"Reconstruct" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... understood that when the Leprecauns of Gort na Cloca Mora acted in the manner about to be recorded, they were not prompted by any lewd passion for revenge, but were merely striving to reconstruct a rhythm which was their very existence, and which must have been of direct importance to the Earth. Revenge is the vilest passion known to life. It has made Law possible, and by doing so it gave to Intellect the ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... and things looked bright for him. His patient did not need him, but K. was anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas office and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy was easy to reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K. did not believe in the innocence of the excursion to Schwitter's. His spirit was heavy with the conviction that he had saved Wilson to ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... are what they have become by the indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the one than we can change the other. We can no more mend men by theories than we can by coercion—to which, by the by, almost all these theorists look longingly as their final hope and mainstay. We must teach men to mend ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the noble; the reverse of the medal proclaims loudly that it is the reverse, and that there is an obverse of a very different kind to be seen by those who will turn the coin. It seems to me that no very great palaeontological skill is necessary to reconstruct the whole frame of the animal from the portion that Mr. Howells sets up for us. His novels remind me of those maps of a limited area which indicate very clearly what lies beyond, by arrows on their margins. In nothing does Mr. Howells more ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... voyage. When we passed a ship, it burst upon me how we'd passed such ships before: when there was fire-drill on deck, I remembered having assisted years earlier at just such fire-drill. The whole past came back like a dream, so that I could reconstruct now the first five or six years of my life almost entirely. And yet, even so there was a gap, a puzzle, a difficulty somehow. I couldn't make the chronology of this slow-returning memory fit in as it ought with the chronology of the facts given to me by Aunt Emma and the Moores of Torquay. There ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... clear that this common element is inherited from Latin, out of which all the Romance languages are derived. Out of the words, endings, idioms, and constructions which French, Spanish, Italian, and the other tongues of southern Europe have in common, it would be possible, within certain limits, to reconstruct the parent speech, but fortunately we are not limited to this material alone. At this point the Latinist and the Romance philologist join hands. To take up again the illustration already used, the student of the Romance languages ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... my ancestors were not married until the 15th of January, 1748. I must have made a blunder—and yet I could hardly believe I had, for I had reason to consider myself accurate. If there was no mistake, I should have to reconstruct my ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... sculpture only because I had already seen it defined in perfect beauty. A deep crack ran across the marble; it was weathered and stained by many rains, and little ferns grew in the crevices, but I could reconstruct every line from my own knowledge. And how? The Parvati of Ranipur differed in many important details. She stood, bending forward, wheras this sweet Lady sat. Her attendants were small satyr-like spirits of the wilds, piping and fluting, in place of the reclining maiden. The sweeping scrolls of a ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... representation, is the heart of this coloured imagery, and so moving, so redolent of life is it that if the world were shattered and Las Meninas shot to the coast of Mars, its inhabitants would be able to reconstruct an idea of the creatures that once inhabited old Mother Earth; men, women, children, their shapes, attitudes, gestures, and attributes. The mystery of sentient beings lurks in this canvas, the illusion of atmosphere has never been so ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... strength of its natural position had enabled the city to withstand the late siege; but Frontenac saw clearly that the defences would not be sufficient to meet a resolute assault, and it was resolved to reconstruct the fortifications on a larger scale. The great engineer Vauban furnished plans which were carried out under Frontenac's personal direction. For twenty leagues around the habitants were pressed into this service, and such was the general ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... prodigal, she will be immaculately perfect. Well, well: at least her presence will make my home less lonely. "An attendant and child." A child! Ah, if HE, my boy, my Alexander, were still a child, I might warm this cold, cold heart in his sunshine! Strange that I cannot reconstruct from this dutiful, submissive, obedient, industrious Alexander,—this redeemed outcast, this son who shares my life, my fortunes, my heart,—the foolish, wilful, thoughtless, idle boy, that once defied me. I remember (musing, with a smile) how the little rascal, ha, ha! ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... written in long forgotten languages on stone, clay tablets, metal, wood and paper. These remnants and records, left by extinguished civilizations, do not tell us all we wish to know, but they do provide the materials which enable us to reconstruct, at least in part, the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... not the El Paso of The Spider's earlier days, and for a brief while he forgot his mission in endeavoring mentally to reconstruct the old town as he had known it. Arrived at the Plaza he turned and gazed about. "Number two," he said to himself, recalling the portly Mexican—and the voice. He shrugged ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... no desire to make mysteries, but it is impossible at the moment of action to enter into long and complex explanations. I have the threads of this affair all in my hand. Even if this lady should never recover consciousness we can still reconstruct the events of last night and ensure that justice be done. First of all I wish to know whether there is any inn in this ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... question as to the antiquity and primitive history of man is full of interest in proportion as the solution is set with difficulties. We question the past, but only here and there a response is heard. Surely bold is he who would attempt, from the few data at hand, to reconstruct the history of times and people so far removed. We quickly become convinced that many centuries and tens of centuries have rolled away since man's first appearance on the earth. We become impressed ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles in its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very speedily renounces its first ambition. "It is no longer reality itself," it says, "that it will reconstruct, but only an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image; the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; we move among relations; the absolute is not in our province; we are brought ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... ship Thames, moored at Carron Wharf, near Tower Bridge. Also a piece of "throw line" similar to that twisted round the body was missing. Also that Duncan, the last time he was seen alive, had declared his intention of taking a bathe. These facts made it easy for the sailor police to reconstruct ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... occupied some three or four years previously, and there, by the merest good luck, I discovered that when he had departed he had left behind him a worn-out travelling-bag, and in that bag was a bundle of papers which supplied me with sufficient information to reconstruct his history to some extent, though I should not like to swear to the absolute accuracy of every detail of his biography as I ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... rapport with his reader. "But his book is a fantasy palace, supported by columns as lovely as they are hollow and insecure, and hovering in rainbow mists between earth and sky." Brandes has rare skill in presenting hypotheses as facts. He has attempted to reconstruct the life of Shakespeare from his works. Now this is a mode of criticism which may yield valuable results, but clearly it must be used with great care. Shakespeare knew the whole of life, but how he came to know it is another matter. Brandes thinks he has found the secret. Back of every ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... grandeur of this famous work. The text given as No. 669 contains a description of the particulars of the battle, but for the reasons given in the note to this text, I must abandon the idea of taking this passage as the basis of my attempt to reconstruct the picture as the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... to reproduce. But, alas! it is like trying to reconstruct a forest out of broken branches and withered leaves. In the fairy book, everything was just as it should be, though whether in words or something else, I cannot tell. It glowed and flashed the thoughts upon the soul, with such a power that the medium disappeared from the consciousness, and ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... suggests another with which it is accidentally associated in memory, the second suggests a third, and, in the course even of a few seconds, we find that we have travelled from one subject to another so remote that it requires an effort to reconstruct the series of links which connects them. The same thing happens with words. A large number of words, despite great changes of sense, retain the fundamental meaning of the original, but in many cases this is quite lost. A truer image than that of the linked chain would ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... this, equally shared by both, was so intense that, for a second, Cassy felt that everything happening then had happened ages ago, that she was taking part in a drama rehearsed on a stage that memory cannot reconstruct but which stood, and, it may be, still stands, back of those doors that close behind ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... latter in this, that, through the creation of signs, it succeeds in isolating, abstracting and noting fragments of sensations, that is to say, in forming, combining and employing general conceptions.—This being granted, we are able to verify all our ideas, for, through reflection, we can revive and reconstruct the ideas we had formed without any reflection. No abstract definitions exist at the outset; abstraction is ulterior and derivative; foremost in each science must be placed examples, experiences, evident facts; from these we derive our general idea. In the same way we derive from several general ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... exaggerate the necessary changes is to postpone or prevent a satisfactory outcome from the present calculated destructions and wrongs and the accompanying moral and religious chaos. Ardent proposals to remake the map of Europe, reconstruct European society, substitute republics for empires, and abolish armaments are in fact obstructing the road toward peace and good-will among men. That road ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... do we go to restore our Constitution to what it has been at some given period, or to reform and reconstruct it upon principles more conformable to a sound theory of government? A prescriptive government, such as ours, never was the work of any legislator, never was made upon any foregone theory. It seems to me a preposterous way of reasoning, and a perfect confusion of ideas, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the method of Zadig, applied to a greater body of facts than the present generation is fortunate enough to handle, will enable the biologist to reconstruct the scheme of life from its beginning, and to speak as confidently of the character of long extinct beings, no trace of which has been preserved, as Zadig did of the queen's spaniel and the king's horse. Let us hope that ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... all, he finds that he must reconstruct his ideas about furs. If he be an American, his first discovery is that his favorite sealskin is out of the race entirely. No Russian would pay the price which is given for sealskin in return for such a "cold fur," nor would he wear it on the outside for display, while it would ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... down. The charge of the mounted Boers was supported by a very heavy fire from a covering party, and the gun-detachments were killed or wounded almost to a man. The lieutenant in charge and the sergeant were both upon the ground. So far as it is possible to reconstruct the action from the confused accounts of excited eye-witnesses and from the exceedingly obscure official report of General Dixon, there was no longer any resistance round the guns, which were at once turned by their captors upon the nearest ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... practises as freely as its newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life; and it stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous cooperation can hold back from becoming a revolution. We are in a temper to reconstruct economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of radical and extended ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... impossible afterwards to reconstruct the manner of its occurrence. To Angele's mind—what there was left of it—the matter always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible confusion. No doubt they two had been watched; the plan succeeded ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of the affair had conceived the idea that it would be a good scheme to reconstruct the wrecked flower barge and have the Queen ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... Vicksburg engrossing. The siege of a small city presents a comparatively simple and compact military problem which is, therefore, comprehensible to the civilian mind, and in addition to this the Vicksburg battlefield is splendidly preserved and marked, so that the visitor may easily reconstruct the conflict. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... intelligence of Bonaparte's landing was received at Vienna it must be confessed that very little had been done at the Congress, for measures calculated to reconstruct a solid and durable order of things could only be framed and adopted deliberately, and upon mature reflection. Louis XVIII. had instructed his Plenipotentiaries to defend and support the principles of justice and the law of nations, so as to secure the rights of all parties ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the paper. So the Valkyrie was now alone in the world, and mistress no doubt of all her father's wealth. "I must have seen her—I am sure there was a child about"; he said to himself again; and his thoughts went groping into a mostly forgotten past, and as he endeavoured to reconstruct it, the incident which had brought him for a few weeks into close relations with Robert Blanchflower, then Major Blanchflower of the—Dragoons, came at ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I must reconstruct the incident as well as I can from my recollection of the facts as related by Jerry in the course of several conversations, each of which I am forced to admit amplified somewhat the ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... necessary, a panic allowing a period of rest to permit the liquidation of transactions employed in helping to make a series of exchanges at high prices, and to allow the capital and savings of countries which had been too rapidly scattered and exhausted to reconstruct themselves during these years of ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... that the plates were ranged and the pictures jostled one another, but it would be more correct to put it they had jostled and had been ranged, for it was only by guess-work that Sally was able to reconstruct the scene as it must have appeared before Gerald had started, as he put it, to clean house. She had walked into the flat briskly enough, but she pulled up short as she crossed the threshold, appalled by the majestic ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... to reconstruct a picture of the High Table, made up as it was for many years of a group of middle-aged or elderly men, with a considerable admixture of youthful Fellow Commoners. During the eighteenth century the proportion of Fellow ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... west chamber off from the rest of the house. We have far too much space to care for as it is. When I reconstruct Stoneledge it will be time enough ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... which may threaten to turn aside a stream of wealth. I sometimes feel as if a great social revolution were necessary to break up our present mercenary civilisation, in order that Christianity, now repelled by the almost universal worldliness, may come into new contact with the soul, and may reconstruct society after its own pure and disinterested principles." Channing's Letter ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... sometimes had trouble in telling friend from foe, and not infrequently they shot at one another; so inadequately were our woolen mills prepared to supply their uniforms! But larger government contracts enabled the proprietors to reconstruct their mills, install modern machines, and build up an organization and a prosperous business that still endures. Making boots and shoes for Northern soldiers laid the foundation of America's great shoe industry. Machinery had already been applied to shoe manufacture, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... Rossettis in London in 1871, but was not impressed by them nor they by me. I met Matthew Arnold in New York and heard his lecture on Emerson. My books are, in a way, a record of my life—that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind. You could reconstruct my days pretty well from those volumes. A writer who gleans his literary harvest in the fields and woods reaps mainly where he has sown himself. He is a husbandman whose crop springs from the seed ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... a long, shrewd look that comprehended the company, individually and collectively, and the entire room, "if Inspector Humphries will kindly close the door, we will reconstruct the crime in the light of the evidence we ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... it is the true formula of atrolactic acid. Lately we have succeeded in performing the complete synthesis of atropic acid, and the artificial preparation of atropine has been greatly facilitated since I have shown that we can easily reconstruct atropine by starting from its products of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... traveling about in England and the United States. He is supposed to be competent in the affairs of both worlds; in reality he is one of those presuming, threadbare, talkative fellows, who, living in a garret, lecture foreign cabinets and reconstruct all Europe. Things, to them, seem to be as easily worked out as words and sentences: one day,[2205] to entice the English into an alliance with France, Brissot proposes to place two towns, Dunkirk and Calais, in their hands as security; another day, he proposes "to make a descent on Spain, and, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... point in my story, I need to get a grip on myself, reconstruct exactly what I experienced, and make doubly sure of ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... us as a man who took life with the greatest earnestness. We see plainly from his features, if we know how to reconstruct them, that he bore within him intimate knowledge which he knew that words could only indicate, not express. Out of such a temper of mind arose his celebrated utterance, "All things fleet away," which Plutarch explains thus: "We do not dip twice into ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... lay there, the past night began to reconstruct itself in his brain. He hadn't been sick at all, was his thought; he had merely been drunk, and it was time for him to get up and go to work. Work suggested his mine, and he remembered that he had refused ten ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... its personal reference and association, elements of distinctive biographical interest. It is the author's first—as also last—attempt to reconstruct his hope of immortality by a rational process based entirely on the fundamental facts of his own knowledge and consciousness—God and the human soul; and while the very assumption of these facts, as basis for reasoning, places him at issue with scientific thought, there is in his way of handling ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... and beginning in the lowness of the actual, and collecting the principles that are in all actualities, the true forms that are forms in nature, and not in man's speech only, the new IDEAS of the New Academy, the ideas that are powers, with these 'simples' that are causes, he will reconstruct fortuitous conjunctions, he will make his poems in facts; he will find his Fairy Land in her kingdom ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... gains in this War, and they are fighting now to hold them. If they fail to hold them, the Germany of the war-lords is ruined. She will have to give up all her bloated ambitions, to purge and live cleanly, and painfully to reconstruct her prosperity on a quieter and sounder basis. She will not do this until she is forced to it by defeat. No doubt there are moderate and sensible men in Germany, as in other countries; but in Germany they are without influence, and can do nothing. War is the national industry of Prussia; ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... tell the truth, which was that I certainly would have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn't; and she never could mention the subject at all before that personage. I can only describe the affair, naturally, from the outside, and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too closely to, reconstruct the possible strange intercourse of these good friends ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... domestic fowl known to us came from Gallus bankiva, the jungle-fowl of India; in fact I think I have seen that form enthroned amongst its supposed descendants in more than one museum. "So we are taught; but try to reconstruct the steps in their evolution and you realise your hopeless ignorance" (M., p. 11). If we cannot construct a "tree" for fowls, how absurd to adventure into the deeper recesses of Phylogeny. If all that Professor Bateson says is true, is not Driesch right when he ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... people gather up their wits and their courage and set to work to repair damages. They clear away ruins, plant, rebuild, very much as ants whose hill has been trodden upon, after running wildly about for a little while, begin all together to reconstruct the tiny cone of sand which is so important in their eyes. In a very short time the changes which at first seem so sad and strange become accustomed and matter-of-course things which no ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... Temple, or Asklepieion, of Cos were brought to light in 1904 and 1905, by the work of Dr. Rudolf Herzog, of Tuebingen. Dr. Richard Caton, of Liverpool, has been able to reconstruct pictorially the beautiful buildings that existed two thousand years ago. They were situated among the hills. The sacred groves of cypresses were on three sides of the temple, and "to the north the verdant plain ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... claws, of the femur, and of all the other bones, and all the other bones taken separately will give the tooth. In this manner anyone who is scientifically acquainted with the laws of organic economy may from a fragment reconstruct the whole animal. The mark of a cloven hoof is sufficient to tell the form of the teeth and jaws and vertebrae and leg-bones and thigh-bones and pelvis of the animal. The least fragment of bone, the smallest apophysis, has a determinative ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... reconstruct imaginatively any scene of Holy Scripture it is almost inevitable that we see it through the eyes of some great artist of the past. The Crucifixion comes to us as Duerer or Guido Reni saw it; the Presentation or the Visitation presents ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... hospitals, academies of law and medicine, governor's palace, public library, and museum, and an interesting public garden on the edge of the bluff, overlooking the bay. The city is served by four street-car lines, connecting the suburbs with both the upper and lower towns. In 1906 contracts were made to reconstruct some of these lines for electric traction. The railways radiating from the city to inland points are the Bahia & Alagoinhas which is under construction to Joazeiro, on the Sao Francisco river, a short line to Santo Amaro, and two lines—the Bahia Central ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... number of cases the manuscripts we read are unacceptable because the authors have not complied with these requirements of the modern stage; and it is impossible for us, with the best will in the world, to reconstruct the works. We can only point out, regretfully, that they do not comply with these modern regulations, and we know quite well that the dramatists will be unable to make the necessary changes. The modern system has had the ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... getting the car on the way had to reconstruct our loads as Mr. Day's car is finished and no more use for further service. We have got all four of us with one car now, things seems to be going fairly well, but we are still troubled with the overheating which means to say ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... reconstruct the accident from Lorraine's description. "He'd no business to start down if his rough-lock wasn't all right," he said. "It ain't like him. Brit's careful about them things—little men most always are. I don't see how 'n 'ell it worked loose. It's ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... do you propose, then?' demanded Grinder. 'Reconstruct the company? Ask the shareholders for more money? Pull down the works and build fresh, and buy some new machinery? And then most likely not make a do of it after all? Not for me, old chap! I've 'ad enough. You won't catch me chuckin' good ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... his wrinkled face reddened with a blush as he answered, "You know what Bonaparte said, sir, 'Il faut laver son linge sale en famille.' There is no need, sir, for you to brag that your father was a—a medical man. He came of a most ancient but fallen house, and was obliged to reconstruct the family fortunes as many a man of good family has done before him. You are like the fellow in Sterne, sir—the marquis who came to demand his sword again. Your father got back yours for you. You are a man of landed estate, by Gad, sir, and ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... overthrow of our present partial legislation, that every American citizen, whether man or woman, may have a voice in the laws by which we are governed. We do not aim at idle distinction, but while we would pull down our present worn-out and imperfect human institutions, we would help to reconstruct them upon a new ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... betook herself to her neat little kitchen to reconstruct those cakes. She would see if it were not possible to suit her husband in this. "Let me see, he said they were too thick; I will thin them then. He said they were sour and bitter; sugar is sweet and ought to remedy that." So in went the water to thin them, and the sugar to sweeten them. "He said," ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... important a function accidental, but I do not see how we can mend the matter. Just as, if we start with the reality and ask how it may come to be known, we can only reply by invoking a feeling which shall RECONSTRUCT it in its own more private fashion; so, if we start with the feeling and ask how it may come to know, we can only reply by invoking a reality which shall RECONSTRUCT it in its own more public fashion. In either ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... original material unity and motive uniformity. But we can see now, better than formerly, that these supply a bare and imperfect sketch of the truth. We should err gravely were we to suppose it possible to reconstruct, with the help of any knowledge our race is ever likely to possess, the real and complete history of our admirable system. "The subtlety of nature," Bacon says, "transcends in many ways the subtlety of the intellect ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... possible. In general it may be said that the two stood on much the same level of mentality, but that they had specialised on different subjects, the Normans on war and politics, the Irish on culture. Of the many writers who help us to reconstruct the period we ought to signalise one, Mrs A.S. Green, who to a rare scholarship adds something rarer, the genius of common sense. This is not the place in which to recall the whole substance of her "Making of Ireland and its Undoing" and her "Irish Nationality"; ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... the Indians or in the letter he had written to the Agent. His "one best bet", as he put it, was to make her scenes as soon as possible, before they had time to reach him with a letter; therefore he must reconstruct his scenario immediately, so that he could get to work in the morning, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... symptoms. In hysteria, too, we at once find a series of perfectly correct thoughts equivalent to our conscious thoughts, of whose existence, however, in this form we can learn nothing and which we can only subsequently reconstruct. If they have forced their way anywhere to our perception, we discover from the analysis of the symptom formed that these normal thoughts have been subjected to abnormal treatment and have been transformed into the symptom by means of condensation ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... however, we accept the Darwinian theory, that the race has been a gradual growth from the lower to a higher form of life, and that the story of the fall is a myth, we can exonerate the snake, emancipate the woman, and reconstruct a more rational religion for the nineteenth century, and thus escape all the perplexities of the Jewish mythology as of no more importance than those of ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the HERALD of that date lay half-opened on Sydenham's old desk. It will be remembered that Sydenham had been detained on some of Mr. Sandford's private business, and it was perfectly feasible to reconstruct its details. Mr. Sandford had been coached in his part by Indiman, and the preparations for the experiment being finally perfected, Sydenham was called in. He appeared, dressed in the same clothes that he had worn the month before, looking a little pale, indeed, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... is exercised in the effort to recall or reconstruct the scenes of the past and in discovering relations ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... same number. During this process you retire, but on your return you indicate with unerring accuracy the coin at which he left off. In order to show (apparently) that the trick does not depend on any arithmetical principle, you reconstruct the Q, or invite the spectators to do so, with a different number of coins, but the result ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... of time the young inventor and the aeronaut began to repair the damage done to the Red Cloud by colliding with the tower. The most important part to reconstruct was the propeller, and Mr. Sharp decided to make two, instead of one, in order to have an extra one in ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... case of authors who wrote before the invention of printing, scholars are familiar with the process of comparing the various MSS. of a single work in order from such a comparison to reconstruct the archetype or original MS., from which the various existing MSS. are derived. Similarly in Folk-Lore, by comparing the different versions of a single tale, it may be possible to arrive, with tolerable certainty, at the original story, of which the different versions ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... been able to visit some islands whose language I know just enough of to see that they supply a valuable link in the great Polynesian chain. One might almost get together all the disjecta membra and reconstruct the original Polynesian tongue. But chiefly, of course, my information about Melanesia may be interesting. I have begun by getting together numerals in forty quite unknown dialects. I will give, at all events, short skeleton grammars too of some. But we have ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and Other Expenditures by Railroads.—When railroads are required to repair a viaduct under which they operate,[237] or to reconstruct a bridge or provide means for passing water for drainage through their embankment,[238] or to sprinkle that part of the street occupied by them,[239] their property is not taken without due process of law. But if ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... single restoration in the proper sense of the word. Not that we mean to say that the different temple models given in our Plates II., III., and IV., and in our Fig. 173, are creations of our fancy. No one of the four pretends to reconstruct one famous building more than another. They are abstract types, each representing, in its general features, one of the varieties into which Assyro-Chaldaean temples may be divided. The arrangements in which the originality of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the time of railroads had a picturesque charm which it has since lost except in remote districts. We learn something about it in Miss Mitford's sketches of "Our Village" and in Miss Edgeworth's "Tales." From such books it is delightful to reconstruct in imagination some of these rural scenes; the wide meadows where the cowslips grow, the brooks running beneath the hawthorns and alders, the lanes winding between hedgerows, the green common where the cricketers play, the low cottages ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... that nameless atmosphere which lingers for long in an apartment which has become associated with tragedy. Instinctively they all moved quietly and spoke in hushed voices. Nigel sat in the chair where his uncle had been found dead and made a mental effort to reconstruct the events which must ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the trail had been made by the Indian to whom the trapping rights of the district belonged. At once the two men began to spy here and there eagerly, trying to reconstruct from the meagre vestiges of occupation who the camper had been and what he ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... the navy in France suffices to show that the speculative maladministration of the French finances has been so great as to make it quite certain that any 'honest government' coming into power must reconstruct the system of the public indebtedness. That is an operation which can hardly be carried out by the most scrupulously honest government without very great profits to the financiers concerned in it, and I only ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... neighbour, of the point of view of a foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, moment by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think, then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past, to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of which we know too little to ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... one has ever attempted to reconstruct for himself a portion of the past from materials of this kind,—from original documents, and party writings which, prompted by hate or personal friendship, are intended for defence or attack, and yet are withal exceedingly incomplete,—he will have felt the need of ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... the rocks to take, not a sketch,—for who can sketch a mountain torrent?—but to note down on paper a kind of diagram, from which afterwards I might reconstruct an image of this feathery, frisky ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of her passion (increased, as is ever the case with women, even the worst, by the sacrifices it had cost her), and if that passion paused, by the energy of her ambition, which already began to scheme and reconstruct new scaffolds to repair the ruined walls of the past,—Lucretia as yet had not detected what was so apparent to the simple sense of Mr. Fielden. That Mainwaring was grave and thoughtful and abstracted, she ascribed only to his grief at the thought of her ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Almighty power. It was the sacredness of a great cause that shed such a lustre on the character of Washington. How unimpressible the victories of Charlemagne, disconnected with that work of civilization which he was sent into the world to reconstruct! How devoid of interest and grandeur were the battles of Marston Moor and Worcester, without reference to those principles of religious liberty which warmed the soul of Cromwell! The conflicts of Bunker Hill and Princeton were insignificant ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... to reconstruct the Liturgy in post-Caroline times was that which grew naturally enough out of the Revolution of 1688. In every previous crisis of political change, the Prayer Book had felt the tremor ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... then they played chess, by which Gus was one florin richer. A third game was in progress, but Todd managed to tip over the board when he was "going to mate in five moves." Cotton thereupon said he had had enough, but Gus avariciously tried to reconstruct the positions. He failed dismally, and Cotton laughed sweetly. Now Cotton's laugh would almost make his chum's hair curl, so he retorted pretty sweetly himself, "I say, Jim. I can't get out of my head that awful hammering you ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... secrets, but I could not follow them; too late I learnt that only the good and pure can do that. Much of the result of years of toil I destroyed the other night, but I still know enough to empower you to reconstruct what I annihilated; you can learn more in one year than I learnt in ten. I am grateful to you, and, if you wish it, I will show ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... line here, one there, with much left to the imagining—such will serve best for the painting of a picture like this—a picture wherein every ordinary bond of human life, the nexus of man's society, is shattered. Where everything must strive to reconstruct itself from the dust. Where the future, if any such there may be, must rise from the ashes ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... be left alone. In response to a vague stirring of something within him—a thing which might have been the primitive underman yawning and stretching to its awakening—he had been trying in the window-facing intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood. As yet there was little familiarity save in the broader outlines. Where he remembered only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... this profoundly depressing milieu, by the aid of which, if the fate of London and Liverpool were to-morrow as that of Herculaneum and Pompeii, we should be able to reconstruct the gutters of our Imperial cities (little changed in essentials since the days of Domitian), Gissing turned his sketch-book to the scenery of rural England. He makes no attempt at the rich colouring of Kingsley or Blackmore, but, as page after page of Ryecroft testifies ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... into chemical and organic compounds, by natural forces, upon the cessation of which, it is liberated by nature's great destroyer, and re-appears in the world of elements. Thus, man is formed out of the very dust by means of energies which reconstruct the crude, inert matter, and to dust he ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... of those quaint survivals which enable us to reconstruct the past topographically, in the same way as the silent letters in a word, apparently meaningless, enable us to reconstruct the philological past. It is no longer a lane, but a narrow passage, and about midway down is crossed by a little street called ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... would be so unexchangeable that they would do duty for many others, the adjective placed in such an ingenious and definite fashion that it could not be displaced, opening such perspectives that the reader could dream for whole weeks on its sense at once precise and complex, could record the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of the characters, revealed by the gleams of this ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at night,[18] when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a contrary impression, and association is turned against itself.[19] ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... creature over there actually eyed me when I smoked that last cig." The dreadful old creature was Mrs. Conover, who found it difficult to reconstruct herself to the present century. "I should think it would be awfully stupid living here. Now, isn't ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis |
