"Complex" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which this is one instance, that the discovery of a given responsive characteristic in one case proves a sure guide to its observation in the other, and the explanation of phenomenon, under the simpler conditions of the plant, is found fully sufficient for its elucidation under the more complex circumstances of the animal. Dr. Bose found 'differential excitability' is widely present as a factor in determining the character of special responses and showed that many anomalous conclusions, with regard to the response of certain ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... doubted whether history has ever known a race of men so hardy, so self-reliant, so adaptable to the most complex situations, so determined to compel success, and so resigned in the presence of inevitable failure, as the early American sea captains. Their lives were spent in a ceaseless conflict with the forces of nature and of men. They had to deal with a mutinous crew one day and with a typhoon ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... silk, and a short, embroidered jacket over his night shirt. Beside the bed stood a table covered with glasses and bottles and pill-boxes, and also a telephone. Every few minutes this telephone would ring, and Peter would wait patiently while Mr. Ackerman settled some complex problem of business. "I've told them my terms," he would say with irritation, and then be would cough; and Peter, who was sharply watching every detail of the conduct of the rich, noted that he was too polite even to cough into the telephone. "If they ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... experience of the representation by others of the parts which she sought to make her own. She had seen Charlotte Cushman; indeed, in "Meg Merrilies," but of the true rendering of a part so difficult and complex as Shakespeare's Juliet, she knew absolutely nothing but what she had been taught by the promptings of her own artistic instinct. She was herself the only Juliet, as she was the only Bianca, and the only Evadne, she had ever seen upon any stage. In those days ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... an enigma to him; but on this day he seemed to grasp its meaning by a new light, as he watched Eve soften under its influence and felt himself drawn imperceptibly from the position of a speculative outsider to that of an intimate. It was a fresh side to the complex, fascinating life of which Fraide was ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... readily agreed, and the proposition was accordingly acted upon; Mr. Ben Allen and Mr. Bob Sawyer betaking themselves to a sequestered pot-shop on the remotest confines of the Borough, behind the bar door of which their names had in other days very often appeared at the head of long and complex calculations worked ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... that of Fig. 69. I have omitted the gripping part of each dumbell because I don't believe it is there. In my picture each circle represents the nucleus of an atom. I haven't attempted to show the planetary electrons. Other crystals have more complex arrangements ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... often happens that, in order to see the entire set of a magazine, it is necessary to visit three or four libraries. A record has been kept as to where the individual volumes are, but as useful as this information might be for those working in the same or in a kindred field it has been found too complex to be indicated in the list of magazines given in Part V.[15] The material here included is based on a personal examination of about three hundred volumes representing one hundred ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... been amply demonstrated and illustrated by writers as widely separated in their interpretation of social evolution as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. But with the further thought in mind that, alike in the lowliest physical organism or in the most complex social organism, life itself is change, we view every problem of life from another angle. To see life steadily and see it whole is one stage. Bergson bids us see life on the move, ever changing, growing, evolving, a ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... will at length come to be realised. Unless in rare cases and for exceptional reasons towns will gradually cease to be fortified even by an encirclement of detached forts. Where the latter are availed of, practical experience will infallibly condemn the expensive and complex cupola-surmounted construction of which General Brialmont is the champion. "A work," trenchantly argues Major Sydenham Clarke, "designed on the principles of the Roman catacombs is suited only for the dead, in a literal or in a military sense. The vast system of subterranean ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... a person's phobias through what seems like an intellectual or rational process. According to psychoanalysis, phobias or fears are due to some buried or subconscious complex. By daily or frequent talks with a psychoanalyst for a period of six months or a year, a person's subconscious disturbance may be brought to light, and if so, the fear is supposed automatically to disappear. Even if true, this ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... such was its tendency, and when he himself was buoyant enough to follow without an effort. Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or feeling, so long as it is simple, likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex ...
— The Gorgon's Head - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... good; and when he asserted that it was his purpose to give his father and mother merely an outline of their adventures, he was unquestionably sincere; but the outline became so extended, and assumed such a variety of complex convolutions, that there seemed to be no end to the story—as there certainly seemed to be no end to the patience of the listeners. So Dominick went, "on and on and on," as story-books put it, until the ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... not the time for settling complex social questions. When your house is being invaded by burglars you do not discuss family questions. Let us win the war first. Nothing else must now be permitted to occupy our ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... when they were first invented, then for street railways, then for telegraph, telephone, and electric-light lines, underground pipe-lines or conduits of all sorts, and finally, for drains, sewerage districts, public, and often private irrigation purposes. Most of the more complex State constitutions define at great length to the extent of some twenty or thirty paragraphs just what purposes shall be considered a public use under eminent domain. In the absence of such definition, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... illustrate. As the vital force gathers up, as it were, into itself inferior forces, and might be said to be a development of them, or, as in the appearance of nerve force, simpler and more general forces are gathered up and concentrated in a more special and complex mode of energy; so again a further specialisation takes place in the development of the nervous system, whether watched through generations or through individual life. It is not by limiting our observations ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the human aggregate,—how insignificant his part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... been murdered before her own eyes—her brother was away, and she herself a captive to an almost merciless foe; could she feel other than grateful for an act of kindness, from one at whose hands she looked for nothing but abuse and death? Nay, more: So strange and complex is the human heart—so singular in its developments—that we see nothing to wonder at, in her feeling for the savage, under the circumstances—loathsome and offensive as he might have been to her under others—a sort of affection—or rather, ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... Highly complex degrees of rank are revealed to us on the monuments of the people who immediately surrounded the Pharaoh. His person was, as it were, minutely subdivided into compartments, each requiring its attendants and their appointed chiefs. His toilet alone gave employment to a score of different ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... cannot take his workmen into his confidence in such a case and explain the nature of such a cunning attack; the thing was too complex, and their untutored minds would fail to perceive if they did not actually reject the explanation, in jealousy for their "rights" concluding that they were being hoodwinked. By very perverseness they would refuse to deny themselves a ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... Reformation against the attacks of the neo-Catholic-Anglicans, under whose influence he had himself been for a time in his youth. To him, therefore, Henry VIII. was "the majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome." This is not the occasion, nor is the present writer the man, to analyse that complex and masterful personality. Froude started to defend the English Reformation against the vile charge that it was the outcome of kingly lust. That charge he has finally dispelled. Henry VIII. was not the monster that Lingard painted. He beheaded two queens, but few will be found to ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... number of small tools, many tiny instruments, and several spools of insulated wire. He then took the articles Seaton had given him, taking great pains not to spill a single grain of salt, and set to work. Hour after hour he labored, a strange, exceedingly complex instrument taking form under his ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... contrary to that holy profession, but all combined together, makes up a black constellation of lies—one powerful lie against the truth. And, besides, it is not against a particular truth, but against the whole complex of Christianity. And error is a lie against such a particular truth as it opposeth, but the tract and course of an ignorant ungodly conversation is one continued lie against the whole bulk and body of ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... kidney, but as prominent symptoms are loss of control over the hind limbs and the passage of ropy and dark-colored urine, the vulgar idea is that it is a disorder of the urinary organs. It is a complex affection directly connected with a plethora in the blood of nitrogenized constituents, with extreme nervous and muscular disorder and the excretion of a dense reddish or brownish urine. It is directly connected with high feeding, especially on highly nitrogenized feed (oats, beans, peas, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... match the smoothly designed other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister, by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signals to a man Cochrane had never seen before, who sat in a strap-chair before many other complex controls with his hands playing back and forth upon them. A loudspeaker blatted unmusically. It was Dabney's voice, highly ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of India in 1901 was 294,361,056 or about one-fifth of the human race, and it comprises more than 100 distinct nations and peoples in every grade of civilization from absolute savages to the most complete and complex commercial and social organizations. It has every variety of climate from the tropical humidity along the southern coast to the frigid cold of the mountains; peaks of ice, reefs of coral, impenetrable jungles and bleak, treeless plains. One portion of ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... immortality is the attainment of a state, and that state the very negation of phenomenal existence. Another consequence refers to the direction our culture should take. We have to compose ourselves to death. Nothing less. We are each of us a complex of desires, passions, interests, modes of thinking and feeling, opinions, prejudices, judgment of others, likings and dislikings, affections, aims public and private. These things, and whatever else constitutes, the recognizable content of our ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... own fault, and partly through the force of destiny, a satirist, an unfortunate politician, a profligate, died early; and we must approach his corpse, as men do those of Burns and Byron, with sorrow, wonder, admiration, and blame, blended into one strange, complex, and yet not unnatural emotion. Like them, his life was short and unhappy—his career triumphant, yet checquered—his powers uncultivated—his passions unchecked—his poetry only a partial discovery of his genius—his end sudden and melancholy—and his reputation, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... ascertain, accurately, and unmistakably, the meaning of the whole, we shall, I think, find less difficulty in determining the character and office of the parts, in fact, the question solvitur ambulando, the 'complex' of the problem being solved, the constituent elements will reveal ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... inconveniently complex nowadays, what with income taxes and other visitations of government, that it is hard for us to have the added risk of wraiths, but there's no escaping. Many persons of to-day are in the same mental state as one ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... process encompassing many variables such as population densities and distribution characteristics; land-use patterns and construction techniques; geographical configurations; vulnerability of transportation; communications and other lifeline systems; complex response operations; long-term physical, social, and economic recovery policies. These factors, together with the realization that an earthquake has the potential for being the greatest single-event catastrophe in California, make it incumbent upon the State to ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various
... presented by twelve human beings. Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an actively good man. The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face like a well-directed blow from a powerful fist. And they had to give the verdict on this complex drama of Stamboul! How much they would have to tell their wives presently! Their sense of their unusual importance pushed through the smugness heavily, like a bulky man in broadcloth showing through a ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... to America marked a sharp break with the past. One needs but to stop to enumerate the changes to realize how great this break was. A simple dialect is exchanged for a complex language. A religion whose basic principle is love gradually supplants the fears and superstitions of heathenhood. The black passes from an enervating, humid climate to one in which activity is pleasurable. From the isolation ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... has no notion what he can do if he makes believe very hard. The human mind is a nicely balanced and extremely complex machine, and when thrown a little off the balance can be made to believe almost anything, as we see in the case of some poor monomaniacs, who have fancied that they were made of all sorts of things—glass and porcelain, and such like. No wonder then that poor Dick Varley, after ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Ippolito. He slowly and weakly turned his head, and his eyes fell upon the painter. He made a helpless gesture of salutation with his thin hand, and began to excuse himself, for the trouble he had given, with a gentle politeness that touched the painter's heart through all the complex resentments that divided them. It was indeed a strange ground on which the two men met. Ferris could not have described Don Ippolito as his enemy, for the priest had wittingly done him no wrong; he could not have logically hated him as a rival, for till it was too late he had ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... ancient-looking broad-bladed dagger, with a complex aspect about it, as if it had some kind of mechanism ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... side by side with communal tenures, then it is pretty certain that we shall not modify that intention, however much we change our laws. If, on the other hand, it could be shown that before the advent of a complex civilization Europeans had no conception of private property in land, but treated land as a thing necessarily and always communal, then you could ascribe modern Socialist theories with regard to the land to that general movement of harking back ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... of intrinsic value to watch and guard and worry about. There was little to make extra and difficult work,—no glass to wash with anxious care, no elaborate silver to clean,—only a few pieces of pewter to polish occasionally. It was all so easy and so simple when compared with the complex and varied paraphernalia and accompaniments of serving of meals to-day, that ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... the fancy that swells your milliner's bill, the newly-invented trimmings, the complex and ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... to the other usufructuaries, became active and paramount,—that is, when the usufructuary converted his right to personally use the thing into the right to use it by his neighbor's labor,—then property changed its nature, and its idea became complex. The legists knew this very well, but instead of opposing, as they ought, this accumulation of profits, they accepted and sanctioned the whole. And as the right of farm-rent necessarily implies the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... own part, I cared very little whether I lost or won at a game so random, so complex, and so dull; but it was sorry news to write to my poor father, and I employed all the resources of my eloquence. I told him (what was the truth) that the successful boys had none of the education; so that, if he wished me to learn, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... faintest haze over the silvery-dark water and the green meadow-bank, and the elm-trees that were spangled with gold. The river slid by in a body, utterly silent and swift, intertwining among itself like some subtle, complex creature. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... a structure as was the empire which gave to it expression. Modern European law is but a dilution thereof. The Roman law attained perfection, as I conceive, about the time of the Antonines, through the great jurists who then flourished. If one might name a particular moment at which so vast and complex a movement culminated, one would be tempted to suggest the reign of Hadrian, who appointed Salvius Julianus to draw up the edictum perpetuum, or permanent edict, in the year 132 A.D. Thenceforward the magistrate had to use his discretion only ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... second place, thinking is also to be recognized; in every act of the will there is a ruling thought;—and let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the "willing," as if the will would then remain over! In the third place, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an EMOTION, and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who must obey: "I ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the family that some misunderstanding had arisen between Ethelberta and Mr. Julian. What Picotee hoped in the centre of her heart as to the issue of the affair it would be too complex a thing to say. If Christopher became cold towards her sister he would not come to the house; if he continued to come it would really be as Ethelberta's lover—altogether, a pretty game ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... European stream of influences in this matter within historical times has involved, we can scarcely doubt when we take into consideration its complex phenomena as a whole, the maintenance of an inequality to the disadvantage of women. The fine legacy of Roman law to Europe was indeed favorable to women, but that legacy was dispersed and for the most part lost in the more predominating influence of tenacious Teutonic custom associated with ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... that he shall get a friend to invite him somewhere. Nothing will induce him to spend the whole holidays here. His name for Ada is: "Country Simplicity." If he only knew how much she knows. Rosa T. he calls a "Pimple Complex" because she has two or three pimples. Oswald has some fault to find with every girl he comes across. He says of Dora: She is a green frog, for she always looks so pale and has cold hands, and he says of ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... vibrating lengths, and attached to the sound-board by dowels. The bridge is doubly pinned, so as to cut off the vibration at the edge of the bearing the strings exert upon the bridge. The shock of each separate pulsation, in its complex form, is received by the bridge, and communicated to such undamped strings as may, by their lengths, be sensitive to them; thus producing the olian tone commonly known as sympathetic, an eminently attractive charm in the tone ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... bottom of ocean, some on the surface, some from east to west or west to east, or aslant in various directions, while, where currents meet there is deflection, modification, or stagnation, but there is no confusion; all goes on with a regularity and harmony which inconceivably excels that of the most complex and beautiful mechanism of man's constructing, although man cannot perceive this order and harmony by reason ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... clearly, in short Anglo-Saxon words—the words that carry their message straightest to hearts red with Saxon blood—of the complex nature of every man—how the angel and the demon live in each and vary through all the shades of good and bad. How yet in each there is always the possibility of a highest and best that can be true for that personality only—a dream to be realized of the lovely life, blooming ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... agreed. We were, however, faced by a strangely complex problem. Here was a woman—one of the most popular in all Italy—denounced by the humble monk of San Domenico as a dangerous adventuress. And yet she was the strongest supporter of the popular Pietro Zuccari—the wealthy man ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... during the few days of our intercourse. Let it suffice for me to say that of all hospitality and entertainment I have known, in no case was theirs not only not excelled, but in no case was it quite equalled. Perhaps the most delightful feature of it was that it was due to no training, to no complex social ideals, but that it was the untutored and spontaneous outpouring from ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... which baffle the efforts of the legislator—The Federal system is complex—It demands a daily exercise of discretion on the part of the citizens—Practical knowledge of government common amongst the Americans—Relative weakness of the Government of the Union, another defect inherent in the Federal system—The Americans have diminished ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... then a missionary; and finally he decided to become a sailor. He wanted to see the world, he had the curiosity of things; he was inclined to search for the strange and the unknown; he must seek that sensation, delightful and fascinating to complex souls, of betaking himself off, of withdrawing from his own world, of breaking with his own mode of life, and of ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... seemed louring, yet indisposed to go back and hire a vehicle, he went on quickly alone. In such an exposed spot the night wind was gusty, and the sea behind the pebble barrier kicked and flounced in complex rhythms, which could be translated equally well as shocks of ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is explained partly by its complex charm and many-sided interest, and partly by the desire to describe it from that point of view which should best reconcile its literary form with what we know of the genius and powers of its author. Those who, like Dr. Johnson, have blamed it ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... also George knew slightly, was trimming a huge oil-lamp which depended by a wire from the scarcely visible apex of the roof. When at length the natural perversity of the lamp had been mastered and the metal shade replaced, George got a general view of the immense and complex disorder of the studio. It was obviously very dirty—even in the lamplight the dust could be seen in drifts on the moveless folds of the curtains—it was a pigsty; but it was romantic with shadowed spaces, and gleams ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... attendance on one big, buxom, sober-hued damsel of the species, and weave about her aerial true lovers' knots, living chains, festoons, and intricate spirals, displaying each his bravest feathers, and seeking to dazzle the idol of the moment with audacious agility, and the beauty of complex curves and contours ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... new doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's. It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was to be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its youth in shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific. But it had not done so then. And when Burns found himself gradually growing beyond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted beyond it in another and a lower one, what was there in those times to take up his education at the point where it ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... annexed provinces present a strangely complex patchwork and oft-repeated palimpsest, civilization after civilization overlapping each other. If Alsace-Lorraine has produced no Titan either in literature or art, she yet shows ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the name Hector Berlioz calls up a series of vast and magnificent whirlwinds of vocal and orchestral sonority, the thoughts of scores that sound and look imposingly complex to the eyes and ears of both the educated and uneducated in the composer's art. We have a vision of close pages embodying the most unequivocal and drastic of musical "realism." The full audacity and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... judgment? Is every man to take the office of the Searcher of Hearts, to try the feelings and motives of his fellow-man? Is that most difficult of all analysis, the estimating of the feelings, purposes, and motives, which every man, who examines his own secret thoughts, finds to be so complex, so recondite, so intricate; is this to be the basis, not only of individual opinion, but of public reward and censure? Is every man to constitute himself a judge of the amount of time and interest given to the proper investigation ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... Channing as soon as possible how little impression he has left behind him!—But it wouldn't be that, of course," she added, seriously. "Underneath the other affair, she's always been a little in love with you, Philip. Women are complex creatures, with a capacity for being attracted quite in proportion to their capacity for attracting.... And after you are once married—You know, there's really no mystery about mating, except what the poets make. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They were always the schemes of little people, very complex in organization, needing a wheel here, a cog there, finally breaking down from the lack of capital. Then some "big people" collected the fragments to cast them into the pot once more. Dr. Leonard added another might-have-been and a new sigh ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... nice adaptation of means to ends which shows an infinite knowledge and infinite benevolence at work; but no one of the instances in which they found their argument, from the watch, which affords the primal illustration, to the human body, which furnishes the most complex confirmations, is a more astonishing or exquisite proof of pre-arrangement than is the adaptedness of gold and silver to the purposes of currency. Your standard or measure, for instance, must, in the first place, possess a certain uniformity; if it be a measure of capacity, it must ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... syllable are usually placed before their Nouns; as, deadh dhuine, a good man; droch ghniomh, a bad action; seann sluagh, old people. Such Adjectives, placed before their Nouns, often combine with them, so as to represent one complex idea, rather than two distinct ones; and the adjective and noun, in that situation, may rather be considered as one complex term, than as two distinct words, and written accordingly; as, oigfhear, a young man; ogbhean, a ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... the ideas which were represented by Hamilton. It is very generally understood, also, that neither the Jeffersonian nor the Hamiltonian doctrine was entirely adequate, and that in order to reach a correct understanding of the really formative constituent in the complex of American national life, a combination must be made of both Republicanism and Federalism. But while the necessity of such a combination is fully realized, I do not believe that it has ever been mixed in just the proper proportions. We are content ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Colonial School's sprawling five-mile complex of buildings and tropical parks, the second student shift was headed for breakfast, while a larger part of the fourth shift moved at a more leisurely rate toward their bunks. The school's organized activities were ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... stories—La Petite Fadette, La Mare au Diable, and Les Maitres Mosaistes—are as neat in their workmanship as a Dutch painting. Her brilliant powers of analysis, the intellectual atmosphere with which she surrounds the more complex characters in her longer romances, are entirely put aside, and we are given instead a series of pictures and dialogues in what has been called the purely objective style; so pure in its objectivity and detachment that it would be hard for any one to decide from ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... platitude, of course, for everybody who has mixed with women and who possesses a gleam of intelligence knows that they are extraordinary, just as he knows, or ought to know, that if they were not bizarre and mystifying, complex and erratic, they would be less insidiously captivating ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... was a fact. By morning—no sleep came to him that night—he had decided what he must do about that fact. It was then not a very complex problem. ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... the four qualities, and the four humors. The elements were fire, air, earth, and water; the four qualities were hot, cold, moist, and dry; and the four humors were phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood. From these ideological building stones a highly complex system of pathology developed; from it an involved system of treatment originated. In essence the practitioner of the humoral school attempted to restore the naturally harmonious balance of elements, qualities, and humors that had broken down and ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... after a week or two the effervescing began to systematise, and the family became a living and complex electrical machine, whose sympathetic poles drew and stuck together, while the antagonistic poles kept up a steady discharge ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... children by the roadside, in order that their souls may be given a good chance to find new bodies by reason of the approaching of many traveling pregnant women who pass along the road. A number of these primitive people hold to the idea of a complex soul, composed of several parts, in which they resemble the Egyptians, Hindus, Chinese, and in fact all mystical and occult philosophies. The Figi Islanders are said to believe in a black soul and a white soul, the former of which remains ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... of history these many races of diverse origin played their individual parts, each contributing its essential characteristics to the growing complex of a new order of society in America. So on this stage, broad as the western world, we see these men of different strains subduing a wilderness and welding its diverse parts into a great nation, stretching out the eager hand of exploration for ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... carrying with it the planets-Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which planets have the sun and not the earth as the centre of their orbits. This cosmical scheme, it should be added, may be made to explain the observed motions of the heavenly bodies, but it involves a much more complex mechanism than is ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... men to hang back and be afraid, but they were cautious and considerate of popular alarms and prejudices, compared with Froude's fearlessness. Other minds were indeed moving—minds as strong as his, indeed, it may be, deeper, more complex, more amply furnished, with a wider range of vision and a greater command of the field. But while he lived, he appears as the one who spurs on and incites, where others hesitate. He is the one by whom are visibly most felt the gaudia certaminis, and ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... seem to be of very simple chemical constitution. We have special grounds for the assumption that the crystalline granulations are for the most part composed of a single chemical compound, not necessarily highly complex even, but which seems to be a relatively simple body such as guanin, fat, melanin, etc. Doubtless other granulations have a more complicated constitution, and very often are a mixture of various chemical substances. The most complicated granules of the ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... to them, the man later on calls indignation. Let us add that a child has the faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; the distant fading boundaries which amplify painful subjects escape him. A child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until later that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit of life. Then he confronts groups of facts ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the salient moment of a complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which illuminate with so strange a splendour so many ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... enough that he had the strongest personal interest in doing so. He loved life with a mad passion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find a means of living longer than other men. All the aims and desires and complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression—the wish to live. To what idolatrous self-worship Keyork Arabian might be capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from the equation of his immediate future, it was ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... and arrange the scattered items of custom, belief, and rite, and to ascertain the degree of association which the scattered items have with each other, but he has set about the far more difficult and complex task of comparative study without ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... was drawn on by the word in which his fate would be quietly reflected; by the fiery young eye in the brilliancy of which the complex became simple, the dark bright; by the wicked old man to whom the whole world, as seen from his mire, had ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... resources as before, the same powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term 'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of long and complex processes of education. There, indeed, was the bald, plain fact—the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education. It was evident that her technical training had been of the roughest. In all technical respects, indeed, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a great delicacy and purity. Only the eyes, much darker than the hair, and the rich brown of the sable cloak where it touched the white, gave accent and force to the ethereal pallor, the supreme refinement, of the rest—face, dress, hands. Nothing but civilisation in its most complex workings could have produced such a type; that was what prevailed dimly in Fenwick's mind as he wrestled with his picture. Sometimes his day's work left him exultant, sometimes in ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been most extensively studied, are notably melodious; thus the leading languages of the group display moderately high phonetic development. In grammatic structure the better-known dialects are not so well developed; the structure is complex, chiefly through the large use of inflection, though agglutination sometimes occurs. In some cases the germ of organization is found in fairly definite juxtaposition or placement. The vocabulary is moderately rich, and of course represents the daily ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... little party to mark the departure of Marcia on the 30th of June—it wasn't definitely decided that the Langworthys were leaving then, but at least Farris and Rogers were—the reasons actuating her were rather more complex than Judith herself fully realized or would have admitted. She liked Marcia; she wanted to do at least this much for her. Living-room, dining-room, music-room, library—they would all be cleared of the larger ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... mind was so complex, peculiar, and original,—so foreign in temperament and spirit to the more representative traits of New England character,—so large, philosophic, and sagacious in vision and survey of great questions, and so ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... said Juve; "that when dealing with such complex affairs as these we are now engaged on, affairs in which the actors are but puppets, acting on behalf of the prime mover, a master-mind, ungetatable, or almost so, we should aim at first securing ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... thought that occurs to us on examining the Landa alphabet is the complex and ornate character of the letters. Instead of the two or three strokes with which we indicate a sign for a sound, we have here rude pictures of objects. And we find that these are themselves simplifications of older forms of a still more complex character. Take, for instance, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... rustic narrator, tells, in the successive veillees of a month, the romance of his youth. It is a work of a very different type to the rural tales that had preceded it, and should be regarded apart from them. It is longer, more complex in form and sentiment, more of an ideal composition. Les Maitres Sonneurs, is a delightful pastoral, woodland fantasy, standing by itself among romances much as stands a kindred work of imagination, "As You Like ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... which Mr. Burke declared himself attached is not French liberty. That liberty is nothing but the rein given to vice and confusion. Mr. Burke was then, as he was at the writing of his Reflections, awfully impressed with the difficulties arising from the complex state of our Constitution and our empire, and that it might require in different emergencies different sorts of exertions, and the successive call upon all the various principles which uphold and justify ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... swords with so renowned a man as Stephen A. Douglas would give him a kind of reflected glory. But in addition to that, he had the better side of the question. His course was simple; he was seeking the support of anti-slavery people; Douglas's task was much more complex, for he wished to offend neither northern nor southern Democrats, and he soon found himself offending both. To carry water on both shoulders is always a risky thing to attempt, and Douglas soon found himself fettered by the awkward position ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... as two thousand years back. Perhaps you will think that is not saying much. Don't suppose I think it good philosophy in myself to keep here out of the world, and sport a gentle Epicurism; I do not; I only follow something of a natural inclination, and know not if I could do better under a more complex system. It is very smooth sailing hitherto down here. No velvet waistcoat and ever-lustrous pumps to be considered; no bon mots got up; no information necessary. There is a pipe for the parsons to smoke, and quite as much bon mots, literature, and philosophy as they care for without ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... delicately rounded face, the frank mouth, which disclosed teeth as white as milk, was enhanced by the fact that every line, every tint spoke of flawless health and a mind attuned to the simple, gracious things of life rather than those which are complex and ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... were few and relatively unimportant, built entirely of wood (except the churches), and very liable to be burnt down on the least excuse. In considering them we must dismiss from our minds the ideas derived from our own great and complex organisation, and bring ourselves mentally into the attitude of a simple agricultural people, requiring little beyond what was produced on each man's own farm or petty holding. Such people are mainly fed from their own ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... especially true of many tales for any young children reprinted by special arrangement from recent English sources. In some cases, where the substance has seemed of more importance to the child than the form, simpler words and forms of expression have been substituted for more complex or abstract phrases, and passages of minor importance have ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... appearance was hailed with acclamation, being the Wassail Bowl, so renowned in Christmas festivity. The contents had been prepared by the squire himself; for it was a beverage in the skilful mixture of which he particularly prided himself, alleging that it was too abstruse and complex for the comprehension of an ordinary servant. It was a potation, indeed, that might well make the heart of a toper leap within him, being composed of the richest and raciest wines, highly spiced and sweetened, with roasted apples ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... relations that exist between the words and word groups (phrases and clauses) that compose it. If the thought is simple, and expressed in straightforward terms, we grasp it readily and without any conscious effort to determine these relations. If the thought is complex, the relations become more complicated, and before we are sure that we know what the writer intends to say it may be necessary to note with care which is the main clause and which are the subordinate clauses. In either case our acquiring the thought ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... hardly necessary to assume that the same law of vital force governs in the appearance and geographical distribution of fungi, as universally obtains in the higher and more complex vegetal growths. And although it may be difficult, in some instances, to draw the precise line between certain low mycological forms and the amoeboid and some other primitive manifestations of animal life, yet ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... steps, the fluted columns, the sculptured bas-reliefs and canopy of the marvellous shrine. The marble, worn and mellowed by the subtle hand of time, took on an unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in some remote way of the honey-colored columns of the Parthenon, but more mystic, more complex, a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss, but made up of cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs' tombs, and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of Siena, or ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and new ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase badly. Doubt, I say, but it was not so much doubt—which is a complex thing—as startled emphatic denial. "Have I believed THIS!" And I was also, you must remember, just ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... pretty considerable fortunes in their negotiations, as middlemen, between the provincial natives and the European commercial houses. Their true social position is often an equivocal one, and the complex question has constantly to be confronted whether to regard a Spanish demi-sang from a native or European standpoint. Among themselves they are continually struggling to attain the respect and consideration accorded to the superior class, whilst their connexions ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Le Brun presides over a very interesting lot of pictures, mostly French. This academic canvas, of Darius' family at the feet of Alexander, has not the simplicity and decorative quality of the Italian pictures of that period, and it is entirely too complex to be enjoyable. The beautiful Courbet on the left, while suggestive of Ribera in its severe disposal of light and shadow, has also a quality of its own, a wonderful mellowness which gives it a unity of expression lacking in its turbulent ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... list is a long one, as given by Mr. Spedding (iii. 511), of the instances which show that he was ill-informed about the advances of knowledge in his own time. And his mind was often not clear when he came to deal with complex phenomena. Thus, though he constructed a table of specific gravities—"the only collection," says Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we find in his works," and "wonderfully accurate considering the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... a free peasantry, as in Italy. We can but glance at the influence of Christianity, first in ameliorating its rigor, by teaching the master that the slave was his brother in Christ, and then by working together with economic forces for its abolition. By complex and partly obscure causes, personal slavery—the outright ownership of man—was abolished throughout Christendom. Less inhuman in theory, less heartless in practice, though inhuman and harsh enough, was the serfdom which succeeded slavery ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... mechanical clock has been thought by some to be the sundial. Actually these devices represent two different approaches to the problem of time-keeping. True ancestor of the clock is to be found among the highly complex astronomical machines which man has been building since Hellenic times to illustrate the relative motions ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... editorial and personal involvements grew more complex. At what moment might a pressure from above close down on his pen, and with what demand? How should he act in the crisis thus forced, at Marrineal's slow pleasure? Take Edmonds's Gordian recourse; resign? But he was on the verge ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "They reconciled us; we embraced, and we have since been mortal enemies"; and the trout; and the soul of the licentiate; and Dr. Sangrado; and the Archbishop of Granada—to mention only the most famous and hackneyed matters—are still things a little larger, a little more complex, a little more eternal and true, than webs of uninteresting analysis told in phrase to which Marivaudage itself is golden and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... environment (surroundings,—soil, climate, etc.) account for and explain the various species that have existed in the past and now exist upon earth, man included. That there are no gaps in the process but that there is demonstrable a steady ascent from lower to higher (simple to more complex) forms of life, until man is reached, the acknowledged highest ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... work; there was no disgrace, he said, in digging the soil, if the brain were kept working as well as the hands. And I did keep my brain working; I allowed it also to lie fallow, and to absorb everything of nature that was complex, grand and beautiful,—and from such studies I learnt the goodness and the majesty of the Creator as they are never found in human expositions of Him made by the preachers of creeds. At eighteen ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... which have a complex signification always tend to slough off a part of their meaning*; and, especially, words that denote a state or property, together with its mode of growth or of manifestation, are prone to drop the latter, even though ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... without ascertaining whether the payment of that particular piece of paper had been provided for. This amounts to saying that the discussion of philosophical problems takes especially a verbal aspect; and the more complex the phenomena a concept thus handled, contains, the more dangerous it is. A concept of the colour red has but a very simple content, and by using it, this content can be very clearly represented. But how can the immense ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... a surprising thing, for Bas came often and maintained flawlessly the pose of amity he had chosen to assume. In his complex make-up paradoxes of character met and mingled, and it was possible for him, despite his bitter memories of failure and humiliation, to smile with just the proper nicety of unrestraint ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... in the Heian epoch and the increase of extravagant entertainment and amusement, there was a remarkable development of music and the dance. Besides the six-stringed harp or wagon, much more complex harps or lutes of thirteen or twenty-five strings were used, and in general there was a great increase in the number and variety of instruments. Indeed, we may list as many as twenty kinds of musical instruments and three or four times as many varieties of dance in the Heian epoch. Most ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... amongst the Jews for fifteen and amongst the Gitanos for three days, during which, on both sides, much that is singular and barbarous occurs, which, however, has perhaps its origin in antiquity the most remote. But the wedding ceremonies of the Jews are far more complex and allegorical than those of the Gypsies, a more simple people. The Nazarene gazes on these ceremonies with mute astonishment; the washing of the bride - the painting of the face of herself and her companions with chalk and carmine - her ensconcing ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... room, sewing, would say, "Play that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key, in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough thing!" ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... enthusiasm, and thinks to arouse it by calling attention to what he himself feels. What folly! The drama of nature lives only in the heart; to see it, one must feel it. The child sees the objects, but not the relations that bind them together; he can make nothing of their harmony. The complex and momentary impression of all these sensations requires an experience he has never gained, and feelings he has never known. If he has never crossed the desert and felt its burning sands scorch his feet, the stifling reflection ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... don't say there's nothing in the theory one heard that the natural war rage of non-combatants, not having the physical outlet the fighters had for theirs, became in some few of them a suppressed Freudian complex and made them a little insane. I don't know. Anyhow to say this became the stunt among a certain section, so it was probably as inaccurate as popular sayings usually are; as inaccurate as the picture drawn by another section—the Potter press section—of an army going rejoicing ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... will bear you,' said Smith critically; 'but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you back into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the national dress altogether, but compromise matters by putting on, in addition to their long gown, a European hat and shoes, which, if anything, looks worse still. The ladies have not yet adopted the European style which, perhaps, they have sense enough to see, is far more complex and inconvenient than their own. Of this much I am certain that no mysterious production of Worth would be more becoming, or suit them better than their own graceful, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... crossing legs, how he arranged hands, arms, shoulders, legs, head, feet for an attitude of complete rest. He repeated his illustration again and again, Susan watching and listening with open-eyed wonder and admiration. She had never dreamed that so simple a matter could be so complex. When he got her up beside him and went through it with her, she soon became as used to the new motions as a beginner at the piano to stretching an octave. But it was only after more than an hour's practice that ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Yet complex as is the problem before us, it is essential that we should face it bravely. There is grave danger lest, just as we have been "rushed into" this war (through no fault of ours, as the diplomatic correspondence abundantly proves), so we may at a given ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... burned in the kiln. The latter are of more than one shape and quality. Some are square, others are oblong. Those from the Birs Nimroud are generally of a dark red color, while those from the Mujelibe are mostly of a light yellow. A large number of them have inscriptions in a complex cuneiform character peculiar to Babylon. These superscriptions have been impressed upon them by a stamp, on which the whole inscription was cut in relief. Each character was not made singly, as on the Assyrian bricks, and ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... She attacked a complex tangle of ropes vigorously. Miss Rutherford, with Frank leaning on her shoulder, staggered up the beach. Just as they reached the tents the head of a young man appeared under the flapping canvas. Then his arms struggled out Priscilla ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... frequently termed flesh-formers. They are composed of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a small quantity of sulphur, and are extremely complex bodies. Their chief function is to form flesh in the body; but without previously forming it, they may be transformed into fat or merely give rise to heat. They form the essential part of every ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... ruins, the cathedral church a wreck, the clergy sunk in sloth and ignorance, there came to the Bishopric, four years vacant, a true man whose name on the page of Manx Church history is like a star on a dark night, when only one is shining—Bishop Thomas Wilson. He was a strange and complex creature, half angel, only half man, the serenest of saints, and yet almost the bitterest of tyrants. Let ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... spite of all, we have been true even in our iniquities to the traditions of our race. No, I cannot assert that these traditions always square with ethics or even with the Decalogue, for we have added a very complex Eleventh Commandment concerning honor. And for the rest, we have defiantly embroidered life, and indomitably we have converted the commonest happening of life into a comely thing. We have been ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... who, in the event of a divorce, returns to her relations. Where the putus tali is allowed to take place, he has a property in her, little differing from that of a slave, as formerly observed. The particular sums which constitute the jujur are less complex here than at other places. The value of the maiden's golden trinkets is nicely estimated, and her jujur regulated according to that and the rank of her parents. The semando marriage scarcely ever takes place but among poor people, where there is no property on either side, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... course of development, change from the simple to the complex. The art of gardening has in many ways been an exception to the rule. The methods of culture used for many crops are more simple than those in vogue a generation ago. The last fifty years has seen also a ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... Egypt revealed in these early monuments of art forces us to the same conclusion. Those earliest monuments show that a very complex society had even then been developed. We not only have a separation between the priestly and military orders, but agriculturists, manufacturers, and traders, with a whole series of subdivisions in each of these classes. The early tombs show us sculptured and painted representations of a daily ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... "c'est d'etre absolument soi-meme." Of course if one concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's word "life," but with ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... with minds unclouded by pity, sympathy, charity, and other like virtues, on the one hand, or by envy, hate, prejudice, and like evil sentiments, on the other. True, men are more enlightened now and education is more general, but society is more complex, with more diverse and conflicting interests, than formerly. The social mechanism is now so intricate that even a slight disturbance in one part may disarrange the whole. Injustice to one may injure the many. Hence the duty of ascertaining as completely ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... a many-sided man, acquainted with smiles and tears, complex in brain, single in heart, direct as light; and his words, candid as mirrors, gave the perfect image of his thought. He was never afraid to ask—never too dignified to admit that he did not know. No man had keener wit or kinder ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... scepticism, is not the incertitude, that I am talking about here. No! This other doubt is a passionate doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling, science and life, logic and biotic. For science destroys the concept of personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to moment—that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... salaries is almost too great to be borne and certainly much greater than it should be. I wish a commission might be appointed, consisting of those best qualified in the entire country, to apply themselves to this most serious, difficult and complex problem, indeed to the entire problem of excessively high prices. I hope they would discover means, if not to remedy the situation entirely, at least ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... though great is never complex but very simple. And so the statement of His purpose is ever exquisitely simple. Listen again: "Call unto Me, and I will answer thee and shew thee great things and difficult which thou knowest not." If a man call he has already turned his face ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... hands clutching the rail of the control panel desperately. "I?" he whispered. "I was roaming the planes, exploring, experimenting, immersed in the pursuits that went with my insatiable thirst for scientific data and the broadening of my knowledge of this complex universe of ours. ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... unscrupulous to be found out. We associate Scotland Yard with detectives—miraculous creations of imaginative writers—forgetting that the Criminal Investigation Department is but one branch in a wondrously complex organisation. Of that organisation itself, we know little. And in spite of—or perhaps because of—the mass of writing that has made its name familiar all over the world, there exists but the haziest notion as to how it ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... Akkad had been founded more than two thousand years before. Nothing but a prodigiously long lapse of time could explain the firm hold thus obtained by a foreign language, and a system of writing the most complex and difficult to learn ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... and fortune, she is welding link by link the chain of circumstance that draws her to ultimate disaster. She is by no means a simple heroine motivated by the elementary passions; instead she is constantly swayed by emotions and desires of the most diverse and complex nature. After her first taste of court life she learns to look back on her husband's rusticity with a sort of contempt, and to ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... intensest joys, a craving for a world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with which he reflects the strength and weakness of his time, its humanity, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... rough casts for the new Italian shells out of the steel from the furnaces, the construction of a new spur to the little railway which bound the old plant together with its shining steel rails. There were questions of supplies and shipping and bank credits to face, the vast and complex problems of the complete new munition works, to be built out of town and involving such matters as the housing of enormous numbers of employees. He scrawled figures and added them. Even with the size of ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... complex both in principle and in its outward manifestations, was nevertheless inadequate to express the exuberant piety of the populace. There were casual divinities in every nome whom the people did not love ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... arrival of "la nef" "l'essai des plats," all as if in a Byzantine or Chinese court.[2146] On Sundays the entire public, the public in general, is admitted, and this is called the "grand couvert," as complex and as solemn as a high mass. Accordingly to eat, to drink, to get up, to go to bed, is to a descendant of Louis XIV, to officiate.[2147] Frederick II, on hearing an explanation of this etiquette, declared that if he were king of France his first edict would be to appoint another ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... reaction, nor of the hazards of the resulting blast and radiation. Protective measures could be based only on estimates and calculations. Furthermore, scientists were reasonably confident that the gun-type uranium-fueled device could be successfully detonated, but they did not know if the more complex firing technology required in an implosion device would work. Successful detonation of the TRINITY device showed that implosion would work, that a nuclear chain reaction would result in a powerful detonation, and that ...
— Project Trinity 1945-1946 • Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer
... earnest inquiry into the germs and primary developments of existing institutions has become more and more active and universal, and the merited celebrity of M. Guizot's work has proportionally increased. Its admirable analysis of the complex political and social organizations of which the modern civilized world is made up must have led thousands to trace with keener interest the great crises of times past, by which the characteristics of the present were determined. The narrative of one of these great ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... car lamps were lit. Maria still looked, however, out of the window; the lights in the house windows, and red and green signal-lights, gave her a childish interest. She forgot entirely about herself. She turned her back upon herself and her complex situation of life with infinite relief. She did not wonder what she would do when she reached Ridgewood. She did not think any more of herself. It was as if she had come into a room of life without any looking-glasses, and she was ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... she did not even care to play. She went into the parlor and touched a few notes, but her heart was heavy and sad. Life was growing too complex. ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... undertook to solve the three complex issues involved, convinced that these were so interwoven as to form one web. Skillful assistants were intrusted with particular lines of investigation. Double shifts were employed in watching each of the Laniers. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... individual is connected with some association like the clan or tribe which is state, church and family, all in one. The stories of the Jewish patriarchs are good illustrations of this stage in social evolution. In advanced and complex societies, however, each individual belongs to a number of groups—to a town, a factory, a school, a home, a political party, a fraternal order, a church. In complex societies these groups are united to form the whole ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... improvements suggested by the experience of sixty years, still needs improvement, and that it was at first far more defective than it now is. But whoever seriously considers what it is to construct from the beginning the whole of a machine so vast and complex as a government, will allow that what Hastings effected deserves high admiration. To compare the most celebrated European ministers to him seems to us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe, who, before ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... seen Jake Hibbard, that carrion crow of the law, loafing about the corridors, and the sight had made him shiver. He had next heard that Jim's case would be quickly called,—probably on the next day,—news producing a complex emotion, the elements of which he could not distinguish. Furthermore, a remark or so which he overheard indicated that the out-of-town men were inclined to take a harsh view of the matter. And reflecting on all these things, he paddled home ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... live. He had always wanted to live. So we all do—but in us the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct existed alone. There is in such simple development a gigantic force, and like the pathos of a child's naive and uncontrolled desire. He wanted that girl, and the utmost that can be said for him was that he wanted that particular girl alone. ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... work. Their variety is partly due to the very various purposes which the buildings of the Romans were designed to serve: these comprised all to which Greek buildings had been appropriated, and many others, the product of the complex and luxurious civilisation of the Empire. But independent of this circumstance, the employment of such various forms in the plans of buildings as the ellipse, the circle, and the octagon, and their facile use, seem to denote ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... than Laughter! It was more profound, more subtle, than either your spoken Word. or, your written, your printed Thought. You were infinitely better than the Very Best that you ever did! High Praise, but True! Your nature was strangely Complex: ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley
... wrong. But with the assurance that their advice is backed up by Deity, followed with an offer of reward if we believe it, and a threat of dire punishment if we do not, the Self-appointed Superior Class has driven men wheresoever it willed. The evolution of formal religions is not a complex process, and the fact that they embody these two unmixable things, dogma and morality, is a very plain and simple truth, easily seen, undisputed by all reasonable men. And be it said that the morality of most religions is good. Love, truth, charity, justice ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Englishman lay his trap for Zona. He was more cruel than Prosper, rougher, necessarily more dramatic, but there was all the essence of the original drama, the ensnarement of a simple, direct mind by a complex and skillful one. Joan's surrender, Prosper's victory, were there. He wondered how Joan could act it, play the part in cold blood. Now he was condemned to live in his own imagination through Joan's tragedy. There was that first pitifulness of a tamed and broken spirit; then later, in London, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... diffusing a more liberal spirit among the clergy and people of the Pays de Vaud. His system of logic, which in the last editions has swelled to six tedious and prolix volumes, may be praised as a clear and methodical abridgment of the art of reasoning, from our simple ideas to the most complex operations of the human understanding. This system I studied, and meditated, and abstracted, till I have obtained the free command of an universal instrument, which I soon presumed to exercise on my catholic opinions. Pavilliard was not unmindful that his first task, his most ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... pilgrimage at Chicago, graduated in an Irish secret society at Buffalo, gave serious trouble to the constabulary at Skibbareen, and so eventually caught the eye of a subordinate agent of Von Bork, who recommended me as a likely man, you will realize that the matter was complex. Since then I have been honoured by his confidence, which has not prevented most of his plans going subtly wrong and five of his best agents being in prison. I watched them, Watson, and I picked them as ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... than was the great King Knut of blessed memory. Then there is a fine figure of a land-agent and several ladies who talk the snappiest of slang. But the mist and the sea have swept across Miss Holme's pages and blotted out the rest of the affair. Not Meredith nor Robert Browning at their most complex have been more baffling. I must admit, however, that the description of a game of mixed hockey, somewhere in the middle of the book, was delightfully fresh and vivid. Here, for a page or two, I could rest from my grapplings with the story and join in all the excitement ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... beseech those who are friendly to our political institutions—who believe that no other than the complex government we have adopted can unite the adaptation of laws to local circumstances with the strength and security of a great empire, to discountenance the pestilent and absurd doctrine that the constitution is to be on all points forever unsettled. We beseech them to save this monument ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... other young men about town. He is affected with a frivolous sense of humor which plunges him at the most inopportune moments into paroxysms of imperfectly suppressed laughter. Cusins is a spectacled student, slight, thin haired, and sweet voiced, with a more complex form of Lomax's complaint. His sense of humor is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has set up a chronic strain which ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Not to the brawlers in Hyde Park. The life of civilized beings is a very complex thing. It isn't filled by good intentions nor even by the cardinal virtues. The function of the older societies is to hand on the best things the world has won, so that those who come after, instead of having to go back to barbarism, ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... such thing as a freak of nature," corrected Arletta, "the utmost reason prevails for all of her acts; but the simplest of nature's laws appears complex and incomprehensible to the Apeman, who merely uses his brain as an organ for self-gratification instead of an instrument to grasp natural laws for which purpose it is intended. And therefore, while your famous Apemen stunt the growth of the brain by misusing ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... furniture and the minister as a luxurious idler, all the vast tumult of this vast torrent of humanity with its false and its true ideas, its exaggeration of evils in the church and its bitterness and shame that are the result of many complex causes, all this as a total fact in its contrast with the easy, comfortable life I have lived, fills me more and more with a sense of mingled terror and self accusation. I have heard the words of Jesus many times lately: 'Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least My brethren, ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... the cause of Suzanna's listlessness, spoke no word. She wondered why the child had lost interest in the festival, indeed in all things pertaining to the occasion. It was difficult, she finally decided, to know how to cope with a child so complex, so changeable. She determined to treat the new mood with indifference, as being the most potent method. So she asked of Suzanna the performance of daily duties just as usual. When she discovered Suzanna gazing at her, Maizie close ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... remedy like punishment is not adequate to cure such a natural and social phenomenon as crime, which has its own natural and social causes. The measures for the preservation of society against criminality must be manifold, complex and varied, and must be the outcome of persevering and systematic work on the part of legislators and citizens on the solid foundation of a systematic ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri |
