"Definiteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... amendment involves the concurrent authority of State and Federal Governments, for the enforcement of the policy it defines. A certain lack of definiteness, through division of responsibility is thus introduced. In order to bring about a full understanding of duties and responsibilities as thus distributed, I purpose to invite the governors of the States and Territories, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to convey by the underscored portion of this remark, but I replied that I had repeated the language General M. had used to me, and I preferred they should seek any further explanation from him, lest I might unwittingly fall into error if I undertook to explain his meaning myself. Their lack of definiteness and my unwillingness to comment upon the language seemed to arouse their apprehensions and suspicions. They have been trying ever since to obtain in writing some definite promise ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... begins with a real crisis, a definite transaction, a point of time as clear as the morning dawn. It is not an everlasting dying and an eternal struggle to live. But it is all expressed in a tense that denotes definiteness, fixedness and finished action. We actually died at a certain point and as actually began ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... to create out of pre-existing matter. All this shows that in the verb bara, as in the Sanskrit tvaksh or taksh, there is no trace of the meaning assigned to it by later scholars, of a creation out of nothing. That idea in its definiteness was a modern idea, most likely called forth by the contact between Jews and Greeks at Alexandria. It was probably in contradistinction to the Greek notion of matter as co-eternal with the Creator, that the Jews, to whom Jehovah ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and—kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Muscular sits down he does it as he does everything—with definiteness and force. He does not spill over as does the Alimentive nor drape himself gracefully like the Thoracic, but planks himself ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... intellectual investigation, the Inductive is far inferior to the true Deductive Method or Process, in all the essentials of a Scientific guide. The Inductive can give us only a high degree of precision and definiteness, with only proximate certainty for the future as the result of a slow mode of procedure; while the true Deductive Method gives us perfect precision, exactitude, and complete certainty, as the result of a rapid mode. The true Deductive Method—brought into disrepute ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... how the source, thus chosen, presented itself to the translator's conception. His references to it are generally vague or confused, often positively misleading. Yet to designate with any definiteness a French or Latin text was no easy matter. When one considers the labor that, of later years, has gone to the classification and identification of old manuscripts, the awkward elaboration of nomenclature necessary to distinguish them, the complications resulting ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... cornea and iris, were inserted. [Footnote: Marble statues also sometimes had inserted eyes] Finally, the whole was gone over with appropriate tools, the hair, for example, being furrowed with a sharp graver and thus receiving a peculiar, metallic definiteness of texture. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... the existing order, "even if it is true that public opinion, when it has attained a certain degree of definiteness and precision, can convert the inert mass of men outside the Christian world—the non-Christian races—as well as the coarse and depraved who are living in its midst, what proofs have we that this Christian ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... being made in these days to meet the evident lack of homemaking knowledge in the rising generation. And since definiteness of plan lends power to accomplishment, we cannot do better than to analyze as carefully as possible the various lines of knowledge required by the prospective homemaker in ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... thought about the brightness of that Chautauqua scene to which Ina and Dwight had gone. Lulu thought about such gatherings in somewhat the way that a futurist receives the subjects of his art—forms not vague, but heightened to intolerable definiteness, acute colour, and always motion—motion as an integral part of the desirable. But a factor of all was that Lulu herself was the participant, not the onlooker. The perfection of her dream was not impaired by any longing. She had her dream as a saint ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... herself on her own resources, three ha'pence was all she could command for ransom from the durance into which self-preservation assuredly would not forbear to betray her. Experience gave a dreary definiteness to anticipation. Once again she would morning by morning awaken in the grim whitewashed ward to all the old hardness and roughness of existence with a tyrannous restraint and monotony superadded. She said to herself, ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... would be something like a present-day musician identifying an unfamiliar composition as belonging to the "French school," the "Italian school," or the "Russian school;" and yet, this same musician might not be able to point out with definiteness a single characteristic of that ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... agent as much information as he asked from him. When their final lists were compared, Banneker noticed that there was no name with the initials I.O.W. on Gardner's. He thought of mentioning the clue, but decided that it was of too little definiteness and importance. The news value of mystery, enhanced by youth and beauty, which the veriest cub who had ever smelled printer's ink would have appreciated, was ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the above, I have unexpectedly been in a large missionary meeting where two noted men of the Methodist Church were the chief speakers. Both addresses were most fervid and eloquent. But I noticed that neither of the speakers had any note of definiteness in regard to the fate of the heathen after death. It did seem to me that one of them came once very near to the idea of eternal extinction, but did not candidly commit himself to it. The other seemed to approach the theory ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... may get an expression for either of those elements, current, pressure, or resistance, in the terms of the other two. This relation holds true and is accurate in every possible case and condition of practical work. This remarkable precision and definiteness of action has made possible the creation of an extensive school of electrical testing, by which we are not only enabled to make accurate measurement of electrical apparatus and appliances, but also to make determinations in other fields by the ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... the upper part, and after that others, indistinct and wavering of outline. I held the negative up to the light. The marks were rather small, and were almost entirely confined to one end of the plate, but as I have said, lacked definiteness. Yet, such as they were, they were sufficient to make me very excited and I shoved the thing quickly back into ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... It was useless to discuss methods of controlling big business by the National Government until it was definitely settled that the National Government had the power to control it. A decision of the Supreme Court had, with seeming definiteness, settled that the National Government had not ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... community producing chiefly in this manner are poverty, or at least only a moderate prosperity, but, to offset this, a certain definiteness ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... now planned a more formidable invasion of the Western Shore. Public sentiment, he hoped, was beginning to turn in his favor. The death of Bacon had deprived the rebellion of all coherency and definiteness of purpose. The country was getting weary of the struggle, and was anxious for the reestablishment of law and order. In Gloucester and Middlesex especially there were many prominent planters that ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble passion. Even the "Mysteries of Paris" and Gaboriau's "Crime d'Orcival" are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible civilization, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis of such figures as the Vicomte d'Orcival, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... instead of purifying the Romish Church from its corruptions had only reduced the latter to greater definiteness and precision, and invested them with the sanction of authority. All the subtilties of its teaching, all the arts and usurpations of the Roman See, which had hitherto rested more on arbitrary usage, were now passed into laws and raised ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the charge of didacticism, which is valid only when teaching is explicit and abstract. The educative power of literature, however, is not diminished because in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, which by its very definiteness is inelastic and narrow; in fact, the more imaginative a character is, the more fruitful it may be even in moral truth; it may teach, as has been said, what the poet ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... marvel of foreign observers. It mattered little in 1812 on which side the United States took its stand; in 1914 such a decision Mould inevitably determine the issue. Of all European statesmen there was one man who saw this point with a definiteness which, in itself, gives him a clear title to fame. That was Sir Edward Grey. The time came when a section of the British public was prepared almost to stone the Foreign Secretary in the streets of London, because they believed that his "subservience" ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... If I mourn a deceased squash, they will mutter, "Woman's farming!" Shunning Scylla, I shall perforce fall into Charybdis. (Vide Classical Dictionary. I have lent mine, but I know one was a rock and the other a whirlpool, though I cannot state, with any definiteness, which was which.) I may be as humble and deprecating as I choose, but it will not avail me. A very agony of self-abasement will be no armor against the poisoned shafts which assumed superiority will hurl against me. Yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... behind which lies no organized power for action. It is on the score of due preparation for such an ultimate contingency that nations, and especially free nations, are most often deficient. Yet, if wanting in definiteness of foresight and persistency of action, owing to the inevitable frequency of change in the governments that represent them, democracies seem in compensation to be gifted with an instinct, the result perhaps of the ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... arrived in Peshawur, and was making energetic efforts to get his force in order for the accomplishment of the relief of Jellalabad. But he foresaw serious delays, and so late as the middle of March was still unable to specify with any definiteness the probable date of his arrival at that place. The European troops in Jellalabad would be out of meat rations early in April, and Havelock's calculation was that the grain, on which mainly subsisted the native soldiers, who had been ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... then steal away unobserved is very difficult to accept. Moreover, he would appear to have come down to Eltham by rail immediately on landing in England, leaving his luggage in the cloak-room at Charing Cross. This pointed to a definiteness of purpose quite inconsistent with his ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... began to take con-structural shape and definiteness of purpose in Elizabethan days. Up to the sixteenth century the tales were either told in verse, in the epic form of Beowulf or in the shrunken epic of a thirteenth century ballad like "King Horn"; in the verse narratives of Chaucer or the poetic musings ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... of governments. Thus far Russia, in her remote seclusion, had taken no part in the politics of Europe. It was not until the reign of Ivan III. that this great northern empire emerged from that state of chaos in which she had neither possessed definiteness of form nor ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... definiteness about those two words which carried conviction with them. Mabane and I were a little staggered. Our position was such a strong one, our request so reasonable, that I think that we had never realized ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ideas on a subject, but often difficulty of expression is due to indecision of mind. Vagueness or confusion of ideas in a writer's mind is always the precursor of a poor style. Too often, struck by a happy thought, he attempts to put it on paper before it has yet sufficient definiteness of form to justify expression, and when he would project it into writing he loses the thought in a mass of the very words in which he seeks to voice it. Again, the writer's mind may contain several ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... invariably blowing from the same direction, Jamaicans have the puzzling habit of using "Windward" and "Leeward" as synonyms for East and West. To be told that such-and-such a place is "two miles to Windward of you" seems lacking in definiteness ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... long moment her hand continued to grasp his, before, as if taking in the ambiguous comfort of his final definiteness, it relaxed and she drew ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... rendering of casual impression, and the mechanical copyism of unimportant subject, which are too frequently visible in our modern school.[O] Their lightness and desultoriness of intention, their meaningless multiplication of unstudied composition, and their want of definiteness and loftiness of aim, bring discredit on their whole system of study, and encourage in the critic the unhappy prejudice that the field and the hill-side are less fit places of study than the gallery and the garret. Not every casual idea caught from the flight of a shower or the fall of a sunbeam, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... now, for the first time, she was asking herself that question which brings tearful uncertainty, vague fears, disquieting speculations to the great majority of women—should she give herself, body and soul, into the hands of a definite man? It was the definiteness, the identification of the man, that caused all her difficulty. All women expect to be chosen by, and to choose, some man; but when he arrives in actual flesh and blood—that is quite another matter. Some, perhaps ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... took faithful notes so that when he came to write a more extended description or a book, he might have something more definite than vague memory impressions on which to rely. When he describes in The Week a mere patch of the river bank, this definiteness of observation ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the road on which others are to travel,—precludes, on the other hand, every affectation and morbid peculiarity;—the second condition, sensuousness, insures that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated into a hazy, unthoughtful, day-dreaming; and the third condition, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... conception of equality—that the ideas of equality in size, relations, forces, resistances, and sensible properties in general, were evolved during the same period. But however this may be, it is clear that as fast as the notion of equality gained definiteness, so fast did that lowest kind of quantitative prevision which is achieved without any instrumental ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... take something serious to buy and equip the doll that Robina, with eight-year-old definiteness, had specified. The girl in the Red Cross dress read ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... still in twilight ignorance. He discerned shadows, nothing more, and, boylike, he ran from shadows into the sunlight. Desmond knew that there were beasts at the Manor. Had you forced from him an expression approaching, let us say, definiteness, he would have admitted that beasts lurked in every house, in every school in the kingdom. You must keep out of their way (and ways)—that was all. And he knew also that too many beasts wreck a house, as they wreck a regiment ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... decision of the Bering Sea Arbitration Tribunal. The application of the principles laid down by that august body has not been followed by the results they were intended to accomplish, either because the principles themselves lacked in breadth and definiteness or because their execution has been more or less imperfect. Much correspondence has been exchanged between the two Governments on the subject of preventing the exterminating slaughter of seals. The insufficiency of the British patrol of Bering Sea under the regulations agreed ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... those sides of human emotion which lie too deep for verbal utterance, a function of which the gradual recognition led on to the invention of opera, is one that cannot be slighted or ignored; in it lies a power of appeal to feeling that no words can reach, and a very wonderful definiteness in conveying exact shades of emotional sensation. Not that it can of itself suggest the direction in which the emotions are to be worked upon; but this direction once given from outside, whether by a 'programme' ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and, second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... codification and reform of the laws which he carried out; he improved the status of slaves, revised the laws of divorce and of intestate succession; and in his "Digest," "Institutes," and other sections of the "Corpus Juris Civilis," first gave definiteness to Roman law and laid the basis of the civil law of most ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... apostles. As in India, so in Europe, many would call death what we call life, many would call life what we call death. Here, as elsewhere, it is high time that men should define the exact meaning of their words, trusting that definiteness, frankness, and honesty may offer a better chance of mutual understanding, and serve as a stronger bond of union between man and man, than vague formulas, faint-hearted reticence, and what is at the root of it all, want of true love ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... called Alcuin of York, came of a patrician family of Northumberland. Neither the date nor the place of his birth is known with definiteness, but he was born about 735 at or near York. As a child he entered the cathedral school recently founded by Egbert, Archbishop of York, and ultimately became its most eminent pupil. He was subsequently assistant master to Aelbert, its head; and when Aelbert succeeded to the archbishopric, on the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "thinking things out." His paintings are, as he used to call them, "anthems," brought forth by the intuitive man, the musician. This was the fundamental Watts. Whatever unity there be, is due rather to unity of inspiration than to strength or definiteness of character and accomplishment, and this was sometimes referred to by Watts as a golden thread passing through his life—a thread of good intention—which he felt would guide him through the labyrinth of distractions, mistakes, irritations, ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... music is an essential, since comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.' ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... chaotic, or when orderly too busy with its ends to know itself, receives through expression the fixed, clear outlines of a thing, and can be contemplated like a thing. Every one has verified the clarifying effect of expression upon ideas, how they thus acquire definiteness and coherence, so that even the mind that thinks them can hold them in review. But this effect upon feeling is no less sure. The unexpressed values of experience are vague strivings embedded in chaotic sensations and images; these expression ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... There are certain psychological laws, especially those relating to the formation of moral habits, that have a considerable value; but to frame a theory of moral education, on a level in a point of definiteness with the possible theory of intellectual education, is a task that I should not like to have imposed upon me. In point of fact, two problems are joined in one, to the confusion of both. There is first the vast question of moral control, which stretches ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... under way. I find, now that I know the other side of it, that the chief mental effect of alcohol, taken as I took it, is to induce a certain scattering and casualness of mind. Also, it induces a lack of definiteness of view and a notable failure of intensive effort. A man evades and scatters and exaggerates and makes loose ...
— The Old Game - A Retrospect after Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon • Samuel G. Blythe
... 3. Where greater definiteness is necessary, the periphrastic forms in -urus sim and -urus essem are employed, especially in clauses of Result, Indirect Questions, and after ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... in the definiteness of detail. He expected some kind of result. But there was none, except that the smile remained on her lips a moment longer, and there was a laughing flash back in the clear depths of her eyes. Her level glance was as innocent as a child's and as he ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... single geographical divisions? On what principle can we divide the earth into sections for economic purposes? These are some of the questions which must be answered if a theory of distribution is to have any definiteness of meaning, and they arise whenever we try to establish a static standard of any kind. If we talk about natural wages, we must know in how much of the world they are natural. The questions become even more urgent when we try to solve dynamic ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... from his steak, Steve observed the brooding eye of Culvera upon him. Faint suspicions, recollections too vague as yet for definiteness, were beginning to stir in the mind of the man. He had taken on the look of wariness, masked by a surface smile, that his face had worn the night ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... series of papers with some novel, preferably The Vicar of Wakefield, in respect to clearness of setting, delineation of character, structure of plot, definiteness of purpose, and clearness and grace of style. What is lacking to make the ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... is unnecessary to the common run of men, because a genius is in advance of his times. It is well also to note that even in him this flash of insight, though unerring in its indications, lacked the definiteness of conviction which results from ordered thought. However accurate, it is but a glimmer,—not yet a ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... in respect of their Nature, or of the Subsistences, Vessels, and openings assigned to them; whereby the Single and Infinite Essence, being inclosed or comprehended in these limits, bounds, or externalnesses, takes on Itself Definiteness of dimension, and becomes Itself manifold, by the manifoldness ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... born a soldier. What I like about my present job is its definiteness. I have my written instructions, and there's no need to argue anything. I carry out my orders. But I beg pardon, I'm not going to talk 'shop' to you. I want you to tell me about yourself. I hope you are not to return to the East, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of languages knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in which his own belief is made sufficiently ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... with Laurance Donovan was in Constantinople, at a café where I was dining. He got into a row with an Englishman and knocked him down. It was not my affair, but I liked the ease and definiteness with which Larry put his foe out of commission. I learned later that it was a way he had. The Englishman meant well enough, but he could not, of course, know the intensity of Larry’s feeling about the unhappy lot of Ireland. In the beginning of my own acquaintance ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... book I have endeavored to give my statements definiteness by the employment of numerous examples, both good and bad. I have made no attempt to present an exhaustive analysis of the technique of individuals or of schools, but have chosen my illustrations with a single view to their aptness; I have, however, ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... true when it corresponds to a certain associated complex, and false when it does not. Assuming, for the sake of definiteness, that the objects of the belief are two terms and a relation, the terms being put in a certain order by the 'sense' of the believing, then if the two terms in that order are united by the relation into a complex, the belief is true; if not, it is false. This constitutes the definition ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... temperament; but one would probably not go wrong in attributing the fulness of the use which he made of this gift to the influence of his Italian studies—more especially to those which led him to Dante, whose multitudinous characters and scenes impress themselves with so singular and immediate a definiteness upon the imagination. At the same time, Chaucer's resources seem inexhaustible for filling up or rounding off his narratives with the aid of chivalrous love or religious legend, by the introduction of samples of scholastic discourse ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... specific direction for a comprehensive analysis of the principal kinds of literature. It is intended to show him the various points in relation to form, content, and spirit, to which in succession he is to devote his attention. It is hoped that the book will give definiteness and delight to literary study, which, for lack of such a guide, has so often ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... always see hardiness and insensibility go together, and it may be of course presumed that we only could have purchased this immunity from suffering at the expense of a large portion of that delicacy in which lie some of our most agreeable sensations. Or man's faculties might have been restricted to definiteness of action, as is greatly the case with those of the lower animals, and thus we should have been equally safe from the aberrations which lead to disease; but in that event we should have been incapable of acting to so many different purposes as we are, and of the many high enjoyments ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... gave vigor, point, and definiteness to the prose, necessary for the business of the world, helped to dwarf the poetry. If both could not have advanced together, we may be thankful that the first part of the eighteenth century produced a varied prose of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... The definiteness of the tone was like the clasp of the arm, and Max glowed anew. By a swift, emotional effort, he conjured up the longings that had preyed upon him in his self-imposed solitude—conjured them for the sheer joy of feeling them evaporate ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... expression that, to her consciousness, gradually became less vague,—became charged with a specific recollection. Had his mind flown back to something that she now remembered,—something about a lover of Lucy's? It was a thought that made her shudder; it gave new definiteness to her present position, and to the tendency of what had happened the evening before. She moved her arm from the table, urged to change her position by that positive physical oppression at the heart that sometimes accompanies ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... shall not tell." She was not antagonistic or defiant. Her voice was not raised, nor did it betray an unusual emotion. It was simply decisive, and the unflinching steadiness of her eyes and the way in which she sat with her hands folded gave to it an unqualified definiteness. ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... outside creation—it merely represents a phase; and to leave out all poetry which has not attained definiteness would not bring us to the truth of literature. If any phase of man's nature has found true expression, it is worth preserving—it may be cast aside only if not expressed truly. There is a period in man's life when his feelings are the pathos of the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... have been lying among the long, thick weeds of the pond. And it would not have been the accident it would have appeared to be. Of that she felt sure. Brought face to face with this definiteness of situation, she began ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sometimes it is almost vitalized into a life of its own. This power of such an object to become the medium of thought and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole, might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out. I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain that I saw over him; and I never presumed to judge him with any definiteness, until he was interpreted to me by one greatly the superior of us both—who was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I—whose own mind and nature included his, and ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... long descent are marked out with a precision and definiteness which would be intolerable presumption, if Paul were speaking only his own thoughts, or telling what he had seen with his own eyes. They begin with what was in the mind of the eternal Word before He ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... at him with an air of surprise that would have been comical under less grievous conditions. She knew, with a vague definiteness, that death was near, perhaps unavoidable, and it had never occurred to her that she or any other person on board need feel any concern about the view entertained by Liverpool as to their fate. Before she could frame a reply, however, Hozier seemed to recover his faculties. He ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... a purpose in everything he did; there was no dilly-dallying nor shilly-shallying; he knew what he wanted to say, and said it. It was the same with all his plans; what he wanted to do, he did. He always hit the bull's eye. His great success in war was due largely to his definiteness of aim. He knew what he wanted to do, and did it. He was like a great burning glass, concentrating the rays of the sun upon a single spot; he burned a ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... two different kinds of realism, according as we make a thought consist of act and object, or of object alone. Their difficulties are different, but neither seems tenable all through. Take, for the sake of definiteness, the remembering of a past event. The remembering occurs now, and is therefore necessarily not identical with the past event. So long as we retain the act, this need cause no difficulty. The act of remembering occurs now, and has ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... these various unlearned tendencies; what one psychologist calls a reflex or a series of reflexes, another will call an instinct. It seems better to consider them as of the same general character but differing from each other in simplicity, definiteness, uniformity of response, variableness among individuals, and modifiability. They range from movements such as the action of the blood vessels to those concerned in hunting and collecting; from the simple, definite, ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... fell back upon the policy of 1881. The Dutch Press, pulpit, and platform commenced an active nationalist propaganda on the old racial lines; and the advocacy of anti-British aims increased in boldness and in definiteness as the Transvaal grew strong with its ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... definiteness with which the fact of judgment is affirmed by the New Testament we have already seen. Nor is the New Testament our only witness. The belief in a higher tribunal before which the judgments of time are to be revised, and in many cases reversed, ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... me an interesting woman. She has opinions of her own, which she expresses clearly and firmly. I like her," responded Morgan with a definiteness of manner which suggested that he was not to be debarred by fear of banter from admitting ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... idea that she must accomplish some definite thing, and between this objective and the irregular demands of the home there appears to be more or less clashing. She is confronted by a problem not easy for any one to solve: how to keep her definiteness of aim and work, and ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... explorations are told in more detail than most of the earlier incidents, but whatever is referred to is treated, we hope, with such simplicity and definiteness of statement that it will be comprehensible and instructive to pupils of the ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... read the facts of life from the open book of chance. That this was such a moment he had no doubt; and when he turned inland and sped across the snow-covered tundra he was not startled because the shadow took upon it greater definiteness and drew in closer. Oppressed with his own impotence, he halted in the midst of the white waste and whirled about. His right hand slipped from its mitten, and a revolver, at level, glistened in the pale light of ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... no peculiar or natural aptitude for this study; though he is said to have constantly blamed himself for not having gone more deeply into it. It is hardly to be denied that mathematical genius and philosophic genius do not always go together. The precision, definiteness, and accurate limitations of the method of the one, are usually unfriendly to the brooding, tentative, uncircumscribed meditation which is the productive humour in the other. Turgot was essentially of the philosophising temper. Though the activity of his intelligence was incessant, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... moved her vaguely, and without strict definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had obviously not discerned her yet in her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... years of life are wasted in small talk and still smaller reading, tears and sighs being wasted over a novelist's creations, while God's creatures die for want of a word of sympathy." Another names, "Frivolity, want of definiteness of purpose." Still another says: "The giving of so little time to serious reflection and for preparation for the responsible duties of life. In other words, frivolity of manner, shallowness of thought, and, as a ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... But definiteness of aim does not necessarily imply narrowness of scope. The Wellesley Calendar for 1914-1915 contains a list of three hundred and twelve courses on thirty-two subjects, exclusive of the gymnasium practice, dancing, swimming, and games required by the Department ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... much like the Colonial or "barn" pointing already referred to,—the wide open joints being filled with mortar brought well to the surface of the stones and smoothed off by the flat of the trowel with little regard to definiteness of line, after which about one-fourth of the width of the pointing is cut sharply away at the bottom so as to leave a sloping weathered edge considerably below the center of the joint. This is sometimes left as cut, in order to preserve a difference in texture, or is gone ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... of definiteness, thoroughness, and unity. There seems to be some doubt as to his success in carrying it out. It is certain that but few students completed his course compared with the number who began it. Instead of sixty to seventy pupils in the ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... time to make a rock garden. When the important matter of the proper site has been put in the past, a definite scheme must be planned. Upon the definiteness of this scheme, much of the success of the rock garden will depend. Here desire will have to be subservient to the situation. It is not so much what you want as what is best in ...
— Making A Rock Garden • Henry Sherman Adams
... favorite branches of knowledge and culture. Of the real elements and processes of a higher education, and of the subjective conditions of mental growth and training, comparatively few, either of the students or their parents, appeared to have any definite idea. There was no lack of definiteness of choice. Tastes and inclinations were usually positive; reasons were not so plentiful. That the young lady 'liked' this study or 'disliked' that, was the reason perhaps most frequently assigned. If its force was not at once conceded, she strengthened it by ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... seem all to assume a definiteness of preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement. They take refuge ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... Beowulf, Ermanaric, and Attila throws out the figures in strong relief. The mere extent of the stage and the number of the supernumeraries required for the action of most of the French stories appear to have told against the definiteness of their characters; as, on the other hand, the personages in Beowulf, without much individual character of their own, seem to gain in precision and strength from the smallness of the scene in which they act. There is less strict economy in the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the greatest ease and without the slightest degree of grammatical incorrectness. "Caught cold," "better ask," "honorably sorry," "feel hungry," and all the common sentences of daily life are entirely free from that personal definiteness which an Occidental language necessitates. We shall see later that the absence of the personal element from the wording of the sentence does not imply, or prove, its absence from the thought of either the speaker or hearer. The Japanese language abounds in roundabout methods of expression. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the city, the symbols of the Apocalypse are terminated. What follows are the words of Christ. The import of these is guarded by his declaration that they are "true and faithful." There is a reality and definiteness in them, which will not admit of their being added to, or taken from. So that any attempt to fritter away their meaning, will be followed by the curses written in the book, and a loss of the blessings ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... knowledge of the multiplication table, I gave a searching test upon that subject and issued a simple little certificate to the effect that the pupil had completed it. These little certificates acted like stakes put down along the way, to give incentive, direction, and definiteness to the educative processes, and to stimulate a reasonable class spirit or individual rivalry. I meet these pupils occasionally now—they are to-day grown men and women—and they retain in their possession these little colored certificates which ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... great Gothic windows of the dining-room, they had much more definiteness of outline, and were distinctly visible to the three gentlemen sipping their claret there, as two fair women in whom all three had a personal interest. These gentlemen were a group worth considering attentively; but any one entering that dining-room for the first time, would perhaps have ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of industrial monopoly, the problem now before us, there is a good deal of vagueness and misunderstanding because of lack of definiteness in the use of words which have rapidly shifted in meaning. The word "trust" originally applied, and still in legal usage applies, to a particular form of organization, that of a board of trustees holding the stock, and thus unifying the control, of two ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... perhaps very far back in animal life, that has in the end made him a warlike creature. Man does seem to be a creature of feelings rather than of instincts as far back as we find much account of him, and to be characterized rather by the weakness and variability of his instincts than by their definiteness. It is quite likely, too, that man never was at any stage a herd animal; in fact it seems certain that he was not, and that his instincts were formed long before he began to live in large groups at all. So he never ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... foundation. They were Sectaries; and the charge of human freedom was transferred from the churches to the sects, from the men in authority to the men in opposition, to Socinians and Arminians and Independents, and the Society of Friends. By the thoroughness and definiteness of system, and its practical adaptability, Calvinism was the form in which Protestant religion could be best transplanted; and it struck root and flourished in awkward places where Lutheranism could obtain no foothold, in the absence of a sufficient prop. Calvanism spread ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion of drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and the pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing so; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown it away ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the deciding particle, and indeed, it is evident that the intensity required in a particle must be related to the condition of those which are contiguous. But if the expectation should be found to approximate to truth, what a generality of character it presents! and, in the definiteness of the power possessed by a particular molecule, may we not hope to find an immediate relation to the force which, being electrical, is equally definite and ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... schoolfellow of Brown's, afterwards President of Corpus and Vice-Chancellor of the University). Mr. Irwin quotes another old friend, Archdeacon Moore, to much the same effect. Their explanations lack something of definiteness. After a few terms of private pupils Brown returned to the Island, and there accepted the office of Vice-principal of his old school. We can only be sure that his reasons were honourable, and sufficed for him; we may include among them, if we choose, that nostalgia ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ejaculated, discontentedly, vaguely baffled by the girl's definiteness and dignity. She left soon after, Julia dutifully walking with her to her car. Miss Toland said nothing of the visitor when Julia came back, but she knew the girl was troubled, and lay awake a long time herself that night, conscious that ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... the model he desired despite her husband, the speculation came into his mind how far he could push his influence over Ninitta. At first a mere impersonal idea, the thought was instantly, by his habit of mental definiteness, realized so clearly that his cheek flushed, partly, it is to be said to his credit, with genuine shame. He looked at the beautiful model, and turned away his eyes. Then, hardly conscious of what he was doing, he laid down his palette, ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... that computations of the age of the earth based on any data at hand are little better than rough guesses. Long before the definite estimates were undertaken, geologists had proved that the earth is very, very old, and it can hardly be said that the attempted computations have added much of definiteness to that proposition. They have, indeed, proved that the period of time to be drawn upon is not infinite; but the nebular hypothesis, to say nothing of common-sense, carried us as far ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... has nowhere presented it in a compact form; and his style of writing is often so corrupt, and his use of terms so inexact, that any exposition of his views, exhibiting them in a methodical arrangement, is liable to the charge of possessing a definiteness of statement beyond that which his opinions had assumed in his own mind. Still, the view that has now been given of his philosophy corresponds as nearly as may be with the indications afforded by his works. The details of his system present many points of peculiar interest. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... nomenclature is still confused. Once "the West" described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies; but the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of settlement has broken down old usage, and as yet no substitute has been generally accepted. The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the public, but for the purpose of the present ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... to yield or the extended time given to it could not be justified. It yields large fruitage in the development of the power of concentration and intellectual keenness. Yes, but better than that. All mathematical subjects, in that they require absolute accuracy and definiteness in their operations, are particularly helpful in developing those fine moral qualities of honesty, integrity, and upright dealing. Again, history is taught in the schools as an intellectual subject. In intellectual development ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... crystallised out of the long black hours of the night of her return to Friars' Holm—Gillian had merely laughed the notion aside, attaching little importance to it. But now, a week later, when Magda reverted to the subject with a certain purposeful definiteness, she ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... impression prevails over the conception and the word. In reflection the process is reversed—the outward object fades away into nothingness, the name or the conception or both together are everything. Language, like number, is intermediate between the two, partaking of the definiteness of the outer and of the universality of the inner world. For logic teaches us that every word is really a universal, and only condescends by the help of position or circumlocution to become the expression of individuals or particulars. And sometimes ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... penetration, and self-consistency. By the necessity of concentration, thought is sometimes led to forget its origin and the source of its problems. But in naming itself philosophy, thought has only recognized the definiteness and earnestness of its largest task. Philosophy is still thought about life, representing but the deepening and broadening of the common ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Reverend Murdo, "Mr. McGinnis is right in asking for definiteness. My answer is that we must trust this committee to do what is wise and reasonable, and we must accept their decision as final in ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... familiar to everybody. It has been elaborated in endless detail, and has expressed itself in the constitutions of all modern democracies. What Karl Marx did, and did for the first time, was to invest this theory of the all-efficiency of the majority with a definiteness, in respect of distribution of wealth, similar to that with which it had been invested already in respect of the making of laws and the ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... answer to inquiries, he explained the position of the pope on the subject of lay investiture, declared that he must stand by that position, and that if Henry also would not obey the pope, he must leave England again. Here was a sharp issue, drawn with the greatest definiteness, and one which it was very difficult for the king to meet. He could not possibly afford to renew the quarrel with Anselm and to drive him into exile again at this moment, but it was equally impossible for ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... mass, but all that appears in any way useful or akin to the new system is wrought in at its proper place, though often with considerable transformation. In this work of mediation there is considerable loss in definiteness, the just and comprehensive consideration of the most diverse interests not always making good the loss. And since such a philosophy, as we have already shown, engages the whole man, its disciple has neither impulse nor strength ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... shipyards, the construction of their engines of war was being carried on by day and by night. No contracts were made for the delivery of work at certain times; everything was done under the direct supervision of the Syndicate and its subordinates, and the work went on with a definiteness and rapidity ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... moments of her vigil when she tried to reassure herself with the very tenuity of her reasons for alarm. It was a comfort to think how little there was that she could state with the definiteness of knowledge. In all that met the eye George's relation to Diane was not less happy than in the first days of their life together. If, on Diane's part, the spontaneity of wedded love had gradually become the adroitness of domestic tact, there was nothing to affirm it but Mrs. Eveleth's ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... instance waves of air, and we know it by the context. His swaying figure of the "Prelude to Rheingold" is as plainly water as is the same figure used by Mendelssohn in his "Lovely Melusina." Not that Wagner plagiarized, but that he and Mendelssohn recognized the definiteness of musical suggestions; which is more than proved by their adopting the same musical ideas to ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell |
