"Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... creating the crusade against witches. These are conclusions of some moment and a caution must be inserted. We have been treating of a period where facts are few and information fragmentary. Under such circumstances conclusions can only be tentative. Perhaps the most that can be said of them is that ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... The first movement expressed a sombre and virile struggle, the Romance a memory full of passionate but sad desire, followed by a slow uplifting, faltering and tentative, towards the distant dawn. Out of this a clear and melodious phrase developed itself with splendid modulations. The sentiment was very different from that which animated Bach's Adagio; it was more human, more earthly, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... while there was no more action. Then, after a few tentative butts at the door, the battering started again. This time, Ed wasn't so lucky. The battering stopped when he fired, but he got an impression that the carrier ran off. He thought he might have hit ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... I told you before, the President does not wish to offend the sensibilities of any one by premature action, but he is, of course, enormously interested in initiating at least tentative conversations. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... here: "Vous ne me parlez, ma chere enfant, que des avantages de la position que je vous offre, mais mon devoir est de vous signaler aussi ses dangers; ils sont grands, je serai sans doute a vos cotes l'objet de plus d'une tentative d'assassinat; independamment de cela, je dois vous confier que des complots serieux se fomentent dans l'armee. J'ai l'[oe]il ouvert de ce cote et je compte bien d'une maniere ou d'autre prevenir toute explosion; le moyen sera peut-etre la guerre. La encore ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... and mathematics of medieval culture are history, economics, ethics, and sociology. Although these subjects are as yet merely in the making, thousands of students are flocking to their investigation, and are going out to try their tentative knowledge in College Settlements and City Missions and Children's Aid Societies. The best instincts of generous youth are becoming enlisted in these living themes. And why should our daughters remain aloof from the most absorbing work ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... quick movement, and turned him, not towards the gate, but in the opposite direction, which further puzzled Shannon. But he was a stock horse first and a hurdle racer as an afterthought; and a good stock horse knows his rider's mind, if that rider is a good man. He made one tentative movement towards his paddock mates, now moving away towards the gate; then, feeling the touch of Wally's hand on the bit, and the light pressure of his knee, he decided that some new game was on ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... today the representatives of the Church in the different States met to adopt a constitution. There had been tentative efforts to effect an organization and adopt a Book of Common Prayer, all of which were overruled by the good providence of God. Many not of our fold desired a liturgy. Benjamin Franklin published at his own expense a revised copy ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... any action by the moving body to regulate the fall; nevertheless, the descent takes place according to a scientific trajectory, the 'parabola,' of which the section of a cone by a plane furnished the prototype to the geometer's speculations. A figure, which was at first but a tentative glimpse, becomes a reality by the fall of a pebble out of ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... greater importance, his team knew him. They were partly of French-Canadian stock, not as large as Farquhar McNaughton's big, fat blacks, but "as full of spirit as a bottle of whisky," as Aleck himself would say. Their first tentative pulls at the stump were taken with caution, until their driver and themselves had taken the full measure of the strength of the enemy. But when once Aleck had made up his mind that victory was possible, and had given them the ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... deepened. He avoided Saunders's tentative gaze. "I reckon I won't, to-day, anyway," he faltered. "I never was much of a hand to hang about ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... myself and my obscure problems (of which such an Olympian as Arncliffe could, naturally, have no conception), it was all somewhat insubstantial and remote; rather of the stuff of which dreams are compounded. And so, watching my opportunity, I presently ventured a tentative inquiry as to the direction in which I might hope to justify the terms of Mr. Arncliffe's letter, and be ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... a tentative list. He named four: first, Farrell Kennedy, who was in town, and said nobody should go if he didn't; Frank Elpaso, the Texan; the Englishman, Tommie Meggeson; and Wickwire, if he could be located—any one of them, Lefever knew, ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... gathering her draperies about her with a tentative hint of leave-taking: "I may go home and tell him that you will not put off ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... had returned from the 15th Brigade, the Germans attacked and broke through. They had been heavily reinforced and our tentative offensive had been replaced by a ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... sharpshooters of the countryside. Its duty was to go forward and make connection with the Scotch and Gurkha troops with which it was brigaded. The Afghans knew this, and knew too, after their first tentative shots, that they were dealing with a raw regiment. Thereafter they devoted themselves to the task of keeping the Fore and Aft on the strain. Not for anything would they have taken equal liberties with a seasoned corps—with the wicked little ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... knocked than the door was opened by Maisie. He was slightly embarrassed at being brought face to face with her thus suddenly after the last scene that they had shared. He entered in a tentative manner, only just crossing the threshold, as though he had not much ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... animals or plants? Was Nature then so poor that forsooth only two lines of differentiation were at the beginning open for her effort? May we not rather believe that life's tree may have risen at first in hundreds of tentative trunks of which two have become in the progress of the ages so far dominant as to entirely obscure less progressive types? The Myxomycetes are independent; all that we may attempt is to assert their near kinship with one or other of ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... The tentative views of Mr. Spencer which we have just discussed, are carried much further, and attempts have been made to work them out in great detail, by many American naturalists, whose best representative is Dr. E.D. Cope of Philadelphia.[202] This school endeavours to explain all the chief ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... vast and fruitful as it appears to-day, is even yet, for its most important results, entirely in the tentative state; its very formation-stir and whirling trials and essays more splendid and picturesque, to my thinking, than the accomplish'd growths and shows of other lands, through European history, or Greece, or all the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... took a tentative step forward, and Patsie followed in his wake. Half a yard from Pixie's chair they stopped short with eager, craning faces, with bodies braced in readiness for a ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... excellence of this article was at once acknowledged on all sides, even by the press; and I appear to have made some impression in the highest administrative circles, for I shortly afterwards heard from my friend Rudolf Liechtenstein, that tentative advances had been made to him with a view to his accepting the position of manager, associated with which there was certainly an idea of asking me to become conductor of the Grand Opera. Among the reasons which caused this proposal to fall through was the fear, Liechtenstein informed me, that ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... to the disputants who do not define substance) had been invented by Peter of Blois, but not yet enjoined upon the Church by the Lateran Council of 1215. The language of the earlier fathers, of St. Bernard, did not suffice. Peter Lombard's tentative terms had given way to less reserved speech. Thomas Aquinas, not yet born, was to unite the rival factions which forked now into Berengarius, who objected to the very terms Body of Christ, &c., always used for the Sacrament; ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... happened will be long remembered in Coniston. A tentative chord or two from a guitar, and then the startled village was listening with all its might to the voices of two young men singing "When I first went up to Harvard"—probably meant to disclose the identity of the serenaders, as if that were necessary! Coniston, never having listened to grand opera, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... know about the Suffrage movement from someone less generously impatient than Georgina, for Georgina always lost her temper about it and to put it fairly ranted, this at any rate was serene and confident, and she asked tentative ill-formed questions and felt her way among Miss Alimony's profundities. She had her doubts, her instinctive doubts about this campaign of violence, she doubted its wisdom, she doubted its rightness, and she perceived, but she found it difficult ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Cabinet on a hundred matters Lloyd George became impressed with the necessity of increasing the size of the British army, already millions strong. The voluntary system had hitherto been relied on, and there was strong opposition, both in the Cabinet and in the country, to tentative proposals for conscription. Lloyd George took an early opportunity of showing that he was on the side of the conscriptionists. There was an outburst of protests, but it proved of no avail, and it was largely through Lloyd George that conscription in Britain became an established ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... valour, but because the presence of the German colony of Kiaochow on Chinese soil and the activity of German cruisers in the Yellow Sea brought the war to China's very doors. Vaguely conscious that this might spell disaster to his own ambitious plans, Yuan Shih-kai was actually in the midst of tentative negotiations with the German Legation regarding the retrocession of the Kiaochow territory when the news reached him that Japan, after some rapid negotiations with her British Ally, had filed an ultimatum on Germany, peremptorily demanding the handing-over of all those interests that had been forcibly ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... progress of the work, and was consulted about several small changes from the original, tentative plans. He agreed to them, and then, as it was only a question of waiting until his craft was done, he decided to call on some of his friends ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... and I must just assume it. It follows from what we said in an earlier chapter to be the way of the child's learning by imitation. It will appear true, I trust, to any one who may take the pains to observe the child's tentative endeavours to act up to social usages in the family and school. One may then actually see the growth of the sort of judgment which I am describing. Psychologists are coming to see that even the child's ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... little mare, with kicking and biting propensities which quite threw the roan's into the shade. She also had a peg of ignominy, and three times a day I had to dance perilously round my precious pair with a tentative body-brush and hoof-pick. The scene generally ended in the pegs coming away from the loose sand, and a perspiring chase through the lines. I had some practice, too, in driving in a team, for one of our drivers "went sick," ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... his standards being the most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly appealed to, and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he is better off than his poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and hair-splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have had woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... a portentous milestone. To his unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together that could have but one conclusion. He found himself reflecting upon that—to him—most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of gladness and doubt. For even in his exaltation he could not visualize Sophie Carr as an ideal minister's ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... development may be explained. The airship and aeroplane in the present stage of evolution possess no economic value. True, cross-country cruises by airship have been inaugurated, and, up to a point, have proved popularly, if not commercially, successful, while tentative efforts have been made to utilise the aeroplane as a mail-carrier. Still, from the view-point of the community at large aerial travel is as remote as ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... in the 15th century; Cape Verde subsequently became a trading center for African slaves and later an important coaling and resupply stop for whaling and transatlantic shipping. Following independence in 1975, and a tentative interest in unification with Guinea-Bissau, a one-party system was established and maintained until multi-party elections were held in 1990. Cape Verde continues to exhibit one of Africa's most stable democratic governments. Repeated droughts during the second half of the 20th century ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... dollars a week. And the lady had been sought by prosperous men! The lowliness of Lincoln's origin went ill with her high notions of her family's importance. She was downright, high-tempered, dogmatic, but social; he was devious, slow to wrath, tentative, solitary; his very appearance, then as afterward, was against him. Though not the hideous man he was later made out to be—the "gorilla" of enemy caricaturists—he was rugged of feature, with a lower lip that tended to protrude. His ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... in the cradle-stage of human life. Anthropologists are rendering a valuable service in their attempts to explore the baffling region of primitive man's mind, and they have hit upon some very suggestive clues, though so far only tentative ones, to the psychological experiences and attitudes which set man's feet on the {xvi} momentous religious trail. At every stage of its long and devious history, religion has been some sort of life-adjustment to realities which were felt to ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... town, at least Mrs. Wesson said so in her column, where she also prophesied a program of festivities for the coming six months. This was reassuring as Mrs. Wesson was supposed to know, and anyway there were signs of it already—a first tentative outbreak of parties, little dinners cropping up here and there. People who did things were trailing back from Europe, bringing new clothes and ideas with which to abash the stay-at-homes. Big houses were opening and little houses that had been ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... these the leader, sometimes the unique example of the school, stands out great, but particular and clear, on a background vague or dark. He is as stupendous, yet as sharp and certain, as a mountain facing the morning, with only sky behind. In the second the originator, if there be one, is vague, tentative, perhaps unknown. More often many minor men together introduce a slow and ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... years the two companies waged a relentless war, which never ceased until Mr. Wilson disbanded his company. Carl Rankin, who was a Columbus boy and an old friend of Alfred's called on Alfred. He advised that he was dissatisfied with his surroundings and a tentative partnership agreement was entered into for the next season. However, the arrangements went no further as Mr. Rankin's health failed him rapidly and it was not long until minstrelsy lost one of the most versatile performers ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... party organization, and to get away from real evils in the form of undue control by organized minorities with the support of organized capital. None of these expedients is an end in itself. They are tentative, experimental. They are movements not towards something definite but away from something definite. They may be inconvenient or distasteful to some of us, but no one need be seriously disturbed by the idea that they threaten ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... man for another—fruit of the ineradicable sex antagonism which so often colours the judgments men pass on women and women on men. Then had come love, against which he had striven in vain, and gradually, out of love, had grown a new tentative belief which the pitiful culmination of the Raynham episode had suddenly ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... would not admit to herself that he was any way in the wrong. She would entertain no suspicion of him. She would have no jealousy in her heart, for how could jealousy exist with a perfect faith? And so she had repeatedly reasoned herself out of these tentative feelings, and resolved that she would do neither her husband nor Mrs. Lorraine the injustice of being vexed with them. So it was now. What more natural than that Frank should recommend to any friend the duets of which he was particularly fond? What more natural than that this young lady should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... The climate of Scotland had not done with them yet: for three days they lay storm-stayed in Poolewe, and when they put to sea on the morning of the fourth, the sailors prayed them for God's sake not to attempt the passage. Their setting out was indeed merely tentative; but presently they had gone too far to return, and found themselves committed to double Rhu Reay with a foul wind and a cross sea. From half-past eleven in the morning until half-past five at night, they were in immediate and ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been sometimes more conspicuous than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them. After many hesitations, and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that intellectual partnership however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partnership. It became, indeed, impossible for us to refuse ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... the old man, "in the matters of resumption; of the sovereign rights of States and federal interference, you would imply that a certain conservative tentative policy is to be promulgated until after the electoral committee have given their verdict." I looked for help towards the lady, and observed feebly that he had very ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... motor, and moreover a powerful organ, appropriate and effective, obtained through internal recasting and metamorphosis, like the wings with which an insect is provided after its transformation. In every living organism, necessity, through tentative effort and selections, thus produces the possible and requisite organ. In India, five hundred years before our era, it was Buddhism; in Arabia, six hundred years after our era, it was Islam; in our western societies it is Christianity. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... pen trade, which has since grown to such enormous dimensions, was only in a tentative condition. Josiah Mason, in conjunction with Perry, of The Morning Chronicle newspaper, was experimenting, and two brothers, named respectively John and William Mitchell, were actually making, by a tedious method, a fairly good article. ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... and then turned shortly in at the sidewalk. "It will hurt no one if I do that." Above Flavilla's flushed face, a tentative finger on her wrist, Frazee's expression grew serious. "I'll tell you this," he asserted; "she's sick. You had better call Markley to-day. And until he comes don't give her any solids. You can ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a tentative finger into her mouth. When she drew it forth, it was with a pained and surprised expression. The place where the tooth should have been ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... say on the other side, that of the mutability of species, and it is these tentative views that his commentators have assumed to have been his real sentiments or belief, and for this reason place Buffon among the evolutionists, though he had little or no idea of evolution in the enlarged and ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... nothing final about a logical rendering of experience. Its value is not contained in itself; its significance is that of standpoint, outlook, method. It intervenes between the more casual, tentative, and roundabout experiences of the past, and more controlled and orderly experiences of the future. It gives past experience in that net form which renders it most available and most significant, most fecund for future experience. ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... true or speaking man (Homo), who was gradually evolved from the preceding stage by the advance of animal language into articulate human speech. As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only express tentative opinions. It was probably during the Diluvial period in the hotter zone of the Old World, either on the mainland in tropical Africa or Asia or on an earlier continent (Lemuria—now sunk below the waves of the Indian Ocean), which ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... year after year to be distracted with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... more, to Dorothy, so she was obliged to make a tentative promise, at least, that she would go with him to the castle the very first moment ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... adequate poetry for the growing mind of the nation. In contrast with the expanding prose, it seems to shrink and fade before our eyes. Its only means of enlargement seems to be in forgetting its own traditions and assimilating itself to the prose. Moreover, we have traces of various tentative sallies; one poet trying rhymes,[143] another trying hexameters,[144] which reminds us of the efforts and essays of the unsatisfied poetic genius in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Benedictine revival had drawn off the interest ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... first race, but of sporting ancestry and unable to forget it, especially when Charlie's adventures in the Green River under-world cheated it of exercise too long, was remembering it now, and bolting down the hilly little street, settled at last into a jerky and tentative gait with the air of accepting their guidance until it could arrange further plans, but ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... greatness so founded be gaped at in all its features or not. My friend and I were alone to gape at them most often while, for the unfailing impression of them, on our way to watch the casting of our figure, we extended our circuit of the place. To which I may add, as another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of the garment of Roman association of which one kept renewing one's consciousness, the half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming—with its quite shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... frequently libelled in this manner by the "Yellow Press," and represented both by pen and pencil as the ringleader and instigator of the so-called "conspiracies"; this accusation, at first tentative, later grew increasingly clear and unmistakable. The campaign of calumny in which even the more respectable Press took its share, was, however, directed more particularly against the Military Attache, Captain von Papen, and the Naval Attache, Captain Boy-Ed, ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... with a curved hand and gracefully separated fingers; it was a staccato movement and her body followed it after an instant's poise of hesitation, head thrust a little forward, eyes inquiring and a tentative smile, although she knew precisely who was there. You would have been aware at once that she was an actress. She entered the room with a little stride and then crossed it quickly, the train of her morning gown—it cried out of luxury with the cheapest voice—taking folds of great audacity ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... experiences are doubtless due in a considerable degree to a difference in seasons, to want of acclimation in the seed sown, to a difference in varieties and to want of knowledge on the part of the growers, whose work, heretofore, has been largely tentative. Five different varieties have been grown, and these have not shown equal degrees of hardiness. But the rapidly increasing sales of seed point to the conclusion that larger areas are being sown every year. ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... the change. From the pier where we landed, a small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was fishing; he hooked a little fingerling. At the first tentative tug on his line he set up a shrill clamor. At that there came running a fat, kindly looking old priest in a long gown and a shovel hat; and a market woman came, who had arms like a wrestler and skirts that stuck out like a ballet dancer's; and a soldier in baggy red pants came; and thirty or forty ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... scarcely hearing the girl's words. At her announcement of going to the island he began to make tentative plans to accompany her. There might be a lot he could do. And she sure needed help. He wondered if he could offer his ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... me landscape-painting if I had asked him, and I did at a later period study water-color with him; but his practice in oil did not suit me, for this reason: it was entirely tentative, he was constantly demolishing his work, so that it was hard to see how a pupil could possibly follow him. The advantage in working under his eye would have been in receiving a great variety of sound artistic ideas; ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... a gong from the car barn beyond came like a reminder of his purpose, a summons to make a tentative effort, at least, to achieve it. So he turned resolutely away, leaving academic dreams in the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... With a tentative list of what he needed, Mr. Alcando went to write a letter to his railroad officials, asking them to order ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... for while France was stamping out revolt, and Great Britain felt increasingly the drag of Ireland, Pitt encountered an antagonist of unsuspected strength. Over against his diffuse and tentative policy stood that of Bonaparte, clear-cut, and for the present everywhere victorious. While Pitt pursued that will o' the wisp, a money-bought peace, the Corsican was bullying the Austrian negotiators at Udine and Campo Formio. Finally his gasconnades carried the day; and on 17th October ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... ever occurred between us. I called upon Senator Morrill of Vermont, and together we made a visit to the President. I spoke of the features of the proclamation that seemed to be objectionable. He said that "the measure was tentative" only, and that until the experiment had been tried no other proclamation would be issued. Upon that I said in substance that the Republican Party might accept the proclamation as an experiment, but that it was contrary to the ideas of the party, and that a ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... into his confidence. If Hill had told his master—even Birchill would realise the risk of that—there would be no valuables to get. Next, we come to Sir Horace Fewbanks's unexpected return. According to Hill's story, he made some tentative efforts to commence a confession as soon as he saw his employer, but Sir Horace was upset about something and was too impatient to listen to a word. Is such a story reasonable or likely? Hill says that Sir Horace had always treated ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... Comedy arose out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been many kinds of the Middle Comedy, many intermediate gradations, between the Old and the New; and this is the opinion of some men of learning. And, indeed, historically ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... censuring those who had accepted the invitation. The prince offered seats to his strange visitors, tea was served, and a general conversation sprang up. Everything was done most decorously, to the considerable surprise of the intruders. A few tentative attempts were made to turn the conversation to the events of the day, and a few indiscreet questions were asked; but Muishkin replied to everybody with such simplicity and good-humour, and at the same time with so much dignity, and showed such confidence in the good ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... books, correspondence, and other documents, and studied maps until I felt as if I had lived in the country concerned and was personally acquainted with the Dutch governors on the Cuyuni and the Spanish monks on the Orinoco. As a result lines more or less tentative were prepared by each of us, Judge Brewer and myself agreeing very closely, and the others not being very distant from us at any important point. One former prime minister of Great Britain I learned, during this investigation, to respect greatly,—Lord ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... this dustbin for the rubbish of all nations. Here the problem is worst—here the victims are weakest and most manageable. London will bear what would stir a riot in Birmingham or Leeds. Make the experiment as partial and as tentative as you please—give the Home Office power to extend or revoke it at ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pleasure. From certain signs about the Bartlett house it was apparent that preparations were in progress for an event of importance. Paperhangers and cleaners came and went, consultations were held daily concerning new rugs and curtains. Miss Enid and Miss Isobel gave tentative orders and Madam promptly countermanded them. Workmen were engaged and dismissed and reengaged. The door to the room at the head of the stairs, which he knew to be Eleanor's, now stood open, revealing a pink-and-white bower. Stray remarks now and then concerning caterers ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... other. She was impatient to be rid of him. Like her mother Earth, having occupied her time for lo! these several years in the building of an ideal from such unpromising materials as were then at hand, she was ready to sweep those tentative makings—confessed failures now that she found the type she really wanted—swiftly, ruthlessly to ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... lacked cohesion, that Pointillism in particular has led painting into an aimless path. It has been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day, after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the "Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious painter, Besnard, imposes upon the Salons, where the elect draw inspiration from him. We can here only indicate ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... in creative work, for playing hooky. Write and run away and live to write another day. So I wired the Budders I was coming and took the train the same day, and when I reached San Francisco I found them all packed up for this Mexican trip,—indeed, they were sitting on their trunks with a tentative ticket for me in their hands. And I was pleased pink to come. The Budders (doesn't Budder sowd as if I ad a code id by ed?) are nice, comfortable creatures,—the sort who are called the salt of the earth but in reality aren't anything so ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Life,—what can we say except that out of the Eater there comes Strength; out of the Unwise there comes not Wisdom! Shams are burnt up; nay, what as yet is the peculiarity of France, the very Cant of them is burnt up. The new Realities are not yet come: ah no, only Phantasms, Paper models, tentative Prefigurements of such! In France there are now Four Million Landed Properties; that black portent of an Agrarian Law is as it were realised! What is still stranger, we understand all Frenchmen have 'the right of duel;' the Hackney-coachman with the Peer, if insult be given: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... slave-market and the infamies of the cotton-field filled all the land with shame reformers arose, declaring that the attempt to compress and confine liberty would end in explosion. In that hour Northern men made tentative overtures looking to the purchase of all slaves. But slavery, Delilah-like, made the southern leaders drunk with the cup of sorcery. They scorned the proposition. In the light of subsequent events we ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... came near to the difficult analysis, to spring from the relation of one woman who was slowly but surely being forced to lay down what she had prized most in her womanhood and another who, slowly but surely, also became aware that hers was the prize in her turn, and thrust forward a tentative hand to grasp it. If I am at all right in this notion, then it is plain that feelings slight and faint, although not non-existent in ordinary homes, might be intensified in such a family as ours, and that a new and great impulse would have been imparted to them by such an artificial accentuation ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... otherwise would have been to draw down a storm of ridicule. There are certain traditions in school life as firmly established as the doctrine of infant damnation in the good old days of theology. Secretly, however, Skippy adored the first warm contact of the tentative toes, the slow ecstasy of the mounting ripple over the sinking body and the long, drowsy languor of complete submersion. It was the apotheosis of happiness when all the aches and vexations of the day disappeared in a narcotic reverie, when ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... a sudden a great chorus of exultant cries rang, the force scattered, shaking fists and weapons, preparing for a tentative charge; and ere I could stop her My Lady had sprung upright, to mount upon a rock and all in view to hold open hand above her head. The sunshine glinted upon her hair; a fugitive little breeze bound her shabby gown closer ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... slanting upwards, their light grey darkened under golden lashes, the brows definitely though palely marked. Her mouth was pale coral-colour, and the small upper lip, lifting when she smiled as she was smiling now, showed teeth of an infantile, milky whiteness. The smile was charming, timid, tentative, ingratiating, like a young girl's, and her eyes were timid, too, and a ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of even more pressing importance, when the Navy depended upon the merchant service for ships, as well as for men; when the war fleets of the nation were composed of impressed ships, as well as manned by impressed sailors. These various laws had been tentative in character. Both firmness of purpose and continuity of effort were lacking to them; due doubtless to the comparative weakness of the nation in the scale of European states up to the seventeenth century. During the reigns of the first two Stuarts, this weakness was emphasized ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... even their form of government, which may be better adapted to their needs than a broader democracy. But of the German modern war-philosophy the world outside can hold but one opinion. It might have been supported as a purely tentative or speculative philosophy, but it could have been promoted in practice only by a crazy ruler. I was not therefore surprised to find circulated in Paris an article by an American physician which I had permitted to be published in America ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... on Gideon, "that you might care to engage in some business here in Newbern—establish yourself, soundly and prosperously, as it were, so that your son, though maturing under different circumstances, would yet feel a pride in your standing in the community. Of course, this is tentative—I'm sounding you, only. You may have quite other ideas. You may have laid out an entirely different future for yourself in some other field. But I wanted to let you know that we stand ready to finance liberally any business you would care to engage in, either here or elsewhere. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... fact Amber was hoping the Rolands, with Sophia Farrell, might linger somewhere en route, remembering that the girl had discussed a tentative project to stop over between ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... laughter, in which all joined, and Vane explained the machine a little more, and above all that this was only a tentative idea and just to see if the mechanism ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... than a quarter of a century since Mr. Hugh Thomson, arriving from Coleraine in all the ardour of one-and-twenty, invaded the strongholds of English illustration. He came at a fortunate moment. After a few hesitating and tentative attempts upon the newspapers, he obtained an introduction to Mr. Comyns Carr, then engaged in establishing the English Illustrated Magazine for Messrs. Macmillan. His recommendation was a scrap-book of minutely ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... be done. That's neither here nor there, though, now. The thing that I want to point out is that one can't live and hold a relationship such as ours without confidence. You and I had that, I thought. I don't see my way clear to ever hold more than a tentative relationship with you on this basis. The thing is too tangled. There's ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... disposal has unfortunately not been sufficient to enable me to engage on any very careful tests as to the sensitiveness of Lola's skin. Yet I have made certain preliminary notes as to what I hope to do in this connexion, and have also begun with a few tentative attempts. I first tried her sensibility to various degrees of warmth by teaching her the use of the thermometer. I made a drawing of a thermometer—according to its actual size—and added principal numbers and ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... deep interest to the introduction among us of the principles of the Hindoo philosophy and religion (including the transmigration of souls), through tentative articles in our magazines; by which there is opening to us a way of escape from that heaven one exponent of which is, to lie in ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... but unfortunately, as the patient at stool gave a sudden bend to the left, his testicle slipped up into the abdomen and was completely lost to palpation. Orchitis threatened, but the symptoms subsided; the patient was kept under observation for some weeks, and then as a tentative measure, discharged to duty. Shortly afterward he returned, saying that he was ill, and that while lifting a sack of corn his testicle came partly down, causing him great pain. At the time of report his left testicle was in position, but the right could not ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... say, I was no further advanced in the morning than at midnight, but Kennedy seemed to have evolved at least a tentative programme. It started with a visit to the public library, where he carefully went over the ground already gone over by the police. Finding nothing, he concluded that Miss Gilbert had not found what she wanted at the library and ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... with a direct traceable salutary effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her seriousness, and gave even her tentative remarks an ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... action. He rose with dignity and buttoned up his waistcoat; he pulled down his coat and gave his cravat a hitch; he rubbed a tentative hand on the lump where the pirates had bumped him; he scrambled over the side onto the cabin-boat deck, and entered upon ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur's reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each with its ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... totally incurious. He had lived a sort of animal life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative excursions around the room on legs that shook when he walked. The snows came and almost covered the cabin, and David had read a great deal, and talked at intervals. David had tried to fill up the gap in his mind. That was how he learned that David was his father's brother, and that his ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... chapters, introductions, "experimental essays and discarded beginnings," treatises with picturesque and imaginative titles, succeeded one another in that busy work-shop; and these first drafts and tentative essays have in them some of the freshest and most felicitous forms of his thoughts. At one time his enterprise, connecting itself with his own life and mission, rose before his imagination and kindled his feelings, and embodied ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... fully the theory of knowledge. It opens with a comparison of the Socratic method to midwifery; it delivers the mind of the thoughts with which it is in travail. The first tentative definition of knowledge is that it is sensation. This is in agreement with the Protagorean doctrine that man is the measure of all things. Yet sensation implies change, whereas we cannot help thinking that objects retain their identity; if knowledge ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... with the name of an individual author, but is found in proverbs or in the folk-epics of the nations, must have originated in the minds of individual leaders. My aim here is more modest: I have made my little pilgrimage through literature to find out in a tentative fashion whether the supply of psychology, outside of science, is really so rich and valuable as is usually believed. What I wish to offer, therefore, is only a first collection of psychological statements, which the prescientific psychologists have proclaimed, and surely will go on proclaiming, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... convinced that uncertainty is essential to the spiritual life; and his works are saturated by the idea that where uncertainty ceases, stagnation must begin; that our light must be wavering, and our progress tentative, as well as our hopes chequered, and our happiness even devoid of any sense of finality, if the creative intention is not to frustrate itself; we may not see the path of progress and salvation clearly marked ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... variety of considerations that bear upon the problem, only a tentative conclusion will be ventured. Namely, that when in any industry the wage scales prior to standardization do reflect the differences in the cost of living at the different centers in which the industry is carried on, such differences should be maintained. As has been remarked, only the relatively ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... the day there had crept, with the approach of evening, that heartening crispness which heralds the advent of autumn. Already, in the valley by the ninth tee, some of the trees had begun to try on strange colours, in tentative experiment against the coming of nature's annual fancy dress ball, when the soberest tree casts off its workaday suit of green and plunges into a riot of reds and yellows. On the terrace in front of the club-house ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... which the law required. They meant to have every blade of grass eaten by their own cattle, which would be counted as improving their claims. They meant to give a homelike air of permanency to their dwellings. They had already talked over a tentative plan of bringing water to their desert claims, and had ridden over the bench-land for two days, with the plat at hand for reference, that they might be sure of choosing their claims wisely. They had prepared for every contingency save the one that had arisen—which is a common experience with us ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... at all." There was a pause, during which Katie looked at her smiling friend, and her own face dimpled bewitchingly. "This is exactly what you would have done, Elizabeth," she said. "You would have heard that tentative remark of Madam's, of course you would, and you would have stood still in the hall and explained that Stephen was your cousin, instead of your brother, and have lost your walk beyond a doubt, you know the Flamingo. Now, I was just ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... "I want to SEE it," she declared, and he was obliged to let her take the ring in her own way and examine it, and place it in every light, and compare it with others worn by her friends, and make little tentative charges of extravagance in his purchase of it, while he sat elated and adoring, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... A few tentative ventures resulted in profits so large that the company grew mightily enthusiastic over the novel manner of working. In each instance, Harris was consulted, and made his confidential statement as to the legality of the thing proposed. Mary gratified ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... tentative, the second brisker, netting no response, I deliberately tried the knob and felt the door promptly yield to me; then, with equal deliberation, I dropped my hand into my pocket where my revolver lay. If some one sprang at me and tried to crack ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... people had done heroic work under adverse conditions. A tentative theory of the mechanism involved had already been formulated, and the search had started for a means to duplicate the super-dielectricity in materials otherwise more suitable to man's needs. But as he grew familiar with the place and the job, Lancaster wondered just how adverse ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... every other important line of human needs and desires it will be found that merely tentative efforts have been made by ingenious minds resulting in inventions of greater or less promise. Many of the finest conceptions which have necessarily been set down as failures have missed fulfilling their intended missions, not so much by reason of inherent weakness, as through ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... wonder that, whilst the two bladders collapsed into one idea, they actually expanded into four names, two Latin and two Greek, gustus and gustatio, [Greek: geusis], and [Greek: geusma], which all alike express the merely tentative or exploratory act of a praegustator or professional "taster" in a king's household: what, if applied to a fluid, we ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... mind, for courting on a moonlit, shadowy road was far more satisfactory than in the bosom of the young woman's family. Not that he was bent on matrimony, but rather on several years of agreeable preparation for it, proposing to make tentative acquaintances, both numerous ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrance to his professional groove. That he was a desultory tentative student of something and everything might only have been ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... De Brissac passed violently? And his oaths of vengeance were breaths on a mirror. Ah well, I had ceased to hate him these twenty years. Did he love yonder woman, or was his fancy like mine, ephemeral? And he married Mademoiselle de Montbazon? That is droll, a kind of tentative vengeance." ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... a good deal of pleasure with his business," was the tentative response, and Abbot knew that he was expected to ask the nature of Mr. Hollins's pleasures. He was silent, however, much to his mother's disappointment, for he had heard from other sources of the frequency with which Mr. Hollins and Miss Winthrop were seen together. Finding that he would ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... any case, Ezekiel would hardly have ventured to contradict a code which enjoyed so venerable a sanction and bore the honoured name of Moses. It is easier to suppose that Ezekiel's programme is a tentative sketch, which was modified and improved upon by the authors of P. Again there was every inducement during and immediately after the exile to formulate definitely the ritual practice of pre-exilic times, and to modify it in the direction ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... was to be permitted to advance a step further. At four o'clock he was surprised by the appearance of Atwill, the "Courier's" manager. Dan had no acquaintance with Atwill, whose advent had been coincident with the "Courier's" change of ownership shortly after Dan's tentative connection with the paper began. Atwill had rarely visited the editorial department, but it was no secret that he exercised general supervision of the paper. It had been whispered among the reporters that every issue was read carefully in proof ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... dear," she went on. "I didn't forget anything! Everything meant you—all else tentative and preparatory. I knew then that the plan was for joy, as soon as we knew enough ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... "Le Petit Epicier de Montrouge," the little grocer qui cassait le sucre avec melancolie; Richepin had boldly and frankly adopted the language of the people in all its superb crudity. All this was, however, preparatory and tentative. We are waiting for our poet, he who will sing to us fearlessly of the rude industry of dustmen and the comestible glories of the marketplaces. The subjects are to hand, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... integuments than in them. Not from this class, however, do your all-the-year-round bathers come. The Arab is an exotic—a child of the Sun, loving not to disport himself in water the temperature of which shocks his tentative knuckles, as he dips them in the unaccustomed element. His wardrobe, again, is too much after the fashion of that pertaining to Canning's needy knife-grinder to make an al fresco toilette other than embarrassing. From the all-the-year-round bathers, as a nucleus, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... his youth and the obvious intelligence of the face. His eyes were masked by deeply browned glasses, for he was bent upon literary pursuits, witness the corpulent, paper-covered volume under his arm. Adjusting his chair to the angle of ease, he tipped back against the wall and made tentative ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the university was at that time divided between sundry general courses and various technical departments, the whole being somewhat tentative. These general courses were mainly three: the arts course, which embraced both Latin and Greek; the course in literature, which embraced Latin and modern languages; and the course in science, which embraced more especially modern languages in connection with ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... life."[32] If this be really the case we can understand the connection of the symbol first with Orpheus, later with Christ, as Eisler remarks: "Orpheus is connected with nearly all the mystery, and a great many of the ordinary chthonic, cults in Greece and Italy. Christianity took its first tentative steps into the reluctant world of Graeco-Roman Paganism under the benevolent ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... after a time the same difficulty should recur—that the discovery of fresh facts may discredit interpretations based upon our present knowledge. Any interpretation therefore to which we may be led by the scientific views at present entertained, must be regarded as only provisional and tentative, liable at any time to be either confirmed, amended, or rejected, as ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... which he had once had, by encroaching on his valuable time with my theological questions. As to Mr. Palmer's book, it was one which no Anglican could write but himself,—in no sense, if I recollect aright, a tentative work. The ground of controversy was cut into squares, and then every objection had its answer. This is the proper method to adopt in teaching authoritatively young men; and the work in fact was intended for students in theology. My own book, on the other hand, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... not state—whether or not the proceedings at Rome had anything to do with it, but he thought that they had a great influence on the mind of the President; that, doubtless, his action was not determined solely by that, and, therefore, that the Secretary of State first made a tentative application to see whether a proposition for another Conference was acceptable, and that he found all countries here represented answering the circular in the affirmative; that they agreed with him that a conference for this purpose ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... it is obvious that a dogmatically negative treatment of them must be premature and that the problem of Myers still awaits us as the problem of far the deepest moment for our actual psychology, whether his own tentative solutions of certain parts of it be correct ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... 2. of the Shinto religion; 3. of home affairs; 4. of foreign affairs; 5. of war; 6. of finance; 7. of judicial affairs; 8. of legislative affairs. This scheme underwent several changes, and for a long time was regarded as only tentative. ...
— Japan • David Murray
... installation of the federation and has maintained an attitude of friendly expectancy, while in no wise relinquishing the position held from the outset that the responsibilities of the several States toward us remained unaltered by their tentative ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... is to be done? The tentative suggestions of this chapter may appear to the reader inadequate. But the opportunity was missed at Paris during the six months which followed the Armistice, and nothing we can do now can repair the mischief wrought at that time. Great privation ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... soon become conscious of this close tentative scrutiny, and at first she had been inclined to resent its cool deliberateness. But, remembering that a man certainly has a right to learn well the character of the woman whom he may ask to be his wife, she felt that there was nothing in his action of which she could complain; and it soon ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... because the absence of tentative predecessors and of anything approaching an eager band of successors, suggests an unpreparedness for the discovery when it came. Thus Calisto and Melibaea (1530), an imitation of a Spanish comedy ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... gained on this journey consisted mainly in the confirmation of tentative theories — the identity of the Karaula with the Darling, and the uninterrupted course of the latter river southwards, as Major Mitchell himself had to confess, into the Murray. Furthermore it seemed now satisfactorily settled that all the inland ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way downtown in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck indulged his conscience in last night. It isn't ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... nothing of importance occurred in the year 1861. The work on the ironclads was pushed on, and there are traces of the reconnoissances by the gunboats in the rivers. In January, 1862, some tentative movements, having no particular result, were made in the direction of Columbus and up the Tennessee. There was a great desire to get the mortar-boats completed, but they were not ready in time for the opening operations at Fort Henry and Donelson, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... observed achievement, since the latter consists of the former plus or minus environmental influence. But where the amount of modification is too obscure to be detected, it is advantageous to take the demonstrated achievement as a tentative measure of the germinal basis. The problem of eugenics is to make such legal, social and economic adjustments that (1) a larger proportion of superior persons will have children than at present, (2) that the average number of offspring of each superior person ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... was accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been a set of little snobs and prigs, and I ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... brought about a temporary modus vivendi, by which a convenient separation was made at the watershed divides of the White and Chilkoot passes and to the north of Klukwan, on the Klehini River. These partial and tentative adjustments could not, in the very nature of things, be satisfactory or lasting. A permanent disposition of the matter ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of conquest, save in the victories of Faith, and rather would suffer, himself, than inflict suffering upon others. Mere courage is restless, impatient, purposeless: but the voyageur was content to remain wherever he could do good, tentative only in the cause of Christ, and distracted by no objects from his mission. His religion was his inspiration; his conscience his reward. His system may have been perverted, his zeal mistaken, his church a sham; we are not arguing that question. But the purity of his intentions, the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... respects, has most serious consequences for social life. It means, briefly, that while general inferences may be drawn from wide and accurate observations of the workings of human nature, these inferences remain general and tentative, and if taken as rigid rules are sure to be misleading. Theories of education and social reform certainly gain from the general laws that can be formulated about original human traits, fatigue, memory, learning capacity, and the like. But they must, if they are to ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... to Violet. She talked about dogs and horses even, in her desire to let herself down to Miss Tempest's level; praised the Forest; made a tentative remark about point lace; and asked Violet if ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... single man, the direction to construct a huge ship or ark, the command to take into it a chosen few of mankind only, and to devote the chief space to "winged fowl and four-footed beasts of the earth." They are aware of the tentative sending out of birds from it, and of their returning twice, but when sent out a third time returning no more. They know of the egress from the ark by removal of some of its covering, and of the altar built and the sacrifice offered immediately afterwards. They know that the ark rested in Armenia; ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... of her reading, loaned her books by Maudsley and Darwin and Havelock Ellis, and often dropped in to talk with her about her studies, her reading, and her plans. He applauded and encouraged her first tentative notion that she would like to study medicine, and it was his arguments and influence that overcame her mother's objections and persuaded her father that it would be worth while to spend upon her medical education the money it would demand. And, finally, came the doctor's ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... introduction to philosophy because of its bearing upon the extent of the field of that study. Furthermore there can be no better exposition of the meaning of philosophy of science than an illustration of its exercise. The following, then, is to be regarded as on the one hand a tentative refutation of positivism, or the claim of natural science to be coextensive with knowable reality; and on the other hand a programme for the procedure of philosophy with reference ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... always be remembered how timid, tentative, and dear the postal and telephone services of even the most civilized countries still are, and how inexorably the needs of revenue, public profit, and convenience fight in these departments against the tradition of official leisure and dignity. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... European markets,—a species of brokerage, which, ostensibly and in the eyes of the world attended by great risk, was really a thing of specifically safe and certain profits, thanks to the telegraphic system, the secret of which we alone possessed. In our tentative efforts, we fixed upon flour as the best-adapted subject for our experiments, being a commodity simple to deal with, and requiring fewer complications in our arrangements than anything else. But, in my own private mind, I had resolved, that, as soon as our capital had grown large ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various |
