"Mathematically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distinct. The one asserts the universal as a fact, the other as a presumption; the one as an absolute certainty, the other as a practical certainty, when there is no reason to expect the contrary. The one contains and includes the particular, the other does not; from the one we argue mathematically to the falsehood of any opposite particular; from the other we do not.... For example, one signal miracle, pre-eminent for its grandeur, crowned the evidence of the supernatural character and office of our Lord—our Lord's ascension—His going ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... fresh from a big school, he ought to have been more mathematically correct, and known that in describing the arc of a circle his left hand would go lower; but he did not stop to think. The consequence was that as his fingers glided over the rough stone, they passed a few ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... that the problem of devising a mechanism for a given purpose ought to be attacked systematically, perhaps mathematically, in order to determine "all the forms and arrangements that are applicable to the desired purpose," from which the designer might select the simplest or most suitable combination. "At present," he wrote, "questions of this kind can only be solved by that ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... you take one of these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then, is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet written any ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... part of it is that you should have had to go to Chatto's, and should have learnt the lady's name so promptly from her husband! Mathematically there were untold chances that this lady who recognised me might be some stranger's wife, and that we might never more hear anything of her! Yet you discover her identity at once. This is the kind of thing which occasionally ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... head impatiently, staring at the so-simple, yet incredible device whose theory had been mathematically proven numberless times, but never put into ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the maps that were constructed by a very laborious and, as far as we had an opportunity of comparing them with the country, a very accurate survey, which employed the Jesuits ten years. I do not pretend to say that the areas, as I have given them in the table, are mathematically correct, but the dimensions were taken with as much care as was deemed necessary for the purpose, from maps drawn on a large scale, of which a very beautiful manuscript copy is now in his Majesty's library at Buckingham-house, made by a Chinese, having all the names ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... And who should be so indulgent to the vagaries of the imagination as the philosophers who taught your youth to doubt everything in the Maker's plan of creation which could not be mathematically proved? 'The human mind,' said Luther, 'is like a drunkard on horseback; prop it on one side, and it falls on the other.' So the man who is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant's religion, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this phenomenon under the heading of the Weber-Fechner law, after the two physiologists who gave it prominence. James pokes a good deal of fun at the "law," which is expressed mathematically. Perhaps the mathematics should have been eliminated as too "scientific" for our present attainment, but it does remain true that it is not the ACTUAL stimulus increase that is important in sensation or perception, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... He'd dabbled with ESP mathematically, but now he found himself wondering if it could exist. Could they be tracking him by some natural or mechanical ability to read his mind? He strained his own mind to find a whisper of foreign thought, outside his brain. He drew a blank, ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... the 15th day being cownted the 25, 50, 10 dayes ar imagined spent, which have crept in betwene the day of Crist his birth regarding the place of the sonne, and the sonnes place not the 25th day of this month, whiche a civile quation, but mathematically and religiusly to be substantiated to be for the true term of the periods of annuall revolutions of the sonne sinse the ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... or darkened by the addition of black, it is removed to another scale, and can only harmonize by contrast with its complement by adding to green the same amount of white or black that has changed the character of the red, and this should be mathematically accurate. ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... a safety belt across his middle, was Space Commander Kevin O'Brine, an Irishman out of Dublin. He was short, as compact as a deto-rocket, and obviously unfriendly. He had a mathematically square jaw, a lopsided nose, green eyes, and sandy hair. He spoke with a pronounced ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... other ground, that one who has become a traveller has loosened himself from his old customary moorings, and so gives himself, as it were, a new starting-point in life, from which he may, if the spirit of delusion is still happily strong within him, draw a mathematically straight line in the given direction A B, to be the faithful index ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... "I'll state it mathematically. If you concentrate your powerful intellect upon the problem you will perceive that two ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... velocity, the velocity being regulated by the distance. The manner in which the difference of velocity is accounted for by the Law of Gravitation has already been explained in the preceding article. Thus Newton proved that Kepler's Second Law was capable of being mathematically explained, and accounted for, by the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... "Universalia ante rem." By it the general name preceded that of the species. Universal concepts represent the real; all else is merely illustrative of the real. The only real sphere is the one held in the mind, mathematically correct in every way. Balls and globes and other actual things are but the illustrations of the genus. Perhaps Anselm was the strongest advocate of this method ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... penetrated.' Watch the soap-bubbles that I am blowing. Each and every one is revolving as the earth revolves, from west to east. What I wish to call your attention to is the fact that can be proven, both mathematically and theoretically, that at a certain rate of speed in the revolution they could not be penetrated by any rifle-ball. At a higher rate of speed they would be harder than globes of solid chilled steel, ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... of course, gains in force by the energy with which it is expressed; it strikes where the brain sends it, by a law as mathematically exact as the law that determines the course of a shell from a mortar. The amount of impression it makes is not to be determined so exactly. Sometimes, in an impressible nature, the idea works havoc, but there are, no less, natures so robustly protected, that this sort of ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... Trajan and Hadrian, and obtained some reputation as a critic and grammarian.[14493] About the same time flourished Marinus, the writer on geography, who was a Tyrian by birth, and "the first author who substituted maps, mathematically constructed according to latitude and longitude, for the itinerary charts" of his predecessors.[14494] Ptolemy of Pelusium based his great work entirely upon that of Marinus, who is believed to have utilised the geographical and hydrographical accumulations of the old Phoenician navigators, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... is a machine that ... that sets up conditions mathematically similar to the conditions in some problem and then lets all the operations proceed while it draws a graph—a prediction—of how the real conditions would turn out. If the tides change with the position of some heavenly body, then we can build ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... exists, whether it is possible; for it would imply a contradiction, were these two opposite forms of society, equality and inequality, both possible. Then we discover, singularly enough, that property may indeed manifest itself accidentally; but that, as an institution and principle, it is mathematically impossible. So that the axiom of the school—ab actu ad posse valet consecutio: from the actual to the possible the inference is good—is given the lie as far ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... not mathematically to be computed, Tom heard a step on the stairs, and looked forth. A tall gentleman wearing a high hat and carrying a black bag was ascending. In a flash Tom recollected a talk with his dead father, in which that glorious and gay parent had explained ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... simplicity, he had assumed circular orbits and calculated their approximate orbital velocities from their distance from the sun. He had determined the mass of the sun from direct weighings aboard their ship. He soon had a fair diagram of the system constructed mathematically, and experimental observation showed it to be a very ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... the ambiguities of life carried over into that other state, its pathos and its small misunderstandings. This was a much-married man whose last spouse had been a triple widow. Even to him the situation proved mathematically complex, and the sumptuous stone to her memory bears the dizzying legend that "Enoch Nudd who erects this stone is her fourth husband and his fifth wife." Perhaps it was the exigencies of space which brought about this amazing elision; but surely, in its very apparent intention, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... mathematically inclined, wanted to know why they wouldn't look at it through their twelve horrid little eyes, and Judy laughed and came down from the table, after expressing a wicked wish that the little Digby-Smiths might all tumble over the dress-circle rail before the curtain rose. Meg ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... never completely fill a filter. The wash-water should be applied at the top of the filter, above the precipitate. It may be shown mathematically that the washing is most !rapidly! accomplished by filling the filter well to the top with wash-water each time, and allowing it to drain completely after each addition; but that when a precipitate is to be washed with the !least possible volume! of liquid the ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... Branshaw was terrifying to them; and whichever girl they selected might not be the one to ring Edward's bell. On the other hand, the expenditure upon mere food and extra sheets for a visit from the Ashburnhams to them was terrifying, too. It would mean, mathematically, going short in so many meals themselves, afterwards. Nevertheless, they chanced it, and all the three Ashburnhams came on a visit to the lonely manor-house. They could give Edward some rough shooting, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... with chintz-covered chairs, solid mahogany bedsteads and highboys, they were pleasant enough even if they weren't chambers to make an antique dealer "Oh!" and "Ah!" Val discovered with approval some stiff prints of mathematically correct clippers hung in exact patterns on his walls, while Ricky's room held one treasure, a ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... say enough of 'Robinson Crusoe' to justify its traditional superiority to De Foe's other writings. The charm, as some critics say, is difficult to analyse; and I do not profess to demonstrate mathematically that it must necessarily be, what it is, the most fascinating boy's book ever written, and one which older critics may study with delight. The most obvious advantage over the secondary novels lies in the unique situation. Lamb, in the passage from which I have ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... that of the separation of the original rotating mass into two nearly equal parts. The mechanical possibility of such a process has been proved, mathematically, by Poincare and Darwin. This, Dr. See thinks, is the method which has prevailed among the stars, and prevailed to such a degree as to make the solar system, formed by the ring method, probably a unique phenomenon ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... fifth remaining diminishes week by week. Our mobility and efficiency increase. There is not the slightest ground for Mr. Methuen's lament about the condition of the Army. It is far fitter than when it began. It is mathematically certain that a very few months must see the last commando hunted down. Meanwhile civil life is gaining strength once more. Already the Orange River Colony pays its own way, and the Transvaal is within measurable distance ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... might be said that the true and well-understood purport of a contract of insurance is not, as the words seem to say, to take the risk of any loss by fire or perils of the sea, however great the risk may be, but to take a risk of a certain magnitude, and no other, which risk has been calculated mathematically from the statements of the party insured. The extent of the risk taken is not specified in the policy, because the old forms and established usage are otherwise, but the meaning is ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... whole, had not greatly troubled himself to demonstrate mathematically or philosophically that a "hussar pupil" was an absolute necessity to him. People can not be forced, against their will, to marry; and the Prince, after all, was free, if he chose, to let the name of Zilah die ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... by various city health departments vary. Those who are mathematically inclined may find the following figures interesting: In some great cities they allow 500,000 bacteria to the cubic centimeter of milk. A cubic centimeter contains about twenty-five drops. In other ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... of History, says a hundred thousand men worked on this pyramid at one time and that it took twenty years to build it. It was scientifically and mathematically constructed ages before modern science or mathematics were born. The one who planned it knew that the earth is a sphere and that its motion is rotary. It is said that in all the thousands of years since it was built not a single fact in astronomy or mathematics ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... changes in the channel and filling up of the Mississippi preclude the possibility of a table of distances mathematically accurate, yet we have taken from accepted authorities the number of miles from the Gulf to the principal points along its banks. The table may be of service to the many that are daily tending to the great Father of Rivers, and those at home may be able to form, perhaps, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... major third became a larger interval than our modern one, and the minor third smaller. Thus thirds did not sound well together, in fact were dissonances, the only intervals which did harmonize being the fourth, fifth, and octave. This system of mathematically dividing tones into equal parts held good up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when Zarlino, who died in 1590, invented the system in use at the present time, called the tempered scale, which, however, did not come into general use ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... against proportional systems of voting is that they do not secure the exact representation of all the electors in a country. Thus the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems, whilst admitting that the new method would generally produce more accurate results, mathematically at least, than the existing method, qualified their statement by saying that their success "in producing in Parliament the 'scale map of the country,' which they held up as the ideal, can be only partial"; and in another ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... part, however small it be, in the magnificent pageant of life and work, for he has not been sent into it 'on chance.' Inasmuch as if there is chance in one thing there must be chance in another, and the solar system is too mathematically designed to be a haphazard arrangement. With all our cleverness, our logic, our geometrical skill, we can do nothing so exact! As part of the solar system, you and I have our trifling business to enact, Monsignor,—and to enact it properly, and with satisfaction to our Supreme Employer, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... kind, there is, we admit, no criterion of equality. But then, in such a case, it is absurd to talk, as Mr Mill does, about the stronger and the weaker. Popularly, indeed, and with reference to some particular objects, these words may very fairly be used. But to use them mathematically is altogether improper. If we are speaking of a boxing-match, we may say that some famous bruiser has greater bodily power than any man in England. If we are speaking of a pantomime, we may say the same of some very agile harlequin. But it would be talking nonsense to say, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... instance, we may state that the earth, as seen from a highflying balloon, used to be almost always described as appearing concave, or like a huge basin, and ingenious attempts were made to prove mathematically that this must be so. The laws of refraction are brought in to prove the fact; or, again, the case is stated thus: Supposing the extreme horizon to be seen when the balloon is little more than a mile high, the range of view on ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... must go through a series of mathematically exact evolutions, Joyselle of course, in his present frame of mind, could not realise. To him, as to every lover, the happenings and exigencies of his situation seemed those of pure hazard, and this phase, as he listened to his ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... morning I might have doubted, but now, thanks to that vain idiot who goes by the name of Wilkie, I am sure, perfectly, mathematically sure of success. Maumejan, who is entirely devoted to me, and who is the greediest, most avaricious scoundrel alive, will draw up such a complaint that Marguerite will sleep in prison. Moreover, other witnesses will be summoned. By what Casimir has said, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... terms. At one time "instinct" or "impulsion," the moral force driving man toward perfection, is a potentiality developed by cultivation, and at another a force that is created by cultivation. Although the sublime is the apex of her mathematically-definite program and is a moral quality attained by the few, every human being has his point of sublimity in the idea of a Supreme Being. On the one hand, beauty is a preconceived idea in the human species; on the other it is not preconceived, but developed. Finally, the rules of art are perceptions ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... can be held by adhesion. If we crushed that stone into dust, we would greatly increase the amount of water that could adhere to the original material. Clay particles, it should be noted, are so small that clay's ability to hold water is not as great as its mathematically computed surface area ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... risk the limitation of their feeling by submitting it to words. Nothing in antique psychology demanded a term of this kind. Classical literature, in close affinity to sculpture, dealt with concrete images and conscious thoughts. The mediaeval art of Dante, precisely, mathematically measured, had not felt the need of it. Boccaccio's clear-cut intaglios from life and nature, Petrarch's compassed melodies, Poliziano's polished arabesques, Ariosto's bright and many colored pencilings, were all of them, in all their varied phases of Renaissance ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Exhibition may mean in a "story" twenty different ways, fifty excursions, alternatives, excrescences, and the novel, as largely practised in English, is the perfect paradise of the loose end. The play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface, and as grave a dishonour, as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry. We are shut up wholly to cross-relations, relations all within the ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... me with the energy of a pang; and I have thought, that, after all we can say of any man, the effect of the greatest influence of an individual on society at large, is but as that of a pebble thrown into the sea. Mathematically speaking, the undulations which the pebble causes, continue until the whole mass of the ocean has been disturbed to the bottom of its most secret depths and farthest shores; and, perhaps, with equal truth it may be affirmed, that the sentiments ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... shortly used in the same way, neither my companion nor I cared to have butter, and contented ourselves with cheese, which luckily was cut at a side-table, and presented to us in large blocks, in the shape of dice, mathematically correct as ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... completeness, only therefore in that province of thought which concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not fettered by the laws of harmony, but only by those of discord. The truly virtuous man, remarks Aristotle, never has occasion to practise self-denial. Hence, mathematically, "the theory of the intellectual action involves the recognition of a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn."[105-1] True freedom, real being, is only possible when law as such is inexistent. Only the lawless makes the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... long exercised an honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one's thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of 'self-expression,' individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... of the route,—if the path, that is, were thirty rods and a mile and a half long. But this, it will be observed, is not the case; and it is a fact perfectly well attested, though perhaps not yet scientifically accounted for (many things are known to be true which for the present cannot be mathematically demonstrated), that near the top of a mountain thirty rods are equivalent to a good deal more than four hundred and ninety-five feet. Let the guide-book's specification stand, therefore, in all its surveyor-like exactness. After making the climb four times ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... reasonings and mathematical calculations we are accustomed to argue as if such substances as air, water, or metal, which appear to our senses uniform and continuous, were strictly and mathematically ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... comet was first seen in 1770. Investigation showed that it was moving in an orbit which should bring it back to perihelion every five and a half years; yet it had never been seen before and, although often searched for, has never been seen since. Laplace and Leverrier proved mathematically that in 1767 it had approached so close to Jupiter as to be involved among the orbits of his satellites. What its track had been before is not known, but on that occasion the giant planet seized the interloper, threw it into a short elliptic orbit and sent it, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... or barrier of lava and scoriae that composed the outer wall of this crater, was almost mathematically circular. Its inner precipice was in most places absolutely perpendicular, though overhanging in a few; there being but two or three spots where an active man could descend in safety. The area within might contain a hundred acres while the wall preserved a very even height of about ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... by these Dutchmen; here rivers run above their levels and cattle feed where fishes were by nature intended to swim. Hogarth's line of beauty is unknown in Holland. No line can be either beautiful or palatable except that which (defined mathematically) is the shortest that can be drawn between two given points. But I have yet a great deal to say before I come to these roads. I left you at Bergen op Zoom, just arrived. On Sunday morning, after a little enquiry, we were glad to find there was a Protestant French Church ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... theory of music to an extremely fine point, having many curious scales, some of them with twenty-four divisions in an octave. Twenty-two was the usual number. The pitch of each note in every mode was accurately calculated mathematically, and the frets of the vina located thereby, according to very old theoretical works by one Soma, written in Sanskrit at least as early as 1500 B.C. When this work first became known to Europeans, its elaboration led it to be regarded ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... special care with their work near public roads, so that the furrows end on to the base of the highway shall be mathematically straight. They often succeed so well that the furrows look as if traced with a ruler, and exhibit curious effects of vanishing perspective. Along the furrow, just as it is turned, there runs a shimmering ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... events according to the causal principle in the realm of material nature, can be approached by us in no other form than in that of mechanism, provided we understand by mechanism an activity according to law and which can be mathematically estimated as to size and number. So far, therefore, every scientific investigator in the knowledge of material nature takes his place on the standpoint of a mechanical view of the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... besides, he, better than any one else, knew to what a point his wife was virginal. He had been able to form a judgment as to the unconquerable modesty resulting from the combined virtues of the amulet and the gypsy, and he had mathematically calculated the resistance of that chastity to the second power. Accordingly, he was at ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... much natural shrewdness, that his conversation was always worth listening to, although he was apt to start by assuming entirely false premisses, which he considered as incontrovertible as if they had been mathematically proved; but, given the correctness of his premisses, nobody could bring more natural wit and sense to bear upon ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that Duelling were totally restrain'd, methinks, I could be glad that our young hot Bravo's would not be altogether brutal, but quarrel mathematically, and with some Discretion. I would recommend the Caution, which Shakespear has prescrib'd by an Example, of offering and accepting a Challenge. In one of his Plays, there is an hereditary Quarrel ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... said Warner. "That rebel cousin of yours has luck. He also has skill. Let x equal luck and y skill. Now x plus y equals the combination of luck and skill, which is safety. That proves to me mathematically that he is unharmed and that he is riding northward—to ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sometimes whole villages, selling their goods and going out into the fields to shout and sing and pray, expecting the vision of the Lord and His Angels in the skies. I have in my hand a pamphlet entitled "Shekineh: The Glory of God in Israel, Facts Mathematically Foretold, of the Soon Coming of Our Blessed Lord." It is earnestly, yearningly written, in that spirit of feeble-minded affectionateness which the Bible-sects seem ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Let it be distinctly understood that the bookmaker cannot lose, no matter how events may go. On the other hand, the man who makes wagers on what he is pleased to term his "fancies" has everything against him. The chances of his choosing a winner in the odious new sport are hardly to be mathematically stated, and it may be mathematically proved that he must lose. Then, apart from the money loss, what an utterly ignoble and unholy pursuit this trapped-hare coursing is for a manly man! Surely the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... promise I required and gave me his hand. On the next day, I gave him my directions, the first article of which demanded that he should at once get himself weighed, so that the result might be made mathematically. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... in progress. About a hundred and fifty people were trying to sit down in a hundred seats. The stewards looked harassed as they explained that there was another meal-time half an hour after the first. Knollys was trying, with impassive dignity, to prove mathematically to an old lady that by waiting until six o'clock for her tea to-day and automatically shifting all her meal-times on half an hour she was losing nothing; and, after all, it would all be the same whether she had her tea at five or six or seven a hundred years hence. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the edge of the park stands an old farmhouse of timber and red tile, with red oast-house beside it, built with those gables which our ancestors seemed to think made such excellent rooms within. Our modern architects try to make their rooms mathematically square, a series of brick boxes, one on the other like pigeon-holes in a bureau, with flat ceilings and right angles in the corners, and are said to go through a profound education before they can produce these wonderful specimens of art. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... saying is, in political economy. We theorize and legislate as if people were things. Most of the schemes of social reorganization are based on this fallacy. It always breaks down in experience. A has two friends, B and C—to state it mathematically. A is equal to B, and A is equal to C. A has for B and also for C the most cordial admiration and affection, and B and C have reciprocally the same feeling for A. Such is the harmony that A cannot tell which he is more fond of, B or C. And B and C are sure that A is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ridge of Ben Arrow, which looked, smoothly covered with snow as it was, exactly like a gigantic turnip-pit. At the back of the milkhouse Kit set down the pot, and with a horn spoon which he took from his pocket he shared the scraping of the pot equally into three parts, dividing it mathematically by lines drawn up from the bottom. It was a good big pot, and there was a good deal of scrapings, which was lucky for both Tweed and Tyke, as well ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... exuberance of his passion, took to exaggerating the scientific principles whereby, from the three primitive colours, yellow, red, and blue, one derives the three secondary ones, orange, green, and violet, and, further, a whole series of complementary and similar hues, whose composites are obtained mathematically from one another. Thus science entered into painting, there was a method for logical observation already. One only had to take the predominating hue of a picture, and note the complementary or similar ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... genius was responsible for sundry attempts at improving the bow, the most complex being the fixed nut. He was struck by the fact that with the ordinary nut advancing and retreating by the action of the screw it was possible for it to be not always mathematically in the same place. Also that as the hair gradually stretched by use, the length thereof increased as the same tension was obtained each time it was screwed up for use. This, of course, made a minute difference in the balance of the bow. He apparently considered this a serious ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... She stepped lightly down into the cockpit with a naive expression of surprise at the yacht's immaculate order. The sails lay precisely housed, the stays, freshly tarred, glistened in the sun, the brasswork and newly varnished mahogany shone, the mathematically coiled ropes rested on a deck as spotless as ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... forces to demonstrate the other phenomena; and to this end the general propositions in the first and second book are directed. In the third book we give an example of this in the explication of the system of the World; for by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the first book, we there derive from the celestial phenomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets. Then, from these forces, by other propositions ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the author has gathered all the tragedy, the mystery, and the suffering possible to the sea. All the vari- ous forms of disaster, all the possibilities of horror, the depths of shame and agony, are heaped upon these unhappy voyagers. The accumulation is mathematically complete and emotionally unforgettable. The tale has well been called the ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... does not always work out with mathematical directness. Most things in the physical, as in the metaphysical, world work out as Ruskin says "not mathematically, but chemically." Though this may seem a far-fetched simile in connection with our dinner, it is a true one. To get back to our nuts. If after a meal of several courses, rich in quality and variety, highly-spiced and flavoured, and perhaps interspersed with little piquant relishes, ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... John, who looked as burly as a drifting ale pipe in a head sea, and whispered something about Young America being an unpleasant companion to sail the air with. Feeling how much better it was to be good-natured, I took the matter mathematically, trusting to the best. To be always right end up is a principle never to be lost sight of. There was land below us, firm and frowning; which, before we knew where we were, we had slipped into, like preserved meat, up ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... of temperament and environment, I shall endeavour to discover and follow the thread of connection which leads mathematically from one man to another. And when I have possession of every thread, and hold a complete social group in my hands, I shall show this group at work, participating in an historical period; I shall depict it in action, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... between this graveyard and that of the further village. Here the grass was carefully tended, and formed virtually a part of the manor-house lawn; flowers and shrubs being planted indiscriminately over both, whilst the few graves visible were mathematically exact in shape and smoothness, appearing in the daytime like chins newly shaven. There was no wall, the division between God's Acre and Lord Luxellian's being marked only by a few square stones set at equidistant points. Among those persons who have romantic sentiments on the subject of their last ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the drive Gen. Gouraud started his cannon going and there was a slaughter in the German lines. Then when the German infantry crossed to our front line trenches (now entirely vacant) they were smashed up because the French guns were firing directly upon these positions, which they knew mathematically. And those of the Boche who went down in the dugouts for safety were killed by the gas which the Frenchmen had left ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... discovery that a question is unanswerable is as complete an answer as any that could possibly be obtained. And from the point of view of physics, where no empirical means of distinction can be found, there can be no empirical objection to the mathematically simplest assumption, which is that ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... which it might have been applied.[1040] The State may do what it can to prevent what is deemed an evil and stop short of those cases in which the harm to the few concerned is thought less important than the harm to the public that would ensue if the rules laid down were made mathematically exact.[1041] Exceptions of specified classes will not render the law unconstitutional unless there is no fair reason for the law that would not equally require its extension to the excepted classes.[1042] Incidental individual ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... rotation is exceedingly small and difficult to observe; and it is only by a very remarkable patience and care and ingenuity that Dr. Kerr has obtained his result. Mr. Fitzgerald, of Dublin, has examined the question mathematically, and has shown that Maxwell's theory would have enabled Dr. Kerr's result ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... the two ladies his design for the work with which he had been haunted; they smiled and promised him their assistance. The youngest, with an air of gaiety suggested one of the first chapters of the undertaking, by saying that she would take upon herself to prove mathematically that women who are entirely virtuous ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has found them in Euclid ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... would," he said. "Next we proceed to take the multiples of the superhydrates mathematically converted into decimals, and then, allowing, of course, for the kilometric variation of the earth's maximum temperature reduced by the square of the hypotenuse, you begin the delicate operation of transferring votes from one candidate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... cannot be proved mathematically, since we cannot actually see the play of forces of the passive fluctuations and their causes. We cannot say how great these fluctuations are, and how quickly or slowly, how regularly or irregularly they change. Nor do we know how far a determinant ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... had access to the photostats of the old U. S. data that General Lanningham brought to South America after the debacle in the United States in A.E. 114. Those end-papers are part of the Lanningham stuff. As far as we've been able to check mathematically, everything is strictly authentic and practical. We'll have to run a few more tests on the chemical-explosive charges—we don't have any data on the exact strength of the explosives they used then—and the tampers ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... that it did not greatly matter what kind of soldiers he was going to fight, so long as they fought, which fact no one disputed. There was a more serious problem. He lay in his bunk pondering upon it. He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... are the points that I wish to make in commenting upon Mr. Littlepage's paper and if he will make any concluding remarks we will be very glad to hear them. In regard to Mr. Hutt's suggestion that we cannot count on crop success or crop failure mathematically—now, there are fortunes to be made from the proper management of good nut orchards. We know of orchards where very large incomes are at present being made, and I am very glad that the sense and sentiment of this ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... too, was to lay down a rule of duty, almost mathematically ascertainable, and not to be disturbed by any sentimentalism, mysticism, or rhetorical foppery. If, in the attempt to free his hearers from such elements, he ran the risk of reducing morality to a lower level, and made it appear as unamiable as sound morality can ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... followed was a thing to live in memory. From the nature of the land, gently rolling to the horizon without an obstruction the height of a man's hand, there was no possibility of escape for the quarry. The outcome was as mathematically certain as a problem in arithmetic; the only uncertain element was that of time. At first the jack seemed to be gaining, but gradually the greater endurance of the hounds began to count, and foot by foot the gap between pursuers and pursued lessened. In the beginning the ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... very fine," the expert went on. "Of course I would have to use instruments to tell me if it is mathematically correct; and the weight, I imagine, is—is about six carats, perhaps a ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... of Caesar's legions, and by a horde of Bourguignons, and lastly by a horde of Sicamores, under one Clodovic, had previously subjugated the whole world, and given their names and laws to Asia, seems to me to be very strange: the thing is not mathematically impossible, and if it be demonstrated, I give way; it would be very uncivil to refuse to the Velches what one accords ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... hardly fail to be instructive and suggestive. The faults so frequently charged against that "dear defunct" in our own tongue, the three-volume novel—the faults of long-windedness, of otiose padding, of unnecessary episodes, etc., are almost mechanically or mathematically impossible in the nouvelle. The long book provides pastime in its literal sense, and if it is not obvious in the other the accustomed reader, unless outraged by some extraordinary dulness or silences, goes on, partly like the Pickwickian horse because he can't ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which scattered the storm, leaving only the gentle patter of a summer shower. The critics applauded; but society applied its lorgnette to its eye and discovered that, in his excitement, Arlt had neglected to make sure that his tie was mathematically straight. The patter died away into silence. Then the wind veered again and the storm broke out afresh, mingled with cries of ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... political storm just going to a life-peerage limit, and then stopping suddenly. But in politics we must not trouble ourselves with exceedingly exceptional accidents; it is quite difficult enough to count on and provide for the regular and plain probabilities. To speak mathematically, we may easily miss the permanent course of the political curve if we engross our minds with ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... finality to the individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it includes the whole of life in a single indivisible embrace. This life common to all the living undoubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates not only the parts of an ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... sizes and forms, by the varieties of cultivation, like a vast carpet of an irregular tesselated pattern, and varied in the color by a thousand hues of brown and green. Here and there vast forests extend, where countless thousands of trees, though ancient and venerable in form, stand in rows, mathematically arranged, as they were planted centuries ago. These are royal demesnes, and hunting grounds, and parks connected with the country palaces of the kings or the chateaux of the ancient nobility. The cultivators of the soil live, not, as in America, in little farm-houses built ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... a body, which is a complete magnitude, can be considered in two ways; mathematically, in respect to its quantity only; and naturally, as regards its matter ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... existence. As it is, man does not really believe in evil, just as he cannot believe that violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite torture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the violin there are thousands who cannot. The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions. ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... and towns of the State, added a little to the meagre stock of information. For further knowledge, the public must be thankful that the argus-eyed tourist has not left the place unnoticed, and that the mathematically-inclined gazetteer has told us from time to time the number of Cleveland's churches, banks, and city councilmen, and ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single organism. Each part of the immense composition, down to the smallest detail, is necessary to the total effect. We are in the presence of a most complicated yet mathematically ordered scheme, which owes life and animation to one master-thought. In spite of its complexity and scientific precision, the vault of the Sistine does not strike the mind as being artificial or worked out by calculation, but as being predestined to existence, inevitable, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... aiming at is this. When a man attempts to demonstrate a thing mathematically, he must take into his calculation everything essentially connected with the problem, just exactly as it is, and not as he would have it; otherwise, he cannot, by any possibility, attain a correct result. ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... stand at the churchyard gate, better worth sitting in, so far as appearance goes, than the other three. Alfold, too, has a great old yew-tree, one of a row of three in the Fold churchyards. Has it ever been noticed that the Alfold, Dunsfold, and Hambledon yews stand almost in a mathematically straight line? From Alfold to Hambledon is five miles as the crow flies, and Dunsfold is almost exactly half way ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... during which the two worked out their future fate, was as a grain of sand as compared with the countless universes in space in all eternity—a relation which reduces the span of man's lifetime to almost absolutely NOTHING, mathematically considered. ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... we may so express it, of a globe is turned out of a piece of wood. This sphere need not be mathematically accurate. It is for rough work, and flaws and cracks are of little consequence. This wooden ball has an axis, a piece of iron wire at each pole. And here we may remark, that, at every stage of the process, the revolution of a sphere upon its axis, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... the 'Muffin Man;' therefore it follows, mathematically, I believe, that we must all know each other. I think we'll try a sitting-down game next. I'll give you all something. Desire, you can tell them what to do with it, and Miss ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... simply monstrous in invention, Swift in invention submits himself loyally to law. Give Swift his world of Liliput and Brobdingnag respectively, and all, after that, is quite natural and probable. The reduction or the exaggeration is made upon a mathematically calculated scale. For such verisimilitude Rabelais cares not a straw. His various inventions are recklessly independent one of another. A characteristic of Swift thus is scrupulous conformity to whimsical law. Rabelais is remarkable for whimsical ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... insignificant chimeras of the brain: and yet, if we will consider, we shall find that it is only of our own ideas. The mathematician considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are in idea in his own mind. For it is possible he never found either of them existing mathematically, i.e. precisely true, in his life. But yet the knowledge he has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or any other mathematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain, even of real things existing: because real things are no further ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... special pleading, and fraught with national prejudice, to defend, like the philosopher Grassi,[593] the persecutor of Galileo, principles {263} and reasoning which, unless you are actually insane, or an ignorant quack in mathematics, you know are mathematically false. What a moral lesson this for the students of the University of London from its head! Man! demonstrate corollary 3, in this note, by the lying dogma of Newton, or turn your thoughts to something ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... previously well considered method, then the study of the structure of the universe took quite a different direction, and thereby attained an incomparably happier result. The fall of a stone, the motion of a sling, resolved into their elements and the forces that are manifested in them, and treated mathematically, produced at last that clear and henceforward unchangeable insight into the system of the world which, as observation is continued, may hope always to extend itself, but need never fear to be compelled ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... infinitely short time. You may mix in a little practical mechanics, if you choose. Invent some method of taking the tardy Courier over his road at the rate of sixty miles a minute. Demonstrate me this discovery (when you have made it!) mathematically, and approximate it practically, and Abscissa is yours. Until you can, I will thank you to trouble neither ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... warfare, it is a strange and bewildering fact that the wars of the smooth-bore era were for the most part, shorter, sharper, and more decisive. Spite of inferiority of weapons the battles of that period were bloodier than those of the present, and it is a mathematically demonstrable proposition that the heavier the slaughter of combatants the nearer must be the end of a war. There is no pursuit now after victory won and the vanquished draws off shaken but not broken; in the smooth-bore era a vigorous pursuit scattered him to the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... then only if the succession of steps of change be infinitely divisible. If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite number of successive decrements, it is mathematically impossible that the emptying should ever positively terminate. In point of fact, however, bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number of decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges or nothing emerges from the spout. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Indian could have excelled, Bill repeated these tactics twenty or thirty times; but always with the same nicely balanced accuracy; with ample pauses between each fresh beginning; with mathematically accurate gauging of the precise provocation needed to shift Jan farther and farther into the wilderness without seriously and dangerously arousing his ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... have either wife or children, which may happen to the most honest people; either relatives or near friends, which is certainly more unusual. He lived alone in his house in Saville Row, whither none penetrated. A single domestic sufficed to serve him. He breakfasted and dined at the club, at hours mathematically fixed, in the same room, at the same table, never taking his meals with other members, much less bringing a guest with him; and went home at exactly midnight, only to retire at once to bed. He never used the cosy chambers which the Reform ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... military. Let us continue to clear up these important points." [Poiret turns crimson with distress.] "Suppose we formulate the whole matter in a maxim worthy of Larochefoucault: Officials with salaries of twenty thousand francs are not clerks. From which we may deduce mathematically this corollary: The statesman first looms up in the sphere of higher salaries; and also this second and not less logical and important corollary: Directors-general may be statesmen. Perhaps it is in that sense that more than one deputy says in his heart, 'It is a fine thing to ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... numbers of each class in the ballot-box. It is reasonable to expect that when there are 10,000 ballot papers in an urn the composition of the first thousand drawn out will nearly be the same as that of any other thousand, or of the whole 10,000. The amount of this probability may be determined mathematically, and is very great. ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... leaving an increased part to white laborers, bringing their labor into greater demand, and consequently enhancing the wages of it. With deportation, even to a limited extent, enhanced wages to white labor is mathematically certain. Labor is like any other commodity in the market—increase the demand for it and you increase the price of it. Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and by precisely ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the mist, dead ahead, just skimming the surface of the water, and coming straight at us, like a mathematically arranged triangle of cannon balls, taking definite form and magnitude oh, so swiftly, unbelievably swift; coming—yes—directly overhead, as before, the pulsing, echoing din in ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... tower to make his experiments regarding the laws of gravitation; and there is in the Cathedral a great silver chandelier suspended after his design—by a simple rod—from the great height of the roof. This was so mathematically correct that the celebrated astronomer took his idea of the pendulum from it. There is a very fine view from the top of the tower, well repaying the trouble of ascending. We were very pleased with the old "leaning ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... with me for not saying a word about going to see you? Arabel and I won't affirm it mathematically—but we are, metaphysically, talking of paying our visit to you next Tuesday. Don't expect ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... with the small mirror in his large telescope. The large mirror is not mathematically centred in the large tube that contains it, but is placed rather obliquely in it. This slight obliquity causes the images to be formed not in the axis of the tube, but very near its circumference, or outer mouth, we may call it. The observer may therefore look at them ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... inquirers. The geologists and biologists had demanded hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of millions of years to allow for the developments with which they were concerned. The physicists, led by Lord Kelvin, refused to admit the demand, claiming that it could be proved mathematically that it was impossible that the sun could have been giving out heat at its present rate for more than a hundred million years, at the very outside. The appearance of radium robbed this argument of its cogency. It is true ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... and necessary that the thoughts of one man should be carried out by the labour of others; in this sense I have already defined the best architecture to be the expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood. But on a smaller scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man's thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the difference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of art. How wide the separation is between ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... but they have not got very far; and it may, I think, be assumed, without further argument, that while you have to deal both with psychological and sociological elements, with human desires, and with those desires modified by social relations, it is impossible to find any data which can be mathematically stated. There is no arithmetical measure of the forces of love, or hunger, or avarice, by which (among others) the ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... can be more irregular than the outline of each mass, and yet scarce anything more regular than the sculpturings on every part of it. We find them fretted over with polygons, like those of a honeycomb, only somewhat less mathematically exact, and the centre of every polygon contains its many-rayed star. It is difficult to distinguish between species in some of the divisions of corals: one Astrea, recent or extinct, is sometimes found so exceedingly like ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... lose one," Matthew Fisher said privately to Senator Cannon. "Uganda will come out of this with a pro-Western government, but it might not be too stable. The whole African situation is unstable. Mathematically, it has to be." ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... mathematically invariable it is not, and could not be expected to be: because the period of a year is too short to include all the possible combinations of partial causes, while it is, at the same time, sufficiently long ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... may be taken only of like things. It is possible to average the figures 3, 4, and 8 by adding them together and dividing by 3. The average is 5. Such a process is mathematically correct, because all of the units comprising the 3, 4, and 8 are exactly alike. One of the premises of mathematics is that all units are alike, hence ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... torments us in the early days of our youth, flinging us from one woman to another until we find one who cannot endure us. And then begins our constancy—that sincere, unending passion which may be expressed mathematically by a line falling from a point into space—the secret of that endlessness lying only in the impossibility of attaining the aim, that is to ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... Our simpler stemma indicates the presence of one rather than more than one such manuscript in the vicinity of Paris in the ninth or the tenth century and again in the fifteenth. This line of argument, which presents not a mathematically absolute demonstration but at least a highly probable concatenation of facts and deductions, warrants the assumption, to be used at any rate as a working hypothesis, that {Pi} is a fragment of the lost Parisinus which contained all ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... compartments, and the partial change of form in the arches, especially of doorways and windows, which in the latter part of the fifteenth century were often obtusely pointed and mathematically described from four centres, instead of two, as in the more simple pointed arch, and which from the period when this arch began to be prevalent was called the TUDOR arch, together with a great profusion of ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... hot and blow cold. They offer facts and statistics, economics and scientific arguments. If the working-man be merely selfish, the revolutionists show him, mathematically demonstrate to him, that his condition will be bettered by the revolution. If the working-man be the higher type, moved by impulses toward right conduct, if he have soul and spirit, the revolutionists offer him the things of the soul and the spirit, the tremendous things ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the Shimba Hills, in which we had been hunting. A road ten feet wide and innocent of wheels ran with obstinate directness up and down the slight contours and through the bushes and cocoanut groves that lay in its path. So mathematically straight was it that only when perspective closed it in, or when it dropped over the summit of a little rise, did the eye lose the effect of its interminability. The country through which this road led was various—open bushy veld with sparse ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... of the real dream which prove almost mathematically the superior nature of the vehicle which gives expression to it. This dream, for instance, is never of a fatiguing nature, however long it may appear to last, because it is only an instantaneous impression made upon the brain by the astral body, when the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... me this: are you one of those scientists whose minds are so mechanical, so mathematically made, as it were, that your entire outlook on science is based on old, established beliefs, or do you belong to that rare but modern type of trained thinker and dreamer who refuse to permit yesterday's convictions to influence ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... Ohio, with their "altar mounds," "sacred enclosures," and "mathematically accurate" but mysterious circles and squares, are still pointed to as impregnable to the attacks of this Indian theory. That the rays of light falling upon their origin are few and dim, is admitted; still, we are not left wholly in ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... long and a yard wide. They have a hundred and twenty names on them and the people are expected to make a selection. They are to make a selection of ten out of fifty or one hundred names. Why, it would seem to be mathematically demonstrable that that is absurd. But when some men get into politics and talk about the people, it seems as if they had to abandon ordinary logic. I am just as much in favor of popular government as anybody, but I am in favor of popular government as ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... of Menelaus (III. 348) is "equal in all directions," which we might conceive to mean, mathematically "circular," as the words do mean that. A shield is said to have "circles," and a spear which grazes a shield—a shield which was [Greek: panton eesae], "every way equal"—rends both circles, the outer circle of bronze, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... left, Mart," and the two men bent over the depression. They saw with astonishment that the cut surface was perfectly smooth, with not even the slightest roughness or irregularity visible. Even the smallest loose grains of sand had been sheared in two along a mathematically exact hemispherical surface by the inconceivable force of ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... reduced at once from the ignorant exaggerations of enthusiasm to the sensible level of the commonplace? The so-called 'marvels' of nature have, thanks to the advancement of practical education, entirely ceased to affect by either surprise or admiration the carefully matured, mathematically adjusted, and technically balanced brain of the finished student or professor of Organic Evolution,—and as for the idea of 'auguries' or portents, nothing could well be more entirely at variance with our present system of progressive learning, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... were mathematically safe—if they depended on the laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's approach easily, long before ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett |
