"Immaterial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vivid religious emotions; but we do not so readily comprehend how such persons as Napoleon and Talleyrand should have embraced a delusion which was utterly irreconcilable with their skeptical natures, and which necessarily presupposed an immaterial state of existence, and the providential superintendence of human affairs by a benevolent order of beings, whose powers must have been deputed to them by a superior and over-ruling Intelligence. It was the part ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Carton presented the facts. Now and then Kahn would rise to object to something as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. But there was lacking something in his method. It was not the old Kahn. In fact, one almost felt that Carton was disappointed in his adversary, that he would have preferred a stiff, straight ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... other, took a casual shot at the sentry pacing on the other side of the broad stream. Sometimes a battery would come driving down to the shore, select an advantageous spot, and begin an afternoon's target practice at the hostile camp; but the damage done was immaterial, and after wasting much powder and shot the recruits would limber up their guns and return to their camp. It would have been easy, at almost any time, for either army to have crossed the Potomac and invaded the territory of the enemy; but each hung back in apparent dread ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... She smiles sweetly, but it is clear she has not the slightest idea who I am, and is waiting to catch my name from the butler. I whisper it to him. Perhaps he will get it right, perhaps he won't; it is quite immaterial. They have asked two hundred and forty guests, some seventy-five of whom they know by sight, for the rest, any chance passer-by, able, as the theatrical advertisements say, 'to dress and behave as a gentleman,' would do every ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... instead of their comfortable laboratories, and our great engineers would long ago have lost their heads. What a time we have had getting the devil out of our mechanical life! Now he can only rule in the immaterial world, in the crude imaginations ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... neither the standard of Mamilius nor the standard of Caliban is my standard. No artist recognises any standard of beauty but that which is suggested by his own temperament. The artist seeks to realise, in a certain material, his immaterial idea of beauty, and thus to transform an idea into an ideal. That is the way an artist makes things. That is why an artist makes things. The artist has no other object in making things. Does your reviewer imagine that Mr. Shannon, for instance, whose delicate ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... are yet ideas further, and greater—that there is still a limitless beyond. I know at that moment that there is no limit to the things that may be yet in material and tangible shape besides the immaterial perceptions of the soul. The dim white light of the dawn speaks it. This prophet which has come with its wonders to the bedside of every human being for so many thousands of years faces me once again with the upheld finger of light. Where is the ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... all the time he had been with her, all the time she had been giving her whole self to him, all the time that she had been surrounding him with her love, he had retained in his soul the power to will to commit it. That he had been given an opportunity to sin was immaterial. What was material was that he had ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... childish affections in Philip, who had made her his especial favourite, was even more prejudicial to his interests in that quarter. Hitherto, indeed, Sylvester's vague dislike had been so undemonstrative and immaterial that he would hardly have owned to it as such, and far less would he have acknowledged that he was, however unconsciously, feeling for a peg on which to hang it, for ground to support it; and yet from ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... are direct and straight-forward. They will tell you to your face that they like you, and occasionally they also have very little hesitation in telling you that they do not like you. They say frankly just what they think. It is immaterial to them that their remarks are personal, complimentary or otherwise. I have had members of my own family complimented on their good looks as if they were children. In this respect Americans differ greatly from the English. The English adhere with meticulous ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... superstition usually plead in excuse for the mummeries, with which they are upbraided, that they feel the good effect of those external motions, and postures, and actions, in enlivening their devotion and quickening their fervour, which otherwise would decay, if directed entirely to distant and immaterial objects. We shadow out the objects of our faith, say they, in sensible types and images, and render them more present to us by the immediate presence of these types, than it is possible for us to do merely by an intellectual view and contemplation. Sensible objects have always a ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... start, and that was the main reason in my consenting to this conference. I have three other earlier deliveries at Indian agencies, but they are not as far north by several hundred miles, and it's immaterial whether we ship or not. But the Buford contract sets the day of delivery for September 15, and it's going to take close figuring to make a cent. The main contractors are all right, but I'm the one that's got to scratch his head and figure close and see that there's no leakages. ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... Poem is located on the banks of the Eden, a pleasant river in Cumberland. It is founded on facts, but the names and some other immaterial points are imaginary. ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... as much as possible, the causes which are used to excite the people, and which alone render them susceptible to criminal doctrines. It is immaterial to me whether or no you will call this Socialism. If you call it Socialism, you must have the remarkable wish of placing the Imperial Government, in so far as this bill of the allied governments is concerned, in the range of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the first line of the 11th sloka, in the Bengal texts, is 'Pravriha.' In the Bombay edition it is 'Anikaha.' The difference in meaning is immaterial. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... spiritual loveliness, but in crowds, and in solitude, and in all the throngful varieties of thought and feeling and action, the symmetrical whole, the beautiful perfection comes up in the vision of memory, and stands, like a bright angel, between us and all other impressions of outward or immaterial beauty. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... "How did they feel, do you suppose—the people, the men and women, who belonged to such things?" As Lee watched her it seemed that she grew more remote, shadowy, like a memory of long vanished beauty made before his eyes from the shifting firelight and immaterial shadows. Mina Raff lost her reality in an unreal charm that compressed his heart. The atmosphere around her stirred with re-created ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... may define as physical or intangible power or influence to effect change in the material or immaterial world. Coercion is the use of either physical or intangible force to compel action contrary to the will or reasoned judgment of the individual or group subjected to such force. Violence is the willful application ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... persons connected with these corporations or placed under their influence give them a fearful weight when their interest is in opposition to the spirit of the Constitution and laws. To the people it is immaterial whether these results are produced by open violations of the latter or by the workings of a system of which the result is the same. An inflexible execution even of the existing statutes of most of the States would redress many evils now endured, would effectually ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Martin van Buren • Martin van Buren
... time in the abstract, the conviction is forced upon us that it bears no resemblance to any sort of matter which comes before our senses; it is immaterial, without form, without substance, without spiritual essence. It is neither solid, liquid, nor gaseous. Yet it is capable of measurement with the closest precision. Nevertheless, it may be doubted if anything measurable could be computed on principles more erroneous than those which ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... events," replied Ernest, "you will admit that, so long as I am ready to bear my share of the common burdens, and take my part in providing for the common wants, and in warding of the common dangers, it is immaterial whether I occupy my leisure hours in ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... immaterial what year we select for examination, the numbers which follow will be found to bear about the same relative proportions in every year. I quote from the Trustees' Report for 1866 merely because it is the latest document at hand which furnishes ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... the area of such a surface as that inclosed by the boundary line shown in Fig. 3, a point, A, is chosen somewhat near the center of the figure; the exact position is, however, immaterial. From the point, A, a line, AB, is drawn in any direction to the boundary; the tracing point of the planimeter is now placed at A, with the hatchet at X, Fig. 3, that is, with the instrument roughly square with AB. The hatchet is now lightly pressed in order to mark its position ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... Nature. His Creation, and every Part of it, is full of him. There is nothing he has made, that is either so distant, so little, or so inconsiderable, which he does not essentially inhabit. His Substance is within the Substance of every Being, whether material, or immaterial, and as intimately present to it as that Being is to it self. It would be an Imperfection in him, were he able to remove out of one Place into another, or to withdraw himself from any Thing he has created, or from any Part of that Space which is diffused and spread abroad to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... congratulations and thanks for her polite attention, observes, 'Give me leave, my dear Miss Heywood, to assure you that the intelligence has given me a degree of pleasure which I have not terms to express, and it is even increased by knowing what you must experience on the event. Nor is it an immaterial reflection, that although your brother was unfortunately involved in the general calamity which gave birth to the charge, he is uncontaminated by the crime, for there was not a credible testimony of the slightest fact against him that ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... Address, because I agree with the Layman that it has of late become an "obnoxious Number." I have Reason to think I was truly informed; if it was a misrepresentation, the Reverend Doctor who presided at the Meeting, may set us right, if he thinks it worth his While. I am still of Opinion, that is immaterial to my Purpose, whether twenty-four or thirty Gentlemen were present, when the Address was carried through; either of those numbers being very inconsiderable, when compared with the whole Number of Congregational Ministers in the Province, which is ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... pursued his inquiries, and adopted his method. He also was born in Miletus, but at what time is unknown, probably B.C. 529. Like Thales, he held to the eternity of matter. Like him, he disbelieved in the existence of any thing immaterial, for even a human soul is formed out of matter. He, too, speculated on the origin of the universe, but thought that air, not water, was the primal cause. [Footnote: Cicero, De Nat. D., i. 10.] This ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... devoted to immaterial pursuits is a child in worldly affairs; he is helpless without a guardian. The world in which we live is wide enough for every place which is worth taking to be occupied; every post to be held creates, so ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... apprehend from the discovery of sentiments which before he had been careful to conceal; now urged his objections against religion, when OMAR gave him opportunity, without reserve. 'You tell me,' says he, 'of beings that are immortal, because they are immaterial; beings which do not consist of parts, and which, therefore, can admit no solution, the only natural cause of corruption and decay: but that which is not material, can have no extension; and what has no extension, possesses no space; ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and aesthetic charm which surrounds woman, that living statue who brightens our life, like sensual fevers and immaterial appetites. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... with the principles of mechanical invisibility. I deal here with the famous X-flyers. The operation of the plane itself is immaterial; its motors; its wing-spread surfaces; its aerial controls. I am concerned only with the scientific principles underlying ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... Church has decided that the soul is immaterial. These saints fell into an error at that time universal; they were men; but they were not mistaken over immortality, because that is ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... and soared and fell in this manner until they knew that to live without each other would be a wandering in deserts. They had grown so intent upon the uncertainties, the variations, the guessings of their affair that the world had become but a huge immaterial background. In time of peace their smiles were soft and prayerful, caresses confided to the air. In time of war, their youthful hearts, capable of profound agony, were wrung by the intricate emotions of doubt. They were the victims of the dread angel of ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... in the main when he allowed himself to base his opposition on one immaterial detail. The breakfast was to be given at the King's Head, and, though it was acknowledged on all sides that no authority could be found for such a practice, it was known that the bill was to be paid by the bridegroom. Nor would Mr Ruggles pay the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... leave to acquaint you with a Comical piece of Grammatical Learning in a Reverend Religioso of these parts, sent thither to convert the West-Indies Pagans, which the Author mentions among his Reasons and Replications, and all these I pass by as immaterial to our purpose, many of them being repeated in ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... location of the hotel are immaterial. If you happened to be there that night you know very nearly all that occurred; if not, you have in all probability never heard of it, for I understand that the proprietors took every precaution ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... by maintaining that his was a second term election also,—and a second regular four year term it was. His appointment, and his election to fill out the remainder of his predecessor's term, he waved aside as immaterial, and staged himself as a candidate for his second term. The Doctor tried to break the combination between the Judge and the second term county candidates by ruthlessly bringing out their deputies against the second termers as ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... submission, he approached his mother's permanent austerity of mind as closely as he was ever likely to do in the whole of his experience. The mere possibility of a fresh awakening of feeling filled him with aversion. At the moment he had as profound a distrust as Sarah of the immaterial elements; and looking ahead, he saw his future stretching before him as firm and flat as the turnpike which he was approaching. Delight and despair were equally distasteful to him. He shrank as instinctively from the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... and had painted into some ghastly semblance of health the wrinkled skin of her cheeks. For underneath the decaying mockery of Madame's body, the indomitable soul of Madame still fought the everlasting battle of mind against matter, of the immaterial against the material elements. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... right, no one need worry about the artist. Perhaps he would do better without being remunerated at all. It is doubtful whether the huge commercial premium that greets success to-day does good or harm. But let it pass. It is immaterial ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... are immaterial, madame, when their sense has been conveyed. You have rejected my brother, and have reduced him ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... surprise, beheld Clara de Haldimar standing before him at the opposite side of the bed. Her likeness to her brother, at that moment, was so striking, that, for a second or two, the irrepressible thought passed through the mind of the officer, it was not a living being he gazed upon, but the immaterial spirit of his friend. The whole attitude and appearance of the wretched girl, independently of the fact of her noiseless entrance, tended to favour the delusion. Her features, of an ashy paleness, seemed ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... introduce the big-store system into Yugoslavia, but this the Serb does not understand. He has a greater sense of responsibility and is more careful with regard to the expenses. To the Croat, in the old Empire, it was immaterial whether the officials were more or less costly. The bill was paid by Austria, who was the foe. For some time the Croat found himself forgetting that he was in Yugoslavia. When Cardinal Bourne came to Zagreb in the spring of 1919 and the town-hall was decorated ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the assertor that temeraria citatio supernaturalium est pulvinar intellectus pigri, and that he who requires me to believe a miracle of his own dreaming, must first work a miracle to convince me that he had dreamt by inspiration. Add, too, the gross inconsistency of resorting to an immaterial influence in order to complete a system of materialism, by the exclusion of all modes of existence which the theorist cannot in imagination, at least, finger and peep at! Each of the preceding gradations, as above defined, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be in town next Monday. Could we contrive to make a party (paying or not is immaterial) for Miss Kelly's that night, and can you shelter us after the play, I mean Emma and me? I fear, I cannot persuade Mary ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... an English pastoral land. The journey is accomplished without fatigue, without anxiety; for the end of it can only be the quiet corner of a moor, or some sleepy meadow. Speed is of no account—distance immaterial. The caravaneer looks down with indifference upon the dense curiosity of the smaller towns; the larger ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... know," she said, "that of all philosophies the essence is to command one's thoughts, to brush away the immaterial, the unworthy, the unhappy. Try and think that life starts with you from to-day. You are one of those few, those very few people, Douglas Jesson, who have before them a future. Try and keep ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... analogous to that of the visible world of matter. Their language is not always quite so precise as one could desire, for while they sometimes speak of the ether itself as the "unseen universe," they sometimes allude to a primordial medium yet subtler in constitution and presumably more immaterial. Herein lies the confusion. Why should the luminiferous ether, or any primordial medium in which it may have been generated, be regarded as in any way "spiritual"? Great physicists, like less trained thinkers, are sometimes liable to be unconsciously influenced by old associations of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... material of me was there upon earth, whirling away through space, held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the earth-inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. But the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter for matter: where it parts from its garment of flesh, there it remains (so far as space concerns it any longer) immovable in space. I was not leaving the earth: the earth was leaving me, and not only the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... assure ourselves that he has ability and moral strength of character, and I submit that the true function of education is to teach him how to learn and how to live—not how to make a living. We are interested naturally to know that a boy has an aptitude for languages or mathematics, but it is immaterial to us whether he has acquired his aptitude, say for learning languages, through learning Latin and Greek or French and German. The educational value is paramount, the vocational negligible. If, therefore, modern languages ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... to take any trouble about so immaterial an affair, and assured him I should not myself. He was so officious, that he would not be prevailed upon to return home, till he had walked ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... Introductions.—In introducing women, the younger is introduced to the older; if nearly of the same age a distinction is immaterial. Young girls are introduced to matrons, and the younger matrons to ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... public. It is sufficient that the measures which they patronized were in a high degree beneficial to the Irish nation; and whether they urged them from a wish to raise themselves to office, or from a principle of pure patriotism, was to the public immaterial. That they supported them zealously and faithfully, from whatever motive, was indubitable. So zealously and faithfully indeed did they exert themselves, that the very same men who had for years made a constant and violent opposition to those measures, exhausting ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... fats and oils are introduced into the soap-pan and boiled by means of open steam with a caustic soda lye 14 deg. to 23.5 deg. Tw. (10 deg. to 15 deg. B.). Whether the fatty matters and alkali are run into the pan simultaneously or separately is immaterial, provided the alkali is not added in sufficient excess to retard ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... illume; That human thought again may dare behold The shape and port of spirits, and once more Hear voices in that distant, shadowy world, To which ourselves, and this, are shadows, they The substance, immaterial essence pure— Souls that have freed their slave, and given back Its force unto the elements, the dread Manes, or the more dread Archetypes of men: Like whom in featured reason's shape—like whom Created in the mould of God—they fell, And mixed with them in common ruin, made One ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... proportion of the words in all languages, in truth all that express intellectual and moral ideas, were originally figurative, the universal law being to represent immaterial by material objects. Examples are the words exist, existence, emotion, affliction, anguish, etc. But in these, and innumerable other words, the primitive physical meaning has become obsolete, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the refuge of the Mind, of Indra, of Agni, of the god of wind, of the entire universe, and of the Grandsire Brahma; who is incapable of being conceived by the Mind, who is without mutation of any kind, who is pure, who is capable of being apprehended by understanding only and who is immaterial as the Mind; who is difficult of comprehension, who is incapable of being measured, who is difficult of being attained by persons of uncleansed souls, who is the origin of the universe, and who transcends both the universe and the attribute ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... hypothesis of an ether filling the heavenly spaces does not, I confess, help my conceptions. I will, and the muscles of my vocal organs shape my speech. God wills, and the universe articulates His power, wisdom, and goodness. That is all I know. There is no bridge my mind can throw from the "immaterial" cause to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... he had just met and fallen in love with. Before that it was immaterial to him what had become of his wife. This woman had said to him: 'Come back to me a free man or never ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... not done, I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite ordinary. Lastly—for I can't go through the catalogue—I will speak of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive, thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, like swallows at evening; they battle and wrangle ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... desirable it seems strange that so few were seen, and that so many of the leading terriers were black and white, and some white entirely," then follows his deduction, viz., "the tendency evidently is that color is immaterial with the best judges, so that a breeder is foolish to waste his time on side issues which are not material." I can only state in passing that if he had a number of dogs on hand that were of the colors he specifies, "black and white, and some white ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... argue or think out all this clearly and methodically to herself. Her mind, on most things, material as well as immaterial, was very much what may be termed a jumble; but undoubtedly the above processes of reasoning and feeling, or something like them, were the result to Ailie of the violent death ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... with his hands, that they were to expect no assistance from him. However, when he met the consul he accosted him thus:—"Manius Acilius, are you unapprized of what is passing; or do you know it, and think it immaterial to the interest of the commonwealth?" This inflamed the consul with curiosity, and he replied, "But explain what is your meaning." Quinctius then said,—"Do you not see that, since the defeat of Antiochus, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... baneful effects upon Indian education. The one was the Education Commission of 1882-83, appointed by Lord Ripon, with Sir William Hunter as President, and the other the Public Service Commission of 1886-87, appointed by Lord Dufferin, with Sir Charles Aitchison as President. It is quite immaterial whether the steps taken by the Government of India during the subsequent decade were actually due to the recommendations of the Education Commission, or whether the Report of the Commission merely ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... this," Hsi Jen explained; "whether you really like to study or whether you only pretend to like study is immaterial; but you should, when you are in the presence of master, or in the presence of any one else, not do nothing else than find fault with people and make fun of them, but behave just as if you were genuinely fond of study, so ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... by stream and tree Something still of what was He,— Plainly put, his More or Less Immaterial Consciousness,— Very fine and very large, Floating o'er his College barge: Always while the world continues Bards shall sing his thews and sinews,— Here he rowed and here he ran, Being rather more than man;— Thus as ages onward go Still he'll great and greater grow, Larger ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... schools: whether genera and species—called "universals," or ideas—have a substantial and independent existence, or whether they are the creation of our own minds; whether, if they have a real existence, they are material or immaterial essences; whether they exist apart from objects perceptible by the senses. It is singular that such questions should have been discussed in the ninth century, since neither Plato nor Aristotle were studied. That age was totally ignorant of Greek. It may ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... hard—very hard. When you book a bet at Newmarket you never have to consider the rank of your opponent, save as regards his solvency. He may be a peer—he is very probably a publican—it is perfectly immaterial to you; but not so here. The company is positively staking against the incommensurable. They have no means of knowing whether that large broad-shouldered man yonder is or is not a royal duke; and when the telegraph announces a collision, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... material and what superfluous will depend upon the case. Thus if it is alleged that a suit of clothes was obtained by the defendant at a certain time, his obtaining the clothes is the material fact and the time may be superfluous or immaterial. But if a note is in controversy its date is ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... eternity seemed something incomparably truer and more real than the fleeting life which he had lived up to that time. His heart was overflowing with concentrated enthusiasm. Though yet alive, he had changed into a being almost immaterial, which desiring complete liberation for itself desired it also for another. He imagined that when free he and Lygia would each take the other's hand and go to heaven, where Christ would bless them, and ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... need not greatly disturb us. In aesthetics, as in ethics, the question of validity has to be kept distinct from that of origin. If symmetry (in general) is appreciated as aesthetically pleasing, the question of its genesis becomes immaterial. Another difficulty, not peculiar to aesthetic investigation, is that of reconstructing the modes of aesthetic consciousness represented by forms of art which differ widely from those of our own age ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mean by that?" cried the baron, in a tone that made Ehrenthal start. "Do you dare to insinuate that any thing can be immaterial to me about which ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... rang, and he insisted on my staying for dinner with him. Well, he gave me a better school than I had asked for—better neighborhood, he said—and told me to board with a certain family who had no children; he gave his reasons, but that's immaterial. They were friends of his, so I learned afterwards. They proved to be fine people. The woman was one of those kindly souls who never know where to stop. She planned and schemed to marry me off in spite of myself. The first month that I was with them she told me all about the girls in that ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... me great pleasure," replied the spirit, "to tarry with you, and once more to taste earthly food, but most of all to have the blessed joy of being of service to you. Here, all being immaterial spirits, no physical injury can befall any of us; and since no one wants anything that any one else can give, we have no opportunity of doing anything for each other. You see we neither eat nor sleep, neither can ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... was prosecuted with vigor and effect. Some of the penal regulations were copied from the edicts of Diocletian; and this method of conversion was applauded by the same bishops who had felt the hand of oppression, and pleaded for the rights of humanity. Two immaterial circumstances may serve, however, to prove that the mind of Constantine was not entirely corrupted by the spirit of zeal and bigotry. Before he condemned the Manichaeans and their kindred sects, he resolved to make an accurate inquiry into the nature of their religious principles. As if he distrusted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... was, was revoked by Charles IV.; but the revocation was never published, the birth of sons making it immaterial. When, however, his son Ferdinand VII. was near his end, leaving only two daughters, he published his father's revocation of the Act of Philip V., and appointed his wife, Cristina, Regent during the minority of Isabel II., then only three ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... was almost certain that if we came upon the men-eaters, he would charge the whole lot of them and accomplish a fine but futile end after hacking down a number of cannibal barbarians, whose extinction or escape remained absolutely immaterial to our purpose, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... pay our way with such money as we had, and the question whether or not our current receipts met our current expenses has not entered into the estimate of our solvency. Of course the general state of our funds, exclusive of gold, was entirely immaterial to the foreign creditor and investor. His debt could only be paid in gold, and his only concern was our ability to keep on ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... from the dark room the sounds of breaking glass, which was immediately followed by strange animal-like sounds as the mad photographer burst out of his den and proclaimed to all the world that nothing meant very much in his life and that it would be absolutely immaterial to him if the paper and its entire staff should suddenly be visited with flood, fire and famine. After this gracious and purely gratuitous piece of information he again withdrew, but strange mutterings still continued to issue forth from his lair. While ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... existence at all had nearly ceased. This is a moral phenomenon that I have often had occasion to observe, and which, there is some reason to think, depends on a principle of attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of the philosophers, but which is as active in the immaterial, as is that of gravitation in the material world. Talents like his, so incessantly and unweariedly employed, produced the usual fruits. He grew richer hourly, and at the time of which I speak he was pretty generally known to the initiated to be the warmest man who had ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... because the Material had retired as behind a veil, leaving the Immaterial less burdened, and the imagination more free to work its will. The Spiritual is ever putting on material garments; but in the moonlight, the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Church, and bred up by her in the choir-schools of the Middle Ages, plain chant is the aerial and mobile paraphrase of the immovable structure of the cathedrals; it is the immaterial and fluid interpretation of the canvases of the Early Painters; it is a winged translation, but also the strict and unbending stole of those Latin sequences, which the monks built up or hewed out in the cloisters in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... "That is immaterial," continued Burchill. "We establish the fact that he did. Now we come to the first chapter of our story. This lady, Mrs. Engledew, a tenant of this flat since the Herapath Estate was built, is an old acquaintance—I am permitted to say, friend—of the late Jacob Herapath. She occasionally ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... immaterial ceremonies, the lady acquainted Mr. Booth that, having heard there was a person in the prison who knew her by the name of Matthews, she had great curiosity to inquire who he was, whereupon he had been shewn to her from the window of the house; that she immediately recollected ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... world, a man is judged not by what he is, but by what he appears to be. Everything pointed to the belief that Gordon was working against the interests of Fernhurst; whether he actually meant to do so or not was immaterial. He had to be dealt with as if it was deliberate. It might be hard on him, but it was not the interests of the individual, but of the community, ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... remarkable voice, rather deep, with a sort of chiselled intonation. The cadences of it fell on the ear softly and yet ruthlessly, and when she had finished speaking you became aware of silence, as after a solemn utterance of destiny. What she happened to have been saying seemed to be immaterial to the effect, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... how continual was the combat waged by duty in the Virgin's name against the wild, passionate blood of her race! Ignorant, indolent though she might be, she was capable of great fidelity of heart, and, moreover, she was not given to dreaming: love might have its immaterial charms, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... are immaterial in themselves," he reminded her. "It's just a question how much happiness they have brought her, whether the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a suggestion in connection with the proposed change. It is relatively an immaterial one and I presume will be included. As a member here from the District of Columbia I think the District of Columbia should ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... the heart that sighs for freedom seeks Her image; there the winds no barrier know, Clouds come and rest and leave your fairy peaks; While even the immaterial Mind, below, And Thought, her winged offspring, chained by power, Pine ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... were there or no is, of course, immaterial to the case. The jeweller, whose name, I believe, ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... looked at his friends, and saw by their faces that they, too, realised what it meant. They were in the midst of a sympathetic strike; the question of the right or wrong of it did not appear. It was immaterial; right or wrong, they must go out because others went; those were ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... Carru, and others, "annihilation is not our destiny. We are immortal. These bodies may perish. These living thoughts, these boundless aspirations, can never die. To-morrow, far away in other worlds, we shall think, and feel, and act and solve the problems of the immaterial destiny of the human mind." Immortality was the theme. The song was hushed upon these dying lips. The forced laughter fainted away. Standing upon the brink of that dread abyss from whence no one has returned with tidings, every soul felt a longing for immortality. They turned ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... light and trivial duty that was the ostensible employment of the moment. More than as many others loitered carelessly about the decks below, somewhat similarly engaged; the whole wearing much the appearance of men who were set to perform certain immaterial tasks, more to escape the imputation of idleness than from any actual necessity that the same should be executed. The quarter-deck, the hallowed spot of every vessel that may pretend to either discipline or its semblance, was differently occupied though by a set ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... potential element of harmony—a sound that in its own place may mean any emotion of joy or sorrow, hate or love. Whether a thought is behind these alluring rhythms, with their sensuous swing or their rush of sound, is immaterial so long as the ear has satisfaction; thus Swinburne and his school fill the place of Spenser and the elder poets, and many an "idle singer of an empty day" jostles aside the masters, who can wait, knowing that sooner or later, return ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... natural and the supernatural; it is all one. At most, he has only the seen and the unseen. The supernatural, as a distinct category, only appears when a definite knowledge of the natural has arisen to which it can be opposed. He has no such distinction as that of the material and the immaterial; so far as he thinks of these things, the invisible is only a finer form of the visible. Of one thing, however, he is perfectly convinced, and this is that he is at all times surrounded by a host of ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... above that of the winds and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself crumbles into dust—this very texture of the life of the soul might have been a gray background over which ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... [against the United States], but an assurance of active resistance to it if attempted...Call such an attitude [on the part of England toward the United States] friendship, or policy, as you will—the name is immaterial; the fact is the essential thing and will endure, because it rests ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... France, as well as of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, was charged with inquiries into the origin of things material, though more especially of things immaterial. It was a period of energetic thinking. Whether Lamarck had read the works of these philosophers or not we have no means of knowing. Buffon, we know, was influenced ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... which, like the AEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities—a God that made all things—man's immaterial and immortal nature—and a world of weal or woe beyond ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... counsel were assigned to argue in his behalf. "This would not have been done, Mr. Crone," said the Lord Chief Justice significantly, "in either of the last two reigns." After a full hearing, the Bench unanimously pronounced the error to be immaterial; and the prisoner was condemned to death. He owned that his trial had been fair, thanked the judges for their patience, and besought them to intercede for him ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... still held possession of us. One would have said that his immaterial essence, liberated, free, all-powerful and dominating, was flitting around us. And sometimes, too, the dreadful odor of the decomposed body came toward us and penetrated us, sickening ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... "It's quite immaterial to me what anybody thinks of it," Mrs. Daggett snapped. "And now, if that's all you've got to suggest, why, I'm sure it's all I have, and so, the sooner we end this, the sooner I'll be at liberty ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... as our immaterial and better part shall be doomed to keep company with its fleshy tabernacle, with all its attendant miseries of gout and indigestion, how much of our enjoyment in this world is dependent upon the mere accessory circumstances by which the business ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Alma doubtfully. Was she crazy? There was something odd about her, now that he noticed, as she stood rigidly there, with that queer red spot on her face, a strange fire in her eyes, and that weird reflection from the maple enveloping her like an immaterial flame. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... might be a rather immaterial point by now. In any event, Chard's information was that an important 'five-year-plan' of the association made it necessary to restrict him for that length of time. We shall observe him closely. If the indications are that he would ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... III. thus commenting on his election in 1198: "The Church in these times ever had an essential preponderance over worldly kingdoms. Resting on a spiritual foundation, she had in herself the vigour of immaterial power, and maintained in her application of it the superiority over merely material forces. She alone was animated by a clearly recognised idea, which never at any time died out of her. For its maintenance and actuation ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... the style of lover's sighs was immaterial, was stirred with an unaccountable feeling. When Cairy put his hand on hers, and his lips quivered beneath his mustache, her face inevitably softened and her eyes widened like a child's eyes. For Conny, even ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... terrible suffering could seem real. The man who stood there, so impotently calling to her, belonged to another order of things—things which a moment ago had been important to her, and which now no longer existed. He had become for her as remote, as immaterial as the gaudy picturesqueness of the scene in which he stood. She gave him a long strange look, and made a strange gesture, a gesture of irrevocable leave-taking. She turned her face again to the sea, and did not ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... further, that it was by giving Russia an interest in preventing the severance of Holland and Belgium, that this country concluded the treaty; and that, therefore, to that treaty we were equally pledged. That Holland had refused to pay was immaterial: if one pledged himself to the payment of a debt to which there was also a third party, it would be dishonourable to take advantage of that third party having refused to fulfil his engagement, as a legal reason for also refusing to fulfil your ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... he says, 'you are an old friend from mine,' he says. 'Why do you bother yourself you should go into this bank and that bank?' he says. 'Why don't you come to my bank?' he says, 'and I would give you all the money you want.' So you see, Mr. Lubliner, it is immaterial to me which bank ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... anax andron Agamemnon is not dead! Ha, we can do anything; there are no victories we may not win! And here is the dead weight and terror of the war lifted from us; and there is no anxiety now to hold our minds. We may go forth conquering and to conquer; we may launch our triremes on immaterial seas, and subdue unknown empires of the spirit!—And here is Athens the quick-witted, hegemon of Greece; her ships everywhere on the wine-dark seas; her citizens everywhere; her natural genius swelled by an enormous sense of achievement; her soul, grown great ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... you must never say that, except of course in private. There may be some truth in it, but it would be laughed at in the present condition of the public mind. History may do me justice; but after all it is immaterial. A man who does his duty should be indifferent to the opinion of the public, which begins more and more to be formed less by fact than by the newspapers of the day. But let us return to more important matters. You are now ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... smaller door which was raised just sufficiently to allow the stone receptacles to pass in. The prisoner began to believe that he was being preserved for something beside lions. However that was immaterial. If they would but hold off for a few more days they might select what fate they would—he would not be there when they arrived ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... distinct supremacy, at least on paper. In the light of recent events it is apparent that the German military authorities realised that the dawn of "The Day" was approaching rapidly, and that it behoved them to be as fully prepared in the air as upon the land. It was immaterial that the Zeppelin was the synonym for disaster. By standardisation its cost could be reduced while construction could be expedited. Furthermore, when the matter was regarded in its broadest aspect, ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... attack as to crush what might have sprung into resistance. It passes from badinage into personalities and recriminations. In these respects it is consonant with the general bearing of the American character. The levity of wit and the pleasantry of humor appear at first purposeless; they are immaterial, and, even when most palpably present, seem, like Macbeth's encountering witches, to make of themselves air, into which they vanish. But sarcasm, and the direct application of ridicule, effect something at once; their course may be swift and cloudy, like that of the bullet, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... called, than it can be something, or equal to two right angles; and therefore that everything could not have had a cause, which, the reader has seen, is the very point assumed by Theists—the very point on which as a pivot they so merrily and successfully turn their fine metaphysical theories and immaterial systems. ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... rainstorm came down upon us in the morning, the water descending in regular sheets. We were so exhausted that we did not care for anything any more. Whether we got wet or dry was quite immaterial to us. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... go up to the regiment before the duel, and now he was explaining to Reimers the reasons which had decided him to take this sudden step. To Reimers alone. But if he wished he might show the letter to the colonel. The opinion of any one else was immaterial to him. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... quite a family affair, then," said Sir Francis Varney, "it certainly does appear immaterial which of you ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... still keeping his place by the door. "It's immaterial to me, so I escape accompanying ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... case. The point was, how to begin with Mrs Peagrim. The fact that twenty-five years ago he had crushed in his arms beneath the shadows of the deodars a girl whose name he had forgotten, though he remembered that she had worn a dress of some pink stuff, was immaterial and irrelevant. Was he to crush Mrs Peagrim in his arms? Not, thought Uncle Chris to himself, on a bet. He contented himself for the moment with bending an intense gaze upon her and asking if she ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... to any one who considers the great and extensive largeness of hell, says a commentator; but not so to those who consider the great expansion of immaterial substance. Mr Banks makes one soul to be so expanded, that ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... philosophical subjects: Lord Byron being, with the great bulk of mankind, a believer in the existence of matter and evil, while Shelley so far refined upon the theory of Berkeley, as not only to resolve the whole of creation into spirit, but to add also to this immaterial system, some pervading principle, some abstract nonentity of love and beauty—of which, as a substitute at least for Deity—the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Mercury?—'Some of them are desirous to appear, not like the spirits of other earths as men, but as crystalline globes. Their desire to appear so, although they do not, arises from the circumstance that the knowledges of things immaterial are in the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... back to London and its refracting and distorting atmosphere. If I had dwelt here for fifty years I should have perceived that Carlotta was but a speck in the whirlwind of human dust whose ultimate destiny was immaterial. As my five days' visit, however, has not advanced me to that pitch of wisdom, I am foolishly concerned in my mind as to her welfare, and anxious to dissolve the triumvirate, Miss Griggs, Stenson, and Antoinette, whom I have entrusted with the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... in the moist, shadowy mosses of the woods; long threads of rose and blue dew floating and swinging and suspended—from what?—in the immaterial morning; tree-frogs with golden eye-lids and white throbbing throats; furze whose perfume of faded peach and rose follows ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... hardly be doubted that C. livia, affinis, intermedia, and the forms marked with an interrogation by Bonaparte ought all to be included under a single species. But it is quite immaterial whether or not they are thus ranked, and whether some one of these forms or all are the progenitors of the various domestic kinds, as far as any light can thus be thrown on the differences between the more strongly-marked ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... looked coldly upon another man? It did. It mattered quite a lot, more than perhaps it ever mattered to the other man. Is the soul such a shallow and blind thing that it cannot sort the true from the false, the material from the immaterial, cannot see that an insult levelled at a likeness is not ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... later, and threw herself into the sea from the promontory of Leucate. Doubtless she too had 'poetic idiosyncrasies'; but her spotless life and, I believe, natural death, afford no indication of an unsound intellect. It is rather immaterial, however, to—" Beulah paused abruptly as a servant entered and approached ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... authority, Dr. Abercrombie, admitted that animals have an "immaterial principle" in them, which is distinct from matter. But he does not say that this principle, or soul, will live after death, as it is supposed to in man. However, many scholars both of ancient and modern times hold this opinion. Broderip, in his Zoological Recreations ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... as far as the ear could reach. The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture. The chill air of the night seemed to lie on my limbs as heavy as a slab ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... a large steam launch, the Esmeralda, which was to carry us up the river. So far as climate goes, it was immaterial what time we chose for our expedition, as the temperature ranges from seventy-five to ninety degrees both summer and winter, with no appreciable difference in heat. In moisture, however, it is otherwise; from December to May is the period of the rains, and during this time the river slowly ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... opinion contains some truth, and some error. For it is manifest from what we have said (Q. 49, A. 4) that only a being in potentiality is the subject of habit. So the above-mentioned commentators considered that angels are immaterial substances, and that there is no material potentiality in them, and on that account, excluded from them habit and any kind of accident. Yet since though there is no material potentiality in angels, there is still ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an Aeolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to flog a man to his work, than to leave him idle till he robs, and flog him afterwards. The essential thing for all creatures is to be made to do right; how they are made to do it—by pleasant promises, or hard necessities, pathetic oratory, or the whip—is comparatively immaterial.[73] To be deceived is perhaps as incompatible with human dignity as to be whipped; and I suspect the last method to be not the worst, for the help of many individuals. The Jewish nation throve under it, in the hand of a monarch reputed not ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... form a just idea of the Creator from the creation. The Indian combines the idea of the Great Spirit with others of a less perfect nature. The word used by him to indicate this Sovereign Being does not convey the notion of an immaterial nature; it signifies with him some one possessed of lofty and mysterious powers, and in this sense may be applied to ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... consolidation powerful enough to make Webster its spokesman in Congress; a consolidation as definite and resolute as that of the slave-holders, and destined to be far longer-lived,—no change in legislation came till 1832, and then the change was immaterial; the "tariff of abominations" was substantially re-enacted. The South had been chafing bitterly, and now South Carolina broke into open revolt. The whole South felt itself aggrieved by the tariff. Its industrial system was not suited to develop manufactures; it lacked the material for skilled ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall. She used to say that she had never seen anything in Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... the several parts of the Union are, then, intimately connected; and the same assertion holds true respecting those opinions and sentiments which may be termed the immaterial ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... it may be, worth $5,000,000 per annum. I have assumed for the sake of simplicity that we shall still be reckoning in terms of money, though possibly the executive may have substituted Marxian labor units; but it is quite immaterial to the present argument what the measuring rod may be. The point to be observed is, that it is impossible to tackle the problem at all without the conception of a rate of interest. For suppose that you tried to do without it, and said, "We shall ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... feed on these, as he was neither seen to do it, nor were the bodies of the animals quickly consumed, and that as to the human victim, they prevented his feeding on him by burying him. But to all this they answered, that he came in the night, but invisibly, and fed only on the soul, or immaterial part, which, according to their doctrine, remains about the place of sacrifice, until the body of the victim be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... that the substance which is subjected to this strain was not amenable to the laws of ponderable existence; if there were room for the notion that comets and their tails, which have to be brandished in such a stupendous fashion, were sky-spectres, immaterial phantoms, unreal visions of that negative shadow-kind which has been alluded to. This, however, unfortunately, is not a permissible alternative in the circumstances of the case. The great underlying and indispensable fact that the comet ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... received its name from that of Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who had crossed the ocean under the Spanish and Portuguese flags. The middle ages were Closing; the great nations of Europe were putting forth their energies, material and immaterial; and the discovery of America came just in season to help and be helped by the men of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... "It's immaterial anyway," he snapped, frowning at me. "You can't make any fool mystery out of it. The point is that Mr. Felderson put on his brakes rapidly, perhaps for a dog or a rabbit, ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... Lawrence were fit for duty"; as Captain Perry in his letter said that 31 were unfit for duty, this would make a total of 134. So I shall follow the prize-money list; at any rate the difference in number is so slight as to be immaterial. Of the 532 men whose names the list gives, 45 were volunteers, or landsmen, from among the surrounding inhabitants; 158 were marines or soldiers (I do not know which, as the list gives marines, soldiers, and privates, and ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... considered as an abstraction. But this is not the view of Art; Art has never magnified the materiality of the finite; on the contrary, its history is only the record of successive attempts to dispose of matter, the failure always lying in the hasty effort to abolish it altogether in favor of an immaterial principle outside of it, something behind the phenomena, like Kant's noumenon,—too fine to exist, yet unable to dispense with existence, and so, after all, not spirit, but only a superfine kind of matter; or as in a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... out the originality of the individual. In Taine's teaching, nation and period were the new (although more concrete) abstractions in the place of the universally valid; but here, too, the particularity of the individual was immaterial. The kernel of my work was a ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... ascertained, time ceases to be an element in the question, and the animus manendi, once ascertained, the recency of the establishment, though it may have been for a day only, is immaterial. ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... on Natural Selection. It has been seen in the last chapter that amongst organic beings in a state of nature there is some individual variability; indeed, I am not aware that this has ever been disputed. It is immaterial for us whether a multitude of doubtful forms be called species, or sub-species, or varieties; what rank, for instance, the two or three hundred doubtful forms of British plants are entitled to hold, if the existence of any well-marked varieties be admitted. But the mere existence of individual ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... oblivion. I cannot here give an exhaustive account of these influences, but will mention a few. Stoicism had at the time succeeded in powerfully influencing every other sect, and it placed [Greek: nous en aitheri] (see Plutarch, qu. R. and P. 375). It had destroyed the belief in immaterial existence The notion that [Greek: nous] or [Greek: psyche] came from [Greek: aither] was also fostered by the language of Plato. He had spoken of the soul as [Greek: aeikinetos] in passages which were well known to Cic. and had taken great hold on his ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... itself? Facts, objects, are but phantoms matter-woven—ghosts of this earthly night, at which the soul, sleeping here in the mire and clay of matter, shudders and names its own vague tremors sense and perception. Yet, even as our nightly dreams stir in us the suspicion of mysterious and immaterial presences, unfettered by the bonds of time and space, so do these waking dreams which we call sight and sound. They are divine messengers, whom Zeus, pitying his children, even when he pent them in this prison-house of flesh, appointed to arouse in them dim recollections ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the human intellect in the present state of life cannot understand even immaterial created substances (A. 1), much less can it understand the essence of the uncreated substance. Hence it must be said simply that God is not the first object of our knowledge. Rather do we know God through creatures, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas |
