"Inchoate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was to Diana like a spark to dry leaves. Her whole nature flamed to it, and there were moments when she walked visibly transfigured in the glow of it. Her mind was rich, moreover, in the delicate, inchoate lovers, the half-poetic, half-intellectual passions, the mystical yearnings and aspirations, which haunt a pure expanding youth. Such human beings, Mrs. Colwood reflected, are not generally made for happiness. ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... A Territory is an inchoate and dependent community, which can be erected into a State only in two ways: first, formally, by an enabling act of Congress, giving permission to the inhabitants to set up for themselves; and second, informally, by a spontaneous and general movement of the people, which Congress must afterwards ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... slack season and pursues her search at the very moment when positions are hardest to find, and her un-employment is therefore most prolonged. Perhaps nothing in our social order is so unorganized and inchoate as our method, or rather lack of method, of placing young people in industry. This is obvious from the point of view of their first positions when they leave school at the unstable age of fourteen, or from the innumerable ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... being, as I have often said, still an embryo, of which no one can yet quite foresee the final development; and from its not having the same experience and self-knowledge as the aristocratic and middle classes. Honesty it no doubt has, just like the other classes of Englishmen, but honesty in an inchoate and untrained state; and meanwhile its powers of action, which are, as Mr. Frederic Harrison says, exceedingly ready, easily run away with it. That it cannot at present have a sufficiency of light which comes by culture,—that is, by reading, observing, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... arose, gathered her notes together, and passed out. Dave looked at Mr. James Ward wonderingly, until that gentleman broke his train of inchoate thought. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... sufficient to stop his work, and in the first two months of the year he was busy continuing his conscientious labours on The Footnote to History, seeing The Wrecker and The Beach of Falesa through the press, planning the South Sea plantation novel Sophia Scarlet, which never got beyond that inchoate stage, and writing the continuation to Kidnapped, first intended to bear the name of the hero, David Balfour, and afterwards changed to Catriona. With this he proceeded swimmingly, completing it between February and September, in a shorter time than any other of his sustained narratives; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and peered over his shoulder through the gap. Yes, I could see it, too. In the deep shadow of the tree there was a deeper shadow yet, black, inchoate, vague—a crouching form full of savage vigor and menace. It was no higher than a horse, but the dim outline suggested vast bulk and strength. That hissing pant, as regular and full-volumed as the exhaust of an engine, spoke of a monstrous organism. ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by no meaner name—that Lord Clarendon is building for himself in the open country at the top of St. James's Street. It promises to be the finest house in town, and, although not covering so much ground as Whitehall, is judged far superior to that inchoate mass in its fine proportions and the perfect symmetry of its saloons and galleries. There is a garden a-making, projected by Mr. Evelyn, a great authority on trees and gardens. A crowd of fine company had assembled to see the newly finished ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... never come within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... form in Fig. 15 bears much the same relation to that of Fig. 14 as did the clearly outlined projectile of Fig. 10 to the indeterminate cloud of Fig. 8. We could hardly have a more marked contrast than that between the inchoate flaccidity of the nebulosity in Fig. 14 and the virile vigour of the splendid spire of highly developed devotion which leaps into being before us in Fig. 15. This is no uncertain half-formed sentiment; it is the outrush into manifestation of ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... second tendency which at the present moment dominates writers is, as I have said, the rising democratic interest in the things of the mind. This is at present a very inchoate and uncultivated interest: but in days of cheap publication and large audiences it dominates many writers disastrously. The temptation is a grievous one—to take advantage of a market—not to produce what is absolutely the best, but ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... blunders with gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... obscurity which covers all the germs of civilization. The more one comes to understand the case of the primitive man, the more wonderful it seems that man ever started on the road to civilization. Among the lower animals we find some inchoate forms of capital, but from them to the lowest forms of real capital there is a great stride. It does not seem possible that man could have taken that stride without intelligent reflection, and everything we know about the primitive man shows us that he did not reflect. No doubt ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... warfare, for it is compelled to expend all that it gains from the enlarged scale of business and from the cessation of competition among its constituent companies upon the strife with its single antagonist. A Trust in this inchoate condition has no special economic character distinguishing it from other large aggregates of competing capital. It is with fully-formed trusts which are able to control prices and regulate to some degree production ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... or no structural or logical connection, but all emanating from a personality whose presence dominates the page, and whose eye is ever upon us. Without this vivid and intimate sense of the man back of all, of a sane and powerful spirit sustaining ours, the piece would be wild and inchoate. ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... slightest noise, an increase in the wind, the snap of an expanding hull plate, the crackle of static over my radio. I whirl around to see who, or what, is watching me. My skin crawls and prickles as though I were covered with ants. My mind is filled with black, inchoate dread. In three words, I'm scared stiff! Yet there is nothing tangible—nothing I should be frightened about, and this terrifies me even more. For I know where this continual fear and worry can lead—to what ends ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... the lower animals, and even to the growth of plants. Now, apart from a craze of generalization we should hardly think of the "stern daughter of the voice of God" in connection with an amoeba corresponding successfully to stimulus, yet the creature in its inchoate way is exhibiting a dim analogy to duty. The term in question was first used by Zeno, and was explained by him, in accordance with its etymology, to mean what it came to one to do, so that as far as this goes, 'becomingness' would be the most ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of their hiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy atmosphere, and wistfully awaiting an ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... content out of his workshop, and spent his sleepless nights working at this huge marble with a paper cap on his head, in which he stuck a lighted candle to see by. The solitary figure of the old man in the vast and dimly lighted studio, groping round the inchoate marble; the stillness of the night, broken only by the sharp click of the mallet and the grating of the chisel, is a picture of many of the bravest hours of his old age. Vasari, observing all this, and wishing to do the revered artist a kindness, sent him 40 lbs. of candles made of goat's fat, ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... for her sentimental hubbub, I could have easily managed Alice. This fellow's strange death gives him the halo of martyrdom. He is out of my reach now. The old man must have feared the 'Iron Gate' of Death! And, after all, his plans to 'efface' Clayton were only inchoate. I cannot terrify them with any hearsay projects. I must get what I can, cling to Dunham, and ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... him wonderingly, and her heart began to beat with a strange quick thrill. It is not always easy to see the outlines of a soul's development, or the inchoate formation of a great love,— and though everything in a certain sense moved her and appealed to her that was outside herself, it was difficult to her to believe or to admit that she, in her own person, might be the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the performance of his duty means success in life, and that his nonperformance means failure; when you can show him that this law is immutable, you have made of him a useful citizen and have instilled into his mind a firm belief that the freedom and liberty of which we boast is not an inchoate substance to be ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... is ceaseless longing, And of the twilight immortality: The urge of some wild, inchoate aspiration Akin to afterglow and stars and winds and sea: This hour makes full and pours out in libation,— Could you forget? Will ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Jimmy that the shadowy and inchoate vision of a combat, a fight, a brawl of some kind persisted in flitting about in the recesses of his mind, always just far enough away to elude capture. The absurdity of the thing annoyed him. A man has either indulged in a fight overnight or he has not indulged in ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... impulsive and aimless reactions of the young, and to provide the stimuli needed to direct them so that they will amount to something. The more the educator knows of music the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical impulses of a child. Organized subject matter represents the ripe fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences involving the same world, and powers and needs similar to theirs. It does not represent perfection or infallible ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... yawned at the curb. As it moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean and lost itself among the inchoate night masses of the great buildings, among the now stilled, now strident, cries and clangings, Anthony put his arm around the girl, drew her over to him and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... co-operation of man were required. The amphibian and reptile forms which then abounded had about run their course, and were ready to assume the more advanced type of bird or mammal. These forms constituted the inchoate material placed at man's disposal, and the clay was ready to assume whatever shape the potter's hands might mould it into. It was specially with animals in the intermediate stage that so many of the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... about; and she would have been less or more than woman had she not wished to learn the whole truth in a matter of this nature. She hoped that her lover was right, and that Graham's heart, in accordance with his development theory, was so inchoate as to be incapable of much suffering. She was not sure, however. There was something she surmised rather than detected. She felt it now in Mrs. Mayburn's presence, and caught a glimpse of it in the flush that was fading from her cheeks. Had ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... which one could slip his feet. When Joe turned handles, needle sprays sprang at him from all sides, and simultaneously a ventilator fan began to run. When in space that fan could draw out what would otherwise become an inchoate mixture of air and quite weightless water-drops. In space a man might drown in his own shower bath without the fan. The apparatus for collecting the water again was complex, but Joe didn't think about that at the moment. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... them, on the part of a few delegates, on the ground that they were "Intellectuals" and not members of the proletariat, a criticism which pursued them all through their lives. Their views found general favor, however, as might be expected from such an inchoate mass of men, revolutionaries to the core, and waiting only for effective leadership. A resolution was adopted requesting Marx and Engels to prepare "a complete theoretical and working programme" for the League. This they did. It took the form of the Communist Manifesto, published in ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... into his face, and her dark, inchoate eyes had now a furtive look, and a look of a knowledge of evil, dark and indomitable. A flame ran secretly to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... continental warfare tend to veil the fuller meaning of the principle he had framed. Had he lived, there is little doubt he would have worked it out to its logical conclusion, but his death condemned his theory of limited war to remain in the inchoate condition in which he had ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... spirits of ancestors or chiefs are the primitive gods. Local divinities and personal spirits are found in the rudest culture, while simple fetichism, or the vague shapes presented by dreams, play a large part in the most inchoate systems. The prominence of one or the other of these elements depends upon local and national momenta, which are a proper study for the science of mythology, but need not detain us here. The underlying principle in all these conceptions of divinity is that of the res per accidens, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... must be allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the elegant ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... words ran high. The former insisted that females are the salt of the earth, speaking, I presume, figuratively. The latter went so far as to assert that the opposite sex have no souls, and that their brains are in a rudimental and inchoate state of development. Thereupon he was tartly taken to task by his master's bride, the beautiful Chandravati, who told him that those only have a bad opinion of women who have associated with none but the vicious and the low, and that ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... cheerfully sacrificed for works of public utility. He inaugurated and urged forward many benevolent and scientific enterprises, and schools of art and music. This extraordinary man seemed to have a prophetic sense of the value and ultimate success of inchoate public improvements, and when he once adopted a scheme allowed nothing to discourage him. He engineered the Holborn Viaduct enterprise, and I notice that at a late meeting of the brave Channel Tunnel Company, Sir E. W. Watkin claimed that "the cause had once ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... soon disappeared, its component vessels subsiding into a sluggishly flowing stream of allotropic iron. Instantly the fleet abandoned the attack upon the planetoid and swung its cone around, to bring the flame-erupting axis to bear upon the inchoate something dimly perceptible to the ultra-vision of the Secret Service observers. Furiously the gigantic composite beam of the massed fleet was hurled, nor was ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... Luke VII, 47: "Many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much."(1006) 1 Pet. IV, 8: "Charity covereth a multitude of sins."(1007) 1 John IV, 7: "Every one that loveth is born of God."(1008) St. Augustine seems to identify the two habits in such passages as the following: "Inchoate love, therefore, is inchoate righteousness; ... great love is great righteousness; perfect love is perfect righteousness."(1009) According to the Tridentine Council, "the justification of the impious" takes place when "the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... discretion to give it effect. The constitutional capability of becoming a voter created by this Amendment lies dormant, as in the case of an infant, until made effective by legislative action. Congress, the legislative power of this jurisdiction, as yet, has not seen fit to carry the inchoate right into effect, as is apparent in the law regulating the franchise of this District. When that shall have been done, it will be the pleasure of this court to administer the law as they find it. Until this shall be done, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that my representation of their contents from memory, was substantially just. The public mind appears still in a state of astonishment. There never was a moment in which the aid of an able pen was so important to place things in their just attitude. On this depend the inchoate movement in the eastern mind, and the fate of the elections in that quarter, now beginning and to continue through the summer. I would not propose to you such a task on any ordinary occasion. But be assured ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... ground-glass doors of opulent companies which he knew were famous, and rooms where millionaires met in secret conclave, but the contrast awakened only his sense of humor. Yet he was always relieved after he had reached his own floor. Possibly its incompleteness and inchoate condition made it seem less lonely than the desolation of the finished and furnished rooms below, and it was only this recollection of past human occupancy that ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... which they treated this subject when they legislated upon it in 1792 what were their views of the powers of Congress on the subject of where the power was lodged and what was the proper measure of its exercise, but we can gather equally well from the inchoate and imperfect legislation of 1800 what those men also thought of their power over this subject, because, although differing as to details, there were certain conceded facts as to jurisdiction quite as emphatically expressed as if ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... make an important difference in the situation. So when her husband disclosed his bad news, she opened her private drawer and disclosed her banknotes, with such a smile in her eyes as I can easily picture to myself. Stimulated by the miracle, he remembered that the inchoate elements of a story, in which was to figure prominently a letter A, cut out of red cloth, or embroidered in scarlet thread, and affixed to a woman's bosom, had been for months past rumbling round in his mind; now was ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... The patriarchal has preceded them all, and it is with the patriarchal that the human race has begun its career. The family or household is not a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and, historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well as the initial or inchoate nation. But its simple direct development gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental despotism, and which nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom. It is found only in pagan and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in the secular order ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... monoplane shot through it, I was aware of a faint taste of oil upon my lips, and there was a greasy scum upon the woodwork of the machine. Some infinitely fine organic matter appeared to be suspended in the atmosphere. There was no life there. It was inchoate and diffuse, extending for many square acres and then fringing off into the void. No, it was not life. But might it not be the remains of life? Above all, might it not be the food of life, of monstrous life, even ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Huge, inchoate commonweal, Lo, at last we catch the thrill: Now we found and forge the steel, Scoop ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... lethargy and for the first time in its history addressed itself systematically to the drafting of a national constitution. To this course it was impelled by the propaganda of Gambetta and other republican leaders, by fear on the part of the Legitimists and Orleanists that the existing inchoate situation would lead to a Bonapartist revival, and by a new modus operandi which was cleverly arranged between the republicans and the Orleanists. Convinced that an Orleanist monarchy was, at least for a time, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... of them. Amongst strong men I had proved myself strong. I had clinched again, as I had often clinched, my right to the title of "Prince." Also, my attitude may be considered, in part, as a reaction from my childhood's meagreness and my childhood's excessive toil. Possibly my inchoate thought was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a prince than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage, then I'd like to know ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... was the unfinished skeleton of a small sea-going vessel on rude stocks; on the plaza rose the framed walls and roofless rafters of a wooden building; near the Embarcadero was the tall adobe chimney of some inchoate manufactory whose walls had half risen from their foundations; but all of these objects had evidently succumbed to the drowsy influence of the climate, and already had taken the appearances of later and less picturesque ruins of the ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... riddle impossible of explanation. He thought, too, with a sort of generous remorse, of that occasion when Sigurd had visited him on board the yacht to implore him to leave the Altenfjord. He realized everything,—the inchoate desires of the desolate being, who, though intensely capable of loving, felt himself in a dim, sad way, unworthy of love,—the struggling passions in him that clamored for utterance—the instinctive dread and jealousy of a rival, while knowing that he was both physically and mentally unfitted ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... but since such a taste is, obviously, in a measure "acquired," the compiler of any list of books must endeavor, by a frank and almost shameless assertion of his taste, to rouse to a divergent reciprocity the latent taste, still embryotic, perhaps, and quite inchoate, of the young person anxious to make some sort of a start. Such a neophyte in the long voyage—a voyage not without its reefs and shoals—will be much more stirringly provoked to steer with a bold firm hand, even by the angry reaction he may feel from such suggestions, than ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... it tenaciously adhered to the very end, and which did much to precipitate the war. Forgetful of the solidarity of European civilization, and the fact that by policy and diplomatic intercourse continuing through many centuries a united European State exists, even though its organization be as yet inchoate, he took the ground that Austria should be permitted to proceed to aggressive measures against Servia without interference from any other Power, even though, as was inevitable, the humiliation of Servia would destroy the status of the Balkan States and threaten ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... that exercised by the great writers of Russian romance. In the works of men like Tourguenef and Dostoievsky the Russian people appear to have recognised, for the first time, that their real condition was truthfully depicted, and that their inchoate aspirations had found sympathetic expression. "Dans le roman, et la seulement," De Voguee says, "on trouvera l'histoire de ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... did not greatly care what the bill did or did not involve. He was, too, in that temper of inchoate agnosticism that was sweeping England at the time, and any scruples that he had in his more superstitious moments were lulled by the knowledge that the clergy had acquiesced. What appeared more important to him than any hair-splittings on the exact provinces of the various authorities in question, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... their titles from their productive attributes. But as to what they produced or how they produced it, no special indication is given. Thereafter two more Kami are born from an elementary reedlike substance that sprouts on an inchoate earth. This is the first reference to organic matter. The two newly born Kami are invisible like their predecessors, and like them are not represented as taking any part in the creation. They are solitary, unseeable, and functionless, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... was the secret of Walker's curiosity—that he respected him. He would have liked to talk to him—not precisely to ask his advice, but to lay before him some of the difficulties that were inchoate in his soul. He had an idea that this man with the grave, suffering face—yes, there was suffering in his face, as one could see on closer inspection!—would ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... and to such things persons of exalted sensibility are liable. In such liability there lie, however, consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate sense of presence is infinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear their Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... yet uncreate, Amid a chaos inchoate, An uncreated being sate; Beneath him, rock, Above him, cloud. And the cloud was rock, And the rock was cloud. The rock then growing soft and warm, The cloud began to take a form, A form chaotic, vast and vague, Which issued in the cosmic egg. Then the Being uncreate On the egg did incubate, And ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... ill-will of General Manager North? I have, and it is distinct from and in addition to his hostility for the unearning branch for which I am responsible. I'm sorry for it, because I may need his good word for my inchoate scheme later on. It came up over some maintenance-of-way charges. He is as shrewd as he is unscrupulous, and he knows well how to pile the sins of the congregation on the back of the poor scapegoat. To make a better showing for the main line, and at the same time to show what a swilling ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... as well as sympathy. My knowledge of feminine nature, its extraordinary gifts of emotional and personal intuition, was of the scantiest, if it had any existence at all. But my own emotional side was active, and my mind an inchoate mass of ideals and more or less sentimental longings for social betterment. And so, with Sylvia's gentle ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... carry in their brains the OVARIAN EGGS of the next generation's or century's civilization. These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet; some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and these are what must form the future. A man's general notions are not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the minds of others. One must be in the HABIT of talking with such ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... made out, and the winch-wheels and ventilators on deck were inchoate masses which took shape only when they were within reach. The green starboard-light threw a sickly glare over the surges which rose to the rail. I had to feel my way along and not release my grip until I had found a ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... glare of a day's news, would make the public thrill. At the outset of the war she had seen the Browns, as part of a preconceived plan, in cohesive rear-guard resistance, with every detail of personal bravery a utilized factor of organized purpose. Now she saw defence, inchoate and fragmentary, each part acting for itself, all deeds of personal bravery lost in a swirl of disorganization. That was the pity of it, the helplessness of engineers and of levers when the machine was broken; the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... strictly to respect the Constitution, and not to interfere at all with slavery in the States within which it now lawfully existed. They said with truth that they had in no case deprived the slaveholding communities of their rights, and they denied the truth of the charge that they cherished an inchoate design to interfere with those rights; adding very truly that, at worst, a mere design, which did not find expression in an overt act, could give no right of action to the South. Mr. Lincoln had been most explicit in declaring that the opposition to slavery was not to go beyond ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... spirit, a creature but made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records. Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... from New York for the voyage across. Tiers of narrow, steel bunks, three deep, on all sides. An entrance in rear. Benches on the floor before the bunks. The room is crowded with men, shouting, cursing, laughing, singing—a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning—the bewildered, furious, baffled defiance of a beast in a cage. Nearly all the men are drunk. Many bottles are passed from hand to hand. All are dressed in dungaree pants, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... refer to what he would include in these and the main criteria which he gives for each of them. He would place the savage condition as being that of the lowest tribes known to us. They have little or no agriculture; their commerce is very inchoate and rude: they have no knowledge of the metals as such; their best weapon is the bow and arrow, or the throwing stick; and their best tool is the stone hatchet and the stone spade. This is very much like the lowest condition of the "wild people" to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... under her firm and steady guidance the training of his yet undeveloped genius, gleams of which from time to time, but fitfully and erratically, illumine his earlier correspondence. The material was there from the first, but inchoate, ill-ordered, confused, and therefore not readily available to correct passing impressions, wild rumors, or even to prevent the radically false conceptions of an enemy's possible movements, such as we have had before us. Bonaparte, furthermore, whose career began amid the troubled scenes ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... the still inchoate Whig party in 1836, and the extraordinary popularity of Jackson, resulted in the complete victory of Mr. Van Buren. But the General's chosen successor and political heir found the great office to which he had been called, and which ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... interpretation of his feelings and borrow expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individual man may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music that is in harmony with his inchoate feelings. Many of the samurai, therefore, will set themselves private regimens that will help their secret religious life, will pray habitually, and read books of devotion, but with these things the Rule of the order will have nothing ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... there was in him somewhat giant-like, perhaps easier to see now than before,—as the ruin seems vaster than the perfect building. The travail of a soul like Balder's must issue greatly, whether for good or ill. He could not remain long inchoate, but the elements would combine to make something either darker or fairer than had been before. Meanwhile, in the uncrystallized solution the curious analyst might detect traits bright or sinister, ordinarily invisible. Here were ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... that led me to inchoate a garden it is not necessary now to speak. Enough that the first and most important step had been taken, the land was bought,—a few acres, with a smart little house peeking up, a crazy little barn tumbling down, and a dozen or so fruit-trees that might do ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... almost trees. As for the blend of perfume, it was dreamily intoxicating. Two bamboos, guarding the side entrance gate, made a soft whispering that heightened the dream-sense. The bottom of the garden looked an inchoate mass of greenery topped by the upper boughs of tall straggling gum trees, growing outside where the ground ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... the material world—it is certain that the thirst for the ideal ever increases in exact proportion with the development of the race. The true and high task of the artist, the poet, is to divine these wants of humanity, to cultivate these inchoate aspirations for the infinite, to hold its nectar to the toil-worn, weary lips, to soothe and elevate the restless spirits, to cultivate, in accordance with the essence of Christianity, this excess of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... the parent's body—I have been witness to the birth—each contains about one-sixth ounce of vital element, fluid and glistening. Physical changes in this protoplasm manifest themselves in the course of a few days. The central portion becomes a little less fluid, and from an inchoate blur a resemblance to a diaphanous shell develops and floats, cloud-like, in a perfectly limpid atmosphere. Gradually it becomes denser though still translucent, as it seemingly absorbs some of the fluid by which it is surrounded. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... largest class of astral entities, is also much the most important to man. Being entirely his own creation, it is inter-related with him by the closest karmic bonds, and its action upon him is direct and incessant. It is an enormous inchoate mass of semi-intelligent entities, differing among themselves as human thoughts differ, and practically incapable of anything like classification or arrangement. The only division which can be usefully made is that which distinguishes between the artificial elementals made by the majority ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... Mrs. Milman, we went to the cathedral. I had never seen it before, and was much impressed with the majesty and grace of the interior. Nevertheless, the Italian style of architecture, with all its elegance, fails to affect me equally with the Gothic. The very rudeness of the latter, a something inchoate and unfinished, is significant of matter struggling with religious ideas too vast to be fully expressed. Even as in the ancient Scriptures there are ideas which seem to overtask the powers of human language. I sat down with Mrs. M. in one of the little ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... inchoate face under the bushes, her eyes diffused rays of warm and kindly light as, licking her lips, she, with a slow movement, smoothed the breast of the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the thing as a historical fact: so much rain-water-look at it—can it become grape-juice, wine? For an instant, he saw with the clear eyes of the mind and said no, his clear mind, answering her for a moment, rejected the idea. And immediately his whole soul was crying in a mad, inchoate hatred against this violation of himself. It was true for him. His mind was extinguished again at once, his blood was up. In his blood and bones, he wanted the scene, the wedding, the water brought forward from the firkins as red wine: and Christ saying to His mother: "Woman, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... inchoate, which she did not recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books into her school-bag. Her face was rosy and calm with the sweet ineffable confidence of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... be registered and Parliament ought to be dissolved. But a zealot of a Premier will not appeal; he will follow his formulae; he will believe he is doing good service when, perhaps, he is but pushing to unpopular consequences, the narrow maxims of an inchoate theory. At such a minute a constitutional king—such as Leopold the First was, and as Prince Albert might have been—is invaluable; he can and will prevent Parliament from hurting ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... I told him all about the program we had planned, which is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be preserved forever and ever), a class song, a procession, and a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be handed down from class to class. He asked us if we had the spade yet, and I told him "no," but Alice and I were going to buy it for the class in ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Fountain of the Blind; or in the scene of Melisande's death—one of the most pathetic and affecting pages in all music. One must wonder at the elasticity and richness of the harmonic texture—which, while it is incurably "irregular," is never crude or inchoate; at the distinction of the melodic line; at the rhythmical variety; at the masterly and individual orchestration. No faculty of trained perception is required justly to value the excellences of Debussy's score. There is great beauty, ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... only time of life when lovers are supposed by poets and romancists to walk 'on air,' so as John Walden was long past the age when men are called young, it is difficult to determine the kind of buoyant element on which he trod when he left the Manor that evening. Youth!—what were its vague inchoate emotions, its trembling hesitations, its more or less selfish jealousies, doubts and desires, compared to the strong, glowing and tender passion which filled the heart of this man, so long a solitary in the world, who now awaking to the consciousness of love in its noblest, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... has since broadened westward to the Pacific, over the infinite areas which in 1800 belonged to Spain. From an early period there have been, as now, unorganized territory and also partially organized and fully organized territories, the last being inchoate States, ready to be admitted to full membership in the Union when sufficiently populous, on condition of framing each for itself ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... alien peoples who composed the rest of it. Something had to be done to bring the governing Power up to such a proportionate strength as should secure its supremacy, and the most convenient plan was to weaken the alien elements. The scheme, though yet inchoate, had been tried with success in the case of the Bulgarians and Greeks, and to test it further he stirred up Albanians against the inhabitants of Old Servia with gratifying results. They weakened each other, and he further weakened them both by the employment of Turkish troops in Macedonia ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... to be devoted mainly to a drawing-room, a lounge, and a library, all furnished in a weird, inchoate sort of magnificence, with money rather than with taste, if one might judge fairly by the fitful and guarded beam of the torch. The taste may have been less questionable than Lanyard thought; but the evidences of luxurious ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... nothing was visible in the white glare through the haze of dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and heaps of inchoate ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a wilderness of disorder, vanishing at last into the darkness beneath the whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunderings of a swiftly rising storm. Near him in the livid glare was something that ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... at Cesare's announcement—Gheta and Mochales to marry! She was certain that the arrangement had not existed that morning. A fleet inchoate sorrow numbed her ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... English settlement, shrank at first from committing himself and his fortunes to the leadership of Mr. Davitt. But no choice was really left him, and there is reason to believe that a decision was made easier to him by a then inchoate undertaking that he should be personally protected against the financial consequences to himself of the new departure, by a testimonial fund, such as was in fact raised and presented to him in 1883. In June 1879 he accepted ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... receptivity, so that the jokes, the songs, the dances, even the spindling little shafts of romance that you shot out into it, could be felt to dig in and take hold. It never occurred to her to think of it with a plural pronoun; it was "it" simply, an inchoate monster, which was, as the show progressed, delightfully loosening up, becoming good-humored, undiscriminating, stupidly infatuate; laughing at things no human being would consider funny, approving with a percussive roar things not in the least good; a monster, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... demand of whole nations exceptional moral foresight and heroism; but a certain hard common-sense in facing the complicated phenomena of political life must be expected in every progressive people. In some respects we as a nation seem to lack this; we have the somewhat inchoate idea that we are not destined to be harassed with great social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer them, the fault is with the question and not with us. Consequently we often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it. Such an attitude ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... than those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, or the adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personal tone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, does manage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of his symphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sit at tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance; evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound the Austrian bugle calls; old soldier ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... (Infernus), is simply a lower state of inchoate and imperfect being, "of saints nipped in the bud." Infant damnation is only a gentle sadness—"levis tristitia." All positive suffering in hell is probably temporal, and therefore must at last ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... informally quitted in his exodus to the promised land of Biggs was one of those oversized, under-calculated dwellings conceived and erected in the extravagance of the San Francisco builder's hopes, and occupied finally in his despair. Intended originally as the palace of some inchoate California Aladdin, it usually ended as a lodging house in which some helpless widow or hopeless spinster managed to combine respectability with the hard task of ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... people have moved steadily along any road, the men who have led them on that road have been selected as subjects. When the people have refused to enter upon a road, or, having entered, have soon turned back from it, the leaders upon such inchoate or abandoned excursions have for the most part been rejected. Those who have been exponents of ideas and principles which have entered into the progress and have developed in a positive way the history of the nation ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... was more than any other man the creator of modern Russia, saw clearly that the only way of holding this inchoate State-mass together was to call into existence a huge administrative machine, and he saw equally clearly that, if such a machine was not itself to become a disruptive force through the personal ambition and self-aggrandisement of its members, it must be framed on democratic and not aristocratic principles. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... very distinctly stated in the Bible; when the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" in the darkness that was "upon the face of the deep,"[205] the great deep of matter showed no forms, it was void, inchoate. Form was given by the Logos, the Word, of whom it is written that "all things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made."[206] C. W. Leadbeater has well put it: "The result of this first ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... of this there may have been, if not recollections of a previous personal experience, at least the reflected inchoate thoughts of ancestors which I am unable in any clearer way to bring out of darkness. But enough! I must say no more, for I again find myself in the land of vague fancy, gliding phantoms ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... ministers declared their intention to vote for it. Sir James Graham thought it would simplify the question if the amendments were limited to the rights of freemen under the reform bill, because the question of inchoate rights would arise more properly under another clause. Sir William Follett acceded to this suggestion; but Lord John Russell still maintained that the provision contained in the clause was a necessary consequence of adopting this new municipal franchise; and, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... dreaming city seemed to be still brooding in the autumn calm over the long succession of her sons. The continuity, the complexity of human experience; the unremitting effort of the race; the stream of purpose running through it all; these were the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and fragmentary shape, pervaded the boy's sensitive mind as he rambled with his mother from ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the case of any known human language, and therefore that animal language is incomparably less subtle and less capable of expressing delicate shades of meaning than our own, these differences are nevertheless only those that exist between highly developed and inchoate language; they do not involve those that distinguish language from no language. They are the differences between the undifferentiated protoplasm of the amoeba and our own complex organisation; they are not the differences between life and no ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... the woman organizer are many and complex. They are the harder to handle, inasmuch as there is very little assistance to be had from any body of tradition on the subject among women workers. The movement for organization among women is still so inchoate. The woman organizer turns to the more experienced men leaders, and finds that often, even with the best will in the world, they cannot help her. The difficulties she meets with are, in detail, so different from theirs that she has to work out her ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... few arms, and the enemy would come sometimes and "practice" on it. It was several times chased all over that country. When we reached Gallatin, this regiment joined the brigade; it was still in an inchoate state, but it was anxious to revenge the trouble it had been occasioned. It was organized with James Bennett as Colonel, W.W. Ward, Lieutenant Colonel, and R.A. Alston, formerly Morgan's Adjutant General, ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the more easily, the more their forefathers practiced the same act. The thing imitated, therefore, must already exist, and cannot be explained as an impulse." "As soon as instinct ceased to be sole ruler of living creatures, including inchoate man, the latter must have made mistakes in the struggle for existence which would soon have finished his career, but that he had instinct and the imitation of what existed to guide him. This human primeval stupidity is the ultimate ground of religion and art, for both ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving, initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself that he was a drain- pipe for the spirit—a dark saying to Glyde, who was himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition. The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... theatre—a very fatiguing enterprise, and also, for Edward Henry, a very nervous one. He was as awkward in displaying that inchoate theatre as a newly-made father with his first-born. Pride and shame fought for dominion over him. Nellie was full of laudations. Ralph ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... and at once placed him in the front rank of orators and statesmen. He said that it was not clear to him that our title was exceptional up to 54 deg.40'. Our claim to the territory north of the Columbia River was the Spanish title only, and this had been an inchoate right. ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... the signal for a rushing swarm of quotations. They surged to and fro, an inchoate throng of half finished phrases, mutilated sentences, parodied sentiments, and brilliant metaphors. I could not distinguish any phrases or ideas of my own making. I saw a poor, ragged, shrunken sentence that might have been mine own catch the wings of a fair idea with the light of genius ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... after she bade him good-night and left him, his thoughts a medley of vague impressions, confused, half-formed, inchoate. He tried to fix his mind on Simon Varr and ended by surrendering it to the vivid, vital ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the four seamen defended them at a great expenditure of learning and lies. He argued at great length:— "That there was no evidence that a master mariner named Blogg ever existed; that he was an outlaw, and, as such, every British subject had an inchoate right to kill him at sight, and, therefore, that the seamen, supposing for the sake of argument that they did kill him, acted strictly within their legal rights; that Blogg drowned himself in a fit of delirium tremens, after being drunk ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... transformations of the slave were not yet ended. The time came when he was permitted to become a citizen. For two years he had led an inchoate, nondescript sort of existence: free without power or right; neither slave nor freeman; neither property nor citizen. He had been, meanwhile, a bone of contention between the Provisional Governments of the States and the military power which controlled them. The so-called State Governments ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... important principle that the common law of estoppel still obtains with regard to bills, notes and cheques, save where distinctly annulled or abrogated by the Bills of Exchange Act, and that therefore a man putting inchoate negotiable instruments into the hands of an agent for the purpose of his raising money thereon is responsible to any one taking them bona fide and for value, although the agent may have fraudulently exceeded and abused his authority and the case does not fall ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... aided Jane Hardie to note down the "preliminary process of the Incubation of disorders of the Intellect," resumed: "Now, sir, your son appears to be in a very inchoate stage of the malady: he ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... man we seek is already found, his features rapidly becoming distinct. He is the offspring of Northern Europe; he occupies Central North-America. Other fresh forms are doubtless to appear, but, though dimly shaping themselves, are as yet inchoate. But the Anglo-American is an existing fact, to be spoken of without prognostication, save as this is implied in the recognition of tendencies established and unfolding into results. The Anglo-American ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... ninety and nine that go not astray, never feel the caressing touch which the yearning Shepherd lays on the obstinate wanderer, who would not pasture in peace; and from the immemorial dawn of inchoate civilization, prodigals have possessed the open sesame to parental hearts that seemed barred against the more dutiful. By what perverted organon of ethics has it come to pass in sociology, that the badge of favoritism is rarely the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... sketch of needed improvements: public buildings, almshouses, roads, canals, aqueducts, town streets, mountain roads—anything, in short, which would arouse local enthusiasm and benefit the country at large. Many—most, perhaps—of these schemes remained inchoate; but many of the grandest were executed, and Napoleon has left his impress as indelibly upon France itself as upon its society. The routes of the Simplon and Mont Cenis, the great canals which bind together the river systems, the restoration of the cathedral ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... her plate, for she knew along what a tortuous path of inchoate ideas and breezy caprices Mrs. Grahame Fenlow, upon the sightliness of whose new chauffeur she and her sister were basing their hopes of keeping their maid of all work, had led the architect in his attempt to design ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... dream vaguely of the possibility of using electricity for conveying intelligence, and that he gave utterance among his intimates to these dreams; but the practical means of so utilizing this mysterious agent did not take shape in his mind until 1832. An inchoate vision of the possibility of using electricity is far different from an actual plan eventually elaborated into ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... various bodies. "Huggins's spectroscope," he says, "has shown that many nebulae are not stars at all; that many well-condensed nebulae, as well as vast patches of nebulous light in the sky, are but inchoate masses of luminous gas. Evidence upon evidence has accumulated to show that such nebulae consist of the matter out of which stars (i.e. suns) have been and are being evolved. The different types ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... in fact, not thinking of the bundle or the gun; or if she thought of them—Such rigid instruments as words, worn blunt with usage and misuse, are quite inadequate to describe the faint and fugitive character of that thought,—the idea still in its inception, inchoate, embryo. She was going to Murray's for news of Philip Haig; and all beyond that ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... Marys began to appear in metropolitan papers. These were read with the peculiar thoroughness of those who, for the first time, found themselves of definite interest to the outside world. Simultaneously the air became full of prophecy, rambling and inchoate. The citizens had not yet come to regard developments as being in any particular their own. They had—for the best reasons—put no money in, but now began to profit by changed conditions. The works were still ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... had made in my mind that, when the English sailor pointed confidently over the darkening waters, and cried 'There's Boney!' I looked up for the instant with a foolish expectation of seeing some gigantic figure, some elemental creature, dark, inchoate, and threatening, brooding over the waters of the Channel. Even now, after the long gap of years and the knowledge of his downfall, that great man casts his spell upon you, but all that you read and all that you hear cannot give you an idea of what ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same kind ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... coyote, fox, and sand rabbit, covers these fringing sand hills. North and south, Sansome, Montgomery, Kearney, Dupont, Stockton, and a faint outline of Powell Street, are roadways more or less inchoate. An embryo western Paris. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... musical tone. Among such secondary helps the most important are the muscular sensations which accompany the innervation of the larynx and other organs used in producing musical tones. For we ordinarily innervate these organs (at least in an inchoate and partial way)—that is, we sound the note to ourselves—when trying carefully to judge of its pitch." ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... come upon it one is an inchoate fool," Mount Dunstan went on. "And afterwards one is—for a time at least—a sort of madman raving to one's self, either in or out of a straitjacket—as the case may be. I am wearing the jacket—worse luck! Do you know anything of the state of a man who cannot utter the most ordinary ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Chamberlain's history of the eighteen centuries you will find that, after all, the men who were real factors in the world civilization were the geniuses who were able to interpret and enforce what was inchoate in the minds of all but had no definite expression and led to no useful action. Each atom counts something, two make a molecule and the world is made up of them—at least it was in my college days. ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... mass of inchoate debris, the result of his toilsome journeys of the night before, was left as it had fallen—there would be time enough to sort all that, a hundred times. At present, he would venture forth with the sole object of examining his surroundings. "This suits me exactly," he muttered, with a good-humored ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... The inchoate character of the Cabinet for a considerable period explains what might otherwise seem to be an anomaly,—the delay of Jefferson in occupying his post. He did not arrive until March 21, 1790, when Washington had been in office nearly ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... be perhaps no reason why, granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an "university" with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social "unions" as large as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies. A college such as this is a mob, not an organism, and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... an act passed the General Assembly making it impossible to sell real property in which a woman has, by virtue of her marriage; an inchoate right, for less than four-ninths of its appraised value: and also providing that upon the sale of any piece or aggregate of pieces of real property not exceeding $2,000, the wife has her absolute right; and moreover providing that in case of a judicial ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... character of these poems, it may be suggested that in spite of much in them that is rough and inchoate, they show that Toru was advancing in her mastery of English verse. Such a stanza as this, selected out of many no less skilful, could hardly be recognized as the work of one by whom the language was ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... came from him with astonishing rapidity. When he saw that I continued silent, they came still faster, mingled with what sounded to me like a stream of inchoate abuse. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Philadelphia have been a dream for many years, and spasmodic efforts have been made from time to time to produce the reality, but as yet nothing tangible has resulted. The idea has been too inchoate to develop much enthusiasm, and year after year our citizens have returned from enjoying the delights of foreign gardens, and mildly wondered, in the true Philadelphia style, why we should not have them. Nor is this marvelous when ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... of the present writer), are the main social elements of the coming time: (i.) the element of irresponsible property; (ii.) the helpless superseded poor, that broad base of mere toilers now no longer essential; (iii.) a great inchoate mass of more or less capable people engaged more or less consciously in applying the growing body of scientific knowledge to the general needs, a great mass that will inevitably tend to organize itself in a system of interdependent ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... and the lessons were abandoned. I dare say Mueller was in a humdrum way a good coach; he could have prepared candidates for our absurd academic examinations; but for an artistic genius, bursting with inarticulate ideas and inchoate purposes he was worse than useless. So Richard had to muddle along as he best might, while his good relatives doubted whether he would ever be able to do anything at all, until by good fortune he tried Theo. Weinlig. Weinlig ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... common use during the classical period. Virgil, in his latest work, as has been noticed, shows a tendency to experiment in combining their use with that of the Graeco-Latin rhythms. The combination, in the writing of the new school, of a sort of inchoate verse with an elaborate and even pedantic prose was too artificial to be permanent; but about the same time attempts were made at a corresponding new style in regular poetry. Rhymed verse as such does not appear till later; the work ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... night his soul had been filled with the image of Olive, but up to this moment he had not thought of marrying her. That was something that belonged to the future, not even considered in his state of inchoate adoration. But now that he had been told he had reason to hope, he hoped; and the fact that one beautiful woman told him he might hope to win another beautiful woman was a powerful encouragement. Henceforth he would not be content with simply ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... over those hapless works of art at the Pymantoning County Fair, you thought, 'What a good thing it would be to have a nice village girl, with a real but limited gift, go from here to study art in New York! And get in love there! And married!' Cornelia and her mother at once stepped out of the inchoate; Ludlow advanced from another quarter of Chaos, and I began ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... firm hand, instead of being servants, will aim at becoming principals. Here lies the advantage, in an ecclesiastical point of view, of their more rudimental state, I mean of the ancient style of architecture, of Gothic sculpture and painting, and of what is called Gregorian music, that these inchoate sciences have so little innate vigour and life in them, that they are in no danger of going out of their place, and giving the law to Religion. But the case is very different when genius has breathed upon their natural elements, and has developed them into what I may ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... therefore be regarded as the culminating ecstasy of the art of life, or as a premature snatching at such an ecstasy while the art of life is still discordant and inchoate. In the first instance it is the supreme reward of the creative act. In the second instance it is a tragic temptation to rest by the way in a unity which is an illusive unity and in a heaven from which "the sun of the morning" is excluded. It thus comes about that what we call religion is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... to notice that in Master Raynal's religion, as in Richard Rolle's, hermit of Hampole, there appears to have been some of that inchoate Quietism which was apt to tinge the faith of a few of the English solitaries. He was accustomed to attend mass devoutly and to receive the sacraments, and on his death-bed was speeded into the next world, at his own desire, by all the observances prescribed by the Catholic Church. ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... why might not the girl and I effect some sort of copulation? This fantasy, drawn exclusively from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only, for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to surprising ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... this point—we find ourselves at the beginning of the thirteenth century face to face with a University at Cambridge, a University which, existing originally in its inchoate condition of an association vaguely aiming at the improvement of the methods of education and the encouragement of scholars, had gradually grown into a recognized and powerful body, with direct influence and control over ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... was a sedative which soon allayed the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of social chaos arose the inchoate form of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... was at first a thing inchoate, awkward, impossible, criticism halted when the actual service at table began. The chef at the White House had been brought to this country by Mr. Jefferson from Paris, and no better was known on this side ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of disorder, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... They drew nearer. They were close upon me. I heard the crashing of the bushes round the entrance, and then dimly through the darkness I was conscious of the loom of some enormous shape, some monstrous inchoate creature, passing swiftly and very silently out from the tunnel. I was paralysed with fear and amazement. Long as I had waited, now that it had actually come I was unprepared for the shock. I lay motionless and breathless, whilst the great dark mass whisked by me and ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Congress there was manifested extreme antagonism of opinion and action between some Representatives, who sought by the abusive and unconstitutional employment of the legislative powers of the Government to interfere in the condition of the inchoate States and to impose their own social theories upon the latter, and other Representatives, who repelled the interposition of the General Government in this respect and maintained the self-constituting rights of the States. In truth, the thing attempted was in form alone action of the General ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... Big James in progress from everlasting to everlasting, was all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have poetically ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... German women spend their days, but I know as little about the exact function of a Buergermeister as about the functions of a Mayor. In short, my knowledge of Germany, like my knowledge of England, is based on a series of life-long, unclassified, more or less inchoate impressions, and the only excuse I have for writing about either country I find in my own and some other people's ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... had struggled for bare life against many and great difficulties; that it had had to wage several desperate wars with the aborigines; had had its financial and legislative troubles; and was still so very very young, we were naturally prepared to find Auckland a rude, rough, and inchoate settlement, pitched down in the midst of a wilderness as savage and uncouth as those shores ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... sovereign member of the Federal Union. The claim, afterward advanced by Mr. Douglas and others, that this declaration was intended to assert the right of the first settlers of a Territory, in its inchoate, rudimental, dependent, and transitional condition, to determine the character of its institutions, constituted the doctrine popularly known as "squatter sovereignty." Its assertion led to the dissensions which ultimately resulted in a rupture ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I have already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return; but clearly it will be—it is not—of the simple inchoate character of the First Stage, for it has been enriched, deepened, and greatly extended by the experience of the Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of mentality—the consciousness ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... It is strange to see in strong human character the strength and the weakness, two flat contradictions, existing side by side and making weak what seems so strong and making strong what seems so weak. However, human character is a tangle of inconsistencies, as disorderly and inchoate as the tangible and visible parts of nature. Susan felt weak, but not the kind of weakness that skulks. And there lay the difference, the abysmal difference, between courage and cowardice. Courage has full as much fear as cowardice, often more; but it has a something else that cowardice has not. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... A youth whose brain glowed like a furnace, whose heart throbbed with tumult of high ambitions, of inchoate desires; endowed with knowledge altogether exceptional for his years; a nature essentially militant, displaying itself in innumerable forms of callow intolerance—apt, assuredly, for some vigorous part in ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... abreast of it you will find the great forest sweeping away in a bay- like curve behind it against the dull gray sky, the splendid columns of its cotton and red woods looking like a facade of some limitless inchoate temple. Then again there is that stretch of sword-grass, looking as if it grew firmly on to the bottom, so steady does it stand; but as the Move goes by, her wash sets it undulating in waves across its broad acres of extent, showing it is only riding at anchor; and you know after ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... vast unfinished Capitol, at that moment surrounded by masses of stone and prostrate columns never yet lifted into their places, seemingly the monument of high but delusive aspirations, the confused wreck of inchoate magnificence, sadder than any ruin of Egyptian Thebes ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... happenings had certainly bred in the nation a desire for constitutionalism and a detestation of military domination. But this desire and detestation required firm leadership. Without that leadership it was inchoate and powerless, and indeed made furtive by the constant fear of savage reprisals. A great opportunity had come and a great opportunity had been lost. President Li Yuan-hung's personal argument, communicated to the writer, was that in sealing the Mandate dissolving Parliament he had ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... like a translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose. It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art. It is amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems, The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of Turann. Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed choral ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... inquisitiveness of appraising eyes, she ignored the women as, already, she had ignored the men. With obliterating unconcern, she reduced them to the fluidity of the inchoate. Other matters occupied her, and, primarily, a trick, an extremely shabby one, from which she had ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus |
