"Potentiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wheat produced antecedent to the Pharaohs," says Bastain,[11] "remaining in Egyptian catacombs through century after century display of course no vital manifestations, but nevertheless retain the potentiality of growing into perfect plants whenever they may be brought into contact with suitable external conditions. We must presume that either (1) during this long lapse of centuries the 'vital principle' of the plant has been imprisoned in the most dreary ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... speculate further on that subject would be futile. It never had existed, as far as he could see, except on paper, and there it remained, a mere potentiality. The single-handed disruption of it proved how utterly deprived it was of cohesion and organization. That one man, alone and in disguise, could have acquainted himself thoroughly with the whole proceeding, could have found his way with no attempt at interference into the meeting place, ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property which was to be disposed of, answered, 'We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the dreams ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... of the most favourable specimens of Swift's controversial method and trenchant satire. The style is excellent—forcible and pithy; while the arguments are like most of Swift's arguments, aptly to the point with yet a potentiality of application which fits them for the most general statement of the principles under discussion. Scott considers the pamphlet "as having materially contributed to the loss of the bill for repeal of the Test ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... statement of mere illiteracy the fact that a large percentage of these illiterates are of foreign birth or extraction and have never learned either to speak or understand the language of their adopted country, the situation is seen to be even more serious in potentiality, both in peace and war. Our authorities have been too lax, it seems, in not requiring that all children of foreign extraction, whether foreign or American born, be educated in the English language. In communities ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... reception of it? And now suddenly a wild idea came to him. He had heard somewhere that it is the women who read fiction. And was not Corydon a perfect specimen of the average middle-class young lady, and therefore of that mysterious potentiality, "the public", to which he must appeal? Why not see what she would think ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... up. He had been going through a strange searching of soul while his gaze wandered from the glistening rock at his feet to Clark's keen face. He began to perceive clearly for the first time the prodigious potentiality of this man who was equally masterful in Philadelphia and the back woods. He saw to what wide scope this enterprise could expand if only this restless and prophetic spirit might be wisely steered by men of colder brains and more deliberate resolution. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... covered the earth-disk, under the firmament, were drawn away into certain regions, which became seas, while the part laid bare became dry land. In accordance with the notion, universally accepted in antiquity, that moist earth possesses the potentiality of giving rise to living beings, the land, at the command of Elohim, "put forth" all sorts of plants. They are made to appear thus early, not, I apprehend, from any notion that plants are lower in the scale of being than animals (which would seem to be inconsistent with ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Church and State; but left unhappy Colombia prone and bleeding. It externalized a mighty protest of enlightenment against Rome's dictates in temporal affairs. And, as has before happened when that irresistible potentiality, the people, has been stirred into action, the Church was disestablished, its property confiscated, and its meddling, parasitical ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... he replied. "Is it so with us? Do we not use signs and gestures as well as words? And what do we mean by 'silent converse,' when mind speaks to mind and soul to soul without the intervention of spoken language? We have the potentiality of telepathic intercommunication, but we have not yet developed it into a kinetic form as these people have done. Ah, when will men begin to appreciate what ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... be established, either by the present employers or by new ones. There will be much to be gained by an independent shop manned by non-union labor, and the danger of this makes a trade union more conservative than it would otherwise be. The chief potentiality in the case is that of the new and independent shop, and if the way is open for this to appear, the range of difference between the pay of favored laborers and that of others is greatly reduced. The trade union may be ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... biological point of view, has not been corrupted by the thousands of years of reasoning and society that weigh on the human child. It is, therefore, nearer to the "fountains of life" if I may be allowed to express myself in that way; and nearer to the mathematical potentiality (which was at first unself-conscious, but which has subsequently been developed). But, of course, it is not enough for mathematics "to be" in something, for that something to begin at once to tap numbers. The table of the mediumistic seances contains much mathematics ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... some fields a matter of common observation. The man who works in the gymnasium knows that exercise increases the strength of a given group of muscles for a while, but not indefinitely. There comes a time when the limit of a man's hereditary potentiality is reached, and no amount of exercise will add another millimeter to the circumference of his arm. Similarly the handball or tennis player some day reaches his highest point, as do runners or race horses. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... depend on forgiveness from God to man? It is the duty of some one to reclaim an evident prodigal; and why should it not be her duty to reclaim this prodigal? Clearly, the very fact that she loved the prodigal would give her a potentiality that way which she would have with no other prodigal. It was at any rate her duty to try. It would at least be her duty if they would allow her to be near enough to him to make the attempt. Then she filled her mind with ideas of a long period of probation, in which every best energy ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... faint curiosity stirred within him remained. The house unexpectedly inhabited behind the ruined facade on the water, the magnetic woman with the echo of apprehension in her cultivated voice, the parent, so easily disturbed, even the mere name "Nicholas," all held a marked potentiality of emotion; they were set in an almost ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... element in the national character. Imperialism, running a cheerful career in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, had set the mode for average opinion; the world to Americans looked immense and the United States the most immense potentiality in it. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... it, extinguished the last funeral pyre of the ultimate Phoenix, and laughed to scorn the gigantic, gold-grubbing pismires of Pliny; the Roc, the Valley of Diamonds, the mountain island of Loadstone, the potentiality of the Talisman, the miraculous virtues of certain drugs, and countless other fables, were accepted and believed by all the nations of the West. One of those drugs, seldom brought to Europe on account of its great demand among the rulers of the East, and its extreme rarity, was a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... "the Godhead" and "God." The Godhead is the abiding potentiality of Being, containing within Himself all distinctions, as yet undeveloped. He therefore cannot be the object of knowledge, nor of worship, being "Darkness" and "Formlessness.[238]" The Triune God is evolved from the Godhead. The Son is the Word of the Father, His uttered thought; and the Holy Ghost ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... as Galileo made may now be bought at a toy-shop for I suppose half a crown, and yet what a potentiality lay in that "glazed optic tube," as Milton called it. Away he went with it to Venice and showed it to the Signoria, to their great astonishment. "Many noblemen and senators," says Galileo, "though of advanced age, mounted to the top of one of the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... work with the merest handful of forces, empirically, while it is practically certain that the enemy has at his command the entire spectrum, visible and invisible, embracing untold thousands of bands of unknown but terrific potentiality." ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... morality which can be set over against a mountain of crimes; a considerable deposit of common sense. And the first fact of common sense is the common bond of men. There is indeed in the Moslem character also a deep and most dangerous potentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may be said later. Fanaticism sounds like the flat contrary of common sense; yet curiously enough they are both sides of the same thing. The fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... proofs to man of his superiority to the world of sense impressions. This denial of the sufficiency of the world of sense in the evolution of the human soul, on the one hand, and the affirmation of the potentiality of a higher world of spirit on the other hand, constitute the nucleus of the Christian religion. Its superiority consists in giving their rights to both worlds, and also in showing that they do not possess the same value. This essential nature of Christianity ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... will end. It cannot endure under an awakened, enlightened public opinion. Negroes, all other things equal, will be admitted to labor unions, or labor unions will lose the potentiality and force they should wield in labor and ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... rudiments of membrane, which not rarely lie under wing-covers firmly soldered together; and in these cases it is impossible to doubt, that the rudiments represent wings. Rudimentary organs sometimes retain their potentiality: this occasionally occurs with the mammae of male mammals, which have been known to become well developed and to secrete milk. So again in the udders of the genus Bos, there are normally four developed and two rudimentary teats; but the latter in our domestic cows ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... there is anything in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing. But again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and potentially nothing: for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a limitation. If the infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as incomplete and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic feature by which it can be distinguished from anything else and discerned ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... relations, visceral and endocrinic activities, is the germ of the impulse to activity which it is the function of society and the individual himself to shape into organized useful work. Thus is manifested a native, inherent, potentiality, which we may call the energy of the baby, the energy of man, a something which the environment shapes, but which is created in the laboratory of the individual. The father and mother are delighted with the fine vigorous ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... people were less interesting than these New Yorkers, because country people were more independent. New Yorkers never looked at each other, but they felt each other; the atoms of the great mass, though separated by never-closing spaces, were held together by an eternal potentiality. There was a sympathy in the mass of city-folk, unspoken and even unobserved by many, but mighty—it was much more wonderful than the simple, verbal friendship between Jake Zeigler and Mat Carrol, neighbors at Bill's Corners. The power that held the atoms of the great mass together was ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... diameters has given birth to new sciences. But still higher magnification is demanded in unravelling the mystery of movements associated with the simplest type of life as seen in plants. Greatest potentiality in life is often latent; the gigantic banian tree grows out of a thing which is smaller than the mustard seed. Within the seed-coat the dormant life remains in safety, protected from dangers outside. The seeds may thus be subjected without ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... and that when a thing's worn out it's for good and all. I think it's reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for good and all, too. There isn't anything of us, as I look at it, except the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope, grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you've had them, that's the end of it; you've exhausted your capacity; ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... nervous system, capable of being affected by the nervous changes in such way as to result in feeling, and is reciprocally capable under these conditions of affecting the nervous changes. But if we accept this explanation, we must assume that the potentiality of feeling is universal, and that the evolution of feeling in the ether takes place only under the extremely complex conditions occurring in certain nervous centres. This, however, is but a semblance of an explanation, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... worthy of our careful study. It demands painstaking attention, both because of its immediate importance to human happiness and because of its potentiality for the future of society. The kind of home and the character of family life which will best serve the world and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or supposition. We are under the highest and sternest ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... nature. His psychological differentiations present too many and constantly-shifting divergencies and re-divergences—exceptional branchings in one direction, and still more exceptional in another—to admit of any sufficiently potentiated potentiality for bridge timber. The arch to such a bridge would have to abut, according to Professor Tyndall, on a vital foundation at one end, and spring from ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the potentiate mingling," that is, from the matter endowed with the potentiality of becoming informed by the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... America"; he would be one of the master criminals of the earth. I fancy he must have felt this intoxicating new access of power, for there emanated from him something of a fierce and exalted delight. A potentiality, as yet neither good nor evil, he suggested a spiritual ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... producer has had the use of and can part with. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... colleagues, as the warm lips and balmy breath of equatorial currents kiss away the jagged ledges of drifting icebergs. In his laborious life, that which is ordinarily denominated "love" had been so insignificant a factor, that he had never computed its potentiality; much less realized its tremendous importance in solving the problem of his social, financial, and professional success. Beauty had not allured, nor grace enthralled his fancy; and his betrothal was a mere incident in the quiet tenor of business routine, a necessary means for the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... him. Then he recalled that she had been the sole occupant of the buckboard—that she had called him by name after the light had fallen on the face of the lookout. It was possible that she might not know who Marie was. Although it was no more than just possible, he cuddled the potentiality to him as if it had ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... excellence and rarity as one of the grand Greek women of the Parthenon. She had, however, a sensuous fulness and bloom, a queenly carriage of head and neck, a clearness of feature, and a liquid kindness of eye that suggested a deep potentiality ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... among his pottering little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto fancied to be the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the lords of earth even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop: below, shod with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the potentiality of the armed heel. Instead of which — ! How fallen was his first fair hope of the world! And even when reconciled at last to the dynasty of the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested round the clangorous walls of Troy — some touch ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... feelings which cause it; flecked too often with brown and grey, because ignorant devotion absorbs with deplorable facility the dismal tincture of selfishness or fear; but none the less adumbrating a mighty potentiality of the future, manifesting to our eyes the first faint flutter of one at least of the twin wings of devotion and wisdom, by the use of which the soul flies upward to God ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... reproductive faculties are essential; because the first demand of evolution is plenty of material. It does not follow that our typical poor man is more of an animal, is less evolved, or has a smaller potentiality to evolve, because he has preserved better the animal faculties which lie at the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Paolo had an almost glass-like quality, fine and clear and perfectly tempered; but he was also finished and brittle. Maria was much coarser, more vulgar, but also she was more human, more fertile, with crude potentiality. His passion was too fixed in its motion, hers too loose ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... that it would take her out of her own home; that it was a blow at domesticity and an actual menace to the home life of America—these did not weight with him. There was only one question for him to settle: Was the ballot something which, in its demonstrated value or in its potentiality, would serve the best interests ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... a European peasant or a Bantu herdsman, looks outward, takes things for granted and asks no questions, so that with the Bantu as with the illiterate European, the primitive thoughts and ways of their forefathers are held good enough by their sons, but this does not preclude the latent potentiality in both for the understanding and acquisition of new thoughts and ways once the shackles of conservatism have been loosened ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... trains, in the spring of 'eighty-two, were somewhat more and less than they now are. The tourist sleeper, with its comfortable berths, its clean linen, its kitchen range, and its dusky attendant, restrained to an attitude of agreeable deference by his anticipation of a gratuity, was a grey atom of potentiality in the brain of an unknown genius. Even the colonist car, which has done noble service in later days in the peopling of the Prairie West, was only in the early stages of its evolution. The purpose of immigrant trains was to move people. To supply comforts as well as locomotion ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed: he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came to nothing more than this—that art exists, not for the hundreds of people who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... sign-board to enter on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... of the ovarian secretion alone. "There must be," he says, "some gross change in those parts of the endocritic system, especially apart from the genital glands, which normally produce masculinity—potentiality that appears to be concentrated in the suprarenals, the pituitary and probably ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... which, as such—however true in itself—is not completely real. Aims, principles, etc., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only, but not as yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only is a possibility, a potentiality, but it has not emerged into existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality—viz., actuation, realization; and its motive power is the will—the activity of man in the widest sense. It is only by this activity that that Idea, as well as abstract characteristics ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... that this one is a something called Matter—self-existent—eternal—infinite—containing within itself the potentiality of Matter, Energy and Mind. Another school, closely allied to the materialists, claim that this One is a something called Energy, of which Matter and Mind are but modes of motion. The Idealists claim that the One is a something called Mind, and that Matter and Force are but ideas ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... degree of the southern face, all photographs agreeing with all travellers as to its tameness. There is only one face of the Denali group that is completely satisfying, that is adequate to the full picturesque potentiality of a twenty-thousand-foot elevation. The writer has seen no other view, no other aspect of it, comparable to that of the northwest face from Lake Minchumina. There the two mountains rise side by side, sheer, precipitous, pointed ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... Aristotle and of others. He took for the text of his lectures the treatise of Aristotle, "De Anima," and this gave him the opportunity of introducing and discussing the deepest questions—upon the Origin and Destiny of Humanity; The Soul, is it Matter or Spirit? Potentiality or Reality? Individual or Universal? Mortal or Eternal? Is Man alone gifted with Soul, or are all beings equally so? Bruno's system was in his mind complete and mature; he taught that everything in Nature has a soul, one universal mind, penetrates and moves all things; ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all the characters of all the forms that have existed, pterodactyls, dinosaurs, butterflies, birds, etc. etc., including the characters of all the varieties of the human race and of human individuals, must have been present in the primordial ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... temple, they could look out into the crowded streets, in which were packed untold numbers of pilgrims, all pressing towards the great square plaza in front of the temple. No guards were to be seen; the solemnity of the occasion was sufficient to keep order. But the terrific potentiality of that semi-fanatical host did not cause the doctor's ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... seems that there has been a special mania, in our South Land especially, for setting up a laudable ideal in the classification of educational institutions, and then working up to it during subsequent ages. They believe there is much in a name or title. This keen sense of potentiality being in the classification, college or university, is too often ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... out of the formal relationship an intimacy never developed, and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early cult as exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real affection is not present until a much later day. The potentiality of the gods always overshadowed their personality. But this was not all loss, for the absence of personality prevented the growth of those gross myths which are usually found among primitive peoples, for the purer more inspiring ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... air is charged with potentiality of new life, hardly dreamt of by our faith on its low stagnant levels. Here are heights to be stormed by faithful unself-seeking love. This way lies deliverance and new creation, and the breaking of prison bars and the turning of our captivity such as ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... more solemn and obligatory knowledge, that however many to-morrows may come, and whatever fate they may bring, we never die; that, strictly speaking, no one yet who has lived has ever died; that for good or for evil our every change from potentiality into motion is carried on beyond our own apparent transitoriness; that we are the waves of the ocean of life, communicating motion to the expanse before us, and leaving the history we have made on ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... self-righteousness. It is a gleam of man's potentiality, that makes him truly sublime. There are many Scripture statements that make man pitifully little; but this is because of his present sinful condition. Bye and bye he will rise into his true condition, and then "The holy spirit of man" will be ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... trucks from the standpoint of the customer. He got permission to investigate delivery outfits in many lines. Selling a five-ton motor truck to many a business man was often equivalent to letting Johnny play with a loaded machine gun. Such a vehicle combined the potentiality of moving from fifty to seventy-five tons of freight daily, according to routing and the number of hours employed; but it involved a daily expense of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... its summons is near, so much the better still; if a half-death overtake me, still so much the better, for so the path of success is closed to me only that I may find opening before me the path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation. Every life has its potentiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... yes," I answered; "but man was made for this world. We are too apt to measure things by our own experience. Why should we limit the potentiality of life by what we know of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... a keeper, who was examining into his condition. After submitting to this scrutiny a few minutes, he gave a mighty yawn, which startled the spectators, but which delighted the Absolute Fool; for never before had he beheld such a depth of potentiality. He knelt in silent delight at this exhibition ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice' (Lord Lucan's anecdote ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... conditions, more or less propitious;" and the American note, as I understand it, is, with allowance for modifications by other nationalities, after all merely the New World incarnation of a British potentiality. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... interpret through art the "years of the modern, years of the unperformed," it remains to be acknowledged with gratitude that this play, designed to bring home to America both its comparative rawness and emptiness and its true significance and potentiality for history and civilisation, has been universally acclaimed by Americans as a revelation of Americanism, despite that it contains only one native-born American character, and that a bad one. Played throughout ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... were entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... more wisely—or diplomatically—in accepting Seaton's proposal to part with his secret to the United States Government, even with the proviso and State pledge that it was to be "used" should occasion arise, rather than leave him to his own devices to do as he pleased with the apparently terrific potentiality of which he alone had the knowledge and the mastery. And while his thoughts thus buzzed in his head like swarming bees, Manella stood regarding him in a kind of pitiful questioning like a child with a broken toy who can not understand "why" it is broken. As he did ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... effort to find a satisfactory solution of the problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the day as it seeks enlightenment on the potentiality of the future life. The stage presents plays based on spiritualistic manifestations or upon supernatural healing or miraculous intervention. Many recent novels have either psychical phenomena for their central interest or plots evolved ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... same. Not chalk, not any loose and friable material, does Phidias or Michel Angelo choose, but ivory, bronze, basalt, marble. It is quite the same whether we seek expression or uses. The stream must be dammed before it will drive wheels; the steam compressed ere it will compel the piston. In fine, Potentiality combines with Hindrance to constitute active Power. Man, in order to obtain instrumentalities and uses, blends his will and intelligence with a force that vigorously seeks to pursue its own separate free course; and while this resists him, it becomes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... at that, of a Dominion stretching thousands of miles between us and the Pacific, and how many thousand miles on the line North to South we could not compute, we began to get a glimmer of the immensity and potentiality of the land we ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... doubt thickened as, day after day, the same scenes were enacted; when one beheld all sorts of conditions of men similarly affected; when, again and again, the potentiality in the human magnet was proved true. Doubt turned to conviction, at the last, that the holy shrine of St. Michael had, in truth, been violated; that the Mont had been desecrated; that the latter exists now solely as a setting for a pearl of an inn; and that within the shrine—it ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... of musical notes. The unknown cause of sensation which Descartes calls the "je ne sais quoi dans les objets" or "choses telles qu'elles sont," and Kant the "Noumenon" or "Ding an sich," is represented by the musician; who, by touching the keys, converts the potentiality of the mechanism into actual sounds. A note so produced is the equivalent of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... spirit which in certain epochs spreads from soul to soul like an epidemic, breaking all the fetters of authority, despising tradition and rejecting discipline in its eagerness to get rid of formalism and unreality; a lawless, turbulent, unmanageable spirit, in which, notwithstanding, is a potentiality for good far higher than any to which the lukewarm "religion of all sensible men" can ever attain. For mysticism is the raw material of all religion; and it is easier to discipline the enthusiast than to breathe ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... world beyond. And yet she was no slave to the ascetic side of Christianity. No doubt there was mixed with her spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness that under other circumstances of life would have made itself manifest, and also a rare potentiality of deep passion. It is this, indeed, which makes the study of her great and ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... countrymen, his people, his friends, his sweetheart, all failed him? Was there justice in Blair Maynard's scorn? Lane's faith cried out in revolt. He augmented all possible catastrophe, and then could not believe that he had sacrificed himself in vain. He knew himself. In him was embodied all the potentiality for hope of the future. And it was with the front and stride of a soldier, facing the mystery, the ingratitude, the ignorance and hell of war, that he left his room and went down stairs to meet the ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... From the soul and body a double unity, viz. of nature and person—results in each individual—of nature inasmuch as the soul is united to the body, and formally perfects it, so that one nature springs from the two as from act and potentiality or from matter and form. But the comparison is not in this sense, for the Divine Nature cannot be the form of a body, as was proved (I, Q. 3, A. 8). Unity of person results from them, however, inasmuch as there is an individual subsisting in flesh and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and widened until men began to feel that this Infinite Being was already in every one of them, and that it rested with themselves to remove the sensual obstructions and reveal him in their own lives. In every individual there was, they realised, the potentiality of Buddha—that is to say, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... wicked, is soon lost to them. Destiny does not help the man that is steeped in spiritual ignorance and avarice. Even as a fire of small proportions, when fanned by the wind, becomes of mighty power, so does Destiny, when joined with individual Exertion, increase greatly (in potentiality). As with the diminution of oil in the lamp its light is extinguished so does the influence of Destiny is lost if one's acts stop. Having obtained vast wealth, and women and all the enjoyments of this world, the man, without action is unable to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... syllabification to what superficially corresponds with | | English free-verse, that is, a substitution of prose for | | verse; but only superficially, since the French language is | | phonetically different from English, and its ordinary prose | | has a naturally greater song potentiality. Since the | | phenomena differ they should not be called by the same name. | | The English term 'free-verse' ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... dissolution and entire destruction of these khandas, and apart from them there is no synthetical unit, soul, or personality. Yet in a certain sense death is not the absolute annihilation of a human existence, because it leaves a potentiality inherent in that existence. There is no identical ego to survive and be born again; but karma that is, the sum of a man's action, his entire merit and demerit produces at his death a new being, and so on in continued series until Nirwana is attained. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... will be urged, is ex hypothesi an accomplished fact at the time that we ask for it? We reply that the Divine indwelling in man is of the nature of a capacity for striving rather than of an attainment, a potentiality rather than an actuality, a prophecy rather than a fulfilment. Man's longing for communion with God, as for an unrealised good, is the longing of like for Like, but it is only through struggle and effort that the goal can be reached. The Eternal is indeed the Life of all life, and to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... way to learn to write is to write. But young men will not write of their own free will; the literary first-mate in way of a Managing Editor with a loaded club of expletives is necessary. Or, stay! there is another way to stimulate the ganglionic cells and become dexterous in the cosmic potentiality—the Daily Theme sent to a woman who thinks and feels. That is the way that Goethe acquired his style. There were love-letters that crossed each other daily, and after years of this practise—the sparks ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... as Anthony took only breakfast at home, was merely a magnificent potentiality, and down a comparatively long hall, one came to the heart and core of the apartment—Anthony's ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... him. He turns within to do it again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and inimitable; that its expression through us cannot be exactly reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... heroic, native, positive and equal," wrote Belloc, "always at the highest potentiality of courage. . ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the ground it flattens the sole, making it steady and supporting. To resist, to survive, to win through, is the end to which the life-principle sets itself with such singleness of aim as to unfold a wealth of potentiality astounding to us ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... intelligently and to note those little signs that are, to the intelligent, the essentials, full of significance. She had concealed her amazement from Branch, but amazed she was, less at his news of Craig as a personage full of potentiality than at her own failure, through the inexcusable, manlike stupidity of personal pique, to discern the real man behind his mannerisms. "No wonder he has pushed so far, so fast," reflected she; for she appreciated that in a man of action manners should always be a ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... sensitive soul. It is not connected with organic function. It is pure intellectual principle. It is immaterial, immortal, the divine element in man. This reason is not a bare unity. As it appears in human experience, it is not full-grown. Potentially it contains all the categories, but the potentiality must be actualised. Consequently reason subdivides into active and passive intellect. The action of the former on the latter, and the response of the latter to the former, constitute the development of the mind, the education of the truth that is ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... speaking without book in this matter. Some of my best Officers to-day have been even such as they. There is an infinite potentiality of capacity lying latent in our Provincial Tap-rooms and the City Gin Palaces if you can but get them soundly saved, and even short of that, if you can place them in conditions where they would no longer be liable to be sucked ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... communication with every man on the boat, each one of whom had his part to play at the proper moment, but not one of whom could see or know the result. The work to be done was in Metcalf's hands and brain, and, considering its potentiality, it was ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... the natural and has no other possible status. Those human possessions which are perennial and of inalienable value are in a manner potential possessions only. Knowledge, art, love are always largely in abeyance, while power is absolutely synonymous with potentiality. Fruition requires a continual recovery, a repeated re-establishment of the state we enjoy. So breath and nutrition, feeling and thought, come in pulsations; they have only a periodic and rhythmic sort of actuality. The operation may be sustained indefinitely, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... face contracting with sudden pain; "your love, then, is but a potentiality. Very well, Amabel, keep it so and you will be spared much misery. As for me, who have not been as wise ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... is a negation of power, and contrariwise the potentiality of existence is a power, as is obvious. If, then, that which necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings are more powerful than a being absolutely infinite, which is obviously absurd; therefore, either nothing exists, or else a being absolutely infinite necessarily ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... were still unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the complicated prescriptions then in vogue. Had Hahnemann stopped at this point he could not have been held up to the indefensible ridicule that was brought upon him, with considerable justice, by his later theories. But he lived onto propound his extraordinary theory of "potentiality"—that medicines gained strength by being diluted—and his even more extraordinary theory that all chronic diseases are caused either by the itch, syphilis, or fig-wart disease, or ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... familiarity over her. In Woodhouse, she knew, it elevated her in the common esteem tremendously. But she was no longer in Woodhouse. She was in Lancaster. And in Lancaster her engagement pigeonholed her. Apart from Dr. Mitchell she had a magic potentiality. Connected with him, she was ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... drama on the New York stage, and had failed. If the opera succeeds it will be because a larger public has discovered that the music which has been consorted with the old pictures, actions, and words has added to them an element either of charm or expressive potentiality hitherto felt to be lacking. Is that true? Has a rock of offense been removed? Has a mephitic odor been changed to a sweet savor by the subtle alchemy of the musical composer? Has a drama abhorrent, bestial, repellent, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... what is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... common-sense. He thought the unity of nature to consist in its periodic evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (to apeiron), which, much in the manner of the "nebula" of modern science, is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar commonplace of science, begins to be recognizable. It has here reached the point of signifying a common substance for all tangible things, a substance that in its own general and omnipresent ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... hand, just as the mere possession of functioning eyes does not automatically give one the ability to read, neither does the genetic inheritance of Guesser potentialities enable one to make accurate, useful Guesses. To make this potentiality into an ability requires years of hard ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... as much potentiality as if she had been a recognized authority in the house ever since it had been a house, and having looked out to confront the amazed Peggotty coming along the passage with a candle at the sound of a strange voice, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... that the concessions granted were almost infinitesimal, yet a result had been obtained, surprisingly confirmatory of the views always advocated by the institute as to the potentiality of the inventive talent of this nation were it released from its shackles. While in former years the highest number of patents taken out had slowly risen to the number of five to six thousand per annum, in the year now expiring it had bounded to more than three times five thousand—had ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... attended. An acquaintance expressed surprise at the great man's honouring with his presence such an ordinary affair as the sale of a brewery. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson, turning with crushing deliberation on the unhappy speaker, "this is not the sale of a mere brewery, but of the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." This story seems to me well worth remembering, both because it is so characteristic of the Doctor, and because it is applicable to so many things. It is so easy to go through the world not ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... speak. But cautious and tentative as was the attitude of all parties concerned, and free as, from beginning to end, the proceedings were from any startling incidents, no one can have watched them without being conscious of the presence of new forces of vast potentiality which must tend to modify very profoundly the relations between the governors and the governed in India itself, and possibly even between India and the Mother Country. They are the forces, largely still unknown, which have been brought into play by Lord Morley's Constitutional reforms, and though ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... potentiality of non—existence is a negation of power, and contrariwise the potentiality of existence is a power, as is obvious. If, then, that which necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... archaic group—the most ancient of the terrestrial crust, and consisting (in Brazil) chiefly of gneiss, mica schists and granite, solidified into their present form by intense eruptive phenomena and dissolved—not by immersion in ocean waters, as some suppose, but by deluges of such potentiality as the human mind ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... their material aspect. Since God is one and only, his essentia and his esse must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true, of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are only "virtual," and made from the human point of view. In God all these points of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... behalf of the establishment of a vast permanent bazaar. I am not competent to estimate the real utility of these great shows. What I do see very clearly is that they involve difficulties of site, huge working expenses, the potentiality of endless squabbles, and apparently the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley |
