"Inorganic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realised somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic 'nature of things' can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of Greece, and used its literature as a mould for its own. It developed Roman law and introduced modern science. The world without and the world within were rediscovered. Land and sea, starry sky and planetary system, were fixed upon the chart. Man himself, the animals, the planets, organic and inorganic life, the small things of the earth gave up their secrets. Inventions utilized all classes of products, commerce flourished, free cities were builded, universities arose, learning spread itself on the pages of newly invented books of print, and, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... Knaggs says salt added to cooking vegetables converts organic salts into inorganic. I cannot follow that. What organic salts are so converted? One or ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... powers of thought to conceive either of an undifferentiated unity, or of a chaos of differences without some kind of relation. Descending to particulars, we may bring Comte as a witness against himself; for while he declares that the sciences which deal with the inorganic world are mainly analytic in their tendencies, he at the same time maintains that the sciences of Biology and, still more, of Sociology and Morals, are synthetic, since they deal with objects in which the whole is not a mere aggregation ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... changes of nature are regular and periodic, while others, without law or method, are apparently adapted by their diversity to draw out the unlimited capacities and varieties of life; so that as inorganic nature approaches a regulated confusion, the more it tends to bring forth that perfect order, of which fragments appear in the incomplete system of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... and much diffused or dominant species will be found on the side of the larger genera. This, again, might have been anticipated; for the mere fact of many species of the same genus inhabiting any country, shows that there is something in the organic or inorganic conditions of that country favourable to the genus; and, consequently, we might have expected to have found in the larger genera, or those including many species, a large proportional number of dominant species. But so many causes tend to obscure this result, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... in all this," said Mr. Allison, "is to lead you to the perception of a most important fact. Still let your thoughts rest intently on what I am saying. You are aware of the fact, that material substances, as well inorganic as organic, are constantly giving off into the atmosphere minute particles, which we call odors, and which reveal to us their quality. The rose and nightshade, the hawthorn and cicuta fill the air ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... the nations of Central Asia," says I. J. Schmidt, "the earth and its interior, as well as the encompassing atmosphere, are filled with Spiritual Beings, which exercise an influence, partly beneficent, partly malignant, on the whole of organic and inorganic nature.... Especially are Deserts and other wild or uninhabited tracts, or regions in which the influences of nature are displayed on a gigantic and terrible scale, regarded as the chief abode or rendezvous of evil Spirits.... And hence the steppes of Turan, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... pretty garments, seem to think. Here is one nation in the world that has attained peace if not happiness: that has preserved the happy belief of the Druids and all primitive peoples, of the relationship of the inorganic to the organic, which scientists now accept and divines begin to consider. Mr Fielding Hall[25] said the other evening "their ideal is untenable in a world of strenuous endeavour and capitalism"—they, of course, do not believe in strenuous endeavour or ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... loosened, the Pope was no longer an accepted peacemaker; and the idea of an international code, overriding the will of nations and the authority of sovereigns, had not dawned upon philosophy. Between the old order that was changing and the new that was unborn, Europe had an inorganic interval ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... and hair; it is the soul also which causes cohesion among the parts of the solid substances such as bones and sinews, that make up our frame. In the same way the world-soul displayed itself in rational beings as intellect, in the lower animals as mere souls, in plants as nature or growth, and in inorganic substances as 'holding' or cohesion. To this lowest stage add change, and you have growth or plant nature; super-add to this phantasy and impulse and you rise to the soul of irrational animals; at a yet higher stage you reach the rational and discursive intellect, ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... in which, to all appearance, the action of the nerve force is suspended, I have but to assume that this force is electric, and apply the poles of my instrument accordingly, and I bring it in from the more healthy parts, along with the inorganic current from my machine. Forcing conduction through the nerves, by means of my artificial apparatus, I rouse the susceptibility of the nerves until they will normally conduct the "nervous influence" ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... an attendance of about 50, both Jews and non-Jews. Rev. Dr. H. P. Mendes, of New York, gave an address on "Bible Ideals in Modern Times," and Professor Frank Carney of Denison University, Professor of Industrial Geography in the Cornell Summer School, spoke on "The Inorganic Basis of the Hebrew Contribution to the World." Professor W.A. Hurwitz of Cornell spoke briefly on the scope of the Menorah movement, and Dr. L. L. Silverman played Kol ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... normal salt, Ca3(PO4)2, is the most important. It is the principal inorganic constituent of bones, and hence of the "bone-ash" of commerce (see PHOSPHORUS); it occurs with fluorides in the mineral apatite (q.v.); and the concretions known as coprolites (q.v.) largely consist of this salt. It also constitutes the minerals ornithite, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... minister's daughter, and familiar from her childhood with this class of questions, especially with all the doubts and perplexities which are sure to assail every thinking child bred in any inorganic or not thoroughly vitalized faith,—as is too often the case with the children of professional theologians. The kind of discipline they are subjected to is like that of the Flat-Head Indian pappooses. At ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... two classes of constituents—the Inorganic, which may be called the foundation; and the Organic, which may be considered the superstructure. With the former of these we are principally concerned here. A plant must derive from the soil certain proportions of silica, lime, sulphur, phosphates, alkalies, and other mineral constituents, or it ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Review, Oct. 1857). In his study of organic laws Spencer was indirectly influenced by the ideas of Schelling through von Baer.] He aimed at showing that laws of change are discoverable which control all phenomena alike, inorganic, biological, psychical, and social. In the light of this hypothesis the actual progression of humanity is established as a necessary fact, a sequel of the general cosmic movement and governed by the same ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... to suppose that Nature has still a mine of undiscovered treasure in the mind and constitution of man, as well as in inorganic nature? No, friends, these things are as natural as the physical senses, and not a whit more of a miracle. It is only that we are accustomed to one, and not to the other, that makes the astral senses seem more wonderful than the physical. Nature's workings ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... settlement of this country would be so great as to make the country uninhabitable. Fortunately, however, this inevitable process breaks down the structure of all organic material, partly converting fiber and pulp into gas, partly liquefying the material and converting the remainder into inorganic matter which is of vast importance as food for plant life. A cycle is thus formed which may be best illustrated in the case of cows which feed on the herbage of a meadow, the manure from the cows furnishing food for the grass which otherwise ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... the courtyard waiting for the gang to start. He stood by the porch and jotted down in his notebook a thought that had occurred to him. This was what he wrote: "If a bacteria watched and examined a human nail it would pronounce it inorganic matter, and thus we, examining our globe and watching its crust, pronounce it to ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... I would hear that curse again. Ha, what an awful whisper rises up! 'Tis scarce like sound: it tingles through the frame As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike. Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice 135 I only know that thou art moving near And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, remained in his position at the window. The old woman sat with her implacable face, unchanging like a thing insensible and inorganic. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... potash and other inorganic substances required by the plant; and they may be advantageously applied where the soil contains a large amount of decayed vegetable matter. The same remark will also apply to lime, which is useful in destroying slugs and ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... in the deep), substance of a slimy nature found at great sea depth, over-hastily presumed to be organic, proved by recent investigation to be inorganic, and of no avail ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... upon the machinery of utterance. The Hebrew scheva, the French eu, and e mute, are varieties of this easily-flowing, unmodulated, unstable, unsatisfactory sound. Like the o (aw), this sound u (uh) has a vacant, unfinished, and inorganic character as a sound, while yet, from its great fluency, its frequent occurrence tends, more than that of any other sound, to give to Language that conversational fluency, rapidity and ease which are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... say the grossly ignorant—have long held over the heads of the pioneers of science these two great charges: No man has ever yet transmuted a metal; no man has ever yet proved the connecting link between organic and inorganic life. I say life, for I take it that this company admits that a slab of granite is as much alive as any man or woman I see before me. But I have manufactured gold, and I could have manufactured protoplasm if I had devoted my life to ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... a clock's hands is derived from the arm which winds up the clock, so surely is all terrestrial power drawn from the sun. Leaving out of account the eruptions of volcanoes, and the ebb and flow of the tides, every mechanical action on the earth's surface, every manifestation of power, organic and inorganic, vital and physical, is produced by the sun. His warmth keeps the sea liquid, and the atmosphere a gas, and all the storms which agitate both are blown by the mechanical force of the sun. He lifts the rivers and the glaciers up to the mountains; and thus the cataract and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... spontaneous generation of animals and vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic elements. (2) That kind of generation in which the parent, whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in structure or habit from itself, but in which after one or more generations the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... into hills and ridges hundreds of feet in height, and trending in every direction like the wreaths of a great snow-drift. I advance with difficulty over these naked ridges, where no vegetation finds nourishment in the inorganic heap. I drag myself wearily along, sinking deeply at every step. I climb sand-hills of strange and fantastic shapes, cones, and domes, and roof-like ridges, where the sportive wind seems to have played with the plastic mass, as children with potter's clay. I encounter ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... this improvement, which, if it be such as described, and applicable to microscopes, will perhaps enable Ehrenberg to verify the opinions he has lately formed concerning the atmosphere—namely, that it is not less full of organic and inorganic life than the ocean, or any ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... it as an argument, and for a few years it was assailed with fierce counterarguments; we now hold it to be a masterful explanation of an enormous body of facts. When it will pass on to the next stage we cannot foresee; but chemists and physicists darkly hint at the possibility of the evolution of inorganic ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... the one through which they are passing at the moment. They do not even know that their mothers are alive—much less that their mothers were once as they now are. To an embryo, its mother is simply the environment, and is looked upon much as our inorganic ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... Plants.—It is the primary function of plants to convert the inorganic matter of the soil and air into organised structures of a highly complex nature. The food of plants is purely mineral, and consists chiefly of water, carbonic acid, and ammonia. Water is composed of the elements oxygen and hydrogen; ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... the Blood. Fibrine, Albumen. Inorganic Substances. Isomerism of Fibrine, Albumen, and elements of nutrition. Relation of animal ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... at the Sorbonne, contributed in different degrees and ways towards a new and profounder conception of the life of societies or of humanity. By Turgot for the first time the idea of progress was accepted as the ruling principle of history. It cannot be denied that, as regards the sciences of inorganic nature, he more than foreshadowed Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and positive, through which the mind of humanity ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... good reason for doubting the necessary alternative, that all these varied species have been evolved from pre-existing crocodilian forms, by the operation of causes as completely a part of the common order of nature, as those which have effected the changes of the inorganic world. ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Another year's instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... there lives "one spirit in all things," and that the whole cognisable world is constituted, and has been developed, in accordance with one common fundamental law. We emphasise by it, in particular, the essential unity of inorganic and organic nature, the latter having been evolved from the former only at a relatively late period.[2] We cannot draw a sharp line of distinction between these two great divisions of nature, any more than ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... to suspect that transmutation of species, the geologic development of the earth, and other like phenomena do not present features conflicting with ordinary experience. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Darwin would be greatly astonished to be told that their theories of inorganic and organic evolution involved any agencies not known to exist in the present course of nature. The great achievement of these writers has been to show that all past changes of the earth and its inhabitants are to be explained as resulting from the continuous action of causes ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... not eradicate that root of all evil, the association of consciousness with a mechanism requiring to be constantly stoked with a particular sort of fuel which exists only in limited quantities. If God could arrange for life to be maintained on a diet of inorganic substances—if he could enable animals, like plants, to go direct to minerals and gases for their sustenance, instead of having it, so to speak, half-digested in the vegetable kingdom—or even if, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly from generalization to generalization after the fashion of the chemist or physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that the inorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps after all be TRUER than the experimental, in spite of the difference in practical value in favour of the latter. It was, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... obtain this nourishing food-producing material? At first it is a little seed, which soon begins to draw into itself from the earth and the surrounding air matters which in themselves contain no vital properties whatever; it absorbs into its own substance water, an inorganic body; it draws into its substance carbonic acid, an inorganic matter; and ammonia, another inorganic matter, found in the air; and then, by some wonderful chemical process, the details of which chemists do not yet understand, though ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... all living animals, it is an interesting physiological fact to find substances harder than the enamel of teeth, and coloured surfaces as well polished as those of a fresh shell, re-formed through inorganic means from dead organic matter—mocking, also, in shape, some of the lower vegetable productions. (1/6. Mr. Horner and Sir David Brewster have described ("Philosophical Transactions" 1836 page 65) a singular "artificial substance resembling shell." It is deposited in fine, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... there would be no oak; the matter that clothes it would enjoy its stupid slumber; and when the forest monarch stands up in his sinewy, lordliest pride, let the pervading life-power, and its vassal forces that weigh nothing at all, be annihilated, and the whole structure would wither in a second to inorganic dust. So every gigantic fact in Nature is the index and vesture of a gigantic force. Everything which we call organization that spots the landscape of Nature is a revelation of secret force that has been wedded to matter, and if the spiritual powers that have thus domesticated ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the economy involved in the welding of physiological processes for the phenomenon of physiological memory, wherein we see reflected, as it were, in the development of the organism, the association of inorganic restraints occurring in nature which at some previous period impressed itself upon the plastic organism. We may picture the seedling at Upsala, swayed by organic memory and the inherited tendency to an economical preparation for future events, gradually developing towards the aesthetic climax ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... of Anthropology relies, for its demonstration, upon human impressibility. Impressibility in its general sense, or the power of being affected by external agents, is proportional to the development of life. Inorganic matter is affected only mechanically or chemically—vegetation is powerfully affected by causes which would have no perceptible influence on stones or metals, and animals are affected by remote objects, by sounds, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... for an instance from the Inorganic world, as showing the distinction between the two kinds of sciences. Another example may be cited from the field of Biology; it is a little more perplexing. For "biology" is sometimes given as the name for the two concrete classificatory sciences—botany and zoology. In point of fact, however, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... authentic jewelry, inorganic chemicals, miscellaneous consumer goods, fruit and vegetables, tobacco, construction minerals, electric power machinery ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of substances are of unstable composition and are readily altered by chemical reagents; to this group belong many vegetable and most animal poisons. These, therefore, must be treated differently from the more stable inorganic compounds. With an inorganic poison we may destroy all organic materials mixed with it, trusting to find the poison still recognisable after this process. Not so with an organic substance; that must be separated by other than ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... and field experiments are small—from 0.7 to 1.3 per cent. The absorption is without doubt chiefly due to the organic matter of the peats, and in all the specimens on which these trials were made, the proportion of inorganic matter is large. The results therefore become a better expression of the power of peat, in general, to absorb ammonia, if we reckon them on the organic matter alone. Calculated in this way, the organic matter of the Beaver Pond peat (which constitutes but 68 per cent. of the dry ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your judgments," he said. "You lack biology. It has no place in your scheme of things.—Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the ground up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic right on up to the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... and there is doubt as to the purity of the water that is being used, it should be boiled and then let stand to cool and settle. Boiling not only destroys and renders harmless any organic germs that may be present, but also precipitates and eliminates much of its inorganic salts. ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... neither gold nor silver: its use is to make the supreme sciences and to direct them against disease." He recognized three basic substances, sulphur, mercury and salt, which were the necessary ingredients of all bodies organic or inorganic. They were the basis of the three principles out of which the Archaeus, the spirit of nature, formed all bodies. He made important discoveries in chemistry; zinc, the various compounds of mercury, calomel, flowers of sulphur, among ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... to exercise an influence which is exactly comparable to that of artificial selection. By Conditions of Existence I mean two things,—there are conditions which are furnished by the physical, the inorganic world, and there are conditions of existence which are furnished by the organic world. There is, in the first place, CLIMATE; under that head I include only temperature and the varied amount of moisture of particular places. In the next place there is what is technically called ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... principle that in the explanation of natural phenomena it is universally agreed to begin with the simplest suppositions, the first hypotheses of the nature and cause of the geminations have for the most part put in operation only the laws of inorganic nature. Thus, the gemination is supposed to be due either to the effects of light in the atmosphere of Mars, or to optical illusions produced by vapors in various manners, or to glacial phenomena of a perpetual winter, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the dust, however, having been sent to Ehrenberg of Berlin, that celebrated savant, after a microscopical examination, laid an account of his inquiry before the Akademie der Wissenschaften, in May 1844, in which he shewed that the dust, so far from being inorganic, contained numerous specimens of a species of flint-shelled animalcules, or infusoria, known as polygastrica, and minute portions of terrestrial plants. The investigation led him to certain conclusions: '1. That meteoric dust-rain ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... solidified. A little more time, a little more heat, and the hills are but April snow-banks. Nature has but two forms, the cell and the crystal,—the crystal first, the cell last. All organic nature is built up of the cell; all inorganic, of the crystal. Cell upon cell rises the vegetable, rises the animal; crystal wedded to and compacted with crystal stretches the earth beneath them. See in the falling snow the old cooling and precipitation, and the shooting, radiating forms that are the architects ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... combustion of a certain amount of material which has been already assimilated in the microscopic cellular laboratories of our body. Every vital activity is manifested at least through chemical and physical forces. And the elements of the fuel for our engines we receive through plants from the inorganic world. For the plant, as we have seen, stores up as potential energy in its compounds the actual energy of the sun's rays. And thus man lives and thinks by energy, obtained originally from the sun. But man not only consumes food and fuel. The complicated protoplasm is continually wearing ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... the leaves at the top. The rootlets absorb the water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds, on the other—earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they are; but ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... whilst the higher forms of life arose only by generation from their kind, there was a perpetual abiogenetic fount by which the first steps in the evolution of living organisms continued to arise, under suitable conditions, from inorganic matter. It was due chiefly to L. Pasteur that the occurrence of abiogenesis in the microscopic world was disproved as much as its occurrence in the macroscopic world. If organic matter were first sterilized and then prevented from contamination from without, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... however, the symbols of the inorganic world did not appeal to Froebel with the same force as those of the organic world. In a letter to Madame von Holzhausen. 31st March, 1831, he writes: "It is the highest privilege of natural forms or of natural life that they contain agreement and perfection ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... not see the effect of that new thought? Treated as slaves, as things and animals, the many had learnt to consider themselves as things and animals. And so they had become 'a mass,' that is, a mere heap of inorganic units, each of which has no spring of life in itself as distinguished from a whole, a people, which has one bond, uniting each to all. The 'masses' of the French had fallen into that state, before the Revolution of 1793. The 'masses' of our agricultural labourers,—the 'masses' of our ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of evolution does not in any degree explain the mystery of the universe. All it does is to offer us an hypothetical picture—true or false—of the manner in which the changes of organic and inorganic life succeeded one another in their historic creation. Evolutionists have to make their start somewhere, just as "personalists" have; and it is much more difficult for them to show how masses of utterly unconscious "nebulae" evoked the mystery of personality than it is for us to show ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... seems to stand as the symbol of the inorganic, the mineral kingdom, with its wonderful crystals; the cylinder as the type of vegetable life, suggesting the roots, stems, and branches, with their rounded sides, and forming a beautiful connection ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the causes which induce variability, excess of food, whether or not changed in nature, is probably the most powerful. This view was held with regard to plants by Andrew Knight, and is now held by Schleiden, more especially in reference to the inorganic elements of the food.[612] In order to give a plant more food it suffices in most cases to grow it separately, and thus prevent other plants robbing its roots. It is surprising, as I have often seen, how vigorously ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... reason purely abstract. Human reason, as we know it to-day, is not a creation, but a growth. Its history goes back to the primordial slime that was quick with muddy life; its history goes back to the first vitalized inorganic. And here are the steps of its ascent from the mud to man: simple reflex action, compound reflex action, memory, habit, rudimentary reason, and abstract reason. In the course of the climb, thanks to natural selection, instinct was evolved. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... then, is not an effect, but a cause. It is not caused; it is from eternity and of necessity. The cardinal point in Holbach's philosophy is an inexorable materialistic necessity. Nothing, then, is exempt from the laws of physics and chemistry. Inorganic substance and organic life fall into the same category. Man himself with all his differentiated faculties is but a function of matter and motion in extraordinary complex and involved relations. Man's imputation to himself of free will and unending consciousness apart from his machine is ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... The Editor therefore states, by way of anticipation, that in certain important points the electrical science of Montalluyah differs from, if it is not opposed to, some of the principles accepted here. In Montalluyah it is an ascertained fact that everything organic or inorganic possesses an electricity of its own, each kind differing from the others in one or more important properties. Glimmerings of the progress effected in electricity and other sciences, including the knowledge ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... complete inanimateness and inertness. The universe is a plenum of souls. Wherever we behold an organic whole, (unum per se,) there monads are grouped around a central monad to which they are subordinate, and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are aggregations of monads without a regent, or sentient soul (unum per accidens). There can be no monad without matter, that is, without society, and no soul without a body. Not only the human soul is indestructible and immortal, but also the animal soul. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... characteristic subject of plastic art; to understand him, to extricate oneself from the labyrinth of his anatomy, a general knowledge of organic nature is imperative. The artist should also acquaint himself theoretically with inorganic bodies and with the general operations of Nature, particularly if, as in the case of sound and color, they are adaptable to the purposes of art; but what a circuitous path he would be obliged to take if he wanted to seek laboriously ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... existence. It was then young, just emerging, as it were, from nothingness, growing into form, assuming shape, and gathering attributes of fitness for exterior vitality, preparing the way for higher existences than mere inorganic matter. How long this era existed, science has failed to demonstrate, but it passed away, and solid land marked the next era of the earth's progress. It was surrounded by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; an atmosphere which, while it stimulated ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... only do we know the existence and properties of other beings and distinguish them from each other. There is continual action and reaction in all things. Love and hate in men are like attraction and repulsion in physics, with causes more obscure. All beings, organic and inorganic, tend to self-preservation. This tendency ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... that not only could he project his ethereal body from his material body in the manner he had already demonstrated, but that with his ethereal body he could amalgamate with inorganic matter. He bade those on the stage approach the table in convenient numbers, i.e. two or three at a time, and listen attentively. He then took his stand on one side of the stage, about fourteen feet from the table; and ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature, and without assistance and combination, water is the most wonderful. If we think of it as the source of all the changefulness and beauty which we have seen in clouds,—then, as the instrument ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... part of natural selection must be clear to all who have read his books. He was careful to state that he used the term "struggle for existence" in a "metaphorical sense," and the dominant factors in the struggle for existence, as Darwin understood it, were natural suitability to the organic and inorganic environment and the capacity for adaptation to circumstances; one species flourishes while a less efficient species living alongside it languishes, yet they may never come in actual contact and there is nothing in the least approaching human warfare. The conditions much more resemble what, among ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... ladies" up to the close of her seventeenth year: the other two had pursued culture at a still more pretentious institute until they were eighteen. All could "play the piano"; all declared—and believed—that they "knew French." Beatrice had "done" Political Economy; Fanny had "been through" Inorganic Chemistry and Botany. The truth was, of course, that their minds, characters, propensities, had remained absolutely proof against such educational influence as had been brought to bear upon them. That they used a finer accent than ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... sentient existence first became evolved from inorganic matter seems to be beyond the scrutiny of man. It is so far without the scope of his experience, his speculation even, that it is futile to attempt to surmise it; although certain interesting phenomena have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... human body, but it is absolutely essential to life. Animals deprived of iron die in a few weeks, and people will do the same under similar circumstances. Iron is obtained principally from fruits and vegetables, but it is also present in other foods. Man can not make use of inorganic iron. He has to get his supply from the vegetable and animal kingdoms. The giving of inorganic iron is folly and helps to ruin the teeth and the stomach of the one who takes it. In the form of hemoglobin this element is the chief agent in carrying oxygen ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements. The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go as ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with skin and bones to-day, so with protoplasm to-morrow. Protoplasm is mainly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out, we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic components. Science has not, I believe, settled all the components of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there; she has settled what it is in great part, and there is no trusting her not to settle the rest at any moment, even if she has ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... against nature, this last being thought of as static and permanent. On the contrary, the personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the organic, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the non-moral to the moral, as these are at last seen in man. Of course, it was the life of organic nature which first suggested this notion to Schelling. An organism is a self-moving, self-producing ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... ambiguously and interchangeably. Using the former term in a broad sense—as meaning any substance containing available plant food applied to the soil, we may say that manure is of two kinds: organic, such as stable manure, or decayed vegetable matter; and inorganic, such as potash salts, phosphatic rock and commercial mixed fertilizers. In a general way the term "fertilizer" applies to these inorganic manures, and I shall use it in this sense ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... often grouped, according to their chemical composition, into three classes; vis., carbonaceous, nitrogenous, and inorganic. The carbonaceous class includes starch, sugar, and fats; the nitrogenous, all albuminous elements; and the inorganic comprises the ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... and takes Christian ground. Geology does not teach that species have been evolved from lower species. Geology declares that new forms are new expressions of creative power. All the physical forces that were operating upon our earth in the inorganic period, are in operation now. Why, O why, has it been that the experience and observation of the ages, as well as the record in the rocks, have failed to give, in all the earth, one sensible demonstration in support of the proposition that man, or ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... only intelligent being in creation, desires to show his intelligence in his works. In order to do so he makes them resemble himself in a measure, by impressing upon them the characteristic of his intelligence, which is logic, and that of his body, which is proportion. Architecture employs inorganic matter alone—stone, marble, brick, iron, wood, when the sap has been dried out of it and it ceases to be an organic substance; and yet, under the hand of the architect, this inert matter expresses sentiments and feelings. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... said, "I don't know who you are, nor where you come from. But I'll give a civil answer to a civil question. As for this Cecil, I don't know anything about him. As for where this asphalt come from, I don't know, and nobody knows. Some say it's inorganic, some say is from vegetable deposits of a long time ago, some say it's fish. The chemists are still scrapping about it. Nobody knows. Now, is there ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... no need probably for me to repeat that, although the present essay deals with certain diseases of timber due to fungi, there are other diseases brought about entirely by inorganic agencies. Some of these were touched upon in the last article, and I have already put before the readers of Nature some remarks as to how trees and their timber may suffer from the roots being ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... Section II. INORGANIC MATTER 1. Solid Matter % 321. Density.. — N. density, solidity; solidness &c. adj.; impenetrability, impermeability; incompressibility; imporosity[obs3]; cohesion &c. 46; constipation, consistence, spissitude|. specific gravity; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... starts the movement; so that, on any theory whatever, we are always brought back to the same question: What started the condensation of the ether into the beginnings of a world-system? So whether we consider the life which characterizes organized matter, or the energy which characterizes inorganic matter, we cannot avoid the conclusion, that both must have their source in some Original Power to which we can assign no antecedent. This is the conclusion which has been reached by all philosophic and religious systems that have really tried to get at ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... the unity, not of a continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order, interrelation of parts—the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of Getting Married it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw has it and Sophocles has not. The Oedipus is as clearly divided into acts as is Hamlet or Hedda Gabler. In modern parlance, we should probably call it ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of the universe, human thought, in its earliest stages of development, resorts to the idea of living personal agents enshrined in and moving every object, whether organic or inorganic, natural or artificial. In an advanced stage, it conceives a number of personal beings distinct from, and superior to nature, which preside over the different provinces of nature—the sea, the air, the winds, the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... investigators. Moreover they have promoted such investigations by furnishing new instruments of research. Now in some respects there is an analogy between geology and history. The new geologist aims to describe the inorganic earth dynamically in terms of natural law, using chemistry, physics, mathematics, and even botany and zoology so far as they relate to paleontology. But he does not insist that the relative importance of physical or chemical factors shall be determined before he applies the methods ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... to perfecting my system of organic communication, and made some advance toward developing life in inorganic matter. From this latter attainment it would be but a step to perpetuate life, and I should thus restore immortality to man. But the shark family having threatened to revolt, I left off my investigations for some months, and organized a military force, with which I ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... discernible; liable to all kinds of strange accidental variety in position and movement, yet in each position subject to imperative laws which can only be followed by unerring knowledge; and involving, in the roundings and foldings of sail and hull, delicacies of drawing greater than exist in any other inorganic object, except perhaps a snow wreath,[O]—they present, irrespective of sea or sky, or anything else around them, difficulties which could only be vanquished by draughtsmanship quite accomplished enough to render even the subtlest lines of the ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... because the experiment did not succeed with every one, that they should give them up, as if there was nothing in them but fancy. They should be examined into all the more earnestly and scrupulously; and there was no doubt that the result would be the discovery of a number of affinities of inorganic creatures for one another, and of organic creatures for them, and again for each other, which at present were ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... raise infusoria into horses or still further into men. [What was an absurdity in 1855 does not seem to be so in 1875.] Mr. Bunsen, it is true, does not hesitate to call the monosyllabic idiom of the Chinese an inorganic formation. But how can we get from an inorganic to an organic language? In nature such a thing would be impossible. No stone becomes a plant, no plant a tree, by however wonderful a metamorphosis, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... The same may be said of white bread, the flour having been largely deprived of its food salts. Giving children lime water, with the idea that the body can convert it into bone (as a hen makes her egg shells out of old mortar) is an entire mistake. The human system cannot use such inorganic material. The men of best bone, so far as we can judge, are those who have been nourished in great ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... made up of three powers: matter, energy and what you call life. I might really say that there are but two powers, for matter, in its last analysis, is a form of energy. And what is life? You can't call it a form of energy, for every inorganic atom has energy without having life. Life, Mr. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... intensity. The result may be described by saying that we have instead of a legitimate development a degeneration of society. A vast populace has grown up outside of the old order. It is independent indeed, but at the heavy price of being rather an inorganic mass than a constituent part of the body politic. It is, briefly, to the growth of a huge 'proletariate' outside the church, and hostile to the state, that Southey attributes all ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... to the chair of Chemistry in Giessen, where he laboured 28 years, attracting students from all quarters, and where his laboratory became a model of many others elsewhere; wrote a number of works on chemistry, inorganic and organic, animal and agricultural, and their applications, as well as papers and letters; accepted a professorship in Muenich in 1852, and in 1860 was appointed President of the Muenich Academy ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in this coincidence, and that is that this structure, which is so difficult to explain in its details, is not accidental, but a consequence of the nature of the materials that served to produce the coal of this region. In the midst of a mass of blackish debris, a, organic and inorganic, and immersed in an amorphous and transparent gangue, we find a few recognizable fragments, such as thick-walled macrospores, b, of various sizes, bits of flattened petioles, c, pollen grains, d, debris of bark, etc. In Fig. 2 all ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... new views on the health question, especially as related to food. It treats of the life in food, showing that in the preparation of food by the usual methods the life-giving vitality is destroyed; that is, the organic elements become inorganic. The reason is clearly stated and recipes and directions for cooking, with menus for a ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... infinitesimal invisible lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree which shelters him from the sun. Each particle—whether you call it organic or inorganic—is ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for myself, was the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates Evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world. The origin of a new species by other than ordinary agencies would be a vastly greater "catastrophe" than any of those which Lyell successfully ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... procedures. The reader who desires a more extended discussion of the fundamental theory and its uses is referred to such books as Talbot and Blanchard's !Electrolytic Dissociation Theory! (Macmillan Company), or Alexander Smith's !Introduction to General Inorganic Chemistry! (Century Company). ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... obscured for a time, it will not be lost for a long time. I feel that almost at once after death the mystery of conscious individuality will again assert itself. Refined by this life, as the molecular construction of inorganic matter is refined by passing through organic life, so the consciousness lately within the molecules of your discarded body, will not be as the consciousness within like molecules of mineral or of vegetable matter; for it will be your consciousness —your consciousness, created ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... incompatible with religious association and with organisation upon the basis of a common faith. It is possible to regard God as a Being synthetic in relation to men and societies, just as the idea of a universe of atoms and molecules and inorganic relationships is analytical ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... New, p. 211. On page 175 Strauss says of those who ridicule Darwin's evolution hypothesis and yet deny miracles: "How do they account for the origin of man, and, in general, the development of the organic out of the inorganic? Would they assume that the original man, as such, no matter how rough and unformed, but still a man, sprang immediately out of the inorganic, out of the sea or the slime of the Nile? They would hardly venture to say that; then they must know that ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... pipe of flesh, as depending upon the physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere product of organization; living bodies being subject to the natural law governing the lifeless and the inorganic. Whilst the religionist assures us that man is not a mere toy of fate, but a free agent responsible to himself, with work to do and duties to perform, the Haji, with many modern schools, holds Mind to be a word describing a special operation of matter; the faculties generally ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... seventeenth year; the other two had pursued culture at a still more pretentious institute until they were eighteen. All could 'play the piano;' all declared—and believed—that they 'knew French.' Beatrice had 'done' Political Economy; Fanny had 'been through' Inorganic Chemistry and Botany. The truth was, of course, that their minds, characters, propensities had remained absolutely proof against such educational influence as had been brought to bear upon them. That they used a finer ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... if it has any existence at all, has only an idealistic existence, and which, when it is discovered, cannot be utilised in any possible direction. Utility is the first attribute of all terrestrial bodies. A stone, for instance, is a useful inorganic substance—it can be built into a house, or thrown at a duck, or, when ground into sand, it can be, and is, sold as sugar by a grocer. It is constantly being utilised in one or other of these directions; and so with all other objects. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... simple, results from the fact that the ministers who have the appearance of governing really govern the country only to a very limited extent. Strictly limited and circumscribed, their power is exercised principally in speeches which are hardly noticed and in a few inorganic measures. ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... essence of the Absolute cannot be in it—it must be alien and foreign to the Absolute, and in that case the Absolute cannot be Absolute for there is something outside of itself. And so it becomes of the greatest importance to examine into the evidences of the presence of Life in all things, organic or inorganic. The evidence is at hand—let ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka |
