"Complexity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... developments were concerned on the one hand with increasing the mathematical sophistication of the model, on the other hand with its mechanical complexity. In both cases we are most fortunate in having archaeological evidence which far exceeds ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... myself to be persuaded it might serve the multitude, now I see it is the Rabbis who need it most. But centuries of crooked thinking have deadened them to the beauties of the Bible: they have left it behind them as elementary, when they have not themselves coated it with complexity. Subtle misinterpretation is everything, a beautiful text, nothing. And then this corrupt idiom of theirs—than which nothing more corrupts a nation—they have actually invested this German jargon with sanctity, and I am a wolf in sheep's clothing for putting good German in ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the Devil's two horns, thus occupying the entire space covered by his wings. He recalls with disdain the ignorance of former days, the limitation of his ideas. Here, then, close beside him, were those luminous globes which he used to gaze at from below. He traces the crossing of their paths, the complexity of their directions. He sees them coming from afar, and, suspended like stones in a sling, describing their orbits ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... the reality of the norms and standards which present themselves in the lives of individuals and of nations. No one particular science or philosophy is able to grant us this central standpoint for viewing the field of knowledge and the meaning of life. The answer to the complexity of the problem of existence is to be found in something which gathers up under a larger and more significant meaning the results of knowledge and life. This volume will attempt to elucidate this all-important point of view—a point of view which is so needful in our days of specialisation ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... under the common head of "asthenic emotion". In plain English they are all forms of heart-sinking, of feeling unstrung. This general type of innate disposition would seem to be the psychological basis of Humility. Taken in its social setting, the emotion will, of course, show endless shades of complexity; for it will be excited, and again will find practical expression, in all sorts of ways. Under these varying conditions, however, it is reasonable to suppose that what Mr. McDougall would call the "central part" of the experience remains very much the same. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... practice of delegated legislation is inevitably and inextricably involved with the whole idea of governmental intervention in the economic field, where the conditions to be regulated are of infinite complexity and are constantly undergoing change. Granted such intervention, it is simply out of the question to demand that Congress should attempt to impose upon the shifting and complex scene the relatively permanent molds of statutory provision, unqualified by a large degree of administrative discretion. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... person dying with considerable matter belonging to the lower astral level still within his emotional body will necessarily pass through such experiences. It should never be forgotten that we are dealing with a matter of the utmost complexity and that even the most exhaustive description in print would present only a fragment of the truth. The conditions of consciousness on any subplane vary as individuals vary. Some people on the lowest astral level are wholly unconscious of their surroundings. Another variation ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics; it has no mythology, no epic poetry, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts, no civil life; everywhere it shows absence of complexity; absence of combination; an exclusive sentiment of unity."[35] It is not very easy to reconcile these two views, and not very satisfactory to regard a race as "characterised by negatives." Agreement should ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... practical objection to the ordinary theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later poems, but the statement is simply not true. Sordello, to the indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun before Strafford, and was therefore the third of his works, and even ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the action day after day show all imaginable and generally incomprehensible changes and multiplication of costume and motions and postures and manipulations of feathers and meal and sticks and paint and water and sand and innumerable other stage properties in astounding complexity and seeming confusion. Yet, from what is known of isolated and fragmentary parts of the dramatized myths, it is to be inferred that every one of the strictly regulated and prescribed actions has or has had a special significance, and it is obvious that they ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... matter out of which stars (i.e. suns) have been and are being evolved. The different types of star spectra form such a complete and gradual sequence (from simple spectra resembling those of nebulae onwards through types of gradually increasing complexity) as to suggest that we have before us, written in the cryptograms of these spectra, the complete story of the evolution of suns from the inchoate nebula onwards to the most active sun (like our own), and then downward to the almost heatless and ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... been necessary to count as far as five, and this though in other respects the Australian natives show substantial mental development, having a most complicated system of exogamy, and sometimes two personal names for each individual. Again, the Andamanese islanders, despite the extraordinary complexity of their agglutinative language, have no names for the numerals beyond two. [127] It is said that the Majhwar tribe can only count up to three, while among the Bhatras the qualification for being a village astrologer, who foretells ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... literal sense, picturesque—is their actual variety of color and form. A broken stone has necessarily more various forms in it than a whole one; a bent roof has more various curves in it than a straight one; every excrescence or cleft involves some additional complexity of light and shade, and every stain of moss on eaves or wall adds to the delightfulness of color. Hence, in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill, there are introduced, by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... to my camp, full of anxious anticipations for the morrow; while the novelty of the scene, and its striking character, the complexity of the phenomena, the lake-bed, the stupendous ice-deposited moraine, and its remoteness from any existing ice, the broad valley and open character of the country, were all marked out as so many problems suddenly conjured up for my unaided solution, and kept ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... in no fitting mood to write a letter. Too many emotions were in conflict in him at once. They were having their way with him; and, perhaps, in this very complexity of his feelings he came nearer to being really and acutely himself than he had ever been in his life. Indeed, there was a moment when he was almost ready to consign the Duke and all that appertained to the devil or the deep sea, and to take his fate as it came. But one of the other selves ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and the aspirations which fill our souls, the timbre of our life is determined. No one is fundamentally and wholly good or bad, we have all of us our overtones, and some of us have very curious mixtures which go to make us what we are. But just as the gramophone will take in all the wonderful complexity of sound waves which are sent out by a whole orchestra of instruments, and will combine these into one wavy line on the record—a kind of compound wave containing "all the elements so mixed"—so also it is with ourselves. All the thought elements ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... arranged in the order of their natural relations, we find that we may pass progressively, or at least with very few interruptions, from beings of more simple to those of more compound structure; and in proportion as the complexity of their organization increases, the number and dignity of their faculties increase also. Among plants a similar approximation to a graduated scale of being is apparent. Secondly, it appears, from geological observations, that plants and animals of more simple organization ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... rightly and justly—perhaps retributively—bring the tendencies and characteristics of the conscious center into objectivity again. Character is destiny, and character is self-created. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought." But in the vast complexity and volume of human life there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity plays its part. Beyond the individual ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Fiesco's inconsistency as an artistic complexity of motive going to show that Schiller had progressed in the knowledge of life and become aware that human heroism is apt to be more or less mixed with base alloy. One writer[45] thinks it shows "how intelligently he ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... indefinitely. One of the fundamental principles of life absolutely forbade man's standing still. The laws of growth and development pushed him on. Whether he would or not, he was compelled to move forward, just as the acorn, obeying the law of its being, changes its form, its size, and adds to its complexity. Little by little man, obeying these inexorable laws, began to develop. His mental, his moral, and his physical natures gradually assumed new forms—new needs and desires were born. More and more his vision became expanded until ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... and Franklin; great engineers, like Stephenson and Brunel; and great poets, like Wordsworth and Byron. And as regards literature, an able critic remarks: "We have recovered in this century the Elizabethan magic and passion, a more than Elizabethan sense of the beauty and complexity of nature, the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... no doubt, Ralph wouldn't come at Christmas, and she would take long walks into the heart of the country, and decide this question and all the others that puzzled her. Meanwhile, she thought, drawing her feet up on to the fender, life was full of complexity; life was a thing one must love to the last fiber ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... sum up the reasons for the importance of the art that strives "to bring the invisible full into play" (l. 150). It may be rough-hewn and faulty; but it is greater and grander than Greek art because of its greater range, variety, and complexity, and because it reaches beyond any possible present perfection ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... as force itself, Felice had once, by some mysterious feminine art, addressed, in all innocence, her little maneuver of fascination. One lift of the steady eyelid, one quiet glint of that terrible cold gray eye, that poniarded her every tissue of complexity, inconsistency, and coquetry, had been enough. Felice had fled the field from this young fellow, so much her junior, and then afterward, in a tremor of discomfiture and distress, had kept ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... credit than the barbarian. There is something by which everything can be paid for, including the smallest services. Everybody demands payment, and he who fails to pay is a failure. Owing to the competition, owing to the complexity of modern life, owing to the thousand things that must be known in order to succeed in any direction, on either side of the great highway that is called Progress, are innumerable wrecks. As a rule, failure in some honest direction, or at least in some useful employment, is the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... am enumerating propositions which are as exact as anything in Euclid. How then has this notion of the inexactness of Biological science come about? I believe from two causes: first, because in consequence of the great complexity of the science and the multitude of interfering conditions, we are very often only enabled to predict approximately what will occur under given circumstances; and secondly, because, on account of the comparative youth of the Physiological ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... hygiene, and in this transformation, though the tasks presented are larger and more systematic, they are also easier and more economical. These two fundamental tendencies of modern medicine—greater complexity of its methods and the predominantly preventive character of its aims—alone suffice to render the position of the private practitioner untenable. He cannot cope with the complexity of modern medicine; he has no authority ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... answer this question here. But we find suggestions from the spectrum and the spectroscope which may be worth our heeding. The materials with which we have to do in their most brilliant scientific theories seem at first to overwhelm us with their vastness and complexity. The hulks are so enormous, the forces are so mighty, the laws are so wide-sweeping, and at times so pitiless, the distances are so over-mastering, even the uses and beauties are so bewildering, that we bow in mute and almost abject submission to ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... left out, a doubt might arise respecting it which would destroy the whole spiritual structure of Judaism. This is not a matter which philosophical reasoning can think out for itself. As in the natural generation of plant and animal the complexity of elements and conditions is so great that a slight tilting of the balance in the wrong direction produces disease and death, so in the spiritual creation of Israel the ceremonies and the laws are all absolutely essential to the whole, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... finds his inspiration not in the sentiment but in the structure of the composition; he competes, as it were, in language with the art or science of the contrapuntist, and evolves an idea of his own from its complexity and elaboration. The poem of Italian music, A Toccata of Galuppi's, wholly subordinates the science to the sentiment of the piece. It is steeped in the melancholy of pleasure; Venice of the eighteenth ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... several parts to the whole. Not many years ago a very few men and boys could edit, print and distribute the most important of newspapers, where now hundreds are necessary parts in a tremendous complexity. But even to-day, of the nearly 18,000 publications in the United States, more than 11,000 are of that class which, in all their departments, are operated by from two to four or five persons, and which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... hats that greet the darkness were coming out like eager, vulgar comets in a dim and muttering firmament. It was just the moment when the outside mood of the huge city begins to undergo a change, to glide from its comparative simplicity of afternoon into its leering complexity of evening. Each twenty-four hours London has its moment of emancipation, its moment in which the wicked begin to breathe and the good to wonder, when "How?" and "Why?" are on the lips of the opposing ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... expressive of moods—the colors of a painting have a stimmung, so have tones and words, when rhythmically composed. The simplest aesthetic experiences, like the beauty of single musical tones or colors, are of no greater complexity; yet almost all works of art contain further elements; for as a rule the sensations do not exist for their own sakes alone, but possess a function, to represent things. The colors of a landscape painting are not only interesting to us as beautiful colors, but as symbols of a landscape; ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... could not control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough; but complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins horribly from the closed entrance. One may not begin at the beginning, and one has but the loosest relative truths to follow up. Adams found himself obliged to force his material into some shape to which a method ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... name of mamma's first husband. Then I'm not a Callingham at all!" I cried, unable to take it all in at first in its full complexity. "I'm really a Wharton!" ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... to be wished that the elaborate and very interesting researches of the Marquis Corti, which have revealed such singular complexity of structure in the cochlea of the ear, had done more to clear up its doubtful physiology; but I am afraid we have nothing but hypotheses for the special part it plays in the act of hearing, and that we must say the same respecting the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with conclusive reasons for thinking that, if every link in the ancestry of these humble indigenous plants had been preserved and were accessible to us, the whole would present a converging series of forms of gradually diminishing complexity, until, at some period in the history of the earth, far more remote than any of which organic remains have yet been discovered, they would merge in those low groups among which the Boundaries between animal and vegetable life ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... From the complexity produced by the dikes, from the high inclination and anticlinal dip of the strata of the basal series, which are overlaid, at the opposite ends of the short ridge, by two great masses of different ages ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... mustache. He was a handsome fellow, well dressed, and with an easy carriage, and he had an expression of intelligent good-humor which made more than one woman in the car look at him. Although Maria did not see him, he saw her at once, and recognized her, and his handsome face paled. The ridiculous complexity of his position towards her had not tended to make him very happy. He had kept the secret as well as Maria; for him, as for her, a secret was a heavy burden, almost amounting to guilt. He continued to glance furtively at her from time to time. He thought that ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... related to a man's work that their acceptance involved loss neither of dignity nor of independence. He was contemporary with the first English publisher, Jacob Tonson. He was also contemporary with the notable reorganization of English prose which freed it from exaggeration, complexity, and obscurity; and he contributed not a little to the flexibility, charm, balance, and ease which have since characterized its best examples. He saw the rise of polite society in its modern sense; the development of the social ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life—all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... in trying to evade the laws of sober, orderly living. Perhaps it was for this very reason that Shakespeare consented to send so early to "Arthur's bosom"[26] a character who had not a little of the complexity of Hamlet. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... It ran up and down in furrows. "So," he muttered, "the sister of the Archbishop, the Countess of Dashleigh!" Accustomed as he was to the life of the aristocracy, even the Great Detective felt that there was here intrigue of more than customary complexity. ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... The complexity of our life appears in the number of our material needs. It is a fact universally conceded, that our needs have grown with our resources. This is not an evil in itself; for the birth of certain needs is often a mark of progress. To feel the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... the Judges were in general less conversant in the affairs of the world, as the sphere of their jurisdiction was less extensive, and as the matters which came before them were of less variety and complexity, the rule being in general right, not so much inconvenience on the whole was found from a literal adherence to it as might have arisen from an endeavor towards a liberal and equitable departure, for which ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... be exceeded in beauty by the subject that inspired them!—it is impossible to say any thing better; but it is possible to say something more. Such in fact is the simplicity, the truth, and the loveliness of Juliet's character, that we are not at first aware of its complexity, its depth, and its variety. There is in it an intensity of passion, a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to soul and sense, is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... of right arrangement in sentences, which we have traced in its application to the leading divisions of them, equally determines the proper order of their minor divisions. In every sentence of any complexity the complement to the subject contains several clauses, and that to the predicate several others; and these may be arranged in greater or less conformity to the law of easy apprehension. Of course with these, as with the larger members, the succession should be from the less specific to the more ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... not be indifferent to the reader to know, that the Highland cattle are peculiarly liable to be taken, or infected, by spells and witchcraft, which judicious people guard against by knitting knots of peculiar complexity on the tuft of hair which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... exchange is exactly balanced by the respective advantages of the exchangers; just as in pure dynamics you have the parallelogram of forces. In the immense complexity of the real world material, friction, and a million other things affect the ideal parallelogram of forces; and in economics other conscious passions besides those of mere avarice affect exchange: there are a million half-conscious ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... teachings have been, or are, the basis of society. Society exists in defiance of them. It is never based, and it never will be based, on any abstract teaching. Its basis is self-interest, ever increasing in complexity, and ever more and more illuminated by ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... to be that the human brain abhors the complexity—the apparently aimless complexity—of nature and real life, and is for ever trying to get away from it by selecting this and ignoring that. And it contrives so well that I suppose the average man is not consciously aware twice a year of that conglomerate of details which the critics call ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... (including the transposed ones) so that all important tones, harmonic and melodic, are brought out. A glance at even a very simple orchestral score such as that found in Appendix B will probably at once convince the reader of the complexity of the task, and will perhaps make him hesitate to "rush in where angels fear to tread" until he has spent a number of years in preparation for ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... himself, who had, I believe, the virtues of purity, abstinence, and self-restraint in their strongest form. No, Trent, there are other and more worthy things among the moral constituents of which I spoke; and in our finite nature, the more we preoccupy ourselves with the bewildering complexity of external apparatus which science places in our hands, the less vigour have we left for the development of the holier purposes of humanity within us. Agricultural machinery has abolished the festival of the Harvest Home. Mechanical travel has abolished the inn, or all that ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and is dependent on the international community for financial and technical assistance. The euro and the Yugoslav dinar are official currencies, and UNMIK collects taxes and manages the budget. The complexity of Serbia and Montenegro political relationships, slow progress in privatization, and stagnation in the European economy are holding back the economy. Arrangements with the IMF, especially requirements for fiscal discipline, are an important element in policy formation. ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... look on this bad habit as a remnant of barbarism, to which the painting of savages is a parallel, or as a consequence of the desire for perfect youthful beauty in feature and in color, as the art and complexity of the toilette would lead us to think—in either case there was no lack of good advice on the part of the men. The use of perfumes, too, went beyond all reasonable limits. They were applied to everything with which human beings came into contact. At festivals even the mules were treated ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... inference and laughed as if at a great joke. Kells shook his head doubtfully, as if Cleve's transparent speech only added to the complexity. And Cleve turned away, as if in an instant he had ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... ascertained by the weather moulding still remaining on the side of the tower or steeple. The interior vaulting of stone roofs was composed of fewer parts and ribs, which were often not more numerous than those of Norman vaulting, and does not present that complexity of arrangement which occurs in the vaulting-ribs of subsequent styles. In the cathedral of Salisbury also in the nave of Wells Cathedral are simple and good examples of Early English vaulting. A curious groined roof, in which ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... deep upholstery, its silk curtains and velvet carpet and gold mounted vanities, Mina Raff was remarkably child-like, small; her face, brightening at intervals in the rapidly passing lights outside, was touched by pathos; she seemed crushed by the size, the swiftness and complexity, of her automobile, and by the gathering imperious weight of her fame. She was still, however, appealingly simple; no matter what she might do it would be invested with the aspect of innocence which, admirable for her art, never for an instant ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... we have in our multiform descent, if we will but heed them; what inner teachings of sympathy and love, if we will but learn them! Distinctive nationalities, giving such beautiful variety to the earth, here join in the individual, imparting the greatest complexity and variety to internal character. Such nationalities, still existing unimpaired abroad, are here formed into one of unequalled breadth and grandeur; their scattered rays of light are here concentrated into one great focus; the blood of the various Peoples pours through one ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple, profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steam utilization could be worked out. If one studies Stephenson's "Rocket" in detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existence de novo, however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... work of life, whether it be applied in the library or study or laboratory, or in the workshop or factory or counting-house or council chamber, has not been keeping pace with the growth of our population, our wealth, our responsibilities. It is not to-day sufficient for the increasing vastness and complexity of the problems that confront a great nation. We in Great Britain have been too apt to rely upon our energy and courage and practical resourcefulness in emergencies, and thus have tended to neglect those efforts to accumulate knowledge, and consider ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the trouble that had come to her, never regretting her promise to the old rancher, but growing keener in the realization of a complexity in her nature that sooner or later would separate the life of her duty from the life of her desire. She seemed all alone, and when this feeling possessed her a strange reminder of the hunter Wade flashed up. She stifled another ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... by that form. For instance, some of the questions involving analysis imply comparison and recalling. A judgment question might call for all the simple processes noted above and others as well. The responses then vary in complexity and difficulty. The order of advance in both complexity and difficulty of the response is from the mere drill question ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... personal acquaintance. The sources for arguments on such subjects are to be found in books, magazines, and official reports. The good you will get from arguments on such subjects lies largely in finding out how to look up material. The difficulty with them lies in their size and their complexity. When it is remembered that a column of an ordinary newspaper has somewhere about fifteen hundred words, and that an editorial article such as on page 268, which is thirty-eight hundred words long, is in these days of hurry apt to be repellent, because of its length, and on ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... than the neatest drawings in China ink, or the most graceful curves done in chalk upon a blackboard. But however the eye may admire a severe and simple unity, it relishes still more a harmonious complexity; and a very mediocre little pensee in water colors, will prove more generally attractive than the monochromatic ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 'fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom'—doubtless played a large part in the complex emotion which stirred the community, not to run away but to approach the god for the purpose of appeasing his wrath. In the complexity of an emotion which led to action of this kind, we must recognise not merely fear but some trust and confidence—so much, at least, as prevented the person who experienced it from running away simply. The emotion is not ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... Unfortunately the common expression that a certain person has wealth is not so true as it would be to say that wealth has him. The life of one with great possessions and corresponding responsibilities may be full of complexity; the subject of literary art may be exceedingly complex; but we do not set complexity over against simplicity. For simplicity is a quality essential to true life as it is to literature of the first class; it is opposed to parade, to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... uphill work; hard task, Herculean task, Augean task^; task of Sisyphus, Sisyphean labor, tough job, teaser, rasper^, dead lift. dilemma, embarrassment; deadlock; perplexity &c (uncertainty) 475; intricacy; entanglement, complexity &c 59; cross fire; awkwardness, delicacy, ticklish card to play, knot, Gordian knot, dignus vindice nodus [Lat.], net, meshes, maze; coil &c (convolution) 248; crooked path; involvement. nice point, delicate point, subtle ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... senses, or their power of resistance"; but not, however, going so far as to paralyze these two powers, or so far as to render us incapable of striving, either to know the object, or to resist the impression it makes on us. There is in the phenomena a complexity which we cannot retrace to unity without driving the intuitive ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and liberalism has made the analysis of social institutions somewhat less dangerous; the general growth of knowledge has reacted in a stimulating way upon the sciences of society; the great increase in the number, complexity and intensity of social problems has proved a strong incentive to social science; The Darwinian hypothesis has rendered preposterous any conception of a wholly static social system. However, the modern social sciences in our capitalistic order meet much ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... glowed responsive to the fingering sunlight, and the painted simulacra of his predecessors looked down almost benignantly from their gilded frames. The little cell behind the wainscoting, into which the increasing complexity of affairs had forced the recent executives, claimed him during most of his working hours; but it was as rightful tenant of this vast chamber that he felt most the governor of New York. It epitomized ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... had given the Australians work suited to their bent when this war of machinery, attaining its supreme complexity on the Somme, left the human machine between walls of shell fire to fight it out individually against the human machine, in a contest of will, courage, audacity, alertness and resource, man to man. "Advance, Australia!" is the Australian motto; ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the pages of almost any of his tales, it is always the same thing, the same criminals, the same horrors, the same broken ejaculations and brutish rage. Gorki has shown no capacity for development, no power of variety and complexity. His passion for mere effect has reacted unfavourably ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... first was some gigantic insect, appeared advancing along the causeway beside the canal with extraordinary rapidity. As this drew nearer Mr. Cave perceived that it was a mechanism of shining metals and of extraordinary complexity. And then, when he looked again, it ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with a moustache, and long and full, was partly blanched and discoloured. He was dressed in a long and richly embroidered robe of blue, brown, and crimson, interwoven with an Eastern complexity of pattern, and covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares passing from hand to hand and from nation to nation. Round his neck was the chain with the Blue Argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as Grand Master of ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... opening of consciousness in the human race; that it preserves a constant parallel with consciousness, that is, with the developed spirit of man, in its nature and growth; and that, by consequence, its first form is not one of analytic simplicity, but of a high synthesis and a rich complexity. The whole mind, he says, acts from the first, only not with the power of defining, distinguishing, separating, which characterizes the intellect of civilized man; his objects are groups; he grasps totalities; sees objects and their relationships as one fact; tends ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... obvious that a story dealing with character and its development by circumstance demanded more room in which to spread itself than one that dealt with a situation, dramatic or psychologic; yet "The Wrackham Memoirs," which, whatever its complexity, belongs to the latter type, takes up very nearly as much space as "The Judgment of Eve," which belongs to the former. Of course no critic of even moderate intelligence would propose to fix a limit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... on the contrary, it is usually imagination which dictates presumed experience. The latter rarely corrects a superstition; as already remarked, discovery of error in the application of inherited theory is applied only to increase the complexity of the formula. Not until the existence of a means of record, and the formation of a body of observations capable of methodical arrangement, is an erroneous belief superseded, when the true causes of the events become manifest; of this principle ideas respecting the ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... struck her, with a complication of motions, sidelong and headlong, the huge waves flying before us and yet carrying us on,—wild motions, rolling, pitching, sinking down the long green slope into the valley, to be flung up into the tumult of wind and wave again. In all this complexity of forces we were as helpless as feathers in the wind, cut off from mother earth as much as if we were carried away on the clouds; the feeling of absolute insignificance growing on one as the ship drove on, the creaking of the ship and the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... velocity in the same strata, is, in reality, variable and irregular in its movements beyond anything which had been anticipated, being made up, in fact, of a succession of brief pulsations in different directions, and of great complexity. These pulsations, he argues, if of sufficient amplitude and frequency, would be capable, by reason of their own "internal work," of sustaining or even raising a suitably curved surface which was being carried along by the main mean ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... inclined to place the lesions of the upper end of the tibia in a more important position than those of any other bone. Evidence of this implication was in my experience more frequent here than in any other situation. This may in part be attributable to the complexity of structure of this epiphysis, and perhaps more correctly to the influence of its irregular outline in favouring lateral forms of impact on the part of the bullet and consequent increase in the ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... KALISCH to be engaged on a series of Spritzbadlieder of extraordinary beauty and complexity, in which a wonderful effect is produced by the employment in the orchestral accompaniment of a new instrument called the Loofaphone, which produces a curious hissing noise like that emitted by a groom when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... so easily wrecked as the soul. As mechanisms go up toward complexity, delicacy increases. The fragile vase is ruined by a single tap. A chance blow destroys the statue. A bit of sand ruins the delicate mechanism. But the soul is even more sensitive to injury. It is marred by a word or a look. Men are responsible ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... considering the complexity of the undertaking, the conversion of the power-plant was done and the repellers, already supposed the ultimate in protection, were reenforced by a ten-thousand-pound mass of activated copper, effective for untold millions of miles. Their monstrous pilot then set the bar and advanced both ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... statements. For if, as Mr. Motley's instructions say, the right of a power "to define its own relations," etc., when a civil conflict has arisen in another state depends on its (the conflict's) having "attained a sufficient complexity, magnitude, and completeness," inasmuch as that Power has to judge whether it has or has not fulfilled these conditions, and is of course liable to judge wrong, every such act of judgment must be attended with grave responsibilities. The instructions say that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mere matters of temperament and constitution, and in spite of which they were charmed with his graceful and truly vigorous speech, his biographer loves to dwell. He has much to say of the length and complexity of the sentences, but nothing of the often exquisite elegance of their structure; much of the number and size of the words of which they consisted,—nothing of the extreme delicacy and dexterity of their use, the wonderful completeness with which they were made to express ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... qualitative but quantitative." Then it follows, of necessity, that intellectually considered the brute is the image of man just as much as man is the image of God, the difference being quantitative and not qualitative. Evolutionists claim that "man's superiority over the brute results from greater complexity and superior development of the brain." Now if man, as they say, once lived the life of the brute, and his superiority now is simply quantitative, why is it that his inferiors of to-day are not passing into real manhood? They are far superior to any creature which is "not far ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... there cases in which every link, however thin, however subtle we may deem it, is definitely shattered? Who would venture to maintain this? We are only beginning to suspect the elasticity, the flexibility, the complexity of those invisible threads which bind together objects, thoughts, lives, emotions, all that is on this earth and even that which does not yet exist to that which exists no longer. Let us take an ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the fountain and source of all real inquiries after truth, holiness, and heaven. It leads to personal examination of God's Word, which leads us from the complexity of human inventions to the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... perusal of these short notices. Any one who wished to understand the personality of Acton could not do better than take the published Bibliography and read a few of the articles on "contemporary literature" furnished by him to the three Reviews. In no other way could the reader so clearly realise the complexity of his mind or the vast number of subjects which he could touch with the hand of a master. In a single number there are twenty-eight such notices. His writing before he was thirty years of age shows an intimate ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... to earn his living during the formative period of his life by the simplest and hardest labour of the hand. The qualities that made him what he was were of a very simple kind, and his character owed its strength, not to any complexity or subtlety of training and education, but rather to that very bareness and simplicity of circumstance that made him a man of single rather than manifold ideas. He was not capable of seeing both sides of a question; he saw only one side. But he came of a great race; and it was ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... beginning any more than we can conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all the characters of all the forms that have ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... to form of their nature when one takes into account that they are observed phenomena. While the physicist withdraws from consideration the part of the observer in the verification of physical phenomena, our role is to renounce this abstraction, to re-establish things in their original complexity, and to ascertain in what the conception of matter consists when it is borne in mind that all material phenomena are known only in their relation to ourselves, to our bodies, our nerves, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... time in danger of becoming conventionalised. But Donatello would not permit his art to be divorced from appeals to reason and intellect; once started, his theory held its own. Donatello was bound by no laws; with all its cadence and complexity his art was unsuited to a canon as would be the art of music. He seems almost to have disregarded the ordinary physical limitations under which he worked. He had no "cant of material," and whether in stone, bronze, wood, or ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... complicated than the vacuum, though equally reliable and powerful. Owing to the complexity of certain parts, such as the steam air-pump and the triple-valve, it is impossible to explain the system in detail; we therefore have recourse to simple diagrammatic sketches, which will help to make clear ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... A lump rose in her throat, and she saw the kindly, accustomed faces through a gathering mist. She regarded each with a certain intentness, a peculiar feeling that there were hidden traits in the commonplace features which she had never seen before—a complexity in the benign candour of Miss Chris's countenance, in the overwrought youthfulness of Bernard's, in the apoplectic credulity of the general's. Familiar as they were, it seemed to her that there were latent possibilities—obscure ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... of course, can compare for complexity with any group of humans who have been collected into machine-like precision of operation. Take one time when an Ipplinger Cultural Contact Group was handed a Boswellister with V.I.P. connections and orders to put him to an assignment—for ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... the loss of Normandy, and the main cause of the revolution in which the reign closed, is to be found in the financial situation of the king. The normal expenses of government had been increasing rapidly in the last half century. The growing amount and complexity of public and private business, to be expected in a land long spared the ravages of war, which showed itself in the remarkable development of judicial and administrative machinery during the period, meant increased expenses ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... requires the complexity of a written language. I dare say our use of it is quite baffling to him. And if he thinks of symbols as being unable to convey much information, then he might not be able to learn to read at ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... poet. His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case, in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity. But there are curious traces in Ibsen's correspondence of the difficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forming a concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the statues of the most perfect or divine natures not only all the complexity of form of which human nature is capable had to be united, but moreover the union must be such as may be conceived to exist in the system of the Universe itself—the lower forms, or those relating to inferior attributes, being comprehended under higher, and all ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... in fiction. First comes the external type, the novel of plot; then the internal type, the novel of character; then the social type, the novel of problem and purpose. The development proceeds from outward to inward, from objective to subjective, from simplicity to complexity." ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... Lewis guns, the employment of vast quantities of barbed wire as effective obstacles, the enormous expansion of artillery, and the provision of great masses of motor transport—have introduced new problems of considerable complexity concerning the effective co-operation of the different arms and services. Much thought has had to be bestowed upon determining how new devices could be combined in the best manner with the machinery already working" ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... Natural Selection (the "child" he is supposed to "murder "). At p. 391 he writes: "In the brain of the lowest savages and, as far as we know, of the prehistoric races, we have an organ ... little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types.... But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Australians or the Andaman Islanders, are very little above those of many animals.... How then was an organ developed far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural Selection could only ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... position which he had then taken up on its behalf. The pressure of the Hofmeyr mediation increased the difficulty of this task by driving President Krueger into a series of franchise proposals of the utmost complexity. The danger was that Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues in the Cabinet, in their earnest desire to avoid war, might recognise some illusory measures of reform as satisfactory, and then, after further consideration, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the chief Barnacles being rather hurried (for they had it in hand just then to send a mail or two which was in danger of going straight to its destination, beating about the seas like the Flying Dutchman, and to arrange with complexity for the stoppage of a good deal of important business otherwise in peril of being done), went their several ways; with all affability conveying to Mr and Mrs Meagles that general assurance that what they had been doing there, they had been doing at a sacrifice for Mr and Mrs Meagles's ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... continues to work with the EU and Kosovo's local provisional government to accelerate economic growth, lower unemployment, and attract foreign investment to help Kosovo integrate into regional economic structures. The complexity of Serbia and Kosovo's political and legal relationships has created uncertainty over property rights and hindered the privatization of state-owned assets in Kosovo. Most of Kosovo's population lives ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... and amongst these gentlemen, too, I have, with very few exceptions, always found sensible men and zealous friends; though the parties pursuing these professions are not to blame; though the increase of attorneys has arisen from the endless number and the complexity of the laws, and from the ten-fold mass of crimes caused by poverty arising from oppressive taxation; and though the increase of 'doctors' has arisen from the diseases and the imaginary ailments arising from that effeminate luxury which has been created by the drawing ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... pictures of diversified life. Mrs. Inchbald's novel is not concerned with the world at large, or with any section of society, hardly even with the family; its subject is a group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the whole business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity of detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been described. Thus ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... and permanent disappointment to sour and disgust me with country or mankind."[458] To Weed he shows a heart laden with gratitude. "I snatch a minute," he writes, "to express not so much my deep and deepened gratitude to you, as my amazement at the magnitude and complexity of the dangers through which you have conducted our shattered bark, and the sagacity and skill with which you have saved us from so imminent a wreck."[459] But Seward was not more amazed at the dangers he had escaped than at the great number of congratulations now pouring in from opponents. "Was ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... with axe and saw wrung from his body, and for the directing power of his brain, he would be rewarded with money which would enable him to satisfy his needs. For the first time in his life Hollister perceived both the complexity and the simplicity of that vast machine into which modern industry has grown. In distant towns other men made machinery, textiles, boots, furniture. On inland plains where no trees grew, men sowed and reaped the wheat which passed through ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... (or at least to make a probable surmise) what frustrated it: if we can not, the theory is imperfect, and not yet to be relied upon. Nor is the verification complete, unless some of the cases in which the theory is borne out by the observed result are of at least equal complexity with any other cases in which its ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... thought which seems to animate them, it is something of this kind. They feel that the world in which we live is the expression of some great plan or purpose or pattern which is not yet complete, which shows no sign of finality, but is ever growing in complexity; which resolves itself again and again into simplicity, and then spreads out again on a yet wider scale. The plan or purpose is not a dead mechanical thing; the life which explains it is within and ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... across the straits. This has been pronounced by Jurien de la Graviere the best of all Napoleon's plans: it exposed ships that had long been in harbour only to a short ocean voyage, and it was free from the complexity of the later and more ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... realised that I had neither convictions nor a definite moral standard, nor heart, nor reason; my whole intellectual and moral wealth consisted of specialist knowledge, fragments, useless memories, other people's ideas—and nothing else; and my mental processes were as lacking in complexity, as useless and as rudimentary as a Yakut's. . . . If I had disliked lying, had not stolen, had not murdered, and, in fact, made obviously gross mistakes, that was not owing to my convictions—I had none, but because I was in bondage, hand and foot, to my nurse's fairy ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... badge. And I am perfectly certain that under certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, and shot me dead between the gay bookstall and the crowded trams. And that is the last touch to the complexity; for though in that country it often seems that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence of that citizen of Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... all particulars the adventure had seemed the usual one, two men undertaking to share whatever lay ahead, expense, danger or loot. And through no fault of his own Kendric saw simplicity altered into complexity. There were Barlow's changed attitude, the desires and ambitions of Zoraida, the absurdity of Bruce West's infatuation, the interference of Ruiz Rios and finally the situation in ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... round of daily life on different sides of the earth; but the miles of sea and land which had physically separated us had been powerless to estrange our spirits. Nothing is more strange, in this mysterious complexity of impressions and events that we call human existence, than the fact that two beings, entirely cut off from all natural means of association and communion, may yet, unknown to each other, be breathing the same spiritual air and learning the same ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... of the year 1886 a study was made of the surface of Mars by W.F. Denning in England. Mr. Denning's drawings corroborated the charts of Green, Schiaparelli, Knobel, Terby and Baeddicker. He found the surface of Mars one of extreme complexity, a multitude of bright spots in places, but with a general fixity of character which led him to believe that the appearances were not atmospheric. He indeed attributed to Mars an attenuated atmosphere and thought that some of the vagaries in its surface ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... by touts, that was dully trying—as we say in London—to "come it" over me. He said he had heard of me. He had read Kipps. I intimated that though I had written Kipps I had continued to exist—but he did not see the point of that. I said certain things to him about the difference in complexity between political life in Great Britain and the colonies, that he was manifestly totally capable of understanding. But one could as soon have talked with one of the statesmen at ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... COUNTRY." This unsuspecting confidence is the true centre of gravity amongst mankind, about which all the parts are at rest. It is this UNSUSPECTING CONFIDENCE that removes all difficulties, and reconciles all the contradictions which occur in the complexity of all ancient, puzzled, political establishments. Happy are the rulers which have ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... not be terrified by the complexity of the cast, which consists of twenty prominent characters, twenty-four in smaller type, four ghosts and a wraith, and a sprinkling of nameless "halberdiers, huntsmen, minstrels, servitors, etc." (The soldier-supers—a type not to be confused with the super-soldier—were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... most vividly revived is usually one of its lesser ones. Years after, when Gwen's thoughts went back to this trying hour at Strides Cottage, this moment would outstep its importance by reminding her how, in spite of the pressure and complexity of her embarrassment, an absurd memory would intrude itself of an operatic tenor singing to the soprano the story of how she was changed at birth, and so forth, the diva listening operatically the while. It went so far ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer that no longer exists - the BIT, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... normal. He gave free rein to his delight in intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue grew into novels in verse like Red-cotton Night-cap Country and The Inn Album; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge. A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains sordid still. Not that his ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... comprehending the complexity of her feelings. Ditmar had not apologized or feigned an altruism for which she would indeed have despised him. The ruthlessness of his laugh—the laugh of the red-blooded man who makes laws that he himself ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... memory, as we commit to memory the letters of the alphabet, but with the difference that whereas the alphabet consists of but twenty-six simple letters, Chinese caligraphy contains almost a hundred thousand characters of extreme complexity. ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... suggestion of the complexity of responsibility, she sought the personal. "As a favor to me, Watts, will you be ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... such a name implies the absurd assumption that either "electricity" or "vitality" is an entity, playing the part of a sufficient cause of electrical or vital phenomena. A mass of living protoplasm is simply a machine of great complexity, the total result of the work of which, or its vital phenomena, depend on the one hand upon its construction, and on the other upon the energy supplied to it; and to speak of "vitality" as anything but the names of a series of operations is as if one should talk of the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... government unless it is large and powerful enough to enforce its demands. The attempt on the part of a small class to acquire a constitutional right of this character must of necessity fail. This is why the system which theoretically tends toward a high degree of complexity has not in practice resulted in ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... that my readers should not be intimidated by the apparent vastness and complexity of this enterprise of forming the literary taste. It is not so vast nor so complex as it looks. There is no need whatever for the inexperienced enthusiast to confuse and frighten himself with thoughts of "literature in all its branches." Experts and pedagogues (chiefly pedagogues) ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... Telephone wires trailed across the ground for miles, were cut into short lengths by shrapnel and high explosive. Accidents happened as part of the inevitable blunders of war. It was all a vast tangle and complexity of strife. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... variation teaches—both in the general theory of evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent—that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the innate tendencies which also vary more or less widely. In view of all this, how can the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... of the battle of Leipzig will never be known, partly because of the extent and complexity of the area over which fighting continued for several days, and partly because of the immense number of troops of different nations which took part in this memorable encounter. It is principally the documents relating to the French army which are missing, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military zone had been declared, because as yet there ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!"[2:1] So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... competent to form an opinion on the subject, very readily allows that political economy, so infinite and subtile are the forces that enter into its shifting phenomena, is a science of no slight complexity, and that the successful unveiling of its disordered tissue demands, in the first instance, the highest intellectual acuteness and profundity. We here encounter the same obstacles as in metaphysics, except that in the one case the phenomena investigated are subjective, in the other objective. Both ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... respect to these two practices, but only because of the large number of abstentions—merely 29 per cent. voted in Rome, 38 per cent. in Naples, and in Turin scarcely more. The people were tired of the excessive complexity and dissimulation of Italian politics. There was a good deal of violence—in Milan, Florence, Bologna and Sicily the riots were sometimes fatal—and with such an electorate, more extensive than heretofore, so that symbols had often to be used instead of the printed ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... from John o' Groats to Land's End. It was discussed in Court and castle and cottage, and was wrangled over at the street corner. It divided families and estranged friends, so fierce was the partisanship it generated; and so full was it of complexity and mystery that it puzzled the heads of the wisest lawyers. England and Scotland alike were divided into two hostile camps, one declaring that Archibald Douglas was son of Lady Jean Douglas, and thus the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... written as the groundwork, and incorporating with it as much of the two others as it had not completely superseded. I had also to unroll such of Bentham's involved and parenthetical sentences as seemed to overpass by their complexity the measure of what readers were likely to take the pains to understand. It was further Mr. Bentham's particular desire that I should, from myself, endeavour to supply any lacunae which he had ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... Don Juan is no more than a votary of pleasure is not worthy of criticism; the famous Casanova, for instance, has nothing in common with him. Casanova was a sensualist without psychical complexity and without tragedy. His sole endeavour was to wring the utmost measure of enjoyment out of life. He knew the woman of reality and did not waste his time in running after phantoms. In his old age he revelled in the after-taste and settled down to write his memoirs. Don ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... of the jury of group No. 1 (elementary education) comprised on the part of the United States the exhibit of public education as organized in 34 States and Territories, in 6 cities (presented as separate units), and in 15 foreign countries. In number, extent, and complexity these exhibits surpassed all previous collections of the kind; the separate entries ran up into the thousands, representing for the most part such important collections as the exhibits of cities, counties, and groups of rural schools, all ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... other events which had transpired since the expiration of the preceding Congress, the legislation pertaining to reconstruction had become a work of vast complexity, involving principles more profound, and questions more difficult, than ever before presented for the consideration and solution of men assembled in ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... ourselves have paid. No one will, of course, pretend that such a reconciliation of the facts of sin with the axiom or intuition of Divine all-goodness is other than incomplete; we merely urge that, having regard to the magnitude and the complexity of the subject it could not be otherwise. A theory, without accounting for all the facts, may be true so far as it goes, correctly indicating the way which, if we could pursue it further, would lead us into more and fuller truth. No doubt, when that which is perfect ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... There is a curious complexity caused by a lease of the same property being apparently granted to George Gibbes, and a double fine levied[99]—i.e., parties brought in who were strangers to the title; and a double fine appears to have been levied for technical purposes when the ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... this view the teacher and the learner ought to use the sounds of the lyre, because its notes are pure, the player who teaches and his pupil rendering note for note in unison; but complexity, and variation of notes, when the strings give one sound and the poet or composer of the melody gives another—also when they make concords and harmonies in which lesser and greater intervals, slow and quick, ...
— Laws • Plato
... which he stands unrivalled and unapproachable; I mean the alibi. There is where he shines, where his oath, instead of being a mere matter of fact or opinion, rises up into the dignity of epic narrative, containing within itself, all the complexity of machinery, harmony of parts, and fertility of invention, by which your true ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... to being a co-operative commonwealth. It has been realised that industry and commerce are not primarily intended as a field for exploitation and profit, but are essential national services in as true a sense as the army and navy. The complexity of the modern economic world and the large individual gains which have been made in it have obscured the fact that the economic structure exists to serve the needs of the community. It was recognised by the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and deductions, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... realm. Likewise, art and religion, though in their views more synthetic and therefore more concrete, are one-sided; they seek to satisfy special needs. Philosophy alone—Hegelian philosophy—is concrete. Its aim is to interpret the world in its entirety and complexity, its ideal is to harmonize the demands of common sense, the interests of science, the appeal of art, and the longing of religion into one coherent whole. This view of philosophy, because it deals with the universe in its fulness and variety, alone can make claim to real concreteness. Nor ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the ruminantia is more complicated in structure than that of any other class of animals; and, owing to this complexity, and the consequent difficulty of investigating it, its nature and functions have been less ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... money is as superfluous in our foreign as in our internal relations. When foreign commerce was conducted by private enterprise, money was necessary to adjust it on account of the multifarious complexity of the transactions; but nowadays it is a function of the nations as units. There are thus only a dozen or so merchants in the world, and their business being supervised by the international council, a simple system of book accounts serves perfectly to regulate their dealings. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... on the embassy (commonly known as De falsa legatione), which was brought to an issue in the following year, marks the moral strength of the position now held by Demosthenes. When the gravity of the charge and the complexity of the evidence are considered, the acquittal of Aeschines by a narrow majority must be deemed his condemnation. The speech "On the Affairs of the Chersonese" and the Third Philippic were the crowning efforts of Demosthenes. Spoken in the same year, 341 B.C., and within a short ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... policy is on the whole subordinated to violence as the standing instrument of government. But after, say, the reign of William III., the element of representation begins to assert itself. Simplicity is by degrees exchanged for complexity; the play of human motives, singularly diversified, now becomes visible in the currents of a real public life. It has for a very long time been my habit, when consulted by young political students, to recommend them carefully to study the characters and events of the American Independence. ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... first time made possible within the astral region. The vast problem of the arrangement and relations of the millions of stars forming the Milky Way was shown to be capable of experimental treatment, and of at least partial solution, notwithstanding the variety and complexity seen to prevail, to an extent previously undreamt of, in the arrangement of that majestic system. The existence of a luminous fluid, diffused through enormous tracts of space, and intimately associated with stellar bodies, was virtually demonstrated, and ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... unless the order of their presentation be natural—be that order, from observation to laws and causes, in which the mind naturally moves, whenever it moves surely and successfully—the child, except in the rare case of prodigies that find a pleasure in unraveling complexity, will still turn from the book with loathing. He will do so because he must. It is not in his nature to violate his nature for the sake of acquiring knowledge, however great the incentives or threatenings attending the process.' 'The child's mind ... with reference ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... standing in the center of Machinery Hall, it suggested nothing sinister or priceless. Two peculiarities, however, marked it as unusual—the concealment of its mechanism and the brevity of its title. For while the remainder of the exhibits located around it varied in the simplicity or complexity of their design, they were alike in the openness of their construction and detailed explanation of plan and purpose. The great steel box, however, bore merely two words and a date: "Drayle's ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... might be, one part from the other (if it be big enough for that) and the whole from the road, and then to fill up the flower-growing space with things that are free and interesting in their growth, leaving nature to do the desired complexity, which she will certainly not fail to do if we do not desert her for the florist, who, I must say, has made it harder work than it should be to get ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... some curious documents illustrative of its comparative value, and of the variety and complexity of medieval literature. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... importance of the diplomatic issues at stake, and have noted their warping influence on military affairs, have the right to accuse him of blindness and presumption. The problem before him was of unexampled complexity, and its solution could be effected only by a succession of experiments. That he put forth too many efforts at one time may be granted; and yet in each case, if the details are fully known, the reasons ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Noblesse will have much pleasure in demonstrating by a Commission of their number, if the Commons will meet them, Commission against Commission! Directly in the rear of which comes a deputation of Clergy, reiterating, in their insidious conciliatory way, the same proposal. Here, then, is a complexity: what will wise ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... impossible, except an inch at a time. The women were, almost without exception, in light-coloured gowns, white, pale blue, Nile green, and pink, while over these costumes were thrown opera cloaks and capes of astonishing complexity and elaborateness. Nearly all were bare-headed, and nearly all wore aigrettes; a score of these, a hundred of them, nodded and vibrated with an incessant agitation over the heads of the crowd and flashed like mica flakes ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... whole as an advantage for the following reasons. I think primitive man (the early Aryan) chose his words by a certain intuition which recognised an innate correspondence between the thought and the symbol. Para passu with the growing complexity of civilization language lost it spiritual character, "it fell into matter," to use H.P. Blavatsky's expression; as the conventional words necessary to define artificial products grew in number, in the memory of these words the spontaneity ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... suppose that any hon. gentleman is likely to change his opinion on a question of such complexity at this late stage of the debate, and therefore I shall only refer by name to these mitigations, bearing in mind how important they are. There are those which depend on the arrangements of employers, and those which ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... which it settles down and attaches itself to a shell or wooden pier by means of suckers, and remains for the rest of its life fixed. Instead of going on and developing into a fishlike creature, it loses its notochord, its special sense organs, and other organs; it loses its complexity and high organization, and becomes a "mere rooted bag with a double neck," a ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... in a policy that was in fact a continuance of the relaxation of the commercial system of the colonies which had been begun in 1822 and 1825 by Robinson and Huskisson. In his present employment Mr. Gladstone was called upon to handle a mass of questions that were both of extreme complexity in themselves, and also involved collision with trade interests always easily alarmed, irritated, and even exasperated. With merchants and manufacturers, importers and exporters, brokers and bankers, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley |
