"Inertia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Squires who with their 'dames' kept open house and celebrated Harvest Home and Christmas Festival with all the buoyancy and vigour of a sane and healthful manhood undeteriorated by any sickly taint of morbid pessimism and indifferent inertia, were the beneficent rulers of a merrier rural population than has ever been seen since their day. Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot's Manor, had been a splendid specimen of 'the fine old English gentleman, all of the olden time,' and his ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Dr. Cattell, now a professor in Columbia, but then an investigator in Wundt's psychological laboratory in Leipsic, made a series of studies on brain and eye inertia in the recognition of letters. Like Dr. Javal he found some alphabets harder to see than others and the letters of the same alphabet different in legibility. He saw no advantage in having a mixture of capital and small letters. He condemned shading in ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... for a moment so lost in her that it is no else than as if they were alone in all the world, he slowly bends over her and kisses her forehead. A cry of indignation breaks from Melot. "Traitor! Ha, King, revenge! Shall you endure this outrage?" But Tristan has suddenly cast off the inertia of dreams, bared his sword, and turned about. "Who will match his life against mine?" He gazes full into Melot's face. "He was my friend. He loved me, he held me high. He, more than any, was concerned for my honour, my fame. He made proud my heart to ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... spare one's energies is natural to man. To gain wealth with the least expenditure of energy is said to be the chief economic motive. Most men are by nature lazy. This law of inertia applies not only in the physical world, but also in the intellectual, moral and spiritual fields. The great majority of men follow the line of least resistance. In politics and morals they accept the standards of their associates. Unconsciously they ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... coast; I would write books and be, all round, a model of push, energy, and enterprise. And I did try. I might as well have tried to remove yonder mountain with a pitchfork, or stop the roll of the Atlantic with a rope of sand. Nothing on earth can cure the inertia of Ireland. It weighs down like the weeping clouds on the damp heavy earth, and there's no lifting it, nor disburthening of the souls of men of this intolerable weight. I was met on every side with a stare of ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... to several incidents and states of mind. I recollect falling more than once, as I had fallen before, and of experiencing, more than once, that painful struggle against what I may style mental and physical inertia. I remember breaking out frequently into loud importunate prayer, and being impressed with a feeling of reviving energy at such times. Sometimes a text of Scripture seemed to flash before my eyes and disappear. On these occasions ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... tube is excessively heated, it can elongate and slip a little within those surrounding it, without disturbing them. In fact, the inner tube of the Armstrong gun is sometimes turned within the others by the inertia of the rifled projectile. On the whole, then, hooping an inner steel tube with successively tighter steel rings, or, what is better, tubes, is the probable direction of improvement in heavy ordnance. An inner tube of iron, cast hollow on Rodman's plan, so as to avoid an inherent rupturing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the second exhibition of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung, Munich, 1910-11.] There has arisen out of the composition in flat triangles a composition with plastic three-dimensional triangles, that is to say with pyramids; and that is Cubism. But there has arisen here also the tendency to inertia, to a concentration on this form for its own sake, and consequently once more to an impoverishment of possibility. But that is the unavoidable result of the external application of an ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... ferry the sleepers lay in windrows, each man resting his head upon some previous treasures that he had brought from his home. No one was able to fear thieves or to escape pillage, because of absolute physical inertia forced ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... on a clay subsoil, they can be abundantly deepened and enriched from the start, if of a heavy clay, inclined to be cold and wet in spring, and to bake and crack in summer, skill should aim to lighten it and remove its inertia; finally, as we have shown, a light, porous soil should be treated like a spendthrift. All soils, except the last-named, are much the better for being enriched and deeply plowed or forked in October or November. This exposes the mould to the sweetening and mechanical ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... having seen it, but added that not all its gold, nor all its treasure, would induce her to spend her days in its indolent and luxurious atmosphere. She loved the West, with its intellectual activity and deep moral life, its progress and its aspirations after the higher liberty. The inertia of the East irritates a strong ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... motionless, as though motion terrified her and inertia were salvation. Her dark hair rippled to her waist; her white arms hung limp, yet the fingers had curled till every delicate nail was pressed deep into the pink palm. She was trying to look at him. Her face was as ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... to them that the French Revolution was caused, and continued, by the weakness and inertia of Louis Fifteenth and his ministers and that the moment the Directorate placed Bonaparte in command of a handful of troops, and gave him power to act, by the use of grape and ball he brought order in a day. It only needed a quick and decisive use of force, he thought, and untold ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... the law of inertia at work. Then we descended to the floor with a crash that seemed calculated to loosen it. That ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... death he has nought that a spiritual realm can claim. The choice is an all-important one; for, as a recent writer puts it, "In this choice, the personality chooses or rejects itself, takes itself for its life-task, or dies of inanition and inertia." ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... Only those who do not probe beneath the surface might be led to entertain this view. Have not the few accumulated the wealth of the world? Are they not the masters, the absolute kings of the situation? Their success, however, is due not to individualism, but to the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass. The latter wants but to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced. As to individualism, at no time in human history did it have less chance of expression, less opportunity to assert itself in a ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Great schemes of social and material improvement also aroused the public hopes in these years. The better minds became conscious of the real aspect of Hungarian life in comparison with that of civilised Europe—of its poverty, its inertia, its boorishness. Extraordinary energy was thrown into the work of advance by Count Szechenyi, a nobleman whose imagination had been fired by the contrast which the busy industry of Great Britain and the practical interests of its higher classes ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... marriage I suddenly felt sad, and through my brain, tired with the long day, there flashed the thought that perhaps I was not living as I ought; I got more and more tired and was gradually overcome with weakness, inertia; I had no desire to move or to think, and after walking for some time, I waved my hand ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... troops, elephants and guns, all accompanying their lord. The trusted councillors looked unutterable things at all Gerrard's suggestions, and military and civil officials combined to defeat all his arrangements by means of the dead weight of their inertia. The Rajah was willing to go, provided he had not to take any trouble, but he criticised freely all the points submitted to him, indicating how much simpler and less laborious it would have been if Gerrard had accepted his offers without insisting on referring things to his superiors. ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... old timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent inertia. Slowly, gently, most sorrowfully through the golden air cleaves a voice that is somewhat a wail, yet not untuned by love. Inarticulate at first, I catch only the low mournfulness; but it clears, it concentrates, it murmurs into cadence, it syllables into intelligence, and thus ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... at one with him. These were not like our Zeitoonli, but wore the settled gloom of resignation that is poor half-brother to Moslem fanaticism, caught by subjection and infection from the bullying Turk. There was nothing we could do at that late hour to overcome the inertia produced by centuries, and we rode on, ourselves infected to the verge of misery. Only our Zeitoonli, striding along like men on holiday, retained their good spirits, and they tried to keep up ours by singing their ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... which could be used successfully in signalling through the Atlantic Cable was one of peculiar construction, by Professor Thompson, called the marine galvanometer. In this instrument momentum and inertia are almost wholly avoided by the use of a needle weighing only one and a half grains, combined with a mirror reflecting a ray of light, which indicates deflections with great accuracy. By these means a gradually increasing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... persistence of force. And so long as natural forces continue to express themselves in the way in which experience has led us to expect there is no need for us to think of anything beyond. The principle of inertia is with us here, for if it be true that force will persist in a given direction unless deflected from its course by some other force, it must be equally true that all forces will work out a given consequence ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... expertness, lapse into a machine whose hands move automatically and whose mind is idle? Such a result is fatal both to his intellect and his will. He becomes passive until at length all initiative is destroyed. For many years the colored people of the South reaped precisely this harvest of mental inertia. Now, thank heaven, they are rousing out of the lethargy that has been their inheritance and their brains are getting to work. It will, however, take years, perhaps generations, for some of them to work up to a normal mental activity and intelligence; but if they persist results ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... reminded of the breaking of waves on a sloping beach. The wave, retarded at its base, is carried forward above by its momentum, and finally spreads far up on the strand; and if it could there remain, the succeeding wave must necessarily find itself superimposed upon the first. But no effects of inertia, no kinetic effects, may be called to our aid in explaining the formation of mountains. Some geologists have accordingly supposed that in ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... impossible, that the rupture should be postponed until the Austrians and Prussians had re-crossed the Rhine. The preparations of the Dutch were going on with the usual slowness.[177] Evidently the French Government counted on their traditional inertia and on the malcontents in Great Britain and Ireland. The private letters of Maret, that soi-disant friend of peace, breathe full ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... passes, to resume his activity when relieved from the pressure of her fire. The case is not strictly similar to the advance of a column of troops upon a fortified position, where the head does the most of the fighting, and the rear mainly contributes inertia to the movement of the mass. It is at least open to argument that a fire progressively diminishing from van to rear is not, for the passage of permanent works, a disposition as good as a weight of battery somewhat more equally distributed, with, however, a decided ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... widespread inertia, this blundering idea that there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they are to-day abandoning, ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... wealth would cease and work would be reduced to a minimum. The prospect was stupendous, but hardly entirely pleasing. If there were no need for effort, then the powers of mind and body would sink into inertia. ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Heigho, Fudge, much force would be lost by expanding them into specific propositions. Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is, to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount. Let us then inquire whether economy of the recipient's ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once did so. Widely shall men cleave ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of these people must be absolutely incredible; not a week passes without their country abounding with events[1338] that are analyzed an debated by the carpenters and blacksmiths of England." The cause of this inertia is manifest; interrogated on their opinions, all reply: "We are of the provinces and we must wait to know what is going on in Paris." Never having acted, they do no know how to act. But, thanks to this inertia, they let themselves be driven. The provinces form an immense stagnant pond, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not that of the flowing of any sort of energy, but the rigidity, or inertia of the medium through which the energy has to make its way; thus bringing us back to rouah and hoshech, the expansive and compressive principles of the opening verses of Genesis. It is the broad scientific generalization of the opposition between Ertia, or Energy, and Inertia, or Absence ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... St John of the Cross and Madame Guyon, are intensely devotional and ecstatic. It seems to be a well-defined condition of listlessness, apathy, and dryness, as they call it, not a state of active pain, but of terrible inertia, weariness, and incapacity for feeling; "a wan ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I've had enough of drugs! I don't know if you feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its exasperating demand of time from the mind—time—life! Live! We only live in patches. We ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... forgotten the better." All the sunshine and peace of his new home had not been enough wholly to brighten or heal Jim's wounded spirit. Hetty had found herself baffled at every turn by a sort of inertia of sadness, harder to deal with than any other form of ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... increases, the amount of red-tape piles up until more social energy is consumed in overcoming social inertia and the friction that is the result of social function, than is produced by the function in question. When this point is reached, the social machinery operates at a constant loss, and it is only a question of time when it will cease to operate altogether, and ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... mind's eye, thou beautifully rollest: but knowest thou whitherward? It is towards the road's end. Old use-and-wont; established methods, habitudes, once true and wise; man's noblest tendency, his perseverance, and man's ignoblest, his inertia; whatsoever of noble and ignoble Conservatism there is in men and Nations, strongest always in the strongest men and Nations: all this is as a road to thee, paved smooth through the abyss,—till all ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... "For suggestion to succeed, the subject must have naturally fallen, or been artificially thrown into a state of morbid receptivity: but it is difficult to determine accurately the conditions of suggestionability. However, we may mention two. The first, the mental inertia of the subject: * * * the consciousness is completely empty: an idea is suggested, and reigns supreme over the slumbering consciousness, * * * The second is psychic hyperexcitability, the cause of the aptitude for suggestion." "For example, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... curve from this, the second derived curve. By aid of a planimeter determine the areas P, P1, P2, of these three curves. Then, if [x] is the distance of the mass-centre of the given area from XX; [x]1 the same quantity for the first derived figure, and I Ak squared the moment of inertia of the first figure, k its radius of gyration, with regard to XX as axis, the following relations are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... in itself; all else is our doing; and if you wish to call it matter or the material world, well and good, but at least it is not the prius of mind, but the posterius, that which is demanded by the mind, but is always unattainable. Even the professional materialist ascribes inertia to matter. The atoms, if he assumes atoms, are motionless, unless disturbed. From whence comes this disturbance? It must proceed from something outside the atoms, or the matter, so that we can never say that there is nothing ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Wingfield-Stratford's Facing Reality are chapters with these titles: "Thinking in a Passion" and "Mental Inertia." Those chapter titles seem to me to signify the chief dangers confronting the world today—perhaps confronting the world in any day—and the main reasons why we do not face reality as we should. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... said, very wisely and truly, that inertia was the breeding-ground of inspiration. I think, on the whole, that the total and entire absence of any species of inertia in Hugh's temperament reacted in a way unfavourably on his books. I do not think they simmered in his mind, but were projected, hot ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that in my heart I keep up her friendship only through inertia, because I have no plans, and that her millions and her beauty leave me cold, she would be dumfounded; I believe that perhaps she ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... whom he was giving an order; the first touch of sluggishness in a re-forming line; the more significant clumsiness of a living evolution that he knew was clogged by the dead bodies of comrades; the ominous silence of a breastwork; the awful inertia of some rigidly kneeling files beyond, which still kept their form but never would move again; the melting away of skirmish points; the sudden gaps here and there; the sickening incurving of what a moment before had been a straight line—all ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... the primitive clan constitution of society in which the individual had no standing apart from the community. From the Roman Empire it passed to Medieval Europe, and it has survived in the Christian world by force of inertia. It is, however, not universal in Christendom (there are religious bodies in which individual freedom of choice is fully recognized), and in some cases where it exists formally or theoretically it is practically ignored. Notwithstanding ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Ceratodus, which lived in Mesozoic times, as far back as the Jurassic, which probably means over five millions of years ago. The Queensland mudfish is an antiquity, and there has not been much change in its lineage for millions of years. We might take it as an illustration of the inertia of evolution. And yet, though its structure has changed but little, the fish probably illustrates evolution in process, for it is a fish that is learning to breathe dry air. It cannot leave the water; but it can live comfortably in pools which are foul with ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... clearly the patient's sleep is pictured the stronger becomes the subjective feeling of drowsiness. After about ten minutes the ability to give strong concentration seems to disintegrate, attention is renewed only by fits and starts and in the presence of great, mental inertia, and the oncoming of sleep is almost overpowering. An unfailing cure for insomnia, speaking for myself, is the persistent effort to put some one else asleep by hard thinking of the end in view, with a continued gentle movement, such as stroking ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... a certain traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different indeed from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister-island, Nuka-hiva. Sails were seen steering from its mouth; now it would be a whale-boat manned with native rowdies, and heavy with copra for sale; now perhaps a single canoe come after commodities to buy. The anchorage was besides frequented by fishers; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the dogmatic disputes of the preceding century. The Methodist movement produced a little revival of the Calvinist and Arminian controversy. But the beliefs of the great mass of the population were not materially affected: they held by sheer force of inertia to the old traditions, and still took themselves to be good orthodox Protestants, though they had been unconsciously more affected by the permeation of rationalism ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... here advocated is to the effect that the descent of the testes in the Mammalia has been produced by the action of mechanical strains causing rupture of the mesorchial attachments, such strains being due to the inertia of the organs reacting to the impulsiveness involved in the activity of the animals composing the group.' The 'impulsiveness' is the galloping or leaping movement which is characteristic of most Mammals when ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... big white hotels facing the river many drawn blinds spoke of napping travelers, and in the shade of the garden of the Grand other travelers were whiling away the listless inertia of the hour ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... without respiration, and in a space void of air, it would no longer have the power of flight. The plumage of the wings being spread, and acting with a broad surface on the atmosphere beneath them, is resisted by the inertia of the atmosphere, so that the air forms a falcrum, as it were, on which the bird rises, by the leverage ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... chance, but by their vocation and by selection, and they spoke the same language. For them, friendship easily became rivalry in courage and energy, and a school of mutual esteem, in which each strove to outdo the other. Friendship kept them alert, drove away inertia and weakness, and they became confident and generous, so that each rejoiced in the success of the others. In the mountains, on the sea, in every place where men feel most acutely their own fragility, such friendship is not rare; but war ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... the inertia of the party, and each man started deliberately to meet the major and his captive. Spidertracks, faithful to his profession, kept well in advance of the others. Suddenly he exclaimed ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... fact which has been proved—and which is of great interest and importance—is that the natural phenomena involving gravitation and inertia (such as the motions of the planets) and the phenomena involving electricity and magnetism (including the motion of light) are not independent of one another, but are intimately related, so that both sets of phenomena should be regarded as parts of one vast system, embracing ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... observe,—1st. That the instantaneous axis travels in a closed curve, and returns to its original position in the body. 2ndly. That by working the vertical bolts, we can make the axis of the instrument the centre of this closed curve. It will then be one of the principal axes of inertia. 3rdly. That, by working the nut on the axis, we can make the order of colours either red, yellow, green, blue, or the reverse. When the order of colours is in the same direction as the rotation, it indicates that the axis of the ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... some little time to overcome the inertia of the logs, and while this was being done by the silent Indian, Rivenoak stalked over the hemlock boughs that lay between the logs in sullen ferocity, eyeing keenly the while the hut, the platform and the person of his late disputant. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... mass of inertia, which opposes, passively, all fundamental changes, cannot now resist scientific demonstration as it has in the past. The instruction in the College of Therapeutics, is thoroughly demonstrative, leaving no room for doubt, and it gives a species ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... of inertia, with arches heavily weighted by great masses of wall, and with broadly contrasting masses of light and shade. It does not depend for its effect upon intellectual quality beyond a rigorous sense of simplicity, or upon refinement of conception or detail, but rather upon ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various
... world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural physics, but they account for the persistent inertia of Heyst, at which we "out there" used to laugh among ourselves—but not inimically. An inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is scarcely worth derision. It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this could not be said of Axel Heyst. He was out of everybody's way, as ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... moment, half inclined to follow the excited, frantic-looking girl, but that queer inertia, which was part of her complex character, came over her. She shrugged her shoulders, the interest died out of her face; she walked slowly through the entrance-hall and down one of the side ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Inertia is that property of a material body that requires time and energy to set in motion, or stop. Inductance is that property of an oscillation circuit that makes an electric current take time to start and time to stop. Because of the inductance, when ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... Old Sun Help Moon Help More Moon Help Star Help Help from Insensible Seas The Fairy Gravitation More Gravitation The Fairy Pulls Great Loads The Fairy Draws Greater Loads The Fairy Works a Pump Handle The Help of Inertia One Plant Help Gas Help Natural Affection of Metals Natural Affection Between Metal and Liquid Natural Affection of Metal and Gas Hint Help Creations Now in Progress Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms Mobility of Seeming Solids The Next World to Conquer Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... more others maintain their individuality throughout nature as we know they do, even in the far distant stars, except by the sleepless care of an Intelligence whose Word is as effective in one part of the universe as in another, and to whose Word these particles of matter can show no inertia and no disobedience, because they have no powers or properties except what He has imparted? This doctrine of the homogeneousness of matter is the antithesis of materialism. It is consistent only with the doctrine of an almighty and ever ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... is more likely, if its molecules realize the power of their inertia, if they simply decide quite constitutionally and without violence to do nothing, pending a remedy ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... eastern lakes he cut fusion and watched on the altimeter dial the battle between gravity and inertia. Near the Mississippi delta he was wrenched in a sharp maneuver as the De-Meteor suddenly took over. He was fortunate to see the streaking missile glow brightly and flare out of existence in the thin regions ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way and imminent ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... uniform motion in a straight line unless acted on by some external force; for though this law was affirmed of material bodies, yet its applicability to large groups of men is striking and suggestive. Not only do human beings have the physical attributes of weight and inertia like other material bodies, but their mental organism, while of a higher order than the physical, is as powerfully affected by external forces. And though it is true that psychology has not yet secured her Newton, and that no one has ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... of these great ice-beds of transformed snow as inert, immovable bodies. They think the snow lies upon the surface of the rocks or earth. The scientific observer knows better. By the very inertia of its own vast and almost inconceivable weight the glacier is compelled to move. Imagine the millions of millions of tons of ice of these sloping masses, pressing down upon the hundreds of thousands of tons of ice that lie below. Slowly the mass begins to move. But all ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia—by dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... are given in Chapter III., where it is shown that they are atomicity, heaviness or weight, elasticity, density, inertia, and compressibility. To be strictly logical and philosophical, the author was compelled to postulate similar properties for the aether, or else his hypotheses would contravert the results ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... at a slow pace; he walked like an automaton. After taking a dozen steps he stopped, looked around him, and slightly bent forward. His strained features resumed their natural proportions, life re-animated his brow, the deathlike inertia of his face gave place to an expression of sadness and prostration. For a few seconds his lips moved, without saying a word, as if to become flexible, and fashioned anew to the use of speech:—then, in a soft voice which Gilbert did not recognize, and with the plaintive ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... squares. The rationale of the law is this: the power necessary to overcome the resistance of the water at the vessel's bow and the friction increases as the square; again, the power necessary to overcome the natural inertia of the vessel and set it in motion, increases this again as the square of the velocity, and the two together constitute the aggregate resistance which makes it necessary that the power for increasing a vessel's speed ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... have noticed day and night. No railway official has ever given me a satisfactory explanation of it. As the car, in a rapid run, is always slightly projected forward of its trucks, a practical friend once suggested to me that it was the gradual settling back of the car body to a state of inertia, which, of course, every poetical traveler would reject. Four o'clock the sound of boot-blacking by the porter faintly apparent from the toilet-room. Why not talk to him? But, fortunately, I remembered that any attempt ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... fate,' when he does not know how large may be the share of the general burden that will fall to him to drag through life, how great may be the number of these parasites who are living on the moral capital of their generation? Surely circumstance consists largely in the inertia, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... feet for two weeks after the malady had hold of her. With a stoicism that taxed her cruelly, she would march smilingly off to school, a bombardment of pains shooting through her head, her hands and tongue dry, a ball and chain of inertia dragging at her ankles. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... always in planning for the future it is necessary to take into consideration the forces that produce and alter social characteristics. Specific measures meet with much scepticism, and enthusiastic reformers must always reckon with inertia, frequent reactions, and slow social development. In the face of sexualism, divorce, and selfish individualism, it requires patience and optimism to believe that the family will continue to exist and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... over the brief golden time of her life, with its fond delusions, its false brightness. Mr. Horton went to see her every day—felt the feeble little pulse which seemed hardly to have force enough to beat—urged her to struggle against apathy and inertia, to walk a little, to go for a long drive every day, to live in the open air—to which instructions she paid not the slightest attention. The desire for life was gone. Disappointed in her ambition, betrayed in her love, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the meaning of it all shall flash out upon the world, the race will be hidebound in callousness and in faint-hearted melancholy. As yet we do not know what to do with all which we know, and we are afflicted with the pessimism of inertia and the pessimism of dyspepsia. Intellectually, we have been living too high the last hundred years or so. In this is the secret of our difference. You insist upon cheapening life for yourself because it has become evident to you that the phenomenon is common, and ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... force with which they are struck, to be clearly heard at some distance. The armature does not strike these alternately by a pendulous movement, as we may easily strike only one continuously, the friction and inertia of the armature causing its movements to be perfectly dead beat when not driven by some external force, and it is kept in its zero position by a strong directive magnet placed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... unimportant. For heaven's sake, Portlaw, you're becoming chuckle-headed with all your feeding and inertia and pampered self-indulgence. You're the limit!—with your thirty-eight-inch girth and your twin chins and baby wrists! You know, it's pitiable when I think what a clean-cut, decent-looking, decently set-up ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... Circumlocution Office is carried to a high pitch in the political sphere. But there it is exercised with a definite object; it is a means to an end, cunningly devised and skillfully applied; it is not a mere matter of instinct, inertia, and routine. The Tite Barnacles of Dickens's satire were perfectly honest people according to their lights. They were sincerely convinced that the British Empire would crumble to pieces the moment its ligaments of ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... this question, the shrill note of reproach in Hannah's voice that revealed, even more than the terrible inertia from which she had emerged, the extent of her suffering, for the instant left Janet utterly dismayed. "Oh mother!" she exclaimed. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... be understood, if it were accompanied by inertia: immobility is not life. But the young Lycosae, although usually quiet on their mother's back, are at all times ready for exercise and for agile swarming. When they fall from the maternal perambulator, they briskly pick themselves up, briskly scramble up a ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... they have not made the most of their opportunities or lived the best possible lives; they have veered this way and that according to the moment's impulse, they have been misled by ingrained habits and paralyzed by inertia, they have wandered at random for lack of a clear vision of their goal. The task of the moralist is to attain such a clear vision; to understand, first, the basis of all preference, and then, in detail, the reasons for preferring this concrete act to that. Here are a thousand impulses ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... speculated upon and mildly enjoyed this display, until a species of hypnotism overtook him, a mercifully deadening inertia that made him slumberous and almost happy. He could keep still at last, and be free from the correcting hand of Mrs. Penniman or the warning prod of the judge's elbow. He dozed in a smother of applied godliness. He was delighted presently ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Joe Sykes, the wages of whose children kept him in active drunkenness and chronic inertia. He was the champion loafer of ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... in the brain. The brain embraces all our past and the possibilities of our future. The individual character with all its active and passive peculiarities, with all its antipathies, genius, talents, stupidities, virtues, and vices, its inertia and its energy is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... spasmodic excitement over the progress of a cricket or polo match. Their achievements were largely those of the stay-at-home warriors who fought with the quill what others faced death with the sword for. Their inertia disgusted her. Their self-satisfaction spurred ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... seemed to hear the voice of the "King"—inextinguishably gay; and, at the thought of him, my inertia passed. What could he be thinking? His daughter spirited away, and now I too mysteriously vanished. What was happening up there, all this time? Up there! How far was it to "up there"? How far had I fallen? All ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... original price. These absurd regulations, violating natural laws and the rules of good government, as well as the colonial monopoly, could only have emanated from the madness of an absolute power supported by the inertia of an enslaved people.... When Spain, enlightened by experience, wished to alter her disastrous system of exploitation, and actually did so with sufficient intelligence and generosity, it was already too late. She had lost her place as a motherland, and with it America as ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... United States, though without the flash of military excitement, presents more than the survey of a battle, or any extended campaign, or series, even of Nature's convulsions. The hot passions of the South—the strange mixture at the North of inertia, incredulity, and conscious power—the incendiarism of the abolitionists—the rascality and grip of the politicians, unparallel'd in any land, any age. To these I must not omit adding the honesty of the essential bulk of the people everywhere—yet with ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... England in the hope that he might there obtain it. The fame of his success in raising the wreck off the Bahamas had already preceded him. He applied direct to the Government. By his urgent enthusiasm, he succeeded in overcoming the usual inertia of official minds; and Charles II. eventually placed at his disposal the "Rose Algier," a ship of eighteen guns and ninety-five men, appointing ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... "It's mass or inertia or something like that. A thing has it everywhere, whether it weighs anything or not. Dick explained it all to me. I understood it when he told me about it, but I'm afraid it didn't sink in very deep. ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has made all things for himself, even the wicked for the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... He is cast out, and the rest rejoice to see him suffering alone, torn to pieces by the enemy, and crying for help to those who are his brothers, for whose faith he is done to death. In the Catholicism of to-day there is a horrible, death-dealing power of inertia. It would find it far easier to forgive its enemies than those who wish to awake it and restore it to life.... My dear Christophe, where should we be, and what should we do—we, who are Catholics ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... from certain postulates. One of them is the objective existence of a material world. It is assumed that the phenomena which are comprehended under this name have a 'substratum' of extended, impenetrable, mobile substance, which exhibits the quality known as inertia, and is termed matter.[E] Another postulate is the universality of the law of causation; that nothing happens without a cause (that is, a necessary precedent condition), and that the state of the physical universe, at any given moment, is the consequence ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... every body, so far as it is altogether unaffected by extraneous causes, always perseveres in the same state of motion or of rest; and the second law that simple or elementary motion is always in a straight line.[36] These doctrines of inertia, and of the composite character of curvilinear motion, were scarcely apprehended even by Kepler or Galileo; but they follow naturally from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... who had so valiantly defended their Queen in earlier days looked on in mournful inertia while preparations for the royal progress went forward, knowing that if Venice thus joyfully accepted the 'resignation' of their Queen—for thus had the act been freely translated to the Cyprian people—they were themselves powerless; and the day of farewell ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... of energy. From the moment of her birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked "as peart as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of decay and inertia. To the intense secret mortification of her mother, who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... call the heart of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a plant or a tree are ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... publication of an edition of the New Testament alone. What a strange miscalculation of forces it appears to have been! It implied that readers generally were as much martinets in language as the editor, and it did not take into account the immense inertia to be overcome, when a single man should undertake to set aside the accumulated reverence of two centuries. The revision of the Bible by Webster was in singular confirmation of traits of character which have already been noted. He had unlimited confidence in himself, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... them, we ought to try and test ourselves in smaller matters with a view to greater, not avoiding or rejecting that self-examination, nor sheltering ourselves under the remark, "Perhaps nothing will be more difficult." For inertia[759] and softness are generated by that self-indulgence which ever occupies itself only with the easiest tasks, and flees from the disagreeable to what is most pleasant. But the soul that accustoms itself to face steadily ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... ill applied to these ends, comes success or failure. The engineer who miscalculates the strength of materials, builds a bridge that breaks down. The manufacturer who uses a bad machine cannot compete with another whose machine wastes less in friction and inertia. The ship-builder adhering to the old model is out-sailed by one who builds on the mechanically-justified wave-line principle. And as the ability of a nation to hold its own against other nations, depends on the skilled activity ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... to the piston, and then look at the result. What losses in leakages, in cooled enthusiasms, in friction-heat, in (pardon the ludicrous analogy) waste gases! Think, too, of the loss involved in unbalanced minds, as in unbalanced engines, one mass of bigoted inertia retarding another mass! Oh, my friend, my friend, you talk of "losses" as though you playwrights had a monopoly of it. Ask men of all trades, of all faiths, and they will give you, in their answers, increased knowledge of ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... himself from the inertia of his quiet habits and made arrangements for a journey through France and Italy, which he said I ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... picturesque general impression than to collect all the available evidence with the untiring persistence of a model detective and to present it with the impartial acumen of a competent judge. Moreover, the inertia of pre-existing opinion has to be overcome. Once readers have been accustomed to accept as absolutely authentic an idealized conventional portrait of a man of genius, it is difficult to induce them ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... no one may imagine that the liberty of buying and selling is the sole basis of the equality of wages, and that society's sole protection against superiority of talent lies in a certain force of inertia which has nothing in common with right, I shall proceed to explain why all capacities are entitled to the same reward, and why a corresponding difference in wages would be an injustice. I shall prove that the obligation to stoop to ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... met Claybrook again. Nothing had been decided. Maida had seemed utterly indifferent. "Perfectly satisfied with things as they are," she had said; there was a diabolical stubbornness in her manner. She made capital of her own inertia. She was as cool as if dealing with an entire stranger. Finally, after two days of backing and filling, of bickering and contesting, she had named her price. "Fifteen hundred," she had said and there was nothing in the way she said it that ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... causeless tears; her teacher discovers an unwonted inattention to her studies, a less retentive memory, a disinclination to mental labor; her father misses her accustomed playfulness; he, perhaps, is annoyed by her listlessness and inertia. What does it all mean? What is the matter with ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... something outside of himself and of the monotony of his accustomed round. If it seems to him too much trouble to enter upon the details of the fad there is all the more reason for freeing himself from such mental inertia. ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... penetration, he held what we call happiness for illusions and deceits of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the internal colloquies render more bitter and intense the affections which have ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the Pit. Never before had he committed himself so irrevocably to the send of the current. But something was preparing. Something indefinite and huge. He guessed it, felt it, knew it. On all sides of him he felt a quickening movement. Lethargy, inertia were breaking up. There was buoyancy to the current. In its ever-increasing swiftness ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... solid core of paganism and savagery below. The danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance and superstition under the crust of civilized society is lessened, not only by the natural torpidity and inertia of the bucolic mind, but also by the progressive decrease of the rural as compared with the urban population in modern states; for I believe it will be found that the artisans who congregate in towns are far less retentive of primitive modes of thought than their rustic brethren. In every ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer |
