"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mills-Tweeper and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and places such as Mount Knitting, Mudlake West, Pigeon Park and Appleblossom Villa. These influential factors combined were undoubtedly the foundations of the enormous mathematical ability which became apparent long before the boy attained the age of three, but unfortunately for the level development of his mentality, the repulsive plainness of Senator Mills-Tweeper coupled with the ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... represented upon the lower of two degrees, and is called sharp; if its tendency is downward, it is represented upon the higher of two degrees, and is called flat. There are exceptions to this, as to all rules." This is deplorable. Music is a mathematical science, and in mathematics there is no such thing as an exception to a rule. But to quote further from the same catechism: "A natural is used to cancel the effect of a previous sharp or flat. If the tendency from the restored tone is upward, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... stands out before all eyes, and which must fix on itself the notice of the most careless passer-by. Suddenly, by the roadside, we come on massive Roman walls, preserved to an unusual proportion of their height. Their circuit may in everyday speech be called a square, though strict mathematical accuracy must pronounce it to be a trapezium. Near the entrance we mark some fragments gathered together, and the eye is regaled, as it so often is in Italy and so seldom in Britain and Northern Gaul, with the sight of the Corinthian acanthus leaf. The wall itself, on the other hand, is of ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... of a classical examination, Julian had an undoubted superiority, but Owen was his equal, if not his master, in the power of unravelling intricacies and understanding logic; and, besides this, Owen was a better mathematician, and, although classics had considerable preponderance, yet one mathematical paper always formed part of the Clerkland examination. Kennedy who, if he had properly employed his time, would have been no mean rival to either of them, had unfortunately been so idle, and continued to be so gay and idle even for the weeks immediately preceding the examination, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... at least—we mean the scenes in the circle. For ourself, we know that when the hoop, composed of jets of gas, is let down, the curtain drawn up for the convenience of the half-price on their ejectment from the ring, the orange-peel cleared away, and the sawdust shaken, with mathematical precision, into a complete circle, we feel as much enlivened as the youngest child present; and actually join in the laugh which follows the clown's shrill shout of 'Here we are!' just for old acquaintance' sake. Nor can we quite divest ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... placid woman, of the flabby order of nerves. She will probably faint when she hears what has happened. She might box a man's ears, but her arm would never drive a dagger home into his heart, especially with such beautiful, almost mathematical accuracy. We must look elsewhere, I fancy, for the person who has paid Bentham's debt to society. Heneage, here, ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is no doubt sufficient capacity in one-inch pipes for minor drains; but, inasmuch as agricultural laborers are not mathematical scholars, and are apt to lay the pipes without precise junctions, it is best to have the pipes so large as to counteract that degree of carelessness which cannot be prevented. The ordinary price of pipes in this country will run thus: meaning above, ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... field and get down to business," suggested Mr. Perry. "If we're able to put this thing through along mathematical lines, I bet you boys will have enough imagination to tell me why mathematics and imagination can put any ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... Beech Street. Beech Street is a short street, and ends in a nondescript unlighted waste patch of ground. They arrived in the gloom of this patch, safe from all human inquisitiveness, and then Richard Morfe warmly kissed Eva Harracles in the mathematical centre of those lips of hers. And Eva Harracles showed no resentment of any kind, nor even shame. Yet she had been very carefully brought up. The sight would have interested Bursley immensely; it would have appealed ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... country who had been under great depths of exercise, or were still under such depths, and endeavoured to converse with them.' Guthrie is almost as dry as Euclid himself, and almost as severe, but, then, he demonstrates almost with mathematical demonstration the all-important things he sets out to prove. There is no room for rhetoric on a finger- post; in a word, and, sometimes without a word, a finger-post tells you the right way to take to get to your journey's end. And many who have wandered into a far country have found their way home ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... however, it was afterwards found, had been anticipated by A. Peaucellier. Chebichev further constructed an instrument for drawing large circles, and an arithmetical machine with continuous motion. His mathematical writings, which account for some forty entries in the Royal Society's catalogue of scientific papers, cover a wide range of subjects, such as the theory of probabilities, quadratic forms, theory ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... astronomy in a succinct, popular form. No mathematical knowledge beyond the simplest outlines is assumed on the part of the reader. The great underlying facts and principles of astronomy are presented in a shape which any intelligent person can comprehend. ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... speech and banish all rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss to characterise Union arrangements and post-Union finance. Let it suffice to say that they combined the moral outlook of Captain Kidd with the mathematical technique of a super-bucket-shop. From the first Great Britain robbed the Irish till; from the first she skimmed the cream off the Irish milk, and appropriated it for her own nourishment. One has a sort of gloomy pride in remembering ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... study of the earth the Arabians showed themselves to be practical and accurate geographers. They applied their mathematical and astronomical knowledge to the study of the earth, and thus gave an impulse to exploration. While their theories of the origin of the earth were crude and untenable, their practical writings on the subject derived from real knowledge, and the practical instruction in schools ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... it by rote, without being aware of the principles upon which the calculations they use are founded. As lieutenants, their services as to navigation are seldom required, and they rapidly forget all about it. As captains, their whole remnant of mathematical knowledge consists in being able to set down the ship's position on the chart. As for navigating the ship, the master is answerable; and the captains not being responsible themselves, they trust entirely to his reckoning. Of course ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... formations present the same regular irregularities of form. Crystals approach the nearest to mathematical figures, but they break with compound irregular fractures at their bases of attachment. Nature gives no perfect mathematical figures; they only approximate mathematical perfection. Infidels do not trouble themselves with science on this account. "The utter absence of any ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... in Babylonia—why should one group be assumed to be older than the other? The only ground for suggesting that these groups had not each a separate evolution, is the assumption that man was "created" once for all, and created summarily; in which case it follows with mathematical precision that the ultimate ancestry of every man living extends back to exactly the same date. That is to say, the highest and the lowest, the blackest and the whitest, only differ in this, that some men began to keep records earlier than ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been so weak in his double letters as he presently ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the least reflection makes us discover at once that what he says is incompatible with the essence which he attributes to his God. Therefore, what is God? It is an abstract word, coined to designate the hidden forces of nature; or, it is a mathematical point, which has neither length, breadth, nor thickness. A philosopher [David Hume] has very ingeniously said in speaking of theologians, that they have found the solution to the famous problem of Archimedes; a point in ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... is needless. Geometrically, every line is imaginary; its graphic representation is a mark. True the text-books say, draw a line, but in a mathematical sense the line already exists; the drawing only ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... know where you come from nor how you come to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising influences. Besides, you ought to know," the young man proceeded, in the same cool, mild, deliberate tone, as if he were demonstrating a mathematical solution, "you ought to know that your connexion with all these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don't at all. They were imposed upon you by circumstances, by ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... of the Clarendon Trustees, as well as every other subject of human or inhuman, interest, capable of consideration, it has occurred to me to suggest for your consideration how desirable roofed buildings are for carrying on mathematical calculations; in fact, the variable character of the weather in Oxford renders it highly inexpedient to attempt much occupation, of a sedentary ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... of her aunt's love for them, and she had not been in the conservatories for months. John said a word or two on the cost of keeping them up, and the need of prudence, with a view to providing for Arthur's children. It was the right chord. She looked up, puzzled: her mathematical knowledge had ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... therefore to a mathematical demonstration, that nearly one-half of Mr. Seymour's vote was fraudulent; and of that fact concealment is no longer attempted from any respectable source. It has been matter of surprise to the cotemporaries of Mr. Seymour, that sensitive as he has shown himself on many occasions in regard to ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... before the election. It was a powerful campaign document. People had not realised what an avenging hand pursued Tammany, but they now understood that Tweed was a common thief, and that Tilden, by reducing strong suspicion to a mathematical certainty, had closed the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... nymph for you if he so wills, but her flesh will ripple and run in the sunlight. His art is one of accents. He works by profile in depth, not by surfaces. He swears by what he calls "cubic truth"; his pattern is a mathematical figure; the pivot of art is balance, i.e., the oppositions of volume produced by movement. Unity haunts him. He is a believer in the correspondences of things, of the continuity in nature; a mystic as well as a geometrician. Yet such a realist is he that he quarrels with any ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... acquaintance with Greek civilisation. The debt incurred by English theology, philosophy, and music, to Germany, offers but a faint parallel. If we add to this our obligations to Italy for painting and sculpture, to France for mathematical science, popular comedy, and the culture of the salon, to the Jews for finance, and to other nations for those town amusements which we are so slow to invent for ourselves, we shall still not have exhausted ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... we now possess of the form and dimensions of this globe of earth and water which we inhabit, has been entirely owing to the superior skill of the moderns in the mathematical sciences, as applicable to the practice of navigation, and to the observation and calculation of the motions of the heavenly bodies, for the ascertainment of latitudes and longitudes. It would require more ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... I felt that some of my freshmen and sophomores could not possibly comply with the mathematical requirements. When I received from the printers my copies of the questions to be proposed to the classes I really felt that a few of my girls were going to have a hard time," and she smiled again, yet there was ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... whosoever shall examine the contention of Benfeius "will be bound, in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable." This, Father, is "one for Benfeius," as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that these matters "admit of almost mathematical precision," it would seem that Benfeius is but a Dummkopf, as the Alemanni say, in their own language, when they ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... may here refer to a curious mathematical calculation, by Dr. Thomas Young, to the effect, that if three words coincide in two different languages, it is ten to one they must be derived in both cases from some parent language, or introduced in some other manner. "Six ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... in the more complicated problems of mathematical astronomy. Give a woman ten minutes and she will describe a heliocentric parallax of the heavens. Give her twenty minutes and she will find astronomically the longitude of a place by means of lunar culminations. Give that same woman an hour and a half with the present fashions, and she can not find ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... and get a headache over. Every insignificant word has, so to speak, its special meaning! For instance, "Hoist her top-sheets and mainsail!" What's it mean? A sailor can tell! He, he!—With almost mathematical precision! ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... he finds in men's judgment of their own actions, better still in their judgments of others' actions, best of all in their judgment of injuries inflicted on themselves. Nor does any objection hold from the ignorance of savages in matters of morality: they are equally ignorant of the plainest mathematical truths; the need of instruction does not take away the necessary difference of moral Good and Evil, any more than it takes away the necessary proportions of numbers. He, then, instead of deducing all our several duties ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... mensuration, growing out of his mathematical knowledge, and his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line distance of his favorite summits,—this, and his intimate knowledge of the territory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... etc.[101] Besides these fantastic meanings, there are more complicated inventions—calculating, from the letters of one's name, the years of life of a sick person, the auspices of a marriage, etc. The Pythagorean philosophy, as Zeller has shown, is the systematic form of this mathematical mysticism, for which numbers are not symbols of quantitative relations, but ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... and Lionel happened then to be cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank. He had in mind two possible wives, each of whom possessed advantages which appealed to him, and he was unable to decide between them by any mathematical process. Suddenly, from a glazed shelter near the empty bandstand, there emerged in front of him one of the delectable creatures who had excited his fancy. May Lawton was twenty-eight, an orphan, and a schoolmistress. She, too, had celibate rooms in ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... care, sir!" said M. Galpin. "Justice, whom I here represent, has the right and the means to enforce respect. You are a physician, sir; and your science is able to answer my question with almost mathematical accuracy." ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... occupied the place of honour over the mantel. On the marble-topped table in the exact centre of the room was a basket of wax flowers and fruit, covered by a bell-shaped glass shade. Miss Hitty's album and her Bible were placed near it with mathematical precision. On the opposite wall was a hair wreath, made from the shorn locks of departed Smiths by Miss Hitty's mother. The proud possessor felt a covert reproach in the fact that she herself ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... English-speaking Secretary. I asked questions about the auxiliary invention (which I call "No. 2 ") and got as good an idea of it as I could. It is a machine. It automatically punches the holes in the jacquard cards, and does it with mathematical accuracy. It will do for $1 what now costs $3. So it has value, but "No. 2" is the great thing(the designing invention.) It saves $9 out of $10 and the jacquard looms must ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... We'll stay here. Mrs. Owen,—the thicker the merrier." But Elsley had vanished into a chamber bestrewn with plaids, pipes, hob-nail boots, fishing-tackle, mathematical books, scraps of ore, and the wild confusion of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... that it is not necessary to have brains to make it, nor knowledge of reading to read it. It is a marvellous work, also, in that it offers a regular and new sense every time its pages are shuffled. It is a contrivance never to be too much admired, because out of mathematical principles it extracts thousands on thousands of curious combinations, and so many singular affinities that it is believed, contrary to all truth, that in it are discoverable the secrets of hearts, the mystery of destinies and the arcanum of the ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... it will require further research, and probably close investigation, both experimental and mathematical, before the exact mode of action between a magnet and metal moving relatively to each other is ascertained; yet many of the results appear sufficiently clear and simple to allow of expression in a somewhat general manner.—If a terminated wire move so as to cut a magnetic curve, a power is called ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... and defiance, festivity and joy, sad remembrance, remorse, pity, penitence, self-denial, love, adoration—may find some fit medium of sound in which to express itself. And, what is not less remarkable, connected with all these forms of substances there are mathematical laws of length and breadth, or definite proportions of each, and reflective angles, that are every way as exact as those which regulate the colors of the prism, the images of the mirror, or the telescopic light of astronomic worlds—mathematics ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Mr Minns, the mathematical master, was built on wires, and expected one rapid explanation of the most complex rule to make it clear as crystal. After twenty years spent in teaching, he still professed to be prostrated with horror ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... associate defective human sympathy with his kind heart and large dramatic imagination, though that very imagination was an important factor in the case. It forbade the collective and mathematical estimate of human suffering, which is so much in favour with modern philanthropy, and so untrue a measure for the individual life; and he indirectly condemns it in 'Ferishtah's Fancies' in the parable of 'Bean Stripes'. But his dominant ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... naval tactics therein contained was wrong, that decisive actions could be fought only by concentrating superior forces on inferior. One can imagine the derision heaped on the landlubber who presumed to teach admirals their business, but there was no dodging the force of his point. Of course the mathematical precision of his paper victories depended on the enemy's being passive while the attack was carried out, but fundamentally he was right. The history of the past hundred years showed the futility of an unbroken line ahead, with van, center, and rear ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... whose memory a few old men of the neighbourhood still cherished fondly, had died at twenty; she had left him her fine eyes, full of gentleness and passion, her pallor and timidity. From his father, optician and mathematical instrument maker to the King, carried off by the same complaint before his thirtieth year, he inherited an upright character and an ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... for the performance of such a duty[*], I have endeavoured to work out its views with that unity of plan which must result from a mathematical principle, and which has enabled me to bring to a satisfactory conclusion, after the lapse of many years, and in the face of considerable difficulty, an undertaking commenced at the command of my Sovereign, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... was sufficient, he addressed himself to mathematical calculations which appeared exhaustive of every rule and branch of the disciplinary science. Hours flew by, and still he worked. He received Syama's call to breakfast; returning from the meal, always the simplest of the day with him, he resumed the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... "Quantities like length, breadth, distance and magnitude, are susceptible of exact mathematical determination; human actions ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... laboratory and, by doing so, won the greatest prize in modern telephone art. His researches resulted in the famous "Pupin coil" by the expedient now known as "loading." When the scientists attempt to explain this invention, they have to use all kinds of mathematical formulas and curves and, in fact, they usually get to quarreling among themselves over the points involved. What Professor Pupin has apparently done is to free the wire from those miscellaneous disturbances known as "induction." ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... officiate for me here, and save me from the degradation of trying 'whether there be more than six ways of nicking seven on the dice, allowing seven to be the main and eleven to be a nick to seven'—a question, after all, admitting of no doubt, and capable of mathematical demonstration." ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... one of the most gallant and genial of men, in whom it was fully demonstrated that "the bravest are the tenderest." It was a pyramidal pile, about eight feet high, of carefully selected stones, laid without mortar, but with mathematical precision; and on one stone near the top was scratched a name dear ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... have been otherwise expressed, but this is well enough a-conscience. In your way, the wit of man shall not prevent this or the like inconvenience; but if this (for I have conferred with artists) be a mathematical demonstration, I could kneel to you, that ere it be too late we might return to some kind of sobriety. If we empty our purses with these pomps, salaries, coaches, lackeys, and pages, what can the people say less than that we have dressed a Senate and a prerogative ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... other two. On the one side is the notion that there is a mystic bond between wrong and punishment; on the other, that the infliction of pain is only a means to an end. Hegel, one of the great expounders of the former view, puts it, in his quasi mathematical form, that, wrong being the negation of right, punishment is the negation of that negation, or retribution. Thus the punishment must be equal, in the sense of proportionate to the crime, because its only function is to destroy it. Others, without this logical apparatus, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... masterpieces of French and Italian literature, and a marked predilection for music, which is greatly cultivated, and which (as always results from a taste for the fine arts) brings the different classes of society nearer to each other. The mathematical sciences, drawing, and painting, cannot here boast of any of those establishments with which royal munificence and the patriotic zeal of the inhabitants have enriched Mexico. In the midst of the marvels of nature, so rich in interesting productions, it is strange that we found no person ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... is a rule that, a proposition being proved false, its opposite is true, and vice versa. In fact, this is the principal method of mathematical demonstration. In social economy, it is not the same: thus we see, for example, that property being proved by its results to be false, the opposite formula, communism, is none the truer on this account, but is deniable at ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the basis of deductive reasoning may be taken from various sources. Sometimes the truth is self-evident or intuitive, as the axioms that lie at the basis of mathematical reasoning. Sometimes they are truths arrived at by inductive processes. Sometimes they are maxims that have gained the assent of mankind; and again, they are the statements of an accepted philosophy, creed, code, or ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... department of the science. The 'introduction' would contain prolegomena not only for the penal code but for the other departments of inquiry which he intended to exhaust.[356] He had to lay down primary truths which should be to this science what the axioms are to mathematical sciences.[357] These truths therefore belong to the sphere of conduct in general, and include ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... in the neighborhood, but she had not written enough about it to satisfy his desire. Why did she not give details? he asked. He reproachfully added that if he had been writing to her of a new-fashioned cap, he would have taken compass in hand and described it with mathematical accuracy. This she should have done concerning the great hunt if she had really wished ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... said Jim, with rather grim humor. "One gets used to that, and resolution counts when you're fighting a snowslide or a flood; but we're up against another proposition now. It's so to speak, mathematical; nothing coming in and much going out! When we have no stores and money left ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... may be discovering comets, like Miss Herschell; one may be laying open the mathematical structure of the universe, like Mrs. Somerville; another may be analyzing the chemical relations of Nature in the laboratory; another may be penetrating the mysteries of physiology; others may be applying science in the healing of diseases; ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... beginning of the fourteenth centuries, again began to decline. With this decline the Equilateral Triangle was almost lost sight of, and then a mode of setting out work by diagonal squares was taken up, for such is the basis found exactly applicable to the work of the fifteenth century, since which time mathematical proportions have been generally employed." And after referring to numerous scale drawings of Churches, windows, doors, and arches, he points out that every student of Church architecture must pronounce those of the untraceried and traceried first point to be the ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... between the earth and the stars by means of mathematical calculations. You should procure some work on astronomy. There is a nice little book published in our office called "The Heavens and the Earth," and another, rather larger, called "The Midnight Sky;" both ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... received it, but he advised me to do it myself. So home with it and to dinner; after dinner I forth with my boy to buy severall things, stools and andirons and candlesticks, &c., household stuff, and walked to the mathematical instrument maker in Moorefields and bought a large pair of compasses, and there met Mr. Pargiter, and he would needs have me drink a cup of horse-radish ale, which he and a friend of his troubled with ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the aetherial medium will agree with our experience; and, as the natural result, several outstanding problems will be explained on a physical basis, which at the present time cannot be satisfactorily explained except from the mathematical standpoint. ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... for, besides taking care in general to conduct all my thoughts according to its rules, I reserved some hours from time to time which I expressly devoted to the employment of the method in the solution of mathematical difficulties, or even in the solution likewise of some questions belonging to other sciences, but which, by my having detached them from such principles of these sciences as were of inadequate certainty, were rendered almost mathematical: ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Great halls seem to have been easy architecture. Naves and transepts were not often failures; facades and even towers and fleches are invariably more or less successful because they are more or less balanced, mathematical, calculable products of reason and thought. The most serious difficulties began only with the choir, and even then did not become desperate until the architect reached the curve of the apse, with its impossible vaultings, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the railroad's mileage within the State bears to its total mileage.[669] To the objection that the mileage formula was inapplicable in this instance because of the disparity of the revenue-producing capacity between the lines in and out of the State, the Court answered that mathematical exactitude in making an apportionment had never been a constitutional requirement. "Wherever," it explained, "the State's taxing authorities have been held to have intruded upon the protected domain of interstate commerce in their use ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... his property was all in his business at the time when Cesar put his savings into the Funds; he had suffered, like others, under the Maximum, and the pickaxes and other implements of his trade had been requisitioned. His reserved and judicious nature, his forethought and mathematical reflection, were seen in his methods of work. The greater part of his business was conducted by word of mouth, and he seldom encountered difficulties. Like all thoughtful people he was a great observer; he let people talk, and then studied them. He often refused advantageous ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... will, and combining by gentle contacts with others floating near them, form large and fleecy flakes, involving the nicest complications of structure, and filling the air with a kind of beauty in which the expression of softness and gracefulness is combined with that of mathematical symmetry ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... long train of torch-bearers defiles through the silent midnight streets to the sound of solemn music, and passing by the dark cemetery of the real dead, bear through 'Tutor's Lane' the coffin of their mathematical ancestor. They climb the hill beyond, and commit him to the flames, invoking Pluto, in Latin prayer, and chanting a final dirge, while the flare of torches, the fearful grotesqueness of each uncouth disguised wight, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... operations of arithmetic is so obvious as to require no discussion. Beyond this point, however, difficult problems arise. The probabilities are that the social and vocational conditions of the coming generation will require that everybody be more mathematical-minded than at present. ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... Samuel's mistake the other way. I do not believe that God has diminished the evidence of His Revelation in order to try us; but I do maintain that the Revelation which He has made does come to us, and must come to us, in such a form as that, not by mathematical demonstration but by moral affinity, we shall be led to recognise and to bow to it. He that will be ignorant, let him be ignorant, and he that will come asking for truth, it will flood his eyeballs with a blessed illumination. The veil ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... much pomp and ceremony, within the precincts of Barchester Cathedral; and a monument was put up to him soon after, in which he was portrayed as smoothing a block of granite with a mallet and chisel; while his eagle eye, disdaining such humble work, was fixed upon some intricate mathematical instrument above him. Could Sir Roger have seen it himself, he would probably have declared, that no workman was ever worth his salt who looked one way ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... intellectual additions made by Pythagoras to human wisdom seem to have been vast and permanent. By probable testimony, he added largely to mathematical science; and his discoveries in arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry, constitute an era in the history of the mind. His metaphysical and moral speculations are not to be separated from the additions or corruptions of his disciples. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... protest, but Miss Slade took no notice and continued in even, dispassionate tones, as if she had been explained a mathematical problem. ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... rudiments fared as ill as its eternal rival, theology. There was a mathematical master, but nobody learned anything from him, or took any notice of him. In his anxiety for position the unfortunate man asked Keate if he might wear a cap and gown. 'That's as you please,' said Keate. 'Must the boys ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... H.—Your answer to No. 4 of the mathematical puzzles is right. If you look carefully you will discover why ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... cent of the peaches of the world. I pause to say here that none of these figures is true. They are all made up for the occasion. But don't despair! I am sure that they don't do California justice by half. Any other Californiac—with the mathematical memory which I unfortunately lack—will provide the correct data. Somebody told me once, I seem to recall, that the Santa Clara valley produces sixty per cent of the worlds prunes. But I may be mistaken. What I prefer to remember is one day's trip in that springtide ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... ground-floor with Gothic vaulting, and which still served its original purpose. A contemporaneous tower flanking the entrance contained the old spiral staircase leading to the upper rooms. I often lingered upon it in astonishment at the mathematical science shown in its design, and the mechanical perfection of its workmanship. What seemed to be a slender column round which the spiral vaulting turned was not really one, for each of the stone steps was so cut as to include a section of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... beauty in a village are not fine houses, costly fences, paved roadways, geometrical lines, mathematical grading, nor any obviously costly improvements. They are, rather, cosiness, neatness, simplicity, and that homely air that grows from these and from the ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... arrangement or machinery, and with the number of identical or yet more of similar and analogous instances, until it rises to a moral certainty—i. e., to a conviction which practically we are as unable to resist as we are to deny the cogency of a mathematical demonstration. A single instance, or set of instances, of a comparatively simple arrangement might suffice. For instance, we should not doubt that a pump was designed to raise water by the moving of the handle. Of course, the conviction is the stronger, or at least the sooner arrived at, where ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... could have acted more wisely. Sir John complains that the opinion of that excellent mathematician, Mr. Thomas Simpson, did not preponderate in favour of the semicircular arch. But he should have known, that however eminent Mr. Simpson was in the higher parts of abstract mathematical science, he was little versed in mixed and practical mechanicks. Mr. Muller, of Woolwich Academy, the scholastick father of all the great engineers which this country has employed for forty years, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... confined themselves exclusively to his style; and partly the fact that what is easily imitable in him is so conspicuous an element of the whole. The rigid framework which he adopted is easily definable with mathematical precision. The difference between the best work of Pope and the ordinary work of his followers is confined within narrow limits, and not easily perceived at a glance. The difference between blank verse in ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... chuen, in the manuscripts. We are able to identify what must be regarded as metaphysical or esoteric applications of certain glyphs in certain places, such as the face numerals.[35-*] But every one of these points is either deducible directly by necessary mathematical calculation, or else from the names of certain signs given by Landa in his day and month list, and then found in other combinations, such as yax, kin, etc. That we have as many of the points as we have, and still ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... did not, apparently, prove me to be in the right. Alexandre Le Mansel, as I heard from Avranches, regained his normal health, and as he grew towards manhood gave active proof of the brilliancy of his intellect. He worked with ardour at his mathematical studies, and he even sent to the Academy of Sciences solutions of several problems hitherto unsolved, which were found to be as elegant as they were accurate. Absorbed in his work, he rarely found time to ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his "categorical imperative"—makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. Or, still more so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which Spinoza has, as it were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask—in fact, the "love of HIS wisdom," to translate the term fairly and squarely—in order thereby to strike terror ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... measures: This information is presented in Appendix E: Weights and Measures and includes mathematical notations (mathematical powers and names), metric interrelationships (prefix; symbol; length, weight, or capacity; area; ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... add an oath, do you think a wise man would swear that the sun is many degrees greater than the earth, before Archimedes had, before his eyes, made out all those calculations by which it is proved? If he does, then he will be despising the sun which he considers a god. But if he will not believe the mathematical calculations which employ a sort of constraint in teaching,—as you yourselves say,—surely he will be very far from believing the arguments of philosophers; or, if he does believe any such, which school will he believe? One may explain all the principles of natural philosophers, but it would ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... present work—inevitable, perhaps, at the outset—as well as, the defence of the whole, to those deserving men, who have made my system their own. A philosophical system cannot come forward armed at all points like a mathematical treatise, and hence it may be quite possible to take objection to particular passages, while the organic structure of the system, considered as a unity, has no danger to apprehend. But few possess the ability, and still fewer the inclination, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... consequence that dividers and calipers should in themselves reflect the same sense of balance and grace that they were designed to govern. Still, even the most prosaic examples of woodworking tools, completely divorced from the quasi-mathematical devices of measure and proportion, have this quality and can be admired solely as decorative objects. This is most evident in the three European bench planes illustrated in figures 21, 22, and 23: one Norwegian, dated 1704; one Dutch (accession ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... been a mathematical scholar and head of his House at Harrow; in 1907 he passed into Woolwich, and two years later was commissioned in the Royal Engineers. He was early interested in aviation; in June 1912, after only three days' practice, he obtained ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... taking mathematical views of the subject, they are in a dangerous way! Mr. Falkirk, it is imperatively necessary that I should at once rejoin the rest of society,— will you let yourself be torn from this ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... of the mathematical sciences above the moral consists in this, that the ideas of the former, being sensible, are always clear and determinate, the smallest distinction between them is immediately perceptible, and the same terms are still expressive of the same ideas, without ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... quotation that she has travelled far from the old ideals which invested women with many beautiful qualities, but not with the sense and knowledge required of useful public citizens. She proceeds in the same article to say that scientific and mathematical teaching should reach a higher standard in girls' schools; and thirdly, that certain branches of psychology, physiology, and hygiene should receive greater attention, because a woman is a better wife ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... then, we regard Swedenborg's doctrine of the future life as a free poetic presentment, not as a severe scientific statement, of views true in moral principle, not of facts real in literal detail. His imagination and sentiment are mathematical and ethical instead of asthetic and passionate. Milk seems to run in his veins instead of blood, but he is of truthfulness and charity all compact. We think it most probable that the secret of his supposed inspiration was the abnormal frequent or chronic turning ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had been an associate of Cavour, I found him very interesting, as was also Sambuy, senator of the kingdom and syndic of Turin, who was with him. Minghetti said that the Italian school system was not yet satisfactory, though young men are doing well in advanced scientific, mathematical, historical, and economic studies. On my speaking of a statistical map in my possession which revealed the enormous percentage of persons who can neither read nor write in those parts of Italy most directly under the influence of the church, he said that matters were slowly ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a climax when the sheep that Isaac had been sent to watch, overran the garden and demolished everything but the purslane and ragweed, while all the time the young man was under the hedge working out mathematical problems from his Descartes. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... as director, they straightway set to work. The boy had an excellent head for such things; and his mathematical knowledge, together with the preparatory study in fortifications he had already pursued in the school, ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... exerts no gravitating or retarding force;" in short, Mr. Laing has to confess some uncertainty about his original dogma as to the triple constituents of the universe, and say "that it may be almost doubted whether such an ether has any real material existence, and is anything more than a sort of mathematical [why 'mathematical'?] entity." [60] "It is clear that matter really does consist of minute particles which do not touch," and even these we must conceive of as "corks as it were floating in an ocean of ether, causing ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... have taken the mathematical or map gradient and not the engineer's gradient. The latter is generally used, I understand, to measure the gradients of ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... stage of the work. How many women are there who have gone through any such process? Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as much of mathematics as is now needful for making any considerable mathematical discovery: is it any proof of inferiority in women, that she has not happened to be one of the two or three persons who in her lifetime have associated their names with some striking advancement of the science? Two women, since political economy ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... had started in the Calle de Valverde. Calleja's Colegio de San Mateo had been suppressed by a government which was the sworn enemy of every form of enlightenment. The new seminary, however, continued the work of the old with little change: While there Jos carried his mathematical studies through higher algebra, conic sections, trigonometry, and surveying, and continued Latin, French, English, and Greek. If we may judge from later results, a course in rhetoric and poetics must have been of greatest benefit ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... take place in absolute space, and can then only be intelligible by admitting it." In dealing with the physical cause of Gravitation, I hope to be able to show that it can not only be admitted as a mathematical proposition, but that it can be made intelligible from ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... than those of your father—his friend Henry Smith for example; but I never met any one who gave me the impression so much as he did, that he would have gone to the front in any pursuit in which he had seen fit to engage. Henry Smith had, in addition to his astonishing mathematical genius, and his great talents as a scholar, a rare faculty of persuasiveness. Your father used to speak with much admiration and some amusement of the way in which he managed to get people to take his view by appearing to take theirs; but he never could have been a power ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... proofs are various. The "cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself contains. The "argument from design" reasons, from the fact that Nature's laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The "moral argument" is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The "argument ex consensu gentium" is that the belief in God is so widespread ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... island, describe the tattooing as representing half-moons, birds, and irregular or zig-zag lines; but on a better acquaintance with Europeans, the fashion changed, and drawings of our tools, animals, and even compasses and mathematical instruments, were executed with the greatest exactness on their bodies. Pantaloons being articles in particular request among them, he who could not obtain a pair, comforted himself by having the representation ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... unsaleable article generally produced in such seasons. Among the foremost who experimented with this object in view I will here name CHAPTAL, PETIOL; but especially DR. LUDWIG GALL, who has at last reduced the whole science of wine-making to such a mathematical certainty, that we stand amazed only, that so simple a process should not have been discovered long ago. It is the old story of the egg of Columbus; but the poor vintners of Germany, and France, and we here, are none the less deeply indebted to those intelligent and persevering ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... are such hidden stores of virtue and knowledge, such inexhausted sources of perfection! We know not yet what we shall be, nor will it ever enter into the heart of man to conceive the glory that will be always in reserve for him. The soul considered with its Creator, is like one of those mathematical lines that may draw nearer to another for all eternity, without a possibility of touching it: and can there be a thought so transporting, as to consider ourselves in these perpetual approaches to him, who is not only the standard ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... father was ill, and the nursery-maid anemic, the little misunderstanding will have disappeared by the time the aunt returns from Kew, and Zerlina will say, after carefully counting the children,—it is this mathematical tendency in mothers that hurts an aunt,—"I do trust you implicitly with the children, dear. You know that; it isn't every one I could trust; you are so capable! I wish I were, but one can't be everything. Of course you don't ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... the scientific method in the physical sciences rests upon the ignoring of individualities; and like many mathematical conventions, its great practical convenience is no proof whatever of its final truth. Let me admit the enormous value, the wonder of its results in mechanics, in all the physical sciences, in chemistry, even in physiology,—but ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... with mathematical exactness in the form of a rectangle, nearly three and one-half miles long, from north to south, and about three miles wide, from east to west. In each direction were nine principal thoroughfares, those running east and west crossing the north and south streets ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the Stoics is that "All faults are equal". They took their stand upon a mathematical conception of rectitude. An angle must be either a right angle or not, a line must be either straight or crooked, so an act must be either right or wrong. There is no mean between the two and there are no degrees of either. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... distinguished themselves in their studies, belong the late Mrs. v. Kowalewska, who received in 1887 from the Academy of Sciences in Paris the first prize for the solution of a mathematical problem, and since 1884 occupied a professorship of mathematics at the University of Stockholm. In Pisa, Italy, a lady occupies a professorship in pathology. Female physicians are found active in Algiers, Persia and India. In the United States there are about 100 female professors, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... to marriage, I mean these processions, and strippings, and exercises of the maidens in the sight of the young men, who, as Plato says, are more swayed by amorous than by mathematical considerations; moreover, he imposed certain penalties on the unmarried men. They were excluded from the festival of the Gymnopaedia, in honour of Athene; and the magistrates ordered them during winter to walk naked round the market-place, and while ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... into view all the mathematical proportions and uniform relations which exist between the constituent bodies of the solar system, in order to indicate the probability of their formation from the constant working of one material cause. Thus he remarks, that the primary planets ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... splendid turn-over!' I thought to myself. 'If this luck holds, at the same rate, I shall have made four hundred and eighty pounds by Tuesday next, and I may look forward to being a Barney Barnato by Christmas.' For I had taken high mathematical honours at Cambridge, and if there is anything on earth on which I pride myself, it is my firm grasp ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Tower pigeons were flying, somehow relieving the mechanical outlines. Was the disproportion between the great arch, forming a kind of pedestal, and the outlines above due to mathematical miscalculation or to the interference of the ornamentation? We finally decided that the proportions had probably been right in the first place. But they had been changed by the Exposition authorities' cutting the Tower down one hundred feet, thereby saving $100,000. ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... is called a man of imagination; it is my habit to exclude most things not capable of mathematical demonstration; but I am not without a certain psychological insight, and I think I understood Mr. Jaffrey's case. I could easily understand how a man with an unhealthy, sensitive nature, overwhelmed by sudden calamity, might take refuge ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... dry; and he can no more hope to persuade 'em that they have no right or business to be married, than he can hope to persuade 'em that they have no earthly right or business to be born. And THAT we know they haven't. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!' ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... class shall name, with the approbation of the Chief Consul, two perpetual secretaries; the one for the mathematical sciences; the other, for the physical. The perpetual secretaries shall be members of the class, but shall make no ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... order. And with this insight goes necessarily an inevitableness, an inexorableness, and, as we say metaphorically, an imperativeness, which no amount of twisting and intellectual thimble-rigging can avoid. The logic of the system cannot be avoided any more than a step in a mathematical demonstration. . . . So long as it stands, its parts, elements, or members are placed, and there is set over each of them the imperative of the system in which they ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... very infancy, and is reported to have worked out long arithmetical sums by means of pebbles and biscuit crumbs before he knew the figures. His father began to teach him Latin, but ceased on discovering the boy's greater inclination and aptitude for mathematical studies. The young Ampere, however, soon resumed his Latin lessons, to enable him to master the works of Euler and Bernouilli. In later life he was accustomed to say that he knew as much about mathematics when he was eighteen ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... has always been in terms of the theatre, and he is willing to curtail any part of his theme for a "point." His explanation, therefore, of the growth of detail, while lacking in the high seriousness of Poe's explanation how he conceived "The Raven," has nevertheless the same mathematical precision about it. In other words, Thomas plays the theatre as Steinitz played chess, with certain recognized openings and certain stated values to the characters. We doubt whether, if the truth were told, many changes ever occur, once a Thomas scenario ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... caster graced the center of the table, containing glass receptacles for salt, red and black pepper, catsup, vinegar, and oil. Knives, forks, and spoons for two—all of utilitarian style—were arranged with mathematical precision beside ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... of furnishings for our room, we felt sure we could squeeze them in—and we did. I got six beginners, and Rose captured the Cowans, root and branch—four instead of two; for it seemed they were not proficient in mathematical pursuits, and their mother was delighted to get them off her distracted hands. All our friends know that Rose adores sums and problems, and she ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... friends were more afflicted, by far, than he; all this opposition only served to strengthen his faith. As to this effect upon him, I recall one or two quaint examples. At the darkest period in the history of the university, I mentioned to him that a fine collection of mathematical books was offered us for five thousand dollars. Under ordinary circumstances he would have bought it for us at once; but at that moment, when any addition to his burdens would not have been advised by any of his ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... his 80th birthday; and it was opened October 1, 1880. The College, which is estimated to have cost L100,000, was built entirely by the founder who also endowed it with an income of about L3,700 per annum, with the intention of providing instruction in mathematics, abstract and applied; physics, mathematical and experimental; chemistry, theoretical, practical, and applied; the natural sciences, geology, metallurgy and mineralogy; botany, zoology and physiology; English, French and German, to which have since been added Greek, Latin, English ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... absolute central principle governing the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principles can only be known in their relation to one another, and can only exist in their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation between the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by a mathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equate all ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... on a severe rationalism, will recognise nothing as true but what is demonstrated to them like mathematical theorems, will look upon the sentiments above referred to as delusions of the fancy, because they see them founded but upon feeling; but they who think so are manifestly in error. If faith in God, in His providence, and in the immortality of the human soul, were a mere product ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... giant was alone and was seated behind a broad polished table, occupied in writing. Orsino was struck by the extremely orderly arrangement of everything he saw. Papers were tied together in bundles of exactly like shape, which lay in two lines of mathematical precision. The big inkstand was just in the middle of the rows and a paper-cutter, a pen-rack and an erasing knife lay side by side in front of it. The walls were lined with low book-cases of a heavy and severe type, filled principally with documents ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... all the county. The board-walk from the gate to the door fairly glistened from the effects of soap and water. The flower-beds, almost painfully neat and free from weeds, were laid out on a strictly mathematical plan. A border of whitewashed clam-shells, laid side by side with military precision, set off the brilliant reds and yellows of the flowers, and a glance at them was like gazing into the face of the midday sun. Tillie shaded her dazzled eyes as she ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... succumb even to the decrees of the masters of the world. Nor did the divi themselves disdain to be initiated in the infernal or celestial science. Nigidius Figulus and the two Thrasylli are magical or mathematical names closely connected with the destinies of the two first imperial princes. Nigidius predicted, and perhaps promoted, the future elevation of Octavianus; and the elder Thrasyllus, the famous Rhodian astrologer, skilfully identified his fate with the ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... on the hearth in his mother's cottage, intently watching the steam rising from the mouth of the tea kettle, and of the great role which this boy afterwards assumed in the mechanical world. It was in 1763, when he was twenty-eight and had the appointment of mathematical-instrument maker to the University of Glasgow, that a model of Newcomen's steam pumping engine was brought into his shop for repairs. One can perhaps imagine the feelings with which James Watt, interested from his youth in mechanical and scientific instruments, particularly those ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... explanation—absolutely and beautifully, also expensively. There are 492 pages in the "Report," and 40 plates, some of them marvelously colored. It was issued after an investigation that took five years. You couldn't think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively. The mathematical parts are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa; velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... our stock of culinary ideas, as well as our landlady's patience, in trying to vary the forms in which it was to appear; not having taken the precaution, as some Cambridge men did at B——s one vacation, to bespeak a French cook at a rather higher salary than the mathematical tutor's.[A]) Probably, however, Mr Plympton's unusual walk made him more anxious about the quantity than the quality of his diet, for he not only attacked the mutton like an Etonian, but announced his intention ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... indeed! I have spent thousands of hours in dreaming and planning what a farm should be like! Do you suppose I am going to let these visions become contaminated by practical knowledge? Not by a long way! I have, in the silent watches of the night, reduced the art to mathematical exactness, and I can show you the figures. Don't talk to me ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... How far mathematics and the pure sciences would help him on the road he did not trouble himself to consider; he only had a vague notion that they would lead him to be a 'scholar.' So he toiled with great energy through the algebraic and mathematical handbooks purchased by friend Turnill, often getting so warm on the subject as to neglect his dinner-hour, in brown studies over the plus and minus, squares, cubes, and conic sections. Every evening that he could ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... room fitted up for astrological labors, and provided with celestial charts, with globes, telescopes, quadrants, and other mathematical instruments. Seven colossal figures, representing the planets, each with a transparent star of different color on its head, stand in a semicircle in the background, so that Mars and Saturn are nearest the eye. The remainder of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... York and Charleston factors, the Charleston Courier and Mercury and the New York Journal of Commerce. The latter sheet, at the date of which I am writing, was in wide circulation at the South, its piety (!) and its politics being then calculated with mathematical precision for secession latitudes.) ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... So, what between her dislike to the marriage should it ever be, and her fear for Alick's unhappiness should he ask and be refused, the poor mother was in a state of confused feelings and contradictory wishes which did not agree with a nature like hers, given to mathematical certainties and averse to loose ends and frayed edges anywhere. As nothing more was to be got out of Leam at this moment, and as Mrs. Corfield knew that Alick would be impatient, they went into the drawing-room ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... learned Judge says "In this case, the reel itself, as an article of manufacture, is conceded to be old and not the subject of a patent. The shape applied to it by the complainant is also an old, well-known mathematical figure. Now although it does not appear that any person ever before applied this particular shape to this particular article, I cannot think that the act quoted above was intended to secure to ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of us had done badly in those subjects our poor madame and the mathematical mistress did not ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... espoused, and the service of his Maker—one widely distinguished from the hypocrites and fanatics of that turbulent era, which, like our own, produced, though in a more exaggerated form, from the stimulus then abroad, the same rank and noxious weeds of hypocrisy and superstition; for man, like a mathematical problem, circumstances and conditions being the same, brings out, invariably, the same results. No form of worship, however ludicrous or revolting, but hath its advocates and supporters; and there is nothing which the proud mind and unsubdued ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... necessary to divide a pie with mathematical exactness into quarters or sixths. A better way is to cut out one piece of the usual size and offer it, and then if less be desired, cut off such portions as may ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... Minoret, whose green old age resembled that of those celebrated personages. Their heads coined in the same mint (for each had the characteristics of a medal) showed a stern and quasi-puritan profile, cold tones, a mathematical brain, a certain narrowness about the features, shrewd eyes, grave lips, and a something that was surely aristocratic—less perhaps in sentiment than in habit, more in the ideas than in the character. All men of this stamp have high brows retreating ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... flash of genius, which made the steam-engine what we now see it, was wholly his own. The science of Glasgow was diligently questioned by him upon the defects of the old engine, but it gave him no hint of the remedy. It was James Watt, mathematical-instrument maker, earning fourteen shillings a week, who brooded over his little model until the conception of the condenser burst upon him, as he was taking his Sunday afternoon stroll on Glasgow Green. Goodyear had a similar experience. Philadelphia has ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... boys, who were good friends, examined each other eagerly about their progress in books. Tom had learned some Greek and Hebrew, besides Latin, in which he was pretty well skilled, and also had given himself to mathematical studies under his father's guidance, who was a proficient in those sciences, of which Esmond knew nothing; nor could he write Latin so well as Tom, though he could talk it better, having been taught by his dear friend the Jesuit Father, for whose memory the lad ever retained ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... up. I have since consulted many learned Antiquaries in relation to its Original, and find them very much divided among themselves upon that Particular. A Fellow of the Royal Society, who is my good Friend, and a great Proficient in the Mathematical Part of Musick, concludes from the Simplicity of its Make, and the Uniformity of its Sound, that the Cat-call is older than any of the Inventions of Jubal. He observes very well, that Musical Instruments took their first Rise from the Notes of Birds, and other melodious Animals; and what, says ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... species, which is well defined as "the perennial succession of individuals," commonly of very like individuals—as a close corporation of individuals perpetuated by generation, instead of election—and reducing the question to mathematical simplicity of statement: species are lines of individuals coming down from the past and running on to the future; lines receding, therefore, from our view in either direction. Within our limited observation they appear ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... of it. You are a star going comfortably through your universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never wobble in your path—everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer coming from you don't know where, going you don't know whither. We pass very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note a ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... be conversant with mathematical Books (the printing whereof and musick, has been my chiefest employment), I have observ'd two things many times the cause why Books of this nature appear abroad not so correct as they should be; either ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... stranger had gone to bed, which he did about half-past nine, Mr. Hall went very aggressively into the parlour and looked very hard at his wife's furniture, just to show that the stranger wasn't master there, and scrutinised closely and a little contemptuously a sheet of mathematical computations the stranger had left. When retiring for the night he instructed Mrs. Hall to look very closely at the stranger's luggage when it came ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... offered to replace it. Even as an explanation of the spiral nebul, not as solar systems in process of formation, but as the birthplaces of stellar clusters, the Planetesimal Hypothesis would be open to many objections. Granting its assumptions, it has undoubtedly a strong mathematical framework, but the trouble is not with the mathematics but with the assumptions. Laplace was one of the ablest mathematicians that ever lived, but he had never seen a spiral nebula; if he had, he might have invented a hypothesis to suit its phenomena. His actual hypothesis was intended only ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... of Elementary Mathematics, being the Reports of the Committee of the Mathematical Association. ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... pain habit, in all emotional relations, a low brain- cell threshold is established which facilitates the reception of specific stimuli; all these processes are motor acts, or are symbolic of motor acts, and we may be trained to perceive misfortune and pain as readily as we are trained to perceive mathematical formulae or moral precepts. In each and every case, readiness of perception depends, as it seems to me, upon a modified state of the brain-cells, their threshold especially, the final degree of perception possible in any individual being perhaps based on the type of ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... to reach the age of eighteen, a tall, flat-chested, weak-witted butt of the local school, who, while able to struggle along with the ordinary studies at the foot of the class, was yet so poorly endowed with the mathematical sense that he could only master the first four rules of arithmetic. Fractions and decimals were unsolvable mysteries to him. His name was ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife, because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded themselves everywhere, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... difficult to conceive by what means they were brought to their present station, especially as it is the summit of a hill; but the world is full of memorials of human strength, in which the mechanical powers that have been since added by mathematical science, seem to be surpassed; and of such monuments there are not a few among the remains of barbarous antiquity in our own country, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. [Greek: Hoi kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi],[108]—the dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had chatted with Miss Fannie Newman—a pretty student in the Woman's College—after nine o'clock; nay, more, he had sat on a campus bench bidding her good night for half an hour, and, with that brilliant mathematical mind of his, had selected the bench at the greatest possible distance from the smallest cluster ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes |
