"Fixity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yellow colour, and she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... unable to make progress, the ministry as a body resigns; but, as a rule, many of the members are immediately reappointed, with perhaps a change of portfolios. A certain continuity arises also from the fact that the subordinate (p. 314) officials in the various departments enjoy a reasonable fixity of tenure. Nevertheless the most obvious feature of parliamentary government as it exists to-day in France, and in other continental countries, is its instability. Only where, as in England, there are two ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Garral at this moment would have been surprised at the fixity of his look which met ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... of the Aquarium, seeing the flat heads of the swimming animals near the glass, would scream and wave their arms as though they could be seen by the fishy eyes of stupid fixity. Then they would experience a certain dismay upon perceiving that the fish ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... what—if the expression may be used without impropriety—I will term her spurs. I am given to understand, however," added Mr. Mortimer, "that the apparatus requires a considerable reservoir, and a reservoir of any size is only compatible with fixity of tenure. An Ishmael—a wanderer upon the face of the earth—buffeted this way and that by the chill blast of man's ingratitude, more keenly toothed (as our divine Shakespeare observed) than winter's actual storm—but this by the way; ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... clearness with which we should see the past and future; perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign. What we do know is, that the more the past and present are known, the more the future can be predicted; and that no one dreams of doubting the fixity of the future in cases where he is fully cognisant of both past and present, and has had experience of the consequences that followed from such a past and such a present on previous occasions. He perfectly well knows what will happen, and will stake ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... business, and that probably enough he had been eye-witness to the little fact,—fact credible perhaps without much proving. One rather regretted there was no date to it, no detail to give it whereabout and fixity in our conception; that the poor little Anecdote, though indubitable, had to hang vaguely in the air. Now, however, the above dated LETTER does, by accident, date Suhm's Anecdote too; date "July 8" as good as certain for it; the Siege itself having ended (July 18) in ten days more. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... remain unsurpassed for keen satiric analysis of the upper classes; and GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880), whose realistic stories of middle class life show a new art in tracing the growth and development of character instead of merely presenting it with the fixity of a portrait. To this list should be added CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882), whose Origin of Species (1859) affected so much of the thought of the second ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... loafers, sallow and dirty, who had come to range themselves in a row within ten feet of us against the front of the public-house. They stared at Flora de Barral's back with unseeing, mournful fixity. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... these country Royalists, if the metaphor may be allowed, to old-fashioned silver plate, antiquated and tarnished, but weighty; their attachment to the House of Bourbon as the House of Bourbon did them honor. The very fixity of their political opinions was a sort of faithfulness. The distance that they set between themselves and the bourgeoisie, their very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation, and enhanced their value. Each noble represented ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... driven home her meaning by a stress on one word. Now she sat looking at him, with a wide-eyed and deeply grave fixity, as if considering what more she should say. Dion murmured something about being very glad if he could help her in any way ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... recently canvassed the conclusions of both these investigators; and as the result of his own observations declares that algae, so far from being as polymorphic as they have been described, vary only within relatively narrow limits, and present on the whole as great fixity as the higher plants. It certainly supports his view to discover, on subjecting to a careful investigation Botrydium granulatum, a siphonaceous alga whose varied forms had been described by J. Rostafinski and M. Woronin, that these authors had included in the life-cycle stages of a second ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... are no longer merely habits, ideals, and knowledge facts, but, added to these, and now more important for emphasis because presumably right principles have already been established, breadth and fixity of character, self-acquaintance, scholarship, and culture. Tell me that the atmosphere, psychical and spiritual, and the training, academic and professional, that will produce the ideal teacher of the child will also produce the ideal teacher of the adolescent? Nay, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... hair is changing, it must now be not-black, though (to be sure) it may still seem black. The difficulty, such as it is, lies in this, that the human mind and its instrument language are not equal to the subtlety of Nature. All things flow, but the terms of human discourse assume a certain fixity of things; everything at every moment changes, but for the most part we can neither perceive this change nor express ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... process of converting arable land into pasture which had been going on all through the century was already becoming less active even in the first years of the reign, and had reached its limit some while before the Armada. As the displacement of labour diminished, fixity and regularity of employment increased, while the labour already displaced was gradually absorbed by the rapid growth of manufactures. This may perhaps in some degree explain the almost unaccountably sudden cessation of laments over agricultural depression. Still, the effective wage earned tended ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... pups at times, miss," replied Stump, his red eyes no doubt meeting the man's stare with a fixity that ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... greater or smaller pile of little boxes lay beside their plates, and one after another they took from each its cylinders, placed them in their indispensables, and held the latter to their ears. The expression of the face in reading is so largely affected by the necessary fixity of the eyes that intelligence is absorbed from the printed or written page with scarcely a change of countenance, which when communicated by the voice evokes a responsive play of features. I had never ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... realize the Kingdom, the more titanic this creation of a new order appears. Nothing we know can remain unaltered; but the smallest improvement takes an unconscionably long while to execute. Haste means folly, and we have to tell ourselves to go slowly. Things as they are have a fixity which demands moral dynamite to unsettle. We ache with curiosity to see how our plans and purposes will work out; we would give anything to be in at the finish. But there is death. We just begin, ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... landowner was regarded as the owner of the land. At the present moment, and without a line of further legislation, the tenant is the real owner, and not the nominal landlord at all. For owing to reduction of rent, fixity of tenure, free sale, and the tenant-right, the tenant is actually more than two-thirds owner. This is a matter of cash and not of theory, for the tenants' rights are at this moment worth more than double the fee-simple of the land itself. What will the Gladstonian party who prate ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... gallant, bent on a dramatic finish, stooping and 'cutting' their horses. The first man was on her side of the course. She stared at him in amazed consternation as he came towards her. His strong blue eyes, caught by the fixity of her glance or by her bright hair, saw her, and became triumphant. He pulled the horse in sharply, and within a few yards of the winning-post wheeled and went back, amid the jeers and howls of the crowd, who thought he ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... generated errors of opposite sorts. Many writers of treatises on Equity, struck with the completeness of the system in its present state, commit themselves expressly or implicitly to the paradoxical assertion that the founders of the chancery jurisprudence contemplated its present fixity of form when they were settling its first bases. Others, again, complain—and this is a grievance frequently observed upon in forensic arguments—that the moral rules enforced by the Court of Chancery fall short ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... looked at the papers till they wearied him, then he took out Stevenson's New Arabian Nights; but he found he could not read: the words meant nothing to him, and he continued to brood over his helplessness. He kept on thinking the same things all the time, and the fixity of his thoughts made his head ache. At last, craving for fresh air, he went into the Green Park and lay down on the grass. He thought miserably of his deformity, which made it impossible for him to go to the war. He went to sleep and dreamt that he was suddenly sound ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... metaphorical colouring about it. It literally means to 'hang upon' something, and so, beautifully, it tells us what faith is—just hanging upon God. Whoever has laid his tremulous hand on a fixed something, partakes, in the measure in which he does grasp it, of the fixity of that on which he lays hold; so 'they that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion,' that stands there summer and winter, day and night, year out and year in, with its strong buttresses and its immovable mass, the very ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... must be guided by certain fixed standards. We must find out from statistics the average age of the parents of the best babies. We must determine and analyse the qualifications of what constitutes the "best" babies, according to the eugenic ideal. We should give heed to the fixity of temperamental characteristics in order to determine their adaptability to conditions that prevail at certain ages. We should select an age in advance of the period at which science has determined individuals to have outlived ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... shut in, and safe and independent, with the new blind drawn, and the gas fizzing in its opaline globe, he tried to read "Don Juan." He could not. He was incapable of fixity of mind. He could not follow the sense of a single stanza. Images of his father and of Hilda Lessways mingled with reveries of the insult he had received and the triumph he had won, and all the confused wonder of the day and evening engaged his ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... loved, was cruel in her coquetry. The smile, then,—that innocent favor of young girls,—did not even lighten her countenance; and if, at times, she did raise her eyes, it was to fasten them upon one or other of the cavaliers with such a fixity, that their gallantry, bold as it generally was, took ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to do?" she asked, suddenly. Her voice carried something Jean did not remember. It thrilled into the icy fixity of ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... Lisbon, the fleet again assembled at Corunna, their victuals already rotten, and their water foul and short. Medina Sidonia even now counseled abandonment; but religious faith, the fatalistic pride of Spain, and Philip's dogged fixity of purpose drove them on. Putting out of Corunna on July 22, and again buffeted by Biscay gales, they were sighted off the Lizard at daybreak of July 30, and a pinnace scudded into ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... "Ulysses, noble son of Laertes, I should give you formal notice plainly and in all fixity of purpose that there be no more of this cajoling, from whatsoever quarter it may come. Him do I hate even as the gates of hell who says one thing while he hides another in his heart; therefore I will say what I mean. I will be appeased neither ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... of Germans were playing a game at a table near the door. A man in the dumb-solemn stage of drunkenness stood regarding his empty glass with owlish fixity. It was all consistent with a certain manner and degree of life; it was commonplace, established in the order of things. In the same order were the dreary street without, and the Etna, loading at her wharf for the return voyage to San Francisco. Their ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... incessantly asked for information. For the science of astronomy he evinced an early taste. When a very little boy, I began to teach him the names and positions of the principal constellations, the revolutions of the earth on its axis, and the fixity of the polar star. I believe we were the first to notice a comet in 1845, which was only a short time visible here, having a south declination, and which we afterwards knew to have been a fine object in ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting, but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late, business had been going even better ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... that he and she were very differently constituted. Of course, she knew that he was infinitely her superior, and indeed that of most people. Like everybody else she admired his uprightness, his fixity of purpose and his devouring energy and believed him to be destined to great things. Still, to tell the truth, which she often confessed with penitence upon her knees, on the whole she felt happier, or at any rate more ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... to uproot, as all the experience of Christian missionaries among peoples practicing polygyny goes to show. We may note also the general truth, that while religion does not originate human institutions or the forms of human association, it is preeminently that which gives fixity and stability to institutions through the supernatural sanction ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... omit many matters of which the explanation would not, I flatter myself, be without interest for my Readers: as for example, our method of propelling and stopping ourselves, although destitute of feet; the means by which we give fixity to structures of wood, stone, or brick, although of course we have no hands, nor can we lay foundations as you can, nor avail ourselves of the lateral pressure of the earth; the manner in which the rain originates in the intervals between our various zones, so that the ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... tests to the remarkable rapidity of decision and fixity of purpose displayed by Curtis in squeezing the breath out of Hermione, and gazing into her eyes until her proud head bent and sought refuge for a glowing face by hiding it on his breast, it will be noted first, that, for a man who had no experience in love-making, Curtis was quickly ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... during the reign of Edward VI., was apparently restored. The selection of Curwen to fill the archiepiscopal See of Dublin was particularly unfortunate. However learned he might have been, or however distinguished his ancestry, he was not remarkable for the fixity of his religious principles. During the reign of Henry VIII. he had acquired notoriety by his public defence of the royal divorce, as well as by his attacks on papal supremacy, though, like Henry, he was a strong upholder of the Real Presence ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... eyes glowed upon him with the fixity and the lustre of those of a child who is entertained and absorbed by an elder's jovial wiles. A flash of laughter broke over her face, and the low, gurgling, half-dreamy sound was pleasant to hear. She was evidently no more than a child to these bereft old people, and by them cherished as ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... uneducated man would have been guilty of doing. Mrs. Chump had, it appeared, a mother's feeling for one flat curl on her rugged forehead, which was often fondly caressed by her, for the sake of ascertaining its fixity. Doubts of the precision of outline and general welfare of this curl, apparently, caused her to straighten her back and furtively raise her head, with an easy upward motion, as of a cork alighted in water, above the level of the looking-glass on her left hand—an action she repeated, with a solemn ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Stanley, Kingsley, Liddell, to mention only a few, were men whose very friendship was the surest proof of my father's merits. The real secret of his success lay not in his friends, but in himself;—in the knowledge that his success or failure in life depended entirely on his own efforts; in the fixity of purpose which made him refuse all offers that would lead him from the pathway that he had laid down for himself; and in the unflagging industry with which he strove to reach the goal of his ambition. "My very struggles," ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... swinging over eternity by a mere thread." Katherine leaned across the desk and her eyes gazed with an even greater fixity into his. "If the thread snaps, do you know who ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... Quiescence. — N. rest; stillness &c. adj.; quiescence; stagnation, stagnancy; fixity, immobility, catalepsy; indisturbance[obs3]; quietism. quiet, tranquility, calm; repose &c. 687; peace; dead calm, anticyclone|!; statue-like repose; silence &c. 203; not a breath of air, not a mouse stirring; sleep &c. (inactivity) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the order of nature as seen in the seasons, in the phenomena of growth, in the fixed relations which exist between life and its environment as regards what is helpful or harmful, in the limitation of size and of faculties in the several species and the fixity of the characteristics generally in each, in the possibilities of cultivation and improvement of species within certain ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... admirable as it is for firmness, for intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities that make us love good men and pity bad ones. He is of the type of Brutus or of Cato—a model of austere fixity of purpose, but ungracious, domineering, and not ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... association and the leaders of the classes. The personnel of the student body is also a factor. It is among the things natural that from time to time changes in the personnel of the student body bring changes of interest and there is no guarantee of fixity so far as numbers are concerned. It is the ideal of the Central Associations to have the classes sustained each year with an increased efficiency, but all of the institutions testify to the fluctuation caused by the human element in the problem. These courses are mostly mapped out, even ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... question of species in zoology and botany, commencing with those races which man knows most about, viz., the domesticated and cultivated races, would be likely somewhat to modify the received idea of the entire fixity of species. This field, rich with various but unsystematized stores of knowledge accumulated by cultivators and breeders, has been generally neglected by naturalists, because these races are not in a state ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... from what you said just now that Mr. Hurst was contemplating some action of the kind. No doubt you had your information from a reliable quarter." This answer Mr. Jellicoe delivered without moving a muscle, regarding me with the fixity of a ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... dried the tears in Mrs. Meyerburg's eyes and her face had resumed its fixity of lines. Only her finger continued to tremble and two near-the-surface nerves in ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... like the Duke of Lyonesse and his acolyte, my Lord of Wargrove, as between Stair and himself. Louis de Raincy himself was "of as good blood as the King, only not so rich," as say the Spaniards. But this restless, stern-visaged Stair Garland, with his curious Viking fixity of gaze, what was his position towards Patsy? Was it all only friendship for the confidante of his sister? Louis Raincy's own hopes and purposes were of the vaguest. He did not even know whether he himself loved Patsy, but he was ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... last, in 1855, a valuable course of observations made at Capo di Monte, Naples, in 1845-6, enabled C. H. F. Peters[421] to set in the clearest light the insecurity of determinations based on the assumption of fixity in objects plainly affected by movements uncertain both in amount ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... of us in a hurry. "A character," he said, "remains just the same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's a thing we too often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose—most haunting ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea'd as monomaniacs and as obstinate as mules to come back again and again. This poor ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... 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 characters were due to variations in our own atmosphere He did not find the Schiaparelli ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the devotion with which her brother observed each ceremonial rite. He joined in prayer with real fervour; he sang earnestly and loudly; a great appeal sounded in his changing voice; and during the sermon he sat with his eyes upon the minister in a stricken fixity. All this was so remarkable that Cora could not choose but ponder upon it, and, observing Hedrick furtively, she caught, if not a clue itself, at least a glimpse of one. She saw Laura's clear profile becoming subtly agitated; ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... to fix my attention on the fixity of the bed. I put my hand over my eyes to shut out all thought save of the dead woman, defenseless already, reclining on that earth into which she will sink. But my looks, impelled by superhuman curiosity, escape ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... in a state of flux, subject to the changes of taste in music, the drama, singing, acting, and even politics and morals; but in one particular the public has shown no change for a century and a half, and it is not quite clear why this has not given greater fixity to popular appreciation. The people of to-day are as blithely indifferent to the fact that their operas are all presented in a foreign tongue as they were two centuries ago in England. The influence of Wagner has done much to stimulate a serious attitude ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... a thrashing, however, the student must cultivate as best he can an intense fixity of perception upon every fact or word or date that he wishes to make permanently his own. It is easy. It is a matter of habit. If you will, you can photograph an idea upon your cerebral gelatine ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... into Lawson's career—a most unwelcome task—the writer has detected a continuity of purpose, a fixity of design, a uniformity of method pervading his every public act. What he is doing now, i.e., exposing somebody or something, he has repeatedly done on a lesser scale in the past; not from worthy motives, but for the sole purpose ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... take the Jewish race, which seems to show extraordinary fixity and stability of type, there is not one dominant Jewish type; there are fully fifty different Jewish types. There is hardly any resemblance between the Jew of Tiflis and the Jew of Tangier, between democratic Ashkenazim and the aristocratic Sephardim. ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... tendency is to attribute the same meaning to the same word wherever it occurs. We instinctively treat a language as if it were a fixed system of signs. Fixity, indeed, is a characteristic of the signs which have been expressly invented for scientific use, such as algebraical notation or the nomenclature of chemistry. Here every expression has a single precise ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... this stone the emblem of Messiah, and associate with it all thoughts of firmness, preciousness, support, foundation of the true Temple, basis of hope, ground of certitude, and whatever other substratum of fixity and immovableness men's hearts or lives need. In all possible aspects of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... brought out still on her brow. Presently she looked up and saw that he had read his letter, and had put it in his pocket; he was tilted back against the crab-apple tree again, his forehead knit, his eyes brilliant, a peculiar fixity in their gaze. "Oh, here!" she cried protestingly, "you look as though you had just decided to become the President of the United States of America! Stop scowling and listen; Elsie is after me again to join her in Europe. She is fairly ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... many shells fell in the neighbourhood of Scholtz's Nek. With an energy which few had hitherto been disposed to give him credit for possessing, the enemy continued to engross himself in establishing, as it were, a fixity of tenure. This growing feeling of security which animated our friends was most depressing. True, it was something to hear that the Boers at Ladysmith had been repulsed with heavy loss—if it were true. It was something; but it was not much. Privations had developed our bumps of ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... motions at the fore-part of the neck. It becomes as necessary, therefore, in the performance of surgical operations upon the subclavian artery, to fix the clavicle by depressing it, as in Plate 8, as it is to give fixity to the lower maxilla and larynx, in the position of Plate 7, when the carotid ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... your melancholy memorial of my late dear and honoured friend, the late Bishop Terrot. Though the photo represents our late friend the bishop with his features shrouded in the cold fixity of death, yet it does bring back the original to the memory of those who knew him well, and I am greatly obliged to you for this memorial of one who has gone from our sight for ever, so far as this world is concerned. It was very kind of ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... hands handle. Our main moral problem is not to adjust our inner ideals to our environment, but rather to compel the environment to level up to our ideals. The world that ought to be makes us forever dissatisfied with the world that is, and sets us with a fixity of purpose at the task of realizing the Kingdom which might possibly be, which we know ought to be, and which, therefore, has our loyal endeavour that it {xxxvii} shall be, regardless of the cost ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... written yesterday to seek advice in the suppression of opinion and punishment for sedition in any of the most advanced governments of the modern world, as it was in the most advanced of the ancient world. The letter is here reproduced as an interesting exhibit of human nature and it fixity. ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts, it has received its sentence, 'twas but mere sensation, a passing paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the sluggish organs ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... its place? There is but the grand confession of scientific ignorance, aware of its knowing nothing—but this is habitually sluggish, and calculated to discourage the curiosity more needful to man than wisdom—or the hypothesis of the fixity of the species and of divine creation, which is. less demonstrable than the other, banishes for all time the living elements of the ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... heart. In Too Late Browning attempts to render a mood of passionate despair;—love and the hopes of love are defeated by a woman's sentence of rejection, her marriage, and, last, her death; it reads, more than any other poem of the writer, like a leaf torn out of "Wuthering Heights." There is a fixity of grief which is more appalling than this whirlblast; the souls that are wedged in ice occupy a lower circle in the region of sorrow than those which are driven before the gale. The Worst of it—another poem of the failures of love—reverses the conventional ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... evolution, so far as the present physical cosmos is concerned, postulates the fixity of the rules of operation of the causes of motion in the material universe. If all kinds of matter are modifications of one kind, and if all modes of motion are derived from the same energy, the orderly evolution ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... uttered rapidly, and in a wheedling undertone, with a continual snaky writhing of her whole body, except her eye, which seemed, in the intense fixity of its glare, to act as a fulcrum for all her limbs; and from that eye, as long as it kept its mysterious ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... leave him alone. In his lassitude he had a great pity for himself. He would have liked to sleep—not to die; he held death in horror—but to sleep and never to wake again. Yet, before him, as desirable as formerly, despite the painful fixity of her dry eyes, and more mysterious than ever, he saw her. His ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... story had relieved Dorn. The strain relaxed in his white face and it lost a little of its stern fixity. He got up and, opening his bag, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... leaping to her feet. With a hunted cry young Gourlay sprang to the door. So great had been the fixity of Gourlay's wrath, so tense had he been in one direction, as he moved slowly on his prey, that he could not leap to prevent him. As John plunged into the cool, soft darkness, his mother's "Thank God!" rang past him on ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... and fixed, and withal vaguely searching—rested on her guardian's face. The fixity of her look increased his nerve-tension. The others, too, were regarding him with varying feelings which were freely expressed in their eyes. Boatfield seemed upset and somewhat resentful, the old ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... said Drene coolly, "what a god I once set up on the altar of domesticity. I used to talk a lot once, didn't I?—a hell of a clamor I made in eulogy of the domestic virtues. Well, only idiots retain the same opinions longer than twenty-four hours. Fixity is imbecility; the inconstant alone progress; dissatisfaction is only a synonym for intelligence; contentment translated means stagnation..... I have changed my opinion concerning the ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... Having assumed fixity as a code, the Mishna in turn became what the Bible had been for centuries—a text, the basis of all legal development and scientific discussion. So it was used by the epigones, the Amoraim, or Speakers, the expounders of the third period. For generations ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... who holds even the flimsiest gossamer of security against a pauper's death, and a pauper's grave. If he be as rich as Croesus, let him remember Solon's warning, with its fulfilment—and the change since 550 B.C. has by no means been in the direction of fixity of tenure. Where are one-half of the fortunes of twenty years ago?—and where will the other half be in twenty years more? Though I am, like Sir John, old only in judgment and understanding, I have again and again seen the wealthy emir of yesterday sitting ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... doubts. His scepticism returns upon itself in a perpetual circle without repose, opposing equally those who maintain that all is uncertain, and those who maintain that nothing is, so utterly indisposed is he to any fixity. In this doubt which doubts itself, and this ignorance which is ignorant of itself, is to be found the essence of his thought. He cannot express it by any positive term; for if he was to say that he doubts, he betrays himself by making it certain that he doubts; and this being formally against ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... one should repeat the exercise afresh, until the time comes when one can concentrate one's gaze in this way for at least four or five minutes of perfect fixity. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... made of various elements, devoured the Radical. The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... with a halo of cambric and fluted lace. Her skin, white with the whiteness of unglazed porcelain, her forehead, where suffering had printed the semblance of deep thought, the purity of the lines refined by illness, the slowness of the glances, and the occasional fixity of the eyes, made Pierrette an almost perfect embodiment of melancholy. She was served by all with a sort of fanaticism; she was felt to be so gentle, so tender, so loving. Madame Martener sent her piano to her sister Madame Auffray, thinking ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... of each group in the descending scale. The Spaniard is less mutable than the Englishman, the Hindoo than the Spaniard, the Hottentot than the Hindoo, and the ape than the Hottentot. Therefore, a power whose existence depends upon the fixity of custom must be inimical to progress, but the authority of a sacred caste is altogether based upon an unreasoning reverence for tradition,—in short, on superstition; and as free inquiry is fatal to a belief in those fables which awed the childhood of the race, it has followed that ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... soldiers, who had made a rude couch for him and were tending him with such skill as they possessed, to be talking in the random of delirium, and they paid little heed to his words. But as Gaston stood by he was struck by the strange fixity of the youth's eyes, by the rigidity of his muscles, and by the coherence and significance ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... normally anterior pair of limbs; and such fishes are from this circumstance called "thoracic," or "jugular" fishes respectively, as the weaver fishes and the cod. This is a wonderful contrast to the fixity of position of vertebrate limbs generally. If then such a change can have taken place in the comparatively short time occupied by the evolution of these special fish forms, we might certainly expect other and far more bizarre structures would (did not some law forbid) have ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... that, theoretically at least, there was no room in such a community for the modern landless labourer. Where all the workers were paid by their tenancy of land, where, in other words, fixity and stability of possession were the very basis of social life, the fluidity of labour was impossible. Men could not wander from place to place offering to employers the hire of their toil. Yet we feel sure that, in actual ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... Che' Wan Ahman. Then it was fastened to a boat pole, fixed upright in the sand of Pasir Tambang, at the mouth of the Tembeling River, where it dangled with all the horror of set teeth, and staring eyeballs—the fixity of the face of one who has died a violent death—until, in the fulness of time, the waters rose and swept pole and head away with them. Thus was a plain lesson taught, by Che' Wan Ahman to the people of Pahang, as a warning ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... though I wondered at the man's expression, and the fixity of his gaze, I paid him no further heed, but turned my attention back to Mottle-face, who had, by this time, bellowed himself purple. Howbeit, in due time, the flask having been replenished and handed to him, he dived back into the recesses ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... that made the alluring difference. Henrietta's mouth was soft, red and mutinous; in her father it had been a blemish, half hidden by the foreign cut of moustache and beard, but in Henrietta it was a beauty and a warning. Rose had never properly studied that mouth before and under the fixity of her gaze Henrietta's eyelids fluttered upwards. There were shadows under her eyes and it seemed to Rose that she had changed a little. She must have changed. Rose had never been in the arms of Francis Sales; she shuddered now at ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... is now a fact that two-thirds of the major league ball players of the present day owe their handsome salaries to the system which John T. Brush so earnestly urged and for which he fought against odds which would have daunted a man with less fixity of purpose. ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... that enforces submission under a threat of physical violence. That a man should be ready to defend his honor—to convince an opponent by endeavoring to kill him—yes, he accepted without cavil those tenets of the French social code. But the brutal British fixity of purpose displayed by this truculent chauffeur left him gasping with indignation. He was quite sure that the man meant exactly what he had said. He felt that any real departure from the compact wrung from him by ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... the word and that he concentrated all the force of his accent; but giving it, by gesture, voice and facial expression, all the significance lacking to that particle, colorless in itself, as he pronounced the word, the fixity of his gaze, his trembling hands, his body shrinking back into itself, while his feet seemed riveted to the earth, all presaged something terrible and frightful. He saw what he was about to relate, he made you see it; the conjunction, aided by the actor's pantomime, opened ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was sitting to carry out their purpose. On learning their kind intentions, Major Clarke fixed his eye-glass in his eye, and, after steadily glaring at them through it for some time, said, "You are all drunk, go back to your tents." The volunteers, quite overcome by his coolness and the fixity of his gaze, at once slipped off, and there was no further trouble. About three weeks after the Annexation, the 1-13th Regiment arrived at Pretoria, having been very well received all along the road by the ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... forefathers. Old penalties for breach of custom have been abrogated; yet communal opinion is able to compel the ancient obedience. Legal enactments can nowhere effect immediate [385] change of sentiment and long-established usage,—least of all among a people of such fixity of character as the Japanese. Young persons are no more at liberty now, than were their fathers and mothers under the Shogunate, to marry at will, to invest their means and efforts in undertakings not sanctioned by family approval, to consider themselves ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... of 1881, though it admittedly did something substantial towards redressing the balance between landlord and tenant by securing to the tenants what were known as "the three F.'s "—viz. Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale—yet left the question in a wholly unsettled state. The fixing of fair rents, no doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants' point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and unsatisfactory system. It was incentive to indifferent ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... this difference to another of Mr. Carlyle's doctrines, which mark at once his independence of thought and his respect for experience, where he declares the necessity for recognising the hereditary principle in government, if there is to be 'any fixity in things.' In the same way we find him almost lamenting the fact that Oxford, once apparently so fast-anchored as to be immovable, has begun to twist and toss on the ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... different periods of life will never agree. When shall thought be regarded as mature? Is there a standard by which we may ascertain beyond question whether a composition be Veal or Beef? I sigh for fixity and assurance in matters aesthetical. It is vexatious that what I think very good my friend Smith thinks very bad. It is vexatious that what strikes me as supreme and unapproachable excellence strikes another person, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... paused—perhaps overcome by his feelings. Miss Temple had looked down when he first began to speak to her; but she now gazed straight before her, and her face, naturally pale as marble, appeared to be assuming also the coldness and fixity of that material; especially her mouth, closed as if it would have required a sculptor's chisel to open it, and her brow settled gradually into ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... of the movement of the earth and the fixity of the sun is condemned on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still. The Scriptures not being capable of lying or erring, it followeth that the position of those is erroneous and heretical who maintain that the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... induced, by their perusal of these pages, to emulate the Herschels—brother, sister, nephew—in all the bright and lovely qualities that ennoble life; in their fixity of purpose, their elevation of thought, their purity of character, their self-denial, their industry, their hopefulness, and ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first among our poets of the second generation—the generation succeeding that of Longfellow and Lowell—although the lack in him of original genius self-determined to a peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity and concentration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has made him less significant in the history of our literary thought than some ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... and that in the year before his father's death, when he was trying to make up his mind what profession he should take up; he then saw something of France and of Italy. Talking with travelled friends, he was wont to praise himself in humorous vein for the sober fixity of his life, and to quote, in that mellow tone which gave such charm to his talk, the line from Claudian, 'Erret et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos; for he had several friends to whom a Latin or a Greek quotation was no stumbling-block. Certain of his college companions, men who had ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... applies this basis of fixity in nature generally to the rules of man's nature, and avow himself a Quietist. Yet he would not despond, but contents himself, and waits. In no poem of the volume is this character more clearly defined and developed than in the sonnets "To a Republican Friend," the first ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... thought further we see that for such creatures as we are the subjection of a large part of our own nature to fixed laws is as necessary for our dominion over ourselves as the fixity of external nature is necessary for our dominion over the world around us. The fixity of a large part of our nature—nay, of all but the whole of it—is a moral and spiritual necessity. For it requires but a ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... self-determination something specifically new comes into existence. He certainly discusses the origin of the moral qualities of man more in detail than he does the origin of his intellectual qualities. He derives them, in their first beginnings, from the fixity, transmission and increase of the social impulses and instincts. These, being the basis of the whole moral development, and leading in their more mature form to love and to sympathy, originated by natural selection; and the other moral qualities, such as moral sense and conscience, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... These individual modes of being affected, then, will always furnish the colours of the portrait which man may paint to himself of the Divinity; it must therefore be obvious they can never be determinate—can have no fixity—can never be reduced to any graduated scale; the inductions which they may draw from them, can never be either constant or uniform; each will always judge after himself, will never see any thing but himself or his own peculiar situation in the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... again, and withdrew, while his superior opened the roll in his hands, and with all apparent fixity and interest studied at the precepts and definitions of the grammar of Dionysius ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... place, it is an assertion of the unity of life. And we must not limit the generality of this proposition. It is not merely a denial of the fixity of species, an assertion that there are no natural kinds so inseparable from one another that each must be the result of a distinct creative act. It is also an assertion that human life must be treated as a part in the larger whole of organic being, that the mind of man is ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... basis on which no equilibrium of habit and civilisation can be established; were it not for this constant change in our physical powers, which our mechanical limbs have brought about, man would have long since apparently attained his limit of possibility; he would be a creature of as much fixity as the ants and bees—he would still have advanced but no faster than other animals advance. If there were a race of men without any mechanical appliances we should see this clearly. There are none, nor have there been, so far as we can tell, for millions ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Britannica. He was an ardent botanist, a collector of insects and molluscs, and one of the pioneers in the anatomy of birds. There are many curious allusions in his writings which seem to shew that he too was beginning to doubt the fixity of species, and to guess at the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest which the great Darwin was the first to make a part of the knowledge of the world. It must be confessed that his son John, the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... still without haste, but with dogged fixity of purpose; but the Mole, now thoroughly alarmed, placed himself in front of him, and looking into his eyes saw that they were glazed and set and turned a streaked and shifting grey—not his friend's eyes, but the eyes of some other animal! Grappling with ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... subsidiary to science, they have acted upon it, and it has reacted upon them. We can only now remark that, on the one hand, classifications and nomenclatures have aided science by continually subdividing the subject-matter of research, and giving fixity and diffusion to the truths disclosed; and that on the other hand, they have caught from it that increasing quantitativeness, and that progress from considerations touching single phenomena to considerations touching the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... master and originator of true scientific methods when his influence on jurisprudence was on the wane. On the same track, Drey, in 1819, defended the theory of development as the vital prerogative of Rome over the fixity of other churches. Moehler was the pupil of Drey, and they made Tuebingen the seat of a positive theology, broader and more progressive than ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... "Zoo." Now as he hissed at me angrily I knew him to be a lizard with a shell on his back. I picked up several of them and examined their faces—they didn't like that at all. They have a peculiar clerical appearance, something of the sternness and fixity of purpose which seems to express itself in the jaws and eyes of some ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... unconscious fixity of her gaze and changed his position, lying on his back. She hastily averted her eyes. Her hands clenched and spread. Even to-morrow if this man found her ... one soft moment ... when she needed all her energy, her fire, her powers ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... traits of character among Semitic nations have been summed up by one writer under five heads:—1. Pliability combined with iron fixity of purpose; 2. Depth and force; 3. A yearning for dreamy ease; 4. Capacity for the hardest work; and 5. Love of abstract thought.[33] Another has thought to find them in the following list:—1. An intuitive monotheism; 2. Intolerance; 3. Prophetism; 4. Want of the philisophic ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... in this respect between time future and time past! Think of the indefinite possibilities in the one, the rigid fixity of the other. Our present actions are like cements that dry quickly and set hard on exposure to the air—the dirt of the trowel abides on the soft brick for ever. Many cuneiform inscriptions were impressed with a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the nun, stood looking from one to the other of us with a smile on her face of that fixity which denoted that she did not understand a single word of ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... and Gabriel Oak as general supervisor. None of these were clothed to any extent worth mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo. An angularity of lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed that serious work was the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Mme. Octave," I would then decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read. The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress them ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... play under the willows, year in and year out, and to retain the swans and the willows as part of the background with which memory will always paint the picture of their infancy. It is good for children to feel a certain fixity and stability about home and school ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... inwards by some violent pressure. The strange conformation of the maxillary bones gave the lower part of this face a resemblance to that of the larger species of apes. The brow, though sloping, was not deficient in intelligence produced by habits of cunning. Two fierce little eyes had the calm fixity of a tiger's, but they never looked you straight in the face. Asie seemed afraid lest she might terrify people. Her lips, a dull blue, were parted over prominent teeth of dazzling whiteness, but grown across. The leading expression of this animal countenance ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... the Department must sluggishly repose until that meal is digested before another can be taken. One idea, of the magnitude of this, is enough for the present crisis. We shall not have another, if the stubborn resistance and fixity of ideas in the bureaus can prevent it. The invulnerability of the Monitors, and the peculiar arrangement by which this important end is obtained, are but one of the items necessary to make up the complete efficiency of war steamers. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... The fixity of the group is markedly greater than that of the simple interval. In the one case in which the mean variation of the group is greater than that of the elementary period the material involved was meager (five instead of ten repetitions) ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... accepting them from every quarter whence they blow to him if only they will fill his sails and propel his bark; but he will never understand what mischief he could work to his enemies by opposing a programme of advanced democratic reform to the imperial programme whose fixity resembles the rigidity of death. But what liberty can he invoke—he who has disavowed and injured all liberties? Not personal liberty—abused and trampled on constantly by his menials; not commercial liberty, sold for thirty pieces of silver after the Germanic ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... straight in front of him with a singular fixity. It is possible that he was conscious of the sidelong scrutiny ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... pushed him upon one side. What ailed the fellow, when every second was crucial, life or death bringing? Medusa-like for one second her face hung, white-illumined, set into terrible fixity, above the great flame, the next instant all was blackness to their dazzled eyes. The light of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and the remainder was to be purchased by the government at a cheap rate, either to be held until there was a rise in price, or to be transported to some other district in need of it. The people were to profit by fixity of prices and escape from further taxation; and the government, by the revenue accruing in the process of administration. There was also to be a system of state advances to cultivators of land; not merely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... lifelong friendships. These friendships are being made over the quilting frames to-day just as they were in the pioneer times when a "quilting" was almost the only social diversion. Content with life, fixity of purpose, development of individuality, all are brought forth in every woman who plans and pieces a quilt. The reward of her work lies, not only in the pleasure of doing, but also in the joy of possession—which can be passed ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros, extinct for untold ages, forced their way through the tangled branches; and the British tiger and hyena harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts of the catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same kind that live now. But what, it has been asked, is a brief period of 3,000 years, when compared with the geologic ages? Or how could any such argument ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... rising and setting, and causing days and years, and being now at this or that altitude; such persons speak from appearances, and in doing so, do not ascribe such effects to the sun, because they are not thinking of the sun's fixity or the earth's revolution. But those who confirm themselves in the idea that the sun produces the things that appear upon the earth by means of its heat and light, end by ascribing all things to nature, even the creation of the universe, and become naturalists and, at last, atheists. These ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... stationary," said Mr. Hume, "and ashore, as you may see from its fixity. Beep her away. We can't ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... equally valid against Iago; but he is of course but a diluted version of that superlative villain, as Marcelia is a rather priggish and infinitely less tender Desdemona. The failure, however, of the central figure to exhibit any fixity of character is the real weakness of the play; and the horrors of the last scene fail to atone for the want of the vivid style which reveals an 'intense ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... also, the different proofs bear a reference, by which the fixity and durability of the colour with which a stuff has been dyed may be tried. Of these, some may be called natural, other artificial. The natural proof consists in exposing the dyed stuff to the air, sun, and rain. If the colour is not changed by this exposure in twelve or fourteen days, ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... glow with the changeable tints of the opal. This delicately painted surface acts as a register of the minutest differences of organization—a shade of colour, an additional streak or spot, a slight modification of outline continually recurring with the greatest regularity and fixity, while the body and all its other members exhibit no appreciable change. The wings of Butterflies, as Mr. Bates has well put it, "serve as a tablet on which Nature writes the story of the modifications of species;" they enable us to perceive changes ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... That fixity of purpose which had enabled Rita to avoid the cunning snares set for her feet and to snatch triumph from the very cauldron of shame without burning her fingers availed her not at all in dealing with Mrs. Sin. The image of Monte receded ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... those who followed the famous Mafia trial, detail by detail, perhaps no one did so with greater fixity of interest than Bernie Dreux. He reveled in it, he talked of nothing else, his waking hours were spent in the courtroom, his dreams were peopled with Sicilian figures. He hung upon Norvin, his hero, with a tenacity that ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... of coming dissolution, the most striking thing about the dying face was its incredible power. It was no ordinary spirit that wrestled there with Death. The eyes glared with strange fixity of gaze from the cavernous sockets hollowed by disease. It seemed as if Bartolommeo sought to kill some enemy sitting at the foot of his bed by the intent gaze of dying eyes. That steady remorseless look was the more ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... than ten paces off, the old man did not turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their stiffened joints. Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism, more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... difficult, indeed, to show that, instead of having reason to complain of the desire for the postponement of important questions, as though the world were composed mainly of knaves or fools, such fixity as animal and vegetable forms possess is due to this very instinct. For if there had been no reluctance, if there were no friction and vis inertae to be encountered even after a theoretical equilibrium had been upset, we should have had no fixed organs nor settled proclivities, but should have ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... at his neighbor, he found the dark glasses focused upon himself with such fixity that he responded with a friendly nod, and, making some trivial remark, found Mr. Mannering not at all averse to conversation. A few commonplaces were exchanged until the arrival of Mr. Rosenbaum's order, when ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... with the thing. Imagine the torture of patience, the fixity of will required to keep it eternally on. Do you know how bandages feel after a time? Think of shrouding your head for twenty years. But think also of the slow stealthiness with which the mute reproach of that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... nomenclature in biology has been found not only to be advantageous, but to be a prerequisite to progress in research, as the vast multiplicity of facts, still ever accumulating, would otherwise overwhelm the scholar. In philological classification fixity of nomenclature is of corresponding importance; and while the analogies between linguistic and biotic classification are quite limited, many of the principles of nomenclature which biologists have adopted having no application in philology, still in some important particulars ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... in this way. Life is not a thing, nor the state of a thing—it is a continuous movement or change. The soul itself is a movement, not an entity. In the physical world, light, when examined, proves itself to be a movement. Even physical science, bound, as it would seem, to assert the fixity and rigidity of matter, is now of the opinion that matter is not the solid thing we are apt to think it. The experiments of Kelvin and Lodge and the discovery of radium, have brought forward a new theory of matter; the old-fashioned base, the atom, is now regarded as being essentially ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... no flesh fit to weigh against his mind, he gave preference to the latter. Now the essence of his nature was to take strong views; not hastily—if he could help it—nor through narrow aspect of prejudice, but with power of insight (right or wrong), and stern fixity thereafter. He had kept his opinion about Sir Duncan Yordas much longer than usual pending, being struck with the fame of the man, and his manner, and generous impulsive nature. All these he still admired, but felt that the mind was far too hasty, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... indistinguishable in the ornament. The migration of races and the early commercial intercourse between distant lands have done much to bring about the fusion of types; but again in contrast to this we find, in the case of extensive tracts of country, notably in the Asiatic continent, a fixity, throughout centuries, of forms that have once been introduced, which occasions a confusion between ancient and modern works of art, and renders investigations much more difficult. An old French traveler writes: "J'ai vu dans le tresor d'Ispahan les vetements ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... was stopped abruptly by the warning of Nels at the door. Skag stood his canteen against a rock and hurried forth. Nels stood at the mouth of the lair, his head turned up the river bed. His eyes did not alter from their look of fixity as the man emerged. The shoulder nearest Skag merely twitched a trifle, the left paw lifting to the toes. Skag followed ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... the existing tribes have exhibited such a fixity and peculiarity of character, as to have rendered them at once a paradox and a bye-word. The Turk has not been more inflexible; nor the Jew shown more individuality. We have hardly begun systematically to examine this subject. If the ancient builders ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... said Indiman, reading the sign over the door. "Spanish Jew, I should say. Yes, and the Queen of Spades in person," he added, in an undertone, for L. Hernandez was standing in the open door-way of the shop and regarding us with a curious fixity of glance. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... wrestling bout. At last Jimmy with perceptible apprehension turned his head on the pillow.—"Good evening," he said in a conciliating tone.—"H'm," answered the old seaman, grumpily. For a moment longer he looked at Jimmy with severe fixity, then suddenly went away. It was a long time before any one spoke in the little cabin, though we all breathed more freely as men do after an escape from some dangerous situation. We all knew the old man's ideas about Jimmy, and nobody dared to ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... appeared to the men who framed them in the distant past. But political creeds, dealing as they do chiefly with the transient and shifting conditions of a world which is passing away continually, can claim no fixity of allegiance, except where they express, not the policy of a day, but the unchanging dictates of righteousness. And inasmuch as the path of ideal righteousness is not always plain nor always practicable; as ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... subject, but at least it can be made secondary to the business interests of the country—that is, to the interests of our people as a whole. Unquestionably these business interests will best be served if together with fixity of principle as regards the tariff we combine a system which will permit us from time to time to make the necessary reapplication of the principle to the shifting national needs. We must take scrupulous care that the reapplication shall be made in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the incarnation was man, not mere flesh; in other words, the Lord was perfect man as well as perfect God. But in that case, how can God and man form one person? In particular, the freedom of his human will is inconsistent with the fixity of the divine. Without free-will he was not truly man; yet free-will always leads to sin. If all men are sinners, and the Lord was not a sinner, it seemed to follow that he was not true man like other men. Yet in that case the incarnation is a ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... wine-cellar. He observed nothing but champagne in any glass, and if food were being served it was done surreptitiously. Sweat dripped from the faces of the dancers, deep flushes discoloured all not so heavily enamelled as to preserve an inalterable complexion, the eyes of many stared with the fixity of hypnosis. Yet when the music ended with an unexpected crash of discord these dancers applauded insatiably till the jaded orchestra struck up once more, when they renewed their ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... the Nautical Almanac. They do not follow the apparent motions of the stars. Stars are allowed to drift across the field of vision, and as each star crosses a small group of parallel wires in the eye-piece its precise time of passage is recorded. Owing to their relative fixity of position these instruments can be constructed to record the positions of stars with much greater accuracy than is possible to the more general and flexible mounting of equatorials. The recording of transit is comparatively dry work; the spectacular element is entirely ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... dropping her lorgnette and giving the canvas the fixity of her unobstructed gaze. "It's most interesting," she said, a little faintly. "Are there many ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... changing times. The chief wants of to-day may not necessarily be the most pressing requisites of a century hence. Therefore, one of the greatest essentials—and at the same time one of the greatest difficulties—in a foundation like this, is to provide for and combine within it such a fixity of principle and such an adaptability of administration as shall enable it to keep pace with the progress of the ages, and suit itself to the several requirements of succeeding generations ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... several minutes, gazing at this opening of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom, appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the Seine, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... something of Talleyrand's wit in the insolent retort, if you have quite grasped the contrast between the two men and their costumes. Maxime scowled and looked full at the intruder; Cerizet not merely endured the glare of cold fury, but even returned it, with an icy, cat-like malignance and fixity ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... The fixity of Swithin's eye alone betrayed emotion. A dumb and grumbling anger swelled his bosom. It was vulgar to be stout, to talk of being stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his sister, he grasped her hand, and said in a tone ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
