"Congruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be disposed to wonder how I could prevail on myself to give so free a representation of my own species, among a race of mortals who are already too apt to conceive the vilest opinion of humankind, from that entire congruity between me and their Yahoos. But I must freely confess, that the many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds, placed in opposite view to human corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding, that I began to view the actions ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... them of bulk, figure, or motion we are not apt to think them the effects of these primary qualities; which appear not, to our senses, to operate in their production, and with which they have not any apparent congruity or conceivable connexion. Hence it is that we are so forward as to imagine, that those ideas are the resemblances of something really existing in the objects themselves since sensation discovers nothing of bulk, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... the leading personages to be met in the traditions of the world is really no more than—Somebody. There is nothing this wondrous creature cannot achieve; one only restriction binds him at all—that the name he assumes shall have some sort of congruity with the office he undertakes, and even from this he oftentimes breaks loose.' {5} We may be pretty sure that the adventures of Jason, Perseus, OEdipous, were originally told only of 'Somebody.' The names are ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... I've no fault to find with her; but she has never done that, and she is the last woman in the world to counsel any wife to do it. Personally, I should hate to be worshipped. In worship hours I should be smoking a cigar, and who with a sense of congruity can imagine a god smoking a cigar? Besides, worship would bore me to paralysis. But Adrian loved it. He lived on it, just as the new hand in a chocolate factory lives on chocolate creams. The more he was worshipped the happier he became. And while consuming adoration he had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... tonic and delightful. Unconsciously impressions stole upon her—the lengthening day, the celandines in the hedges, the swelling lilac buds in the cottage gardens. They spoke to her youth, and out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond. Still, her face kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs. Jellison. More than that—the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its significant ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... business faculty were the perpetual torment of his wife, was master of his house. While he was rolling out the psalm, expounding the chapter, or 'wrestling' in prayer, he was a personality and an influence even for the wife who, in spite of a dumb congruity of habit, regarded him generally as incompetent and in the way. Reuben's religious sense was strong and deep, but some very natural and pathetically human instincts entered also into his constant pleasure in this daily function. Hannah, with her strong and harsh ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... performed—for Fitzpiers did not study economy where pleasure was in question. Hence it perhaps arose that Giles and all his belongings seemed sorry and common to her for the moment—moving in a plane so far removed from her own of late that she could scarcely believe she had ever found congruity therein. "No—I could never have married him!" she said, gently shaking her head. "Dear father was right. It would have been too coarse a life for me." And she looked at the rings of sapphire and opal upon her white and slender fingers that ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... strange scenes, we feel as if all were unreal. This is but the perception of the true unreality of earthly things, made evident by the want of congruity between ourselves and them. By and by we become mutually adapted, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Sympathetical Mummie, abstracted from the Works of Paracelsus, and translated out of the Latin, by Fernando Parkhurst, Gent." London, 1653. pp. 2.7. Quoted by the "Foreign Quarterly Review," vol. xii. p. 415.] and mixed with rich earth. In this earth sow some seeds that have a congruity or homogeneity with the disease: then let this earth, well sifted and mixed with mummy, be laid in an earthen vessel; and let the seeds committed to it be watered daily with a lotion in which the diseased limb or body has been washed. Thus will the disease be transplanted from the human body ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... different observers at different days on the same point. No discrepancy greater than 7 feet has been thus discovered. In other cases the same observer returned and observed at the same places, and here a similar congruity of result has been found ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the moment he had done with work, as if he were a fine steel spring. A few hours' sleep sufficed him, and he saw the morning stars the year round. His weazened face was leather color, but forever dimpling and changing to keep some sort of congruity between itself and his eyes, that winked and blinked and spilled over with merry good nature. He always seemed afflicted when obliged to be sober. He had been known to laugh in meeting on several occasions, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... amusements; his eye travelled through an open door to the little dining-room and the Russell pastels of Lady Mary's parents, as children, hanging on the wall. The character of the little dwelling impressed itself at once. Smiling; he acknowledged its congruity with Julie. Here was a lady who fell on ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... body—that vehicle of divine virtue or power." So he maintains that the Kabalistic three souls—Nephesh, Ruach, Neschamah—originate in a misunderstanding of the true Platonic doctrine, which is that of a threefold "vital congruity." These correspond to the three degrees of bodily existence, or to the three "vehicles," the terrestrial, the aerial, and the ethereal. The latter is the augoeides—the luciform vehicle of the purified soul whose irrational part has been brought ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... itself with typical seriousness. We were much more serious than the Pendletons, but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I must have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible clustered—so that the more of these there were the more one might imagine a great social order ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy. On this occasion he therefore recognised as the servant opened the door a congruity between the weather and the "four-wheeler" that, in the empty street, under the glazed radiance, waited and trickled and blackly glittered. The butler mentioned it as on such a wild night the only thing they could get, and Vanderbank, having replied that ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... noticeable fault if all the dresses of ladies of different families obviously showed the design and facture of one modiste. This could easily be avoided without prejudice to the point of harmony in colour and congruity of line. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... should be entered by the western portal, the dullest eye cannot fail to perceive the uniform character of the work, a quality which gives to this Cathedral a congruity of structural forms and an architectonic value that is lacking in buildings which exhibit the styles of various periods. Here we see the complete architectural expression of one master mind, although the edifice was erected under the supervision of successive bishops. The present Cathedral ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... occupants and the purposes of a country home. Nobody wants a modern city house planted down in the open country, nor should any sensible man seek a refuge from the bare streets of the city in the little less bare streets of a country village. There is no congruity between the classical forms of Grecian Architecture and the varying climate ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... natural science, where sufficient proof can be brought to show that the movement of the heavens is always of uniform velocity. Reason is employed in another way, not as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established principle, by showing the congruity of its results, as in astrology the theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established, because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them. In ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... indriyartham; Vidwan means Sakshi; and ekah, independent and distinct. What is intended to be said here is that when the soul, in a dream, musters together the occurrences and objects of different times and places, when, in fact, congruity in respect of both time and place does not apply to it, it must be regarded to have an existence that is distinct and independent of the senses and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... been studied very little,—says, "The poetry of the troubadours and trouveres represents in its totality a collection of songs which in their frequently amazing naivete and melodiousness, their spontaneity and sound music, intimate congruity of melody and text and extraordinary originality, have been unparalleled to this day." All these songs are distinguished by graceful simplicity; but the ear of the non-musician can hardly perceive the originality on which Beck lays such stress. In any case, the music ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... he disregarded Mr. Locke, who asserts that "Wit lies in an assemblage of ideas, and putting them together with quickness and vivacity, whenever can be found any resemblance and congruity whereby to make up pleasant pictures and ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... part of the humour of the character of Nestor. This is what Nestor's critics do not see; the inopportune nature of his tactical remarks is the point of them, just as in the case of the laird of Drumthwacket, "that should be." Scott knew little of Homer, but coincided in the Nestorian humour by mere congruity of genius. The Pisistratidze must have been humourless if they did not see that the poet smiled as he composed Nestor's speeches, glorifying old deeds of his own and old ways of fighting. He arrays his Pylians ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... have a great deal of Wit, and prompt Memories, have not always the clearest Judgment or deepest Reason: For Wit lying most in the Assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with Quickness and Variety, wherein can be found any Assemblance or Congruity, thereby to make up pleasant Pictures, and agreeable Visions in the Fancy. Judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side; in separating carefully one from another, Ideas, wherein can be found the least ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... or the truth "in Christ." For truth in the ordinary and scientific sense is received by a spontaneous, rather than chosen by a voluntary, act; and the apprehension of the same (belief) supposes a position of congruity rather than an act of obedience. Far otherwise is it with the truth that is the object of Christian faith: and it is this truth of which Leighton is speaking. Belief indeed is a living part of this faith; but only as long as it is a living part. In other ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet's lines on old age, sine amore jocisque, borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity of genius. Mr. Collins states the hypothesis—not his own—"that BY A CERTAIN NATURAL AFFINITY Shakespeare caught also the accent and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Bella's time of life it was not to be expected that she should examine herself very closely on the congruity or stability of her position in Mr Boffin's house. And as she had never been sparing of complaints of her old home when she had no other to compare it with, so there was no novelty of ingratitude or disdain in her very much preferring ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the sources of action, the motives, and especially the ends which guide a man in the conduct of life. But since men live before they reflect, Ethics and Morality are not synonymous. So long as there is a congruity between the customs of a people and the practical requirements of life, ethical questions do not occur. It is only when difficulties arise as to matters of right, for which the {11} existing usages of society ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... present time. Merely naming this as possible, but not probable, a consideration of more weight is that the period of rotation of Venus is but indefinitely fixed, and that a small diminution in the estimated angular velocity of her equator would bring the result into congruity with the hypothesis. Further, it may be remarked that not exact, but only general, congruity is to be expected; since the process of condensation of each planet from nebulous matter can scarcely be expected to have gone on with absolute uniformity: the angular velocities of the superposed ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... procession is so painfully "not" regardless of expense. You see Cardinals with dirty robes, under the most gorgeous stoles, while the surplices are as yellow as the stained gold-worked bands which hang across them. There is, indeed, no sense of congruity or the inherent fitness of things about the Italian ceremonials. A priest performs mass and elevates the host with muddy boots on, while the Pope himself, in the midst of the grandest service, blows his ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... infinitely more delightful, a captivating woman. There were combined, in her, qualities not commonly met together, great vivacity of mind with great grace of manner. Her words sparkled and her movements charmed. There was, indeed, in all she said and did, that congruity that indicates a complete and harmonious organisation. It was the same just proportion which characterised her form: a shape slight and undulating with grace; the most beautifully shaped ear; a small, soft hand; a foot that would have fitted the glass slipper; and which, by the bye, she ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... term "taste" is to be distinguished from that of "judgment," with which it is constantly confounded. Judgment is a general term, expressing definite action of the intellect, and applicable to every kind of subject which can be submitted to it. There may be judgment of congruity, judgment of truth, judgment of justice, and judgment of difficulty and excellence. But all these exertions of the intellect are totally distinct from taste, properly so called, which is the instinctive and instant preferring of one material object ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... arrangements; and the difference of arrangement in the Shield of Hercules is altogether for the worse. The natural consecution of the Homeric images needs no exposition: it constitutes in itself one of the beauties of the work. The Hesiodic images are huddled together without connection or congruity: Mars and Pallas are awkwardly introduced among the Centaurs and Lapithae;— but the gap is wide indeed between them and Apollo with the Muses, waking the echoes of Olympus to celestial harmonies; whence however, we are hurried back to Perseus, the Gorgons, and other images ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... in Italy rather as the rival than pupil of the masters whom he travelled to study. Whatever he borrowed from the Venetian school—the object of his admiration—he converted into a new manner of florid magnificence. It is just the excellence of Rubens—the completeness, the congruity of his style—that has raised him to the eminence in the temple of fame which he will ever occupy. A little short of Rubens is intolerable: the clumsy forms and improprieties of his imitators are not to be endured. Mr Fuseli excepts Vandyck and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... sung by a handful of fisherfolk here on an islet of the Atlantic—the real congruity (if indeed the Church be, as the Bidding Prayer defines it, "the whole body of Christian people dispersed throughout the world")—was probably less perceptible to the Commandant after fifteen years' sojourn on the Islands than to Vashti, newly returned from ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... shall be at least acknowledged to act consistently with myself in seconding the noble person who spoke last; and I am convinced, that many of those who differ from me in opinion, would gladly be able to boast of resembling me in congruity of principles, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... I ought to have given some consideration to the proposal; but I think I must suffer from chronic inflammation of the logical faculty. It revolted against the suggested congruity of Carlotta and the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Congruity, the subjection of the parts to the whole, and to the end in view—the doctrine of key—Hawthorne illustrates all this. If we do not mark passages and delectate over phrases, we receive an exquisite sense of harmony—and harmony is the last word of style. It is this power ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed, eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock, I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal's habits a certain congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend to believe in a ship which comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of opera-goers cannot ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... be traced even as far back as in the first origin of poetry. As, in the shape in which language comes down to us, this is seldom perceptibly the case, an imagination which has been powerfully excited is fond of laying hold of any congruity in sound which may accidentally offer itself, that by such means he may, for the nonce, restore the lost resemblance between the word and the thing. For example, How common was it and is it to seek in the name of a person, however arbitrarily bestowed, a reference to his qualities ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... between the Biblical days and the geological periods of the earth would by no means be established by such an identification of the days of creation with the periods of the world: for the geological or even the cosmic and astronomical periods are nowhere in congruity with ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... justification of nationalism so far as nationalism is founded on a true interpretation of history. For, inasmuch as the true social harmony rests on feeling and makes use of all the natural ties of kinship, of neighbourliness, of congruity of character and belief, and of language and mode of life, the best, healthiest, and most vigorous political unit is that to which men are by their own feelings strongly drawn. Any breach of such unity, whether by forcible disruption ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... is strange, and strangely just: Nakaeia, the author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity. Not the nature, but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed. At home, in a quiet by-street of a village, the man had been a worthy carpenter, and, even bedevilled as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... three excellent heads in the place upon the shoulders of three brothers, who put those heads together, and learned how to make and how to sell scales. All over New England, industries have rooted themselves which appear to have no congruity with the places in which they are found. We heard the other day of a village in which are made every year three bushels of gold rings. We ourselves passed, some time ago, in a remarkably plain New England town, a manufactory of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... material blessing, and a rendering to Him of His gifts of outward nourishment. In this case, the shew-bread would be anomalous, a literality thrust into the midst of symbolism. The other explanation keeps up the congruity, by taking the material bread, which is the result of God's blessing on man's toil, as a symbol of the spiritual results of God's blessing on man's spiritual toil, or, in other words, of practical righteousness or good works, and conceives that these are offered to God, by a strong ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... in whom poor Agathe thought she recognized her son was astride the last two classes of poverty. She saw the ragged neck-cloth, the scurfy hat, the broken and patched boots, the threadbare coat, whose buttons had shed their mould, leaving the empty shrivelled pod dangling in congruity with the torn pockets and the dirty collar. Scraps of flue were in the creases of the coat, which showed plainly the dust that filled it. The man drew from the pockets of his seam-rent iron-gray trousers a pair of hands as black as those of a mechanic. A knitted woollen ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... lines drawn on this floor, which, notwithstanding they may be very contiguous to each other, and advance ad infinitum, can never approximate so near as to effect a junction, in which fundamental axiom all mathematicians profess a perfect congruity and acquiescence:—now, to elucidate the hypothesis a little, we will suppose here is one line; and we will further suppose here is another line. [Draws his cane over LOVEYET'S feet, which makes him jump.] Now we will suppose that line is you, and this line is compos'd, form'd, constituted, ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... grace of condignity!" [see Note] cried the monk fervently. "Grace of sin and gracelessness! It is not all worth so much as one of these rushes upon your floor. If you carry grace of congruity to the gates of Heaven, I warn you it shall never bear you one step beyond. Lay down those miserable rush-staffs, wherein is no pith; and take God's golden staff held out to you, which is the full and perfected obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ. That staff ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... power over human form as the expression of human soul. Yet those arts of design in which that younger people delights [221] have in them already, as designed work, that spirit of reasonable order, that expressive congruity in the adaptation of means to ends, of which the fully developed admirableness of human form is but the consummation— a consummation already anticipated in the grand and animated figures of epic ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... putting together with quickness, ideas in which can be found resemblance and congruity, by which to make up pleasant pictures and ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... the grace of Christ, and the inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesu Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity: yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... remember all the discussions of those prolonged, repeated, anxious, careful rehearsals, and the comical despair of which Miss Paton, the heroine of the opera, was the occasion to all concerned, by the curious absence of dramatic congruity of gesture and action which she contrived to combine with the most brilliant and expressive rendering of the music. In the great shipwreck scene, which she sang magnificently, she caught up the short end of a sash tied around ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... joy at the cost of another's agony. No! no!—she is not in love with him!—the poor hurrying brain insisted. She has been interested, excited, touched. That, he can always achieve with any woman, if he pleases. But time and change soon wear down these first fancies of youth. There is no real congruity between them—there never, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as beasts are to kingdoms; so that there is a fitness in symbolizing the years foreshadowed in that vision, by 2300 days; between which measure of time and the duration of the existence of beasts, there is a perfect congruity. ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... opposite and usual course. Let this acknowledgment make my peace with the lovers of the supernatural; and I am persuaded it will be admitted, that to you, as a Master in that province of the art, the following Tale, whether from contrast or congruity, is not an unappropriate offering. Accept it, then, as a public testimony of affectionate admiration from one with whose name yours has been often coupled (to use your own words) for evil and for good; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... called themselves Scriveners, and took upon themselves to make testaments, charters, and other things belonging to the mystery, to the great damage and slander of all honest and true scriveners. Their apprentices caused them trouble, because they had not their "perfect congruity of grammar, which is the thing most necessary and expedient to every person exercising the science and faculty of the mystery." Every apprentice found deficient was ordered to be sent to a grammar school until "he be erudite in the books of genders, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... instructor named it for him, writing the designation and value outside in a peculiarly beautiful and legible hand. "It's so puzzling, you see," he said in explanation, as Philip smiled another superior and condescending British smile at this infantile proceeding; "the currency itself has no congruity or order: and then, even these queer unrelated coins haven't for the most part their values marked in words or ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... remarkable dialogue between the disreputable Parolles and the otherwise sweet and maidenly Helena, in Act I. Scene i. of All's Well that Ends Well, has often been noticed by critics as a peculiar lapse in dramatic congruity on the part of Shakespeare. This is evidently one of several such instances in his plays where he sacrificed his objective dramatic art to a subjective contingency, though by doing so undoubtedly adding a greater interest ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... a natural gift, but of learning and precept, is well witnessed by that work of his entitled De Analogia, being a grammatical philosophy, wherein he did labour to make this same Vox ad placitum to become Vox ad licitum, and to reduce custom of speech to congruity of speech; and took as it were the pictures of words from the life ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... laws of a government, how wholesome soever in themselves, are such as, if men by a congruity in their education be not bred to find a relish in them, they will be sure to loathe and detest. The education therefore of a man's own children is not wholly to be committed or trusted to himself. You find in Livy the children of Brutus, having been bred under monarchy, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... pass to another part of the literary field. From the Bible to Shakespeare. This, at first thought, may seem a long journey. There appears but little congruity between the two. The only needed connection is the similarity of attack. The same spirit has whetted its sword against each; but the lack of similarity is more apparent than real. The Bible is God's exhibit of human nature and its relation to ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Operation of the Mind, was to quicken and encourage us in our Searches after Truth, since the distinguishing one thing from another, and the right discerning betwixt our Ideas, depends wholly upon our comparing them together, and observing the Congruity or Disagreement that appears among the several ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... us of right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Remembering well her mother's delicate and fragile grace of figure and countenance, and coupling with that recollection her own unprotected and solitary state, and somewhat melancholy story, I had pictured to myself (as if contrast were not in this world of ours much more frequent than congruity) a mild, pensive, interesting, fair-haired beauty, tall, pale, and slender;—I found a Hebe, an Euphrosyne,—a round, rosy, joyous creature, the very impersonation of youth, health, sweetness, and gaiety, laughter flashing from her hazel ...
— Country Lodgings • Mary Russell Mitford
... — N. agreement; accord, accordance; unison, harmony; concord &c 714; concordance, concert; understanding, mutual understanding. conformity &c 82; conformance; uniformity &c 16; consonance, consentaneousness^, consistency; congruity, congruence; keeping; congeniality; correspondence, parallelism, apposition, union. fitness, aptness &c adj.; relevancy; pertinence, pertinencey^; sortance^; case in point; aptitude, coaptation^, propriety, applicability, admissibility, commensurability, compatibility; cognation &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... welfare. When it is controlled with reference to some emotional theme, as in fiction, drama, and poetry, it has no reference necessarily to actual objects or events; it is concerned only with producing the effect of emotional congruity between incidents, objects, forms, or sounds. A great novel does not pretend to be a literal transcript of experience, nor a portrait of an actual person. When random mental activity is thus controlled, it is "imagination," in the popular sense, the sense ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... philosophic bias, is inclined to quarrel with the obvious human congruity of Shakespeare's utterances. What is the use of this constant repetition of the obvious truism: "When we are born we cry that we are come to this ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... greatest genius on earth, not even a Bacon, can be a perfect master of every branch."—Webster's Essays, p. 13. "The verb OUGHT is only used in the indicative [and subjunctive moods]."—Dr. Ash's Gram., p. 70. "It is still a greater deviation from congruity, to affect not only variety in the words, but also in the construction."— Kames, El. of Crit., ii, 28. "It has besides been found that, generally, students attend those lectures more carefully for which ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... thither from Antioch. That statue, whether of Christian or pagan origin is not known, has a name in history, for it was one of the works of art destroyed by the Latins in the taking of Constantinople; and the prediction engraven on it bears at least a remarkable evidence of the congruity in itself, if I may use the word; of that descent of the North upon Constantinople, which, though not as yet accomplished, generation after generation ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... upon the resolutions, pass what you [Footnote: I. e. some measure, if not mine, whereby the war may be waged effectually. The reading of [Greek: poiaesate], adopted by Jacobs after Schaefer, is not in congruity with the sentence.] approve, that you may oppose Philip, not only by decrees and letters, but ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... must have held latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing between a Haydn symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite congruity between Milly and Cypher's. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... something to revive the half-extinct religiosity which had been starved and poisoned in the later days of the ancien regime, forcibly suppressed under the Republic, and only officially licensed by the Napoleonic system. In Les Martyrs it has even a certain "grace of congruity,"[28] but in regard to Les Natchez, with which we are for the moment concerned, almost enough (with an example or two to come presently) ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... by mutual influences, and set off each other by mutual contrasts. The persons are thus assorted and attempered with perfect insight both of their respective natures and of their common fitness to his purpose. And not the least wonderful thing in his works is the exquisite congruity of what comes from the persons with all the circumstances and influences under which they are represented as acting; their transpirations of character being withal so disposed that the principle of them shines out freely and clearly ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... laundress piled up with frilled and fluted whiteness—the certain luxury, she felt while she passed with quick prevision, of her own dawn of glory. The greatest amusement perhaps was to recognise the pretty sentiment of earliness, the particular congruity with the hour, in the studied, selected dress of the little tripping women who were taking the day, for important advantages, while it was tender. At any rate she mostly brought with her from her passage through the town good humour enough—with the penny bunch ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... priori metaphysics. To know all this truth is a theoretic achievement, indeed, but it is a narrow one; for the relations between conceptual objects as such are only the static ones of bare comparison, as difference or sameness, congruity or contradiction, inclusion or exclusion. Nothing happens in the realm of concepts; relations there are 'eternal' only. The theoretic gain fails so far, therefore, to touch even the outer hem of the real world, the ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... granted that if the reality at all corresponded to Lélut’s imaginary picture, this is its natural explanation. The story of the “vision” and the “abyss” are thus made, not without a certain appearance of probability, to fit into one another, and both into the accident at Neuilly; and a certain congruity of external and internal alarm is hence given to the great crisis of Pascal’s life. Unhappily, however, there is a lack of evidence regarding the accident itself, {94} and, still more, the accompanying story ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... the continuer of the forerunner's message; by the simple, remote region which He chose for His earliest work. The belief that the kingdom was at hand was equally necessary, and repentance equally indispensable as preparation for it, whoever the King might be. The same law of congruity between message and hearers, which He enjoined on His followers, when He bade them be careful where they flung their pearls, and which governed His own fullest final revelations to His truest friends, when He said, 'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intended to be understood as the time when it was constructed. No paleographical description of it, however, has yet been published, from which the period of its construction might be determined, or the congruity of its parts verified. It may, however, in order to disencumber the question, be admitted to be the map mentioned by Annibal Caro in 1537, in a letter to which occasion will hereafter be had to refer, and that its author was the brother of ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... author, as Boyle lecturer, of a famous "Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God," as also independently of "The Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion"; as a theologian he inclined to Arianism, and his doctrine of morality was that it was congruity with the "eternal fitness of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Ethics and theology clearly distinguish two kinds of merit: (1) condign merit,(408) which is merit in the strict sense (meritum adaequatum sive de condigno), and (2) congruous merit (meritum inadaequatum sive de congruo), so called because of the congruity, or fitness, that the claim should be recognized. Condign merit presupposes some proportion between the work done and the reward given in compensation for it (aequalitas s. condignitas dati et accepti). It is ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... brown-stone hearth and jambs. Back a little, between these sloping jambs, we had a nice iron fire-board set, with an ornamental collar around the funnel-hole. The stove stood modestly sheltered, as it were, in its new position, its features softened to almost a sitting-room congruity; it did not thrust itself obtrusively forward, and force its homely association upon you; it was low, too, and its broad top looked smooth ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... horseman a symbol of the gospel itself, but the gospel is not a living, active, intelligent agent, such as the symbol evidently is, but is only a system of the revealed truth. All congruity and appropriateness in the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... to these, is required by them, and crowns them. The Ascension was not only the close of Christ's earthly life which would preserve congruity with its beginning, but it was also the clear manifestation that, as He came of His own will, so He departed by His own volition. 'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go unto the Father.' Thus the earthly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... we have already quoted: "Let him choose a motive, whether of character or passion: carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast; ... and allow neither himself in the narrative, nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... or the probability of Darwin's hypothesis is not here the question, but only its congruity or incongruity with theism. We need take only one exception to this abstract of it, but that is an important one for the present investigation. It is to the sentence which we have italicized in the earlier part of Dr. Hodge's own statement of what ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Abelard, though he composes songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises in which he tries to find a ground of reality below the abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their congruity with human experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into her eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her great and energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century, that French prose romance begins; ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is competent to this office—for in its intercourse with these the mind is passive, and is affected painfully or pleasurably as by an instinct. But the profound and ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... you once more of the admirable congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously is can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource, and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... exaggerations are observable; the gestures go further than the words, and that is a matter not difficult to recognize. As soon as the recognition is made it becomes necessary to examine whether a certain congruity invariably manifests itself between word and gesture, inasmuch as with many people the above-mentioned lack of congruity is habitual and honest. This is particularly the case with people who are somewhat theatrical and hence gesticulate too much. But if word and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... deposit. The time that went to the making of it, only four years in all, was comparatively short, but it was for Schiller a time of rapid change; and the play, intensely subjective from the first, participated in the ripening process. The result is a certain lack of artistic congruity. Schiller himself, always his own best critic, felt this and frankly admitted it in the first of his 'Letters ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... world, many garments probably having passed a probation in pawnbrokers' shops, or in those of old clothes-men in London or Liverpool. I was particularly struck by the total want of perception of congruity as to dress exhibited both by men and women after they had abandoned their native costume, which, if somewhat scanty, was graceful and adapted to the climate. The women we saw were dressed in straw bonnets of huge proportions and ugly shape, and loose gowns of gay colours ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... I, if anywhere, the old world literature will be valued and nursed with gracious care; so with a pleasing sense of the general congruity of all around me, I enquired for the rooms of the librarian. Nobody seemed to be quite sure of his name, or upon whom the bibliographical mantle had descended. His post, it seemed, was honorary and a sinecure, being imposed, as a rule, upon the youngest "Fellow." No ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... the regulations of His supreme intelligence. Rome indeed boasts that the authenticity of the second Testament depends upon the recognition of her infallibility. The authenticity of the second Testament depends upon its congruity with the first. Did Rome preserve that? I recognize in the church an institution thoroughly, sincerely, catholic: adapted to all climes and to all ages. I do not bow to the necessity of a visible head in a defined locality; but were I to seek for such, it would not be at Rome. I cannot discover ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... reached the full maturity of perfection, a colder and more unimpressive design than is here carried out it would be difficult to find. Still, notwithstanding the long period that elapsed between its commencement and completion, there is a congruity about the whole building which is eminently pleasing, and to some extent redeems the defects in its details and proportions, while the views afforded in various directions by the triple aisles on either side of the nave are ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... the horrors of the destructive doctrine which they are but too prone to follow, there is, according to our thorough persuasion, to which also Her Majesty the Empress of all the Russias accedes in the most perfect congruity with our intentions and principles, no other means, except to incorporate her frontier provinces into our States, and for this purpose immediately to take possession of the same, and to prevent, in time, all misfortunes which might arise from the continuance ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... outcasts and other members of the community, the most elementary principles of liberty and privilege which they themselves now enjoy, is a significant comment upon their political sanity and sense of congruity. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... keeping it alive to the end of the story; in that adaptation of the measure to the sentiment, and in the sudden change of measure to suit a sudden change of sentiment; a wild and romantic description; and in the congruity of the accompaniment to her characters, all conceived with great purity and delicacy—she will be allowed to have discovered uncommon maturity of mind, and her friends to have been warranted in forming very high expectations of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... one thing being the cause of the aptitude and congruity of another, and yet if it be taken away the other remains; because although a thing's becoming may depend on another, yet when it is in being it no longer depends on it, just as a friendship brought about by some other may endure when the latter has ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... seem to some a rather incongruous way of presenting religious and secular things. It may be so, but we are not careful to preserve congruity, or to dilute our dish to please the palate of the fastidious. This world is full of incongruities, and we are endeavouring to present that portion of it now under consideration as it actually ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... have behaved as Odysseus is made to do. {34} But Cronos was an odious ruffian. The world-wide tale of swallowing and disgorging the children was attracted to his too notorious name 'by grace of congruity.' Does Professor Tiele now grasp ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... those petulant, ill-treated, starved nerves. "What have I to do with Aurora, or Aurora with me?" he would ask, furiously, the incongruity of what had happened to him calling forth sometimes a desperate laugh. But Nature laughs at man's ideas of congruity; remembering that, he could only hold his hands against his eyes and try to press the image of Aurora out ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... the Assemblage of Ideas, and in the putting Those together with Quickness and Variety, wherein can be found any Resemblance, or Congruity, to make up pleasant Pictures, and agreeable Visions in the Fancy; the Writer, who aims at Wit, must of course range far and wide for Materials. Now, the Age, in which Shakespeare liv'd, having, above all others, a wonderful Affection to appear ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... out in general all who're particular. But what's the boy doing? what! reading all thro', And my luncheon fast cooling!—this never will do. Boy (poring over the Articles).— Here are points which—pray, Doctor, what's "Grace of Congruity?" Doctor P. (sharply).—You'll find out, young sir, when you've more ingenuity. At present, by signing, you pledge yourself merely. Whate'er it may be, to believe it sincerely, Both in dining and signing we take the same plan,— First, swallow all down, then digest—as we can. Boy (still ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... most delicate, most finished, and most sustained work. And this, like Emma, resolutely abstains from even the slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting" story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned throughout ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... P. Marsh, in his "Lectures on the English Language," says that the deviser of the locution in question was "some grammatical pretender," and that it is "an awkward neologism, which neither convenience, intelligibility, nor syntactical congruity demands." ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... that, In adapting the beatitudes to the gifts a twofold congruity may be observed. One is according to the order in which they are given, and Augustine seems to have followed this: wherefore he assigns the first beatitude to the lowest gift, namely, fear, and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... mother's whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war. "Herminia," says Mr. Allen, "had done her best" to indoctrinate the child with the pure milk of the emancipating social gospel; "but the child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. There is," he proceeds, "no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of their ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... every tribe, or gens, had a common progenitor from whom it took its title and origin,—these legends are at one time treated with the due suspicion which should attend upon them; yet, at another, if a fortunate congruity, some lucky "dovetailing," can be observed amongst them, they are raised into the rank of historical evidence. The mode of interpretation which we have described as characterising the first and undisciplined age of critical inquiry, is not laid aside. Such personages as Danaus and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... altogether disengaged from the necessity of verification; his images must have at least subjective truth; if they do not accurately correspond with objective realities, they must correspond with our sense of congruity. No poet is allowed the licence of creating images inconsistent with our conceptions. If he said the moonlight burnt the bank, we should reject the image as untrue, inconsistent with our conceptions of moonlight; whereas the gentle repose of the moonlight on the bank readily associates ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... instance, may be regarded as so much truth or falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by the student of to-day. That is the dogmatic method of criticism; judging every product of human thought, however alien [9] or distant from one's self, by its congruity with the assumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel, according to the mental preference of the particular critic. There is, secondly, the more generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims at a selection from contending ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... imprecation could have had a prophetic effect upon my destiny; to believe that the pretences of mesmerizers were specially favoured by Providence, and that to question their assumptions was an offence of profanation to be punished by exposure to preternatural agencies. There was not even that congruity between cause and effect which fable seeks in excuse for its inventions. Of all men living, I, unimaginative disciple of austere science, should be the last to become the sport of that witchcraft which even ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... own proper sphere, may be quite perfect both technically and in other respects. When compared with the highest idea and ideal of art, it is indeed defective. In the highest art alone are the idea and its representation in perfect congruity, because the sensuous form of the idea is in itself the adequate form, and because the content, which that form embodies, is itself ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Reason has this Passage been always praised by the Criticks? 'Tis because the Figure is in itself beautiful and pathetick, but they did not examine into the Congruity and ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... proves that he shall and must do? To your astonishment, it turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic utterance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low grunt or growl, has in him what transcends all logic-utterance: a Congruity with the Unuttered. The Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or outer skin, is his or is not his: but the Doable, which reaches down to the World's centre, you ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... follows that there is no reason to believe that there will be any congruity between my character and my "free" acts. I may be a saint by nature, and "freely" ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... Knowledge, and became eminent as an orator, a writer, and a lecturer on political and general subjects. Hailed abroad [139] as a prodigy, and received with acclamation into the brotherhood of intelligence, abstract justice and moral congruity demanded that such a man should no longer be subject to the shame and abasement of social, legal, and political proscription. The land of his birth proved herself equal to this imperative call of civilized Duty, regardless of customs and the laws, written ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... working them out a test is wanted to enable us to decide whether we are working wisely or to our harm, I believe such a test may be found in the congruity of the new with the old. Shall I by adding a fresh power to myself strengthen those I already possess? By taking this path, rich in a certain sort of good as it undoubtedly is, shall I be diverted from paths where my special goods lie? Here I am, a student of ethics. A ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... in which he himself perhaps has only half-believed. He and Fenwick had been friends now—in some respects, close friends—for a good many years. Of late, they had met rarely, and neither of the men was a good correspondent. But the friendship, the strong sense of congruity and liking, persisted. It had sprung, originally—unexpectedly enough—from that loan made to Fenwick in his days of stress and poverty; and there were many who prophesied that it would come to an end with Fenwick's success. Watson ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in congruity with those principles and methods that the Banca Commerciale, which had its headquarters in Milan, set itself to discharge the complex functions of a financial, industrial, commercial and political agency of German ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... it from the immediate subject. Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a ponderable something thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will still question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford, to attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just then?—Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... destructive both of merit and demerit as between man and God. If we are but clay in the hands of the potter, there is no intelligible meaning in our deserving from him either good or evil. We are as He has made us. Edwards explains, indeed, that the sense of desert implies a certain natural congruity between evil-doing and punishment (ii. 430). But the question recurs, how in such a case the congruity arises? It is one of the illusions which should disappear when we rise to the sphere of the absolute and infinite. The metaphor about a debt and its payment, though ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... virtuous majesty, and are now hallowed in our memories, not less for their conduct than their writings. Such men are the flower of this lower world: to such alone can the epithet of great be applied with its true emphasis. There is a congruity in their proceedings which one loves to contemplate: 'he who would write heroic poems, should make his ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... discrepancies, if the compositions be fictitious indeed, are only a proof that these men attained a still more wonderful skill in aping verisimilitude than if there had been no discrepancies at all. They have left in the historic portions of their narrative an air of general harmony, with an exquisite congruity in points which lie deep below the surface,—a congruity which they must be supposed to have known would astonish the world when once discovered; and have at the same time left certain discrepancies on the surface (which criticism would be sure to point out), as if for the very ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... features of plants may be, though floral structure may draw them into congruity, is well demonstrated by our so-called grass-trees, which pertain truly to the liliaceous order. These scientifically defined as Xanthorhoeas from the exudation of yellowish sap, which indurates into resinous masses, have all the essential notes of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... say that there ought to be many good stories of a people like the Manx; and here again I have to confess to you that the absence of all literary conscience, all perception of keeping and relation, all sense of harmony and congruity in the Manxman has so demoralised our anecdotal ana that I hesitate to offer you certain of the best of our Manx yarns from fear that they may be venerable English, Irish, and Scotch familiars. I will content myself with a few that bear undoubted ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... a discussion, when the biographer reaches this juncture, concerning the congruity of reform delegates who can be bought. It is too knotty a point of ethics ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... one of the most pleasing of our author's performances. The scenes are busy and various, the incidents numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... congruity between the circumstances and the prodigy itself forms a moral proof whose value cannot ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... But please to observe that I have laid particular stress on the words 'human mind,'—meaning to exclude thereby all results common to man and all other sentient creatures, and consequently confining myself to the effect produced by the congruity of the animal impression with the reflective powers of the mind; so that not the thing presented, but that which is re-presented by the thing shall be the source of the pleasure. In this sense nature itself is to a religious observer the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... disputation seemed to consist in this clear view in which he beheld the diversified bearings of every argument, with its precise congruity to the question in debate; and which, whilst it demonstrated the capacity of his own mind, conferred on him, on all occasions, a decided and systematic superiority. It must, however, be granted, that when contending for victory, or rather for ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... some of us, astounding, words, said, when He was here on earth, 'They which shall be counted worthy to attain to the life of the resurrection from the dead,' etc. The text brings out very clearly the continuity and congruity between the life on earth and the life in heaven. Who is it of whom it is said that 'they are worthy' to 'walk in white'? It is the 'few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments.' You see the connection; clean ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... suffused the American stereotype, gave it that power to possess consciousness, that liveliness and sensible pungency, that stimulating effect upon the will, that emotional interest as an object of desire, that congruity with the activity in hand, which James notes as characteristic of what we regard as "real." [Footnote: Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 300.] The French in despair remained fixed on their accepted image. And when facts, gross ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... phenomenal vortices of matter as those from which historic evolution takes its start, this impossible gulf or "lacuna" dividing the human scene from all previous "scenes" is immediately bridged; and the whole stream of material sense-impression flows forward, in parallel and consonant congruity, with the underlying creative energy of all the complex visions of which it ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... as our intellects are involved in our perception of the truth revealed? Do we not often feel that something must be true far in advance of our ability to prove it so? And in truths of a certain order is there not an intuitive perception, a perception growing out of a sense of fitness, of congruity, which outruns the slow advance of the intellect? Love and sympathy often far outrun intellectual process. This is not to say that feeling is all; that a sense of fitness and conformity is a sufficient basis of doctrine. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... readjusted at Hastings, it was thought Sterling's health had so improved, and his activities towards Literature so developed themselves into congruity, that a permanent English place of abode might now again be selected,—on the Southwest coast somewhere,—and the family once more have the blessing of a home, and see its lares and penates and household furniture unlocked from the Pantechnicon ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... muse; she could not do that connectedly. 'If this is the beginning, what will the end be!' she said in a whisper, and felt many misgivings as to the policy of being overhasty in establishing an independence at the expense of congruity ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... CONGRUITY. A term used in the 13th Art. The "School authors" mentioned are the theologians of the middle ages as compared with the "Fathers" of the early times. Bishop Harold Browne says, "The school-authors thought that some degree of goodness was attributable ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... consequential propositions. I have thought of two or three more; but they come rather too near detail, and to the province of executive government, which I wish Parliament always to superintend, never to assume. If the first six are granted, congruity will carry the latter three. If not, the things that remain unrepealed will be, I hope, rather unseemly incumbrances on the building than very materially detrimental to its ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... waggons, the hurrying, hooded, private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic flights, escapes, pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed that by a sort of strange congruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply involved. It was natural that this record of the magnificence of her companion's position should strike her as, after all, the best meaning she ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... wit, and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason.' For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy: judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... question whether the Holy Souls pray for us and can gain anything for us by merit of congruity, or, at least, impetrate it for us, as others prefer to say. Some have said that they do not thus pray for us, because it is not fitting to their state, in that they are debtors and, as it were, kept in prison for their debts; and also ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... at the time. The alloy to this charm was a slight coarseness of voice and accent, which contrasted somewhat strangely with his constant courtesy and high breeding. Perhaps this was characteristic. A defect of some sort pervades his pictures. Their great want is equality and congruity,—that perfect union of qualities which we call taste. His apartment, especially at that period when he lived in his painting-room, was in itself a study of the most picturesque kind. Besides the great picture itself, for which there seemed hardly space between the walls, it was crowded with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... with the freshest red, eyes widely opened, dark deep grey and decidedly prominent, though curtained with thick black lashes. The glossy chestnut hair partook of the redundance and vigour of the whole being, and the roses hung on it gracefully though not in congruity with the thick winter dress of blue and black tartan, still looped up over the dark petticoat and hose, and stout high-heeled boots, that like the grey cloak and felt hat bore witness to the early walk. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... double-faced or hipped roof, which gives the idea of a ship, bottom upwards. Later buildings have been added to this, as the wants or ambition of the family have expanded. These are all constructed of wood, and seem to have been built in defiance of all laws of congruity, just ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... gleam on the skies they made radiant with light; nor was it where their sweet voices strangely mingled with the clash of arms and the shouts of charging squadrons that they sang of glory, good-will, and peace. This had been out of keeping with the congruity which characterises all God's works of nature, and which will be found equally characteristic of His works of providence and grace. As was meet, the glad tidings of peace were announced to men who were engaged in an eminently peaceful occupation; who passed tranquil lives amid the quietness ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... to light up the entire labyrinth of his brain; each sense-message came inward like a bomb-shell, reaching with its explosion the highest as well as the deepest centers, discharging circuits of swift fire through every area of associated ideas, and so completely shattering the normal congruity between impressions and recognitions that the slight drag of the sheet across his raised toes was sufficient to make him feel again the pressure of thick boots that he had worn years ago when he tramped as new postman on the ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... excepting a few written in youth and having more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which were intended for the public eye, Stevenson the deliberate artist is scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order or logical sequence or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He has at his command the whole vocabularies of the English and Scottish languages, classical and slang, with good stores of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There is no congruity between any outward thing and man's soul, of such a kind as that satisfaction can come from its possession. 'Cisterns that can hold no water,' 'that which is not bread,' 'husks that the swine did eat'—these are not exaggerated phrases for the good gifts which God gives for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... domestic system of American communities calls loudly for the reform of simplicity and congruity. We begin to build and are not able to finish. Our economics are false and mischievous, our aims are petty and low. The web of our daily living is not round and even-threaded. The homes which are constructed ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... answer is—that it can be used with as much propriety in that case, as in the removal of slaves from Africa—the removal in the one case being no less involuntary than in the other. Another answer is—that the framers of the Constitution selected the word "migration," because of its congruity with that of "persons," under which their virtuous shame sought to conceal from posterity the existence of seven hundred thousand slaves amongst a people, who had but recently entered upon their ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... that in their interior accommodation, and perhaps relative arrangement to each other, are tolerably suited to the business and convenience of the husbandman, still, the feeling will prevail that there is an absence of method, congruity, and correct taste in the architectural structure of his buildings ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... in logical ideas and their affinity to moral enthusiasm, springs from their congruity with the primary habits of intelligence and idealisation. The soul or self or personality, which in sophisticated social life is so much the centre of passion and concern, is itself an idea, a concretion in discourse; and the level on which it swims comes to be, by association and affinity, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana |
