"Potential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have Mr. Rand's word for it that the prisoner had no thought of the watchman, and no intention of using, even in case of need, the weapons with which it has been proved he was provided. Mr. Rand must know. As a rule, gentlemen bearing arms about their persons may be considered the potential users of said arms, whether the antiquated rapier or the modern pistol—but then, I bethink me, we are not speaking of men of honour. We are speaking of a small criminal in a small way, and Mr. Rand assures us that his thoughts matched his estate—they were humble, they were creeping. Headstrong, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... may be marked by differences in tone-quality as well, and thus the potential complexity is greatly increased; but in spoken language, as has been said, this element of rhythm is negligible. In speech-rhythm, however, the three conditions of time, stress, and pitch are always present, and therefore no consideration of either prose rhythm or verse can hope to be complete or ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... stages which mark the historical evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man and woman. What the institution could become, what it has become, shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... potential drama, of the raw material of it, as the days passed, she found increasingly generous store at Brockhurst. It invaded and held her imagination, as the initial conception of his poem will that of the poet, or ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... 35. Supply current 220 volts, direct. In the case of the metallic electrode, if resistance is used, the cost of running this arc is sixty-six cents per hour. With the carbon electrode, $2.20 per hour. If a motor generator set with a seventy volt constant potential machine is used for a welder, the cost will ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... active and passive, is formed with never more than two words. Every shade of meaning (continued, potential, etc., action) is expressed by these two words, of which one is the single auxiliary esti (itself conjugated regularly). The double auxiliary—"to be" and "to have"—which infests most modern languages, with all its train of confusing and often illogical distinctions ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... person of Kawa Kendi, heretofore merely one in whom was a potentiality, became after the purification and "coronation" the very incarnation of the god. Kawa Kendi had crossed from the comparative safe haven of the potential ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... ic. And Horne Tooke, who derives ive from the Latin ivus, (q. d. vis,) and ic from the Greek [Greek: ikos], (q. d. [Greek: ischus]) both implying power, has well observed that there is a general correspondence of meaning between these two classes of adjectives—both being of "a potential active signification; as purgative, vomitive, operative, &c.; cathartic, emetic, energetic, &c."—Diversions of Purley, Vol. ii, p. 445. I have before observed, that Tooke spelled all this latter class of words without the final k; but he left it to Dr. Webster ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... whom he cared to talk. He rarely lent himself to the usual run of social badinage; but retired into his shell whenever it became the dominant note of the conversation. A man of his bulk and prominence and potential boredom was an object of hospitable consideration. He could always talk to Beatrix, for she never chattered. Therefore he was generally to be found somewhere within the conversational radius ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... Do not very strict minded people pretend that the passions and vices mean the same things? Is vice ever more seductive than when it wears the cloak of virtue? Wherefore in order to corrupt virtuous souls it is sufficient for it to appear in a potential form. This is the form in which the Platonicians deified it. In all ages, in order to justify the passions, it was necessary to apotheosize them. What am I saying? Am I so bold as to play the iconoclast with an accredited superstition? What temerity! Do I not deserve to be persecuted by all ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... reproach the cynicism of the Pit, which on this side or that may compel ruin, you are met with a very easy rejoinder. "The Chicago Board of Trade"—it is the same apologist who speaks—"is a world-renowned commercial organisation. It exercises a wider and a more potential influence over the welfare of mankind than any other institution of its kind in existence." This assurance leaves you dumb. You might as well argue with a brass band as with a citizen of Chicago; and doubtless ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... dear," remembering that he had a daughter of his own, nearly the builder's age, "we men have come to think of women primarily as potential mothers, and secondarily as people of affairs. And considering that motherhood is something that is denied to us lords of ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... days went. The Colonel, mystified but pleased by revelations of actuality and life in his heretofore too-embalmed assistant, found an increasing interest in developing him. Here was a youth, with the qualities of potential great valuableness, and the wise editor, as soon as this appeared, gave him his chance by calling him off the fields of taxation and currency and assigning him to topics plucked alive from ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... all their fault," she continued. "We do all we can to attract them—the way we dress. Who was it said that to every woman every man is a potential lover. We can't get it out of our minds. It's there even when we don't know it. We will never succeed ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... careful research work, and full appreciation of the requirements and necessities of the markets for which she was catering, and a determination to meet those requirements in strict accordance with the wishes and needs of her potential customers. Behind all the efforts had been lavish financial support by the German Government, and the pledging of national credit ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... intellectual notions on his feelings, and his emotional tendencies on his thoughts, the thing which he enjoys is always as the concave to the convex of the thing which he produces. But although Alfieri was not a poet, and was not even a potential novel writer, he was, in a sense, essentially a dramatist; though even here we must distinguish and diminish. Alfieri was not a man who cared for rapid action or for intricate plot: he never felt the smallest inclination to violate the old traditions of the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Lauriston was justly alarmed and demanded cancellation of the sale. Not only was this done, but the police, in order to prevent another such accident, required that a notice be fixed to Lisette's loose-box informing any potential buyer of her ferocity, and that any sale would be null and void unless the buyer declared in writing that he was aware ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... suffered so bitterly when he did not come, that still she was dazed. Still she was gnawed as by a neuralgia, tormented by his potential absence from her. She had awaited him in a faint delirium of nervous torture. As she stood bearing herself pensively, the rapt look on her face, that seemed spiritual, like the angels, but which came from ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... flocks. It has crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy in a good cause, and bold out of reach. It has been the most defiant runaway, and the meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready and potential in every place, so that the happy country—village and field alike—has been all grass, ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks of animals "whose ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of her intended emigration to America, as he possibly might have done, it most likely excited no particular emotion in his phlegmatic bosom. He could not have imagined that the exportation of a little singing-girl to New York should interfere with a potential venture of his own in fair linen. The gods kindly hid the future from his eyes, so that he might enjoy the comic vexation her lively sallies caused to Doctor Bartolo in the play, unknowing that she would be the innocent cause of a more serious provocation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the youths some share of whom must by right belong to the service of Art. And here are the millions which go to support men in every molehole of scientific research and other millions spent stupidly and wantonly for whatever the shopkeepers tell us is beautiful. We could not create these potential forces that make for art. But if it is true that they are here, we can organize them, as David Starr Jordan and the like of him less than twenty years ago organized the forces that make for science. We can make a ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... After the divine! Striving ever for some goal Past the blunder-god's control! Dreaming of potential years When no day shall dawn in fears! That's the Marna of ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... indifference to this danger. Boys appear at these dinners in the great houses, because of their uniforms, who would never have been permitted even to come to the front door in other days, for all are potential heroes. Every woman carries her knitting, and it is seldom that you hear a croaker even among the most luxurious class. Well, the dinner is over by half past ten, and I go home to an hour and a half's work, which has been sent from the office, and fall at last into ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... developed swindling are impossible without a commerce, but the cupidity that begets these forms of vice is not lacking amongst the Natives and waits only for the opportunities which developed commerce affords. The potential capacity for criminality and immorality is indeed no less among the Natives than among Europeans. Theft, arson, murder and rape are the most common forms of crime committed by the Natives to-day because ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... all spiritual endeavor to win the whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in language that they understand, we should not too hurriedly despise or denounce these things. Far better that our primitive emotions, with their vast store of potential energy, should be won for spiritual interests on the only terms which they can grasp, than that they should be left to spend themselves ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... home. Where the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of the potential wealth of the land is ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... endeavouring to frustrate what at the time of her first interference was the merest flirtation between a Romeo who was tied to a desk all day, and a Juliet who was constantly coming into contact with other potential Romeos—plenty of them. Our own private opinion is that if the Montagus and Capulets had tried to bury the hatchet at a public betrothal of the two young people, the latter would have quarrelled on the spot. Setting their family ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole object: and that the indignant contempt which it excited in me was as exclusively confined to his employer and suborner. I refer to this Review at present, in consequence of information having been given me, that the innuendo of my 'potential infidelity,' grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the originator of the calumny. I give the sentences as they stand in the Sermon, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... when I clasped their frosty finger tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart. It may be only the clinging touch of a child's hand; but there is as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others. A hearty handshake or a friendly letter gives ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... which, while supplying sufficient revenue for public purposes, will still be signally beneficial and helpful to every section and every enterprise of the people. To this policy we are all, of whatever party, firmly bound by the voice of the people—a power vastly more potential than the expression of any political platform. The paramount duty of Congress is to stop deficiencies by the restoration of that protective legislation which has always been the firmest prop of the Treasury. The passage of such ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements whether we are ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... She was naturally somewhat broken in spirit on first entering our establishment, but as the days went by she became happier, and so enterprising and ingratiating that we hastened to smother in its infancy a shameful doubt as to whether or not we had introduced into our sympathetic bosoms a potential viper. Morning, noon and night there was continuous scrubbing, polishing and beeswaxing; at all moments one was meeting a pink and breathless Victorine, and the house echoed to an interminable stream of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... only up to the present, is the story of how the Jewish massacres were stayed. The Jews were potential Germans, and Germany, who sat by with folded hands when Arabs and Armenians were led to torture and death, put up a warning finger, and, for the present, saved them. In her whole conduct of the war, nothing has been more characteristic than her 'verboten' to one projected massacre ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... there was but the one underling, and any audience that proved to have a later-embarrassing potential could be silenced with ease. Still, it was unusual, and the lieutenant who served as combination secretary and backstop for ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... ray up, and was about to pull the trigger that would send the huge engine toppling over upon them, when he saw that it was running. He thought of the unknown energies in the machine, the potential destruction, and he shook his head. Cautiously he looked around the edge of the towering mass, waiting—his beam flashed out, and there was a snapping sound as the ray caught a reaching hand and hurled its owner against a mighty transformer ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... made no Parliamentary mark. One thought of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... destiny since that protest and affirmation received the sword's decisive arbitrament! With what sense of opportune occasion these two kindred nations are surely drawing toward that "modus vivendi," tentatively flexible, yet more potential, responsive, and insistent than treaty covenants, "triple alliances," ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... we might not continue indefinitely to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in the infinite character of its potential destiny. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of all the potential parts of his mind (reason and will except) more noble or more necessary to the actiue life then memory: because it maketh most to a sound iudgement and perfect worldly wisedome, examining and comparing the times past with the present, and by them both considering the time to come, concludeth ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... outcome of the affair were a matter of utter indifference to them.) "D'ye tell me a month alongside men that have sailed with me before won't make sailors of them, eh? Tchutt, I know different.... Sailors they'll be before we reach the Horn." (Here one of the potential 'sailors' ran to the ship's side, intent on an affair of ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... Protestant had sallied out to make bed with the gods; and the souls of such the just gods do truly take into certain shining realms whither poor involatile bodies of flesh may not follow. The requirement is that one feel his own potential godship enough to rebel. For, having rebelled, he will assuredly venture beyond mortal domains into that garden where stands the tree of Truth—this garden being that one to the west just beyond the second ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... growth by adequate seed trees or artificial seeding. The latter danger may easily warrant public alarm manifested by restrictive laws. Universal ground burning of green timber will distinctly reduce the prospect of unassisted natural reforestation on the great area of potential timber land in which, as a resource, regardless of ownership, the public is vitally interested. Under present conditions at least, a large proportion of this is likely to be logged without any ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... without the ambition to be supreme, peoples, some of them, would be nothing. It is the vision of empire, however forlorn and hopeless, that keeps many nations alive, perhaps all. Nations seek to express in visible form the evidence of their inner and potential greatness. The historic and time-honored art of empire-building is the only art they know. Whether this is the tragedy of history, the world's fate and the condemnation of it to perpetual warfare—or is but a term ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... doctrine of unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of organic implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness. Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is potential ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... Bedford, Broadview and Lancaster best under his conditions. Mr. Becker's choice is McDermid but he thinks Crath No. 1 a potential commercial variety. Mr. Oakes likes Crath No. 1 and Ill. No. 3. Mr. Etter lists Burtner and Alleman as his best varieties. Mr. Fateley especially favors one tree because of nut and bearing qualities. Other growers have not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... grave answer, "Christianity has failed—utterly, absolutely, glaringly failed. At this moment, the world, I am convinced, holds more potential barbarism than did the Roman Empire under the Antonines. Wherever I look, I see a monstrous contrast between the professions and the practice, between the assumed and the actual aims, of so-called Christian peoples. Christianity has failed ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... come from breeding and not from cultivation. If he were not born to greatness, like his rival, at least he satisfied her critical judgment of what a gentleman should be; and she was quite sure that the potential capacity lay in her to care a good deal more for him than for anybody else she had met. Since it was not on the cards, as Miss Virginia had shuffled the pack, that she should marry primarily for reasons sentimental, this annoyed her in ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... intermediation of an elastic fluid in the steam-engine, a certain definite portion of the molecular motion is destroyed in raising the weight. In this sense, and this sense only, can the heat be said to be converted into gravity, or more correctly, into potential energy of gravity. It is not that the destruction of the heat has created any new attraction, but simply that the old attraction has now a power conferred upon it, of exerting a certain definite pull in the interval between the starting-point of the falling weight and its collision ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... blame you, if you disqualified yourself from this decision. I think we could get the newscasts to see it as impeccable public behavior. We'll paint you as the administrator so devoted to pure justice that even potential resentment will be a barrier to your personal decision. How's ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... The potential tier of hard knots laughed genially. "I don't blame you for wanting to be shown, Mr. Steuchfield. But I can assure you that the new policy has come to stay. I have the management behind me in this thing, and any day you'll come ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... examining the family album inquisitively, but beyond a big-browed and quite undistorted baby nursing a kitten, there did not seem anything remotely potential, and she smiled at herself as she thought of the difficulty of evolving bibs into briar pipes and developing Greek folios ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... too amiable view of a clergyman in The Private Secretary. But the controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a potential overstatement, it also involves an important truth. One of the best points urged in the course of it was this, that though vice is punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive, because it ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... entirely unnavigable at all times of the year. Raging floods in the wet season, and mere driblets in the dry, they are at present denied to the most powerful or shallowest of river steamboats. The prospects of the Orange river as a potential waterway are in any case practically destroyed by a great bar which blocks approach to the estuary ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... of nature and circumstance is very close, and it is impossible to separate them with precision. Nurture acts before birth, during every stage of embryonic and pre-embryonic existence, causing the potential faculties at the time of birth to be in some degree the effect of nurture. We need not, however, be hypercritical about distinctions; we know that the bulk of the respective provinces of nature and nurture are totally different, ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... in its salient features in the Gospel biography. For this reason, S. Paul speaks as we have seen[211] of the birth of the Christ in the disciple, and of His evolution and His full stature therein. Every man is a potential Christ, and the unfolding of the Christ-life in a man follows the outline of the Gospel story in its striking incidents, which we have seen to be ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... respect to the poles of the magnet there corresponds a certain distribution of the lines of force, which latter shift themselves when the disk is vibrating. If the bobbin be met by these lines in motion, there will develop in its wire a difference of potential that, according to Faraday's law, will be proportional to their number. All things equal, then, a telephone transmitter will be so much the more potent in proportion as the lines set in motion by the vibrations of the disk ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... ABCDGEF. The section DGE of this circuit is a slide wire, uniform in resistance throughout its length. The scale is fixed on this slide wire. The current from the cell Ba as it flows through DGE, undergoes a fall in potential, setting up a difference in voltage, that is, an electromotive force, between D and E. There will also be electromotive force between D and all other points on the slide wire. The polarity of this is in opposition to the polarity of the thermo-couple ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... hill, not to concede that there were two equally strong centres of attractions, that drew the world hither-ward. One remained, indeed, gravely suspended between the doubt and the fear, as to which of these potential units had the greater pull, in point of actual attraction. The impartial historian, given to a just weighing of evidence, would have been startled to find how invariably the scales tipped; how lightly an historical Mont, born of a ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... happened, so brief was the frozen instant while she stood transfixed. One of them was John Galbraith, in the back row, and he let his breath go out again in relief almost in the act of catching it. He guessed what had happened well enough—that she'd recognized one of those friends whose potential horror had made her willing to give up her promotion and her little part—the one she'd spoken of, perhaps, as the "only one that really mattered." But it was all right. She was going on as if nothing ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... $200 million in debt relief in December 2000 under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program. Sao Tome's success in implementing structural reforms has been rewarded by international donors, who pledged increased assistance in 2001. Considerable potential exists for development of a tourist industry, and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies. Sao ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... for it was quite superior to the limitations of sense and matter-of-fact. According to the map, this solitary burrow was surrounded by Seminary, Depot, Court-House, Woolen Factory, and a variety of other potential institutions, which composed the flourishing city of New Cincinnati. But the map was meant chiefly for ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... States minister until after the Queen's abdication and when they were in effective possession of the Government buildings, the archives, the treasury, the barracks, the police station, and all the potential ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... Disputes: none Climate: continental; cold, cloudy winters with frequent snow or rain; cool to moderately warm, cloudy, humid summers Terrain: mostly mountainous (Alps) with Rhine Valley in western third Natural resources: hydroelectric potential Land use: arable land 25%; permanent crops 0%; meadows and pastures 38%; forest and woodland 19%; other 18% Environment: variety of microclimatic variations based on elevation ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... his eyes saw many things never seen before. He coveted them all, especially such as shone in steel or brass or bright new wood. He hardly knew their names; but what beautiful playthings they would make. All movable objects are potential playthings to him. He makes them also, like the Creator, out of nothing; if he wants a horse he has it on the instant by straddling a stick or tying a string to a companion. He has epic uses for his father's tools, his mother's knitting needles; they can slay a thousand foes at ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... computed a potential maximum stress-safety at the hub of something over two-tenths of a gee, and the two finally settled on one-tenth as well within ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... of the initiative and resourcefulness we are trying to inculcate in all our soldiers. I observed the entire operation and he has demonstrated a great potential for leadership." Fyfe hesitated and for a moment a shadow of repugnance darkened his features as if, for purposes of camouflage, he were about to perform the necessary but distasteful task of smearing mud over ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... operations where it is needed to a more distant objective, seems suicidal to the general in command; but if, without provoking disaster on the field it has left, it has the effect of turning the enemy's flank, detaching his actual or deterring his potential allies, and inducing neutrals to intervene, it may win a war although it postpones or risks ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... selection from a multitude of thoughts and sensations—some, at least, equally conscious with those we empirically knew. No primacy was granted by this theory to the ordinary waking self, except that among potential selves it appeared the fittest to meet the needs of common life. As a rule, the waking life was remembered in hypnosis, and the hypnotic life forgotten in the waking state; this destroyed any claim of the primary memory to be the sole memory. The ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... perished for its sake, and from men who wrought other magic among lost causes and wars without gain, and fell and died, still surprised, still interested, with their faces among flowers. All men who die so are not wizards, nor are all martyred and adventuring women witches, but all such bring a potential strain of ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... river front contiguous to wharves totals 1,169,900 square feet. There is a great deal of potential open storage space away from the wharves and along railroad tracks, which could be reached ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... The Potential implies possibility, liberty, power, will; as, Tahgemewan kahnahbuge, it may rain; Kegahwesenemin kiya kahmenequamin, we shall ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... thousand straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat; and are, for your behoof a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity. Few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers thievish valets; an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came, by tap of drum enlisted, or formed ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... brazen enough about it. The subtle way had failed. Now he was going all out. And he was really quite safe. With the broken cables to act as conductors, the first thunderstorm would obliterate all proof of his activities in this valley. Mercury, because of its high electrical potential, was cut off from communication with other worlds. Moulton, even if he had knowledge of what went on, could not ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... be said, in other than a metaphorical and popular sense, to be formless or empty; or in any respect less the seat of law and order than it is now. One might as well talk of a fresh-laid hen's egg being "without form and void," because the chick therein is potential and not actual, as apply such terms to the nebulous mass which ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the margin of the other. He turned from the door and went into the dining-room, where the stove was ostentatiously roaring over its small logs and its lozenges of peat, But even here the fire had been so recently lighted that the warmth was potential rather than actual. By stooping down before the stove, and pressing his shoulder against its brass doors, Colville managed to lull his enemy, while he studied the figures of the woman-headed, woman-breasted hounds developing ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... masked, against Germany. It will be but the elementary common sense of the situation for all the Allies to plan tariffs, exclusions, special laws against German shipping and shareholders and immigrants for so long a period as every German remains a potential servant ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... the difference of potential of the centrifugal force between the position of the clock and the centre of the disc by f, i.e. the work, considered negatively, which must be performed on the unit of mass against the centrifugal force in order to transport it from the position of the clock on the rotating ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... through credulity or trickery, he must settle for the crime before a judge who is absolutely just! If he has this education, which is a constitutional ingrafting from the mother's blood, fructified by a like potential father, he will be almost immune from all diseases. This is an education that can not be secured unless the individual has the prenatal and environing influences to differentiate these static attributes of his nature, and, if he has, the result will be that ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... when he was away from her, when he had had leisure to consider that she might regard him in the light of a third potential rifler of her father's treasure-house. But at the moment, looking down into her dark eyes, he reproached himself and wondered where his true ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... I? Our knowledge of our own consciousness is the absurdity. All we know is that our normal waking consciousness is only one special type. Around it lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different, and quite as real. Sometimes we, or it, or they, break through. I am paraphrasing ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... that of some unfortunate sleuth with a family. My nearest relative is a third cousin who lives in Chicago but has nevertheless shown no criminal tendency to date. I'm remarkably well-protected from any potential struggle between duty and inclination." He smiled, and added apologetically, "Detective ethics is a pretty complicated subject to discuss, and I'm afraid it isn't getting on with the problem of who stole a ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... and looks, with a curious smile into her darkly-earnest, cynical young face. "Suppose I am madly in love with you—'madly in love' is the correct phrase, isn't it?—suppose I am at your feet, going through all the phases of the potential mood, 'commanding, exhorting, entreating' you to marry me—you wouldn't say no, would you, Edie? You like me—don't deny it. You know you do—like me well enough to marry me to-morrow. Would you refuse me in spite of my dependence on my ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... through the solid earth With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth, I faced the dim Forefather of ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in order to constitute "Negro Domination" it does not necessarily follow that negroes must be elected to office, but that in all elections in which white men may be divided, if the negro vote should be sufficiently decisive to be potential in determining the result, the white man or men that would be elected through the aid of negro votes would represent "Negro Domination." In other words, we would have "Negro Domination" whenever the will of a majority of the whites would be defeated through ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... translated, as it is given in the margin of some of our Bibles, 'God shall help her at the appearance of the morning.' There are two promises here: first of all, the constant presence; and second, help at the right time. Whether there be actual help or no, there is always with us the potential help of God, and it flashes into energy at the moment that He knows to be the right one. The 'appearing of the morning' He determines; not you or I. Therefore, we may be confident that we have God ever by our sides. Not that that Presence is meant to avert outward or inward trouble ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... way we pass through the most remarkable white fir nursery we have yet seen. Not far away were a few hoary monarchs from the still hanging but burst open cones of which winged seeds were flying before the breeze. These potential firs were carried in many cases over a mile before they found lodgement. It was a beautiful and delightful demonstration of Nature's lavish method of preserving this useful species ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... rains: in seasons of prolonged drought they are said to be reduced to great extremities. Hence the rain-maker is a very important personage among them to this day; indeed the men in authority whom travellers dub chiefs or sheikhs are in fact the actual or potential rain-makers of the tribe or community. Each of them is believed to be animated by the spirit of a great rain-maker, which has come down to him through a succession of rain-makers; and in virtue of this inspiration a successful ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... is generally a difference of electrical condition between the various parts of the earth's surface and those portions of the atmosphere adjacent to or above them. Inasmuch as air is one of the very best insulators, this difference of condition (or potential) in any particular region is in most cases incapable of being neutralized or equilibrated by an electric flow. Consequently the air remains more or less continually charged. With these points admitted as facts, the question arises, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... coveted them in return. And so he, who, in old days, when he travelled, used always to seek out new people and crowded places, might now be seen fleeing savagely from human society as if it had cruelly injured him. And how could he not have turned misanthrope, when in every man he saw a potential lover for Odette? Thus his jealousy did even more than the happy, passionate desire which he had originally felt for Odette had done to alter Swann's character, completely changing, in the eyes of the world, even the outward signs by which that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Objectives: The utilization of the proportionate ratio of the manpower made available to the military establishment during the postwar period. The manpower potential to be organized and trained ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... spotless purity, and black grief and death. A blend of black and white produces gray which, as has been said, is silent and motionless, being composed of two inactive colours, its restfulness having none of the potential activity of green. A similar gray is produced by a mixture of green and red, a spiritual blend ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... of mica is put between tin foils, it heats excessively; and the fall of potential over the air films separating the mica and foil is great enough to cause disruptive discharge to the surface of the mica. There appears to be a luminous layer of minute sparks under the foils, and there is a strong smell ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... Could the world have been appreciably worse off without it? The question is rather an idle one, since it turns on "might have beens." That the element of good in the message of Jesus has been to some extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual that to strike a balance between the two forces is impossible, and the question is generally decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one scale or ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... borrowed largely, very largely, from China. It could scarcely have been otherwise. For whereas the Japanese language in its original form—a form which differs almost as much from its modern offspring as does Italian from Latin—has little capacity for expansion, Chinese has the most potential of all known tongues in that respect. Chinese may be said to consist of a vast number of monosyllables, each expressed by a different ideograph, each having a distinct significance, and each capable of combination and permutation with one or more of the others, by which combinations and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... others in it. But in financial speculations, as in battles, there must be what is called "food for powder;" and if one be too solicitous about this worthless pabulum, nothing great can be accomplished. So Camors passed as one of the most scrupulous of this goodly company; and his word was as potential in the region of "the rings," as it was in the more elevated sphere of the clubs and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the soul of the new movement in religion, was the potential nobility of human nature—a nobility to be made real by utmost effort of the individual, and by all wisest appliances of society. It was from this standpoint that he judged slavery, and in this spirit that while still in Santa Cruz he began to write ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... lapsed against a tree, quite helpless, nerveless, and with staring eyes fixed on his. As yet an embryo woman, inexperienced and ignorant, the sex's instinct was potential; she had in one plunge fathomed all that his reason ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... (pursues Eleutherius) methinks both you and the Chymists may easily agree, that the surest way is to Learn by particular Experiments, what differing parts particular Bodies do consist of, and by what wayes (either Actual or potential fire) they may best and most Conveniently be Separated, as without relying too much upon the Fire alone, for the resolving of Bodies, so without fruitlessly contending to force them into more Elements than Nature made Them up of, or ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... sturgeon, an ill name he gained. Were turbots then less common in the seas? No: but good living waxes by degrees. Safe was the turbot, safe the stork's young brood, Until a praetor taught us they were good. So now, should some potential voice proclaim That roasted cormorants are delicious game, The youth of Rome (there's nothing too absurd For their weak heads) will take him at ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague, chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the present, we only believe in the future. To believe what we have not seen is to believe ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... would involve such prodigious and concentrated short term release of high temperature energy that it is necessary to consider a variety of potential environmental effects. ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... many of us are well aware of how much freer and abler our lives would be, were such important forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical atmosphere in which we have been reared. There are in everyone potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use. Part of the imperfect vitality under which we labor can thus ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... following honest trades—millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory. John, the land-labourer, is the one living and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may be said, on the other hand, that as yet we see no limit of man's mastery over nature, and that apparently we are just entering upon the stage of material progress. Moreover, so far as any given country is concerned, wealth is potential food supply, and in the United States during the last fifty years wealth has increased four times as fast as the population. Malthus, of course, did not foresee the inventions and agricultural progress of the nineteenth century. Still, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... either the first or second game of the rubber. During the rubber game, however, the doubler should be more conservative, and should "take in" his rubber unless satisfied that the double will produce 300, with a potential possibility of more. ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... war, so that they brought about the doom of their empire by a series of acts which would seem deliberate if we had not known that they were merely blind. With a folly that still seems incredible, they took the risk of adding the greatest power in the world—in numbers of men and in potential energy—to their list of enemies at a time when their own man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted the United States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation, of course, was ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... were made on the outward voyage by Simpson and Wright[36] into the atmospheric electricity over the ocean, one set of which consisted of an inquiry into the potential gradient, and observations were undertaken at Melbourne for the determination of the absolute value of the potential gradient over the sea.[37] Numerous observations were also made on the radium content of the atmosphere over the ocean, to be compared ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... their silent but potential course," said the Earl, looking around him, "without a voice which speaks to our ear, but not without influences which affect, at every change, the indwellers of this vile, earthly planet. This, if astrologers fable not, is the very crisis of my fate! The hour approaches ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... a difference of opinion among the wisest in regard to the social usefulness of forms of protective labor legislation for adult women which are not shared by men. There can be none in respect to the social harm of using the vitality, the charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It means such a waste to thus use ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of yielding energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of the lock, which intervenes between the finger of the man who pulls the trigger and the cartridge. If that change is brought about, the potential energy of the powder passes suddenly into actual energy, and does the work of propelling the bullet. The powder, therefore, may be appropriately called work-stuff, not only because it is stuff which is easily made to yield work in the physical sense, but because a good deal of work in the economical ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Special Tools. Charging Equipment. Wiring Diagrams for Charging Resistances and Charging Circuits. Motor-Generator Sets. Suggestions on Care of Motor-Generator Sets. Operating the Charging Circuits. Constant Current Charging. Constant Potential Charging. The Tungar Rectifier. Principle of Operation of Tungar Rectifier. The Two Ampere Tungar. The One Battery Tungar. The Two. Battery Tungar. The Four Battery Tungar. The Ten Battery Tangar. The Twenty Battery Tungar. Table of Tungar Rectifiers. Installation ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... that civilization as it goes on ought not perhaps to grow more fighting—but ought to grow more ready to fight. The more valuable and reposeful is the order we have to guard, the more vivid should be our ultimate sense of vigilance and potential violence. And when I walk round a summer garden, I can understand how those high mad lords at the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed, caught at roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For to me any ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... of decadents, criminals, and potential rebels had become in a few hours his absorbing desire. And in this short time he had almost frayed the smooth edges of the ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... shark. To the mediaeval mind there was something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediaeval position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an opportunity for profit—that is, a potential property interest—was outlawed. In consequence it became impossible for reputable citizens to engage in the business. Usury therefore came to be monopolized by aliens, exempt from the current ethical formulation, who were "protected," for a consideration, by the prince, just as dubious modern property ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... him, too, and so the matter was simple for her. She was pouring, as usual, for her mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set duties and walk round among the actual portraits in fact and in frame and talk about them to the potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long sojourn in England, at once pressed himself into the service of handing about the curate's assistant; Mrs. Forsyth electrically explained that it was one of the first brought to New York, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... Robert and his cabinet was, therefore, justly held to be opposed to the practice of parliament and the doctrines of the constitution. Much of the odium of this procedure fell upon the Duke of Wellington, who was supposed to be the potential adviser of Sir Robert in this matter, and whose despotic sympathies, betrayed in many ways, gave great offence to the people. Had not the previous ministers, by their inconsistency, incompetency, and truckling to O'Connell and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... have said, are in the minority, for obvious reasons, for these little disdainful distinguished gentlemen figure here as potential fathers, with their fees somewhat indelicately named; for there's a husbandry on earth as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... atomic rays Omega made all do his bidding. For countless centuries man had mastered the atom, divided it, harnessed its electrons. Following the discoveries of the great French scientist, Becquerel, man had learned that the potential energy of all atoms—especially that of radium—is almost limitless. And as the disintegration of the atom carries an electrical discharge, man had learned to control this energy. Omega's machines, utilizing atoms from everywhere, even the ether, split them by radio-activity through ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... could say nothing, for his revelation was sobering to me, bringing me suddenly back to the realization that our doom was impending, that every decision I made had the potential to either bring us to safety, or to supply the necessary force to hurl us viscously off the cliff of mortality. He was silent as well and allowed me a few moments of meditation to turn his speech in my mind. As is my tendency, I looked abstractly out the window as I thought, fixing my subconscious ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... those less developed countries with the potential for above-average economic growth; see less ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... lawn; a square of gray—the cobble-paved barnyard—and pays it no further attention. How can he know that what he takes to be a farmstead is but a piece of painted canvas concealing a small mountain of potential death? ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... book) Improved the Roman plan By spotting a potential crook In every fellow-man. And by the Thousand off they went To jail, until ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... &c. v.; existent, under the sun; in existence &c. n.; extant; afloat, afoot, on foot, current, prevalent; undestroyed. real, actual, positive, absolute; true &c. 494; substantial, substantive; self-existing, self-existent; essential. well-founded, well-grounded; unideal[obs3], unimagined; not potential &c. 2; authentic. Adv. actually &c. adj.; in fact, in point of fact, in reality; indeed; de facto, ipso facto. Phr. ens rationis[Lat]; ergo sum cogito: "thinkest thou existence doth ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... We, who are as little gross as need be, become their instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth; and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source of life. In us her ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... happen if he, the great hyped-up superman, found that the Nipe had only been working at half his normal potential? What would happen if that alien horror simply slashed out with one ultrafast hand and showed Colonel Mannheim and all his watching technicians that they had completely underestimated ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... conventional high explosives surrounding the core exploded without setting off a nuclear blast, and in the process scattering the costly plutonium (about 250 million dollars worth) across the dessert. After extensive research and testing of other potential containment ideas, the concept of Jumbo was decided on in the late summer ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum
... is an ego, and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness, which can expand or contract without reference to reason or record—a potential infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side the German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these Teutons were not sufficiently ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... on the German emigrant steamer had seen the coming of the shabby little English trader with bumping hearts. Till then the crew, with (so to speak) their backs up against a wall, had fought the fire with diligence; but when the nearness of a potential rescuer was reported, they discovered for themselves at once that the fire was beyond control. They were joined by the stokehold gangs, and they made at once for the boats, overpowering any officer who happened to come between them and their desires. The limp, tottery, half-fed, wholly ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... of mine should marry a Dutchman." It was a dominant thought of Mr. Belcovitch's, and it rose spontaneously to his lips at this joyful moment. Next to a Christian, a Dutch Jew stood lowest in the gradation of potential sons-in-law. Spanish Jews, earliest arrivals by way of Holland, after the Restoration, are a class apart, and look down on the later imported Ashkenazim, embracing both Poles and Dutchmen in their impartial contempt. But this does not prevent the Pole and the Dutchman from despising ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... disastrous shipwreck. These Palinurus watched, until, overcome by sleep, and the vessel no longer guided truly, he fell into and was swallowed up by the insatiable sea. So the Mason who loses sight of these, and is no longer governed by their beneficent and potential force, is lost, and sinking out of sight, will disappear unhonored ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the plate circuit, but that they could be amplified there by the energy derived from the local battery in the plate circuit without change of frequency or wave form, and that they could be fed into the grid circuit, where they increased the potential variations on the grid so that the operation constantly ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... affair, the more strange and inexplicable it bulked in his understanding. He had not thought to defy the Pack and get off lightly; but he had looked for no such overt effort at disciplining him so long as he kept out of the way and suspended his criminal activities. An unwilling recruit is a potential traitor in the camp; and retired competition isn't to be feared. So it seemed that Wertheimer hadn't believed his protestations, or else Bannon had rejected the report which must have been made him by the girl. In either case, the Pack had not waited ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... of approximately conical shape, but rounded on all points and angles. Its potential is ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... that we ourselves are the most advanced product of it. It is a great maxim that Nature obeys us precisely in proportion as we first obey Nature. Let the electrician try to go counter to the principle that electricity must always pass from a higher to a lower potential and he will effect nothing; but let him submit in all things to this one fundamental law, and he can make whatever particular applications of ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... he composed each paragraph mentally as a whole before committing any part of it to paper, balancing and reshaping until it fully satisfied his sense of unity and rhythm. Something of formality and ponderousness quickly becomes evident in his style, together with a rather mannered use of potential instead of direct indicative verb forms; how his style compares with Johnson's and how far it should be called pseudo-classical, are interesting questions to consider. One appreciative description of it may be quoted: 'The language of Gibbon never flags; he walks forever ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... bookcase, Mr. Lavender took out the third from the top of a pile of newspapers. "Listen!" he said. "'The problem before us is the extraction of every potential ounce of food. No half measures must content us. Potatoes! Potatoes! No matter how, where, when the prime national necessity is now the growth of potatoes. All Britons should join in raising a plant which may be our ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... inheritance are divisible into two series, conservative and progressive transmission; the laws of adaptation to direct (active) or indirect (potential) adaptation. ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... potential energy residing in so much food has been converted into the energy of so much human labour, and when this is so directed that a productive machine results from it, there is in the machine, as Dr. Crozier puts ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... had made it very plain during the past five days of what Shann had come to look upon as an uneasy partnership that he considered himself far abler to manage in the field, while he had grave doubts of Shann's efficiency in the direction of survival potential. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... Regent Orleans. The country was convulsed with bitter personal disputes between Jesuit and Jansenist, fighting even to mutual persecution upon points either beyond or beneath the human intellect. A third party stood by, unseen, occasionally stimulating each, but equally despising both, a potential fiend, sneering at the blind zealotry and miserable rage that were doing its unsuspected will. Rome, that boasts of her freedom from schism should blot the 18th century ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... would answer the needs of Jugoslavia as well, or almost as well, as Fiume. Now, I am speaking from first-hand knowledge when I assert that this is not so, for I have seen with my own eyes every harbor, or potential harbor, on the eastern coast of the Adriatic from Istria to Greece. As a matter of fact, the entire coast of Dalmatia would not make up to the Jugoslavs for the loss of Fiume. The map gives no idea of the city's importance as the southernmost point at which a standard-gauge ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... his narrow surroundings, both physical and mental and even moral; he enters a larger and larger world. The religious expressions of his nature in the local provincial and even national stages of his life cannot satisfy his larger potential life. Only the religion of humanity can do this. And this is the religion of Jesus. The white light of religion, no less than that of scientific truth, has no local or national coloring. Perfect truth is universal, eternal, unchangeable. Occidental ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... intelligible in a translation; but it may be paraphrased thus: All knowledge is founded upon experiences of sensation, but it is not all derived from those experiences; inasmuch as the impressions of relation ("reine Anschauungen"; "reine Verstandesbegriffe") have a potential or a priori existence in us, and by their ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Empire; it is the seat of thought; it is the abode of moral responsibility! What battles, what famines, what excursions of pleasure, what banquets and pageants, what concepts of change have sprung into life here! Every pigeon-hole contains a potential revolution; every office-box cradles the embryo of a war or dearth. What shocks and vibrations, what deadly thrills does this little thunder-cloud office transmit to far-away provinces lying beyond rising and setting suns! Ah! Vanity, these are pleasant lodgings for five years, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... mysteries of history that for uncounted centuries man imagined that he only needed woman in her capacity as a wife and potential mother—that for long ages woman had no place in society except as wife or mother. Why it was so long before the spirit of God moved women to shatter that conception, I do not understand. But with its shattering ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... ambition commanded no more than idleness and stupidity, all men practically would be idle and stupid." "Men's capacities," we are reminded, "are practically unequal, because they develop their own potential inequalities; they do this because they desire to place themselves in unequal external circumstances,—which result the condition ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... is the life of action of a reasonable being. Now of reason as it is in man there are two parts, one obeying, one possessing and considering. And there are also two aspects in which the active or moral life may be taken, one potential, one actual. Clearly for our definition of the chief good we must take the moral life in its full actual realisation, since this is superior to ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... is that God does not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask—Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the glory of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... fixed. At any age this number is accordingly represented by the granules as well as by the cells which have already undergone further development. During growth the proportion of developed cells increases, and sometimes, owing to the failure to recognize potential nerve cells in the granules, the impression is carried away that this increase implies the formation of new elements. As has been shown, such is not ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before? The fact is that civilization, even when it seems to entail corruption, brings intelligence with it and that intelligence, in days of trial, stands for potential pride, nobility and heroism. That, as I said in the beginning, is the unexpected and consoling revelation of this horrible war: we can rely on man implicitly, place the greatest trust in him, nor fear lest, in laying aside ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of premisses), because only under this supposition is the judgement we may be considering possible a priori; while on the side of the conditioned or the inferences, only an incomplete and becoming, and not a presupposed or given series, consequently only a potential progression, is cogitated. Hence, when a cognition is contemplated as conditioned, reason is compelled to consider the series of conditions in an ascending line as completed and given in their totality. But if the very same condition ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... despairing, I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my Lohengrin, which I had totally forgotten. Suddenly I felt something like compassion lest the music might never sound from off the death-pale paper." In other words, Lohengrin, though finished in every detail, was merely potential music. To make it anything more, the aid of singers and ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... foregone conclusion. Its exact purport we do not know yet, but it amounted to a flat refusal, as most of us had foreseen, and was accompanied by alternative proposals which placed Joubert in the position of a potential conqueror—dictating terms, and our acceptance of these cannot be read by the Boers in any other light than as an admission of weakness or pusillanimity. Of course we know that it means nothing of the kind, but simply that Sir George White would not expose sick and wounded, ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... to carry this Act into effect. Commissioners were appointed; a General Order was issued by the Lord Lieutenant, and in due time that most potential of documents, a ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... a close secret, to divulge it at a moment's notice, in a sudden fit of warm friendliness, to a comparative stranger, and so Abel Cumshaw found it. It is even harder to surrender one's hopes and ambitions in favor of a potential rival, honest and all as that rival may appear to be. For one brief moment Cumshaw paused on the brink of revelation, the while he weighed the matter in his mind. In some strange way Bryce had guessed that he was after the gold, but did he know why and how? Cumshaw rather fancied he didn't. ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... thousand straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat, and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity; few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish valets—an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the world." Shelley, who knew what he was talking about when poetry was the subject, has said it, and with a profundity of truth Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will one day be potential or magisterial wherever the English language is spoken—that is to say, in the four corners of the earth; and in his own American hemisphere, the uttermost avatars of democracy will confess him not more their announcer ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... are their household gods, their personal idols. Bid them burn the unceasing flame in reverence only to the infinite, and they turn from you. Whatever their manner of scorning your protest may be, within themselves it leaves a sense of aching void. For the noble soul of the man, that potential king which is within us all, knows full well that this household idol may be cast down and destroyed at any moment,—that it is without finality in itself, without any real and absolute life. And he has been content in his possession, forgetting that anything possessed can only ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... with the natural parts and functions they affect, conquer or subdue the inharmony, and vice versa, as before stated. In all cases of disease and medicine, it is a simple question of A WAR BETWEEN THE ATOMS, and, therefore, the most potential forces within Nature are always at the command of the true Alchemist, because he knows bow and when to select his fighting forces, and when to set them in motion, for the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne |
