosed the shallows ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... artificial systems on which the chemist, physicist, and astronomer operate. But in astronomy, physics, and chemistry the proposition has a perfectly definite meaning: it signifies that certain aspects of the present, important for science, are calculable as functions of the immediate past. Nothing of the sort in the domain of life. Here calculation touches, at most, certain phenomena of organic destruction. Organic creation, on the contrary, the evolutionary phenomena which properly constitute life, we cannot in any way subject ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson |
