"Insoluble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... These attempted solutions of an insoluble problem may be found in brief in Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Lit. i. 37. Perhaps the boldest is that of Cantorelli, that the annales were constructed not out of the tabula but out of the commentarii; but this is in conflict with the passage in the scholiast on Virgil. To ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... discussion of the problem of freedom with that of Judah Halevi (above, p. 171), we see that Ibn Daud is more consistent, whatever we may think of his success in solving the insoluble problem. He frankly insists on the absolute freedom of the will and on the reality of the objectively contingent, not shrinking before the unavoidable conclusion that the events which are the results of such freedom or chance are no more known beforehand to God than they are to ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... with a solution containing 30 or 40 per cent. of potash. This arrangement is similar to that of a Callaud element, with this difference—that the depolarizing element is solid and insoluble. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... I had utterly given up the whole problem of religion as insoluble. I believed in poetry, science, and democracy—and they were enough for me then; enough, at least, to leave a mighty hunger in my heart, I knew not for what. And as for Mackaye, though brought up, as he told me, a rigid Scotch Presbyterian, he had gradually ceased to attend the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... I went on—I do not clearly remember now the exact line of argument I adopted—to urge upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not necessarily insoluble puzzles for the world at large, that no one soldier fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't an absolute condemnation of me to declare that I went on living ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... and partly due to Werner Siemens, was a method of reproducing printed matter by transferring the print from paper to plates of zinc. Caustic baryta was applied to the printed sheet to convert the resinous ingredients of the ink into an insoluble soap, the stearine being precipitated with sulphuric acid. The letters were then transferred to the zinc by pressure, so as to be printed from. The process, though ingenious and of much interest at the time, has long ago been superseded by ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... was afraid to put together the disjointed fragments and form a general idea from all the agonizing and conflicting experiences of the day. He felt something bordering upon despair, which he had never known till then. Towering like a mountain above all the rest stood the fatal, insoluble question: How would things end between his father and his brother Dmitri with this terrible woman? Now he had himself been a witness of it, he had been present and seen them face to face. Yet only his brother ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... leave children to hunger?" "Is this wealthy England?" his audience reply in a fashion of their own. Reasoning does not avail against hunger and privation. I am forced to own that, for my part, the awful problem of poverty seems insoluble by any logical agent; but the man of the mob does not now care for logic than ever he did before, and he has advisers who state to him the problems of life and society with passionate rhetoric which ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... pounds into kilos and shillings into francs; Monsieur intervening occasionally with information about the rate of exchange at the moment. Madame insisted on taking this into account in comparing the cost of living in the two countries. Then we used to be faced with problems which I regard as insoluble. ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... bear Mrs. Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her immediate circle, was in her old age 'a great genealogist of all Sussex families, and much consulted.' The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and water will flow as readily through minute tubes choked with needle- valves, or through felt and the like, or along wicks, as will plain water. For this reason, and for the practically identical one that it is quite free from dirt or insoluble matter, diluted spirit is specially suitable for the protection of the water in cyclists' acetylene lamps, [Footnote: As will appear in Chapter XIII., there is usually no holder in a vehicular acetylene lamp, all the water being employed eventually for ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... formation extends all round my house in Kent; and its surface, from having been exposed during an immense period to the dissolving action of rain-water, is extremely irregular, being abruptly festooned and penetrated by many deep, well-like cavities. During the dissolution of the chalk the insoluble matter, including a vast number of unrolled flints of all sizes, has been left on the surface and forms a bed of stiff red clay, full of flints, and generally from 6 to 14 feet in thickness. Over the red clay, wherever the land has long remained as pasture, there ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... the captains of industry in England had a soul in them such as yours. The look of England is to me at this moment abundantly ominous, the question of capital and labour growing ever more anarchic, insoluble altogether by the notions hitherto applied to it—pretty sure to issue in petroleum one day, unless some other gospel than that of the 'Dismal Science' come to illuminate it. Two things are pretty sure to me. The first is that capital and labour never can or will ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... membrane is seen purposely removed from its contiguous parts, so as to render more visible its form and insertions. Under this tissue is found with the Nos. 7, 8, and 9, the endosperm or perisperm, containing the gluten and the starch; soluble and insoluble albuminoids, that ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... generally were. They loved the echoes of her little feet down the damp, silent aisles of their chapel, and her small, sweet, slender voice, as she asked strange baby-questions, which, as usual with baby-questions, hit all the insoluble points of philosophy and theology exactly on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... this time the United States Dispensatory and other works on pharmacy, ascribed the following rather indefinite cause for the acridity of the Indian turnip. It was said to be due to an acrid, extremely volatile principle. This principle was insoluble in water and alcohol, but soluble in ether. It was dissipated both by heating and drying, and by this means the acridity is destroyed. There was no opinion given as to the real nature ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... every cranny and dog-hole in the universe that the creation of the world had now become no more mysterious than the making of a dumpling, though concerning this last there were still some to whom the question as to how the apples were got in presented an insoluble problem—this seized me with an amazement of pleasure. I do not mean to say a presumptuous thing at all; but it is a simple fact that from this first beginning of acquaintance with Carlyle, he never once appeared to teach me anything in the way of thought. I know he did so; I know that he ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... potash, silicate of soda, etc., which are soluble in water, and therefore available to plants. If we roughen a corn stalk with sand-paper we may sharpen a knife upon it. This is owing to the hard particles of silica which it contains. Window glass is silicate of potash, rendered insoluble by additions of arsenic ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... folly for which Nero stood the symbol; but it certainly was not philosophical considerations of this kind that led the Roman authorities to rage against the Christians. The problem, I repeat, is insoluble. However this may be, the Christians were declared responsible for the fire; a great number were taken into custody, sentenced to death, executed in different ways, during the festivals that Nero offered to the people to appease them. Possibly Paul himself was one of ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... in so much as no written Law, delivered in few, or many words, can be well understood, without a perfect understanding of the finall causes, for which the Law was made; the knowledge of which finall causes is in the Legislator. To him therefore there can not be any knot in the Law, insoluble; either by finding out the ends, to undoe it by; or else by making what ends he will, (as Alexander did with his sword in the Gordian knot,) by the Legislative power; which no other ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... is seldom pure. It carries in it carbonic acid; and that acid, beating in shower after shower against the face of a cliff— especially if it be a limestone cliff—weathers the rock chemically; changing (in case of limestone) the insoluble carbonate of lime into a soluble bicarbonate, and carrying that away in water, which, however clear, is still hard. Hard water is usually water which has invisible lime in it; there are from ten to fifteen grains ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... to have said, speaking as though he were on a different social footing from Trix, would have better expressed Trix's meaning. But she chose her own phraseology, and doubtless it conveyed to her exactly what she did mean. Anyhow, it was an amazing riddle, an insoluble riddle. Trix stared at the photograph, finding no ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... it came about that, within three months of his extraordinary accident, Mr. Fenwick was comfortably settled in an apartment within a few minutes' walk of Krakatoa Villa; and all the incidents of his original appearance were getting merged in the insoluble, and would soon, no doubt, under the influence of a steady ever-present new routine of life, be completely absorbed in the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... impossibility of settling the names of the twelve apostles struck me as a notable fact.—I farther remembered the numerous difficulties of harmonizing the four gospels; how, when a boy at school, I had tried to incorporate all four into one history, and the dismay with which I had found the insoluble character of the problem,—the endless discrepancies and perpetual uncertainties. These now began to seem to me inherent in the materials, and not to be ascribable ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... lifelong friend, his furrowed face the incarnation of cynical hopelessness. 'What is, is worst,' he seemed to say. His yellow, wise old eyes watched the quick face with the air of one who, having posed an insoluble problem, awaits with a sarcastic ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... real definition executes those conditions. The nominal definition, that I may express it most briefly and pointedly, puts a question; the real definition answers that question. Thus, to give our illustration, the insoluble problem of squaring the circle presents us with a good nominal idea. There is no vagueness at all in the idea of such a square; it is that square which, when a given circle is laid before you, would present the same superficial contents in such exquisite truth ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... simple problems ever intertwined, Close home, elusive, present, baffled, grappled. By each successive age insoluble, pass'd on, To ours to-day—and we pass ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... on laws which deny the rights of the individual, ought such laws to be obeyed in the name of popular sovereignty, or to be disobeyed in the name of natural rights? It is a real issue, and on these lines it is unfortunately quite insoluble. ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... division consists of the nitrogenous materials, containing also carbon, hydrogen, a certain amount of oxygen, sulphur, and possibly other elements. Among the carbohydrates, the commonest are starch and cellulose, which are insoluble bodies, and sugar, which is soluble. The hydrocarbons, fats, oils, and so on, form a comparatively small proportion of the rabbit's diet; the proverb of "oil and water" will remind the student that these are insoluble. The nitrogenous ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... supposed that the resulting change could not be other than favourable. She had been on too formal terms with her father-in-law—a remote and ceremonious old gentleman to whom her own personality was evidently an insoluble enigma—to feel more than the merest conventional pang at his death; and it was certainly "more fun" to be a marchioness than a countess, and to know that one's husband was the head of the house. Besides, now they would have the chateau to themselves—or at least the old Marquise, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... too, began to seem far less insoluble than it had seemed the night before. She felt certain, as she travelled with her springing step, that she would find it possible to meet creditably the great emergency with what she had at home and could discover at the little general-store ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... frequently discussed as to the origin of the Aryans can only mean, if it means anything, a discussion of the ethnic affinities of those numerous races which have acquired Aryan speech; with the further question, which is perhaps insoluble, among which of these races did Aryan speech arise and where was the cradle of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... there was now one pressing and immediate problem to be solved—how to keep Buisson-Souef as his own without paying for it? To one less sanguine, less daring, less impudent and desperate in his need, the problem would have appeared insoluble. ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... same regions where the daring speculations of his theological ancestors took their origin. Septimius, the rather disagreeable hero of his last romance, is a peculiar example of a similar change. Brought up under the strict discipline of New England, he has retained the love of musing upon insoluble mysteries, though he has abandoned the old dogmatic guide-posts. When such a man finds that the orthodox scheme of the universe provided by his official pastors has somehow broken down with him, he forms some audacious theory of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and entreaties, and we have lost the root of Livingness and with it all possibility of growth or of liberty. This is dualism, which cuts us off from our Source of Life; and so long as we take this false conception for the true law of Being, we shall find ourselves hampered by limitations and insoluble problems of every description: We have lost the Key of Life and are consequently unable ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again: "What am ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and prospects, to mention a singular and interesting case of sudden conquest over a difficulty that once had seemed insuperable. For a period of three centuries there had existed an enigma, dark and insoluble as that of the Sphinx, in the text of Suetonius. Isaac Casaubon had vainly besieged it; then, in a mood of revolting arrogance, Joseph Scaliger; Ernesti; Gronovius; many others; and all without a ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... that our satellite is shaped like an egg, the more pointed end being directed away from us. We are here, of course, faced with a riddle, which is all the more tantalising from its appearing for ever insoluble to men, chained as they are to the earth. However, it seems going too far to suppose that any abnormal conditions necessarily exist at the other side of the moon. As a matter of fact, indeed, small portions of that side are brought into our view from time to time in consequence of slight ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... it is the real father of monasticism—that spirit of seclusion and self-abnegation which became so prevalent in the third and fourth centuries, and which remained in the church through the mediaeval period. Gnosticism busied itself with the solution of insoluble questions respecting the origin of evil, which Christianity justly relinquished to the domain of useless inquiries—"the wisdom of the world." Gnosticism would acknowledge no limits to human speculation; Christianity accepts ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Hamar interposed; "we don't want to take your money, all we wanted to do was to prove to you we could perform the tricks you believed to be insoluble. ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... imaginable, gap-toothed, beetle-browed ogress of a wife. Why he married her has never been told. Why the mortal male whom we meet for the first time at a dinner party has married the amazing mortal female sitting somewhere on the other side of the table is an insoluble mystery, and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we expect to know about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of matrimony is concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The ogre marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to love—and ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... "liquor" pass to the Mash-Tun, where the starch of the malt is rendered soluble. From the mash-tun the clear wort passes to the Copper, where it is boiled with hops. From the copper the boiled wort passes to the Hop Back, where the insoluble hop constituents are separated from the wort. From the hop back the wort passes to the Cooler, from the latter to the Refrigerator, thence (for the purpose of enabling the revenue officers to assess the duty) to the Collecting Vessel,[4] ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... expression—entirely free from artifice or affectation, charmed Henri for one reason, yet, on the other hand, redoubled his perplexity. How could he conciliate his scruples of conscience with the aspirations of his heart? The problem seemed then as insoluble as when it had been presented the first time. But Valentine was saved. For the moment that was the essential point, the only one in question. The involuntary revelation of her secret had brought the color to her ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... of authorship partly as insoluble, partly as of slight importance for a literature which is manifestly popular. With even greater brevity may the problem of nationality be disposed of. Some critics have claimed an Italian, some an English, some a French, and some a German ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... baffled generation after generation of a great and virile race, who complacently attribute their incapacity to master it to Irish perversity, and pass on, leaving it unsolved by Anglo-Saxons, and therefore insoluble! ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... wrong, as many men in all ages have been on first bending their minds to the consideration of spiritual things. All is not mystery. In the dealings of God with man, much, very much, is mysterious, and by us in this life apparently insoluble; but many things—especially those things that are of vital importance to the soul—are as clear as the sun at noonday. However, our red man was at this time only beginning to run the spiritual race, and, like ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... perfectly and with regularity performed, the balance of power must of necessity be lost, and disease engendered. The system then becomes charged with uric acid, which has a strong affinity for certain bases in the human organism, and forms salts either insoluble or only slightly so, which are with difficulty eliminated either by the skin or kidneys, and hence we have the formation of calculi in the bladder, nodosities on the joints, and tophi in the ears, indicating the ...
— Buxton and its Medicinal Waters • Robert Ottiwell Gifford-Bennet
... always Roumania to be thought of, even if the problem of getting goods through to that country in face of the chaos which was rapidly making way in Russia was almost becoming insoluble. The French, like ourselves, were most anxious to afford succour to that stricken kingdom. Amongst other things, they requested us to send off to Moldavia a certain consignment (thirty, I think it was) of 6-inch howitzers, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... state of our morals and of our imperfect civilization, a problem crops up which for the moment is insoluble, and which renders superfluous all discussion on the art of choosing a wife; we commend it, as we have done all the others, to ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Science of Language,' brought us no farther along to the goal of our investigation than Compound Roots—one-, two-, three-, four-, five—(or more) letter Roots—some four or five hundred of which are the insoluble residuum which the Philologists furnish as the Ultimate Elements of Language. It was pointed out that these Roots are not, however, the Ultimate Elements of Language, any more than Compound Substances ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... area. This sand has been "unconsciously selected" from amidst the gravel in which it first lay with as much precision as if man had "consciously selected" it by the aid of a sieve. Physical Geology is full of such selections—of the picking out of the soft from the hard, of the soluble from the insoluble, of the fusible from the infusible, by natural agencies to which we are certainly not in the habit ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... of this man, (hypnotist astrologer and thought-reader all rolled into one) have ever since remained an insoluble mystery. ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... even at that hour of agony, turns Martha's thoughts to Himself. What He is is the all-important thing for her to know. If she understands Him, life and death will have no insoluble problems nor any hopelessness for her. 'I am the Resurrection and the Life.' She had risen in her grief to a lofty height in believing that 'even now'—at this moment when help is vain and hope is dead—'whatsoever thou wilt ask ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the elements are due to the influence of light; for example, a sulphur soluble in carbon disulphide is converted into sulphur which is insoluble, and the rate of change of yellow phosphorus into the red variety is greatly accelerated by light. Hydrogen and chlorine combine under the action of light with explosive rapidity to form hydrochloric acid and there are many other ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... originally revolving about a superior center of gravitational force, would not result in the formation of a ring of small bodies, but rather of a dispersed mass of them. But back of any speculation of this kind lies the problem, at present insoluble: How could the explosion be produced? (See the question of explosions ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... Grilo. He did not know whether that was so; but he felt that his heart was full of noble sentiments, and he loved the theater better than the apple of his eye. Would he succeed in being an Ayala or a Tamayo? Would he be rejected by the public? It was an insoluble mystery ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist's diagnosis? What ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... insoluble mysteries of German life is the cheapness of furnished lodgings as compared with the high rent and rates. To be sure, the landlady does not cook for you, and the bed-sitting-room is not considered sordid in Germany. In fact, the separate sitting-room is almost ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... understand you, Rebecca. You—you yourself and your whole conduct—are an insoluble riddle to me. I am free now—both in my soul and my circumstances. You are absolutely in touch with the goal you set before yourself from the beginning. ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... that what he approves and practices is absolutely pure, and incapable of perversion. The moment it is admitted that it can, by any possibility, be turned to base uses, the lists are thrown open to all corners, and the utterly insoluble question arises, just what degree of capacity for perversion entitles an amusement to approval or rejection? Insoluble, I say, because, not to speak of any other difficulty, one is obliged to confront the fact that no one amusement presents a similar temptation ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... tentacles to bend with precision toward the point of excitement, even the central tentacles, which are motionless when themselves charged, now responding to the call. The inflection which follows mechanical irritation or the presence of any inorganic or insoluble body is transient; that which follows the application of organic matter lasts longer, more or less, according to its nature and the amount; but sooner or later the tentacles resume their former position, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... threatening ranks along the sides of the vessel. Still and majestic she lay upon the quiet river; a very wonderful floating home indeed, and unlike all else she had ever known, to Dolly's apprehension. How she and the rest were ever to get on board was an insoluble problem to her, as to most of them; and the chair that was presently lowered along the ship's side to receive them, seemed a very precarious sort of means of transport. However, the getting aboard was safely accomplished; one by one they were hoisted up; and Dolly's feet stood ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... true universals and contraries; their synthesis is motion, a conception which requires them both and is completed by them. Or again, the philosophical extremes of downright materialism and idealism are each wholly true, yet but half the truth. The insoluble enigmas that either meets in standing alone are kindred to those which puzzled the old philosophers in the sophisms relating to motion, as, for instance, that as a body cannot move where it is and still ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... me plainly that he had not touched the matter, thinking success to be out of the question; and he predicted that if I attempted it I should find myself in the dilemma of having to solve the insoluble. I felt the force of the consul's remark when I reflected that I could not rely on the governor's assistance, or even speak to him on the subject. I saw that I must not let him suspect my design, for besides his duty to his Government he was a devoted friend to the interests of Trieste, and for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... instincts of animals are, however, acts of such a nature that, if they were performed by men, they would involve the generation of a series of ideas and of inferences from them; and it is a curious, and apparently an insoluble, problem whether they are, or are not, accompanied by cerebral changes of the same nature as those which give rise to ideas and inferences in ourselves. When a chicken picks up a grain, for example, are there, firstly, certain sensations, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Associates upon ascertaining for him "Why Champagne foamed?" They, with a hidden vein of pleasantry, required "material to experiment upon." Friedrich Wilhelm sent them a dozen, or certain dozens; and the matter proved insoluble to this day. No King, scarcely any man, had less of reverence for the Sciences so called; for Academic culture, and the art of the Talking-Schoolmaster in general! A King obtuse to the fine Arts, especially to the vocal Arts, in a high degree. Literary fame itself ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... be at the mercy of the universal quarrel of Guelf and Ghibelline, that city was Ravenna. In its larger sense that quarrel was her inheritance. It was the one thought which filled her mind. But here, as elsewhere, the great quarrel was insoluble or at any rate not to be solved. It merely bred faction and divided the city against itself. Guelf and Ghibelline tore Ravenna as they tore ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... many feathers and some brave plumage, but no down, I must in all humility beat my way back to the traditional lost ideals of our organically incorporated class.... Perhaps the most conscienceless class who seek to solve the insoluble is the 'cultured' class. But most of them seem to me like artistic undertakers officiating at the 'wake' of Life. With their platitudes, their prudery, and their chastity, they make for death. These languid ones desire to have life served up to them in many courses. ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... The shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul also was solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not a moral coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at that calm and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much I had lost. At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt Constance ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the problem of ruling this city—which in every respect might be compared to the Paris of the nineteenth century—without an armed force was infinitely difficult, and for that stiff and stately pattern-soldier altogether insoluble. Very soon matters reached such a pitch that friends and foes, both equally inconvenient to him, could, so far as he was concerned, do what they pleased; after Caesar's departure from Rome the coalition ruled doubtless still the destinies of the world, but not the streets ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... vicinity of the bituminous springs) is inodorous and without taste—an extraordinary fact, showing that this bitumen is of a nature quite different from that of pyrotechnic mineral or vegetable tar. In its dry state it is quite insoluble in water, though when charged with essential oil, as it exudes from nature's laboratory, it imparts a pungent and unpleasant taste. A considerable quantity of gas bubbles up through these bituminous springs, showing that decomposition is still ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... part, and that some coagulable lymph, or cretaceous, or calculous material, has been left on the membrane; which gives pain, when the muscles move over it, as some extraneous body would do, which was too insoluble to be absorbed. Hence there is an analogy between this chronic rheumatism and the diseases which produce gravel or gout-stones; and it may perhaps receive relief from the same remedies, such ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... assumed the name of State; and the union changed its name of "The United Colonies" to the proud title of "The United States of America." Were the new States essentially different from the colonies? This is one of the insoluble questions connected with the formation of the Union. Calhoun later declared that the Declaration of Independence changed the colonies from provinces subject to Great Britain to States subject to nobody. Lincoln in his message of July 4, 1861, said that "The Union gave each of them whatever ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... researches. I hope that they will permit us to study the physical and chemical factors of life under much simpler conditions than heretofore, and it is toward this end that I am directing my researches. They will enable us to approach much nearer the solution of the old insoluble problem of life and death. What indeed is the death of an organism all of whose parts may ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... quantity of those substances actually added in the process of manufacture, and not to the percentage of gelatine or agar, as the case may be, present in the finished medium; the explanation being that the commercial products employed contain a large proportion of insoluble material which is separated off by filtration during the preparation of ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... sour-complexioned theologians who would call this devotion to objects so far outside of his parish an illicit passion. But to me it seems a blessing conferred by heavenly wisdom upon a good man, and I doubt not he escapes from many an insoluble theological puzzle, and perhaps from many an unprofitable religious wrangle, to find refreshment and invigoration in the society ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... clearing, why the changing of the lorry numbers? That would then be a part of the business quite unconnected with the illicit traffic. After much thought, Merriman had to admit to himself that here was one more of the series of insoluble puzzles with ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... not correspond to the solution of water. We have strata consolidated with siliceous matter, in a state different from that under which it has been observed, on certain occasions, to be deposited by water. We have strata consolidated by feld-spar, a substance insoluble in water. We have strata consolidated by almost all the various metallic substances, with their almost endless mixtures and sulphureous compositions; that is to say, we find, perhaps, every different substance introduced into the interstices of strata ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... at this present moment, and because of his forceful, determined character he was presently not at all disturbed by the problem it presented. It was a problem, like some of those knotty financial complications which presented themselves daily; but it was not insoluble. What did he want to do? He couldn't leave his wife and fly with Aileen, that was certain. He had too many connections. He had too many social, and thinking of his children and parents, emotional as well as financial ties to bind him. Besides, he was not ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... blacker and more insoluble became this question, and yet he was going into battle to-morrow to fight his own brother to the death on this issue. True the problem of national existence was at stake, but this black problem of the possible degradation ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... toward the goal. The glory of Christianity is largely hi the paradox that it sets before men an unattainable ideal and then commands them to attain the ideal. If the cross is nothing but a revelation of an ideal for men, this paradox is insoluble and intolerable. In the scriptural light of the cross, however, we catch the glory not of an abstract ideal, but of a Father's love for his children —not of the commands of conscience in the abstract, but of the desires of a personal Friend who will lift men as they ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... clothes, usually such a sorely insoluble problem for academic people of small means, was solved by the Marshalls in an eccentric, easy-going manner which was considered by the other faculty families as nothing less than treasonable to their caste. Professor Marshall, it is true, having to make a public appearance on the campus every ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... less prima facie objection to those agents which consist of assimilable elements, such as are found making a part of healthy tissues. These are divisible into three classes,—foods, poisons, and inert, mostly because insoluble, substances. The food of one animal or of one human being is sometimes poison to another, and vice versa; inert substances may act mechanically, so as to produce the effect of poisons; but this division holds ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was a step gained; it was one more victory, yet it produced no material alteration. Rome, and the Spanish marriage, remained as before, insoluble elements of difficulty; the queen, to her misfortune, was driven to rely more and more on Renard; and at this time she was so desperate and so ill-advised as to think of surrounding herself with an Irish bodyguard; she went so far as to send a commission ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... the notorious Sparrow, the King of the Underworld, interest himself so actively on his behalf as to travel up there to Perthshire, after making those secret, but elaborate, arrangements for safety? The whole affair was a mystery, complete and insoluble. ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... God have been, in general, mere scourges, and nothing better; smiting blindly, rashly, confusedly; confounding too often the innocent with the guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and replace old sins by new. But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle be, I must believe—as long as I believe in any God at all—that such men as Robespierre were His ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... written verse professionally can realize the extent to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... electrical appliances, innumerable as might be their impalpable emanations, insoluble as seemed the mystery of their power of catching and transmitting sounds by the agency of ether, they were still physical appliances producing physical effects in obedience to the laws of nature. But what he sought lay beyond nature and was subject to some rule of which ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... my dear," said my father, slowly taking his hand from his waistcoat, as if the effort were too much for him, and the problem were insoluble. "But this, begging your pardon, I do think, that before a young woman does really, truly, and cordially centre her affections on one object, she suffers fancy, imagination, the desire of power, curiosity, or Heaven knows what, to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Border States little by little gave up the hope of becoming free, the old anti-slavery convictions of their best men faltering, and the practical problem of emancipation, really difficult, being too easily decided insoluble. More significant, owing to a variety of circumstances, the abolition spirit itself greatly subsided early in the present century. Completion of the emancipation process in the North was assured by the action of New York in 1817, proclaiming ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... permit the working of her thoughts to go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back. The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to blame; yet, ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Aegean Sea, on the coast of Thrace and opposite the mouth of the Hebrus; the Mysteries are said to have found their first home in this island, where the Cabirian gods were worshipped; this cult, shrouded in deep mystery to even the initiates themselves, has remained an almost insoluble problem for the modern critic. It was said that the wishes of the initiates were always granted, and they were feared as to-day the 'jettatori' (spell-throwers, casters of the evil ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... A tenth part of this solution is again mixed with nine times its bulk of water. The degree of dilution is now 1:100, or 2x. This process is continued as far as is found necessary for a given purpose. Insoluble substances can be dealt with in the same manner by first grinding them together with corresponding quantities of a neutral powder, generally sugar of milk. After a certain number of stages the powder can be dissolved in water; the solution may then be diluted further in the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... These, no doubt, were insoluble questions; and what did it matter? The essence of the thing was contained in this fact: The Needle was hollow. At forty or fifty yards from that imposing arch which is called the Porte d'Aval and which shoots out ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... that Canadian sealers should give up their rights in Bering Sea for a money payment, and to arrange for a measure of reciprocity in natural products and in a limited list of manufactures. But the question of the Alaskan boundary proved insoluble, and the Commission broke up ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... be failing him. The change had taken place almost overnight. The fact that the case had the appearance of presenting the unusual had merely stimulated him at first. But then doubts had crept in and the problem had begun to appear insoluble. ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... Mystery of Mary Stewart, a most ingenious examination of a practically insoluble problem: performed in the true spirit of historical investigation. The conclusions, with a less exhaustive treatment of the evidence, are presented in the History of Scotland—which is also a running criticism on English ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... the fundamental question for any philosophy of ethics; but it receives no answer at all from the prevailing school of metaphysical thought. This school offers no solution of the problem which was found insoluble by the type of philosophy whose aim is to co-ordinate the results of science. A comparison of the purposes and results of the two schools may ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... new ties with the outside world. Live, work, do something! Do not sit here musing and brooding over insoluble conundrums. ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... "That that is is"...for what is "that" but "that," and "is" but "is"?'). Unless we are willing to admit that two contradictories may be true, many questions which lie at the threshold of mathematics and of morals will be insoluble puzzles ...
— Sophist • Plato
... overreached himself. He has given you a choice of two problems, both of which he deems insoluble. Neither of them is insoluble. The only gleam of intelligence Old Cotangent showed was when he said that squaring the circle was too easy. He was right. It would have given you your Liebchen in five minutes. I squared the circle before I discarded pantalets. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... been among her chief attractions; if she were to turn into an echo their delicious duet ran the risk of becoming the dullest of monologues. He forgot that five minutes earlier he had resented her being glad to see their friends, and for a moment he found himself leaning dizzily over that insoluble riddle of the sentimental life: that to be differed with is exasperating, and to be ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... least a score of times every day that she could not understand how this dreadful affair had come to pass. The most complete explanation from her daughter availed nothing; she deemed the event an insoluble mystery, and, in familiar talk with Mrs. Mumford, breathed singular charges against Louise's lover. 'She's shielding him, my dear. I've no doubt of it. I never had a very good opinion of him, but ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... The apparently insoluble economical and social problem is merely the problem of Kriloff's casket. {256} The casket will simply open. And it will not open, so long as people do not do simply that ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... of the human heart, had yielded no results, then, at least, the lesson of their failure and defeat remained for the instruction of future generations. Either the problems they sought to solve were proved to be insoluble, or their methods of solution were found to be inadequate; for here the mightiest minds had grappled with the great problems of being and of destiny. Here vigorous intellects had struggled to pierce the darkness which hangs ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... We crossed much open plain, and passed through several shady forests of casuarina. A curious provision of nature for the distribution of the seeds of a parasitical plant was observed here, each seed being enclosed within a sort of pulp, like bird-lime, insoluble in water; the whole resembling a very thin-skinned berry. On this being broken, probably by birds, the bird-lime is apt to attach the seed to trees or branches, and so the parasitical growth commences. On the plains, the blue flowers of a large variety of ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... the mortality or the immortality of the soul does not divide them so clearly; because such a question is entirely insoluble; and a vivid consciousness of its insolubility accompanies all argument. The question of race does not divide them so clearly; because both with regard to race and with regard to class the division is very largely a superficial ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... trade. Here in Utopia the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all trading finally involves individual preferences which are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really defined standards, every economic ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... himself, were but the merest supers in the prelude to adventure. Moira and I were the only ones who were real, the only actors that were something more than mummers. Yet even I failed to see that what had happened that night was something more than a queer insoluble mystery. There was nothing in my experience to tell me that it was vitally connected with the early history of Victoria, that it had its being in the now far-off days before Australia became a nation. I think if ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... ancient philosophy disdained to be useful, and was content to be stationary. It dealt largely in theories of moral perfection, which were so sublime that they never could be more than theories; in attempts to solve insoluble enigmas; in exhortations to the attainment of unattainable frames of mind. It could not condescend to the humble office of ministering to the comfort of human beings. All the schools contemned that office as degrading; some censured it as immoral. Once indeed Posidonius, a distinguished writer ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The repairs of the prodigious roof ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... defined as colours in a solid or insoluble state, prepared for the artists' use. Hitherto, we have treated of colours in the abstract sense, as appealing to the eye only: we have now to consider them as ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... ascertained, M'Munn's Elixir is simply an aqueous infusion of opium—procured by the ordinary maceration—and preserved from decomposing by the subsequent addition of a small portion of alcohol. Narcotin being absolutely insoluble in water is eliminated as the circular says. This fact alone would not account for the difference between its action and that of laudanum. This is explained by the fact that all the other alkaloids possess diverse rates of solubility in water, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... TEA is made by fermenting the tea leaves before they are dried. This fermentation turns them black and produces a marked change in their flavor. The process of preparation also renders some of the tannin insoluble; that is, not so much of it can be dissolved when the beverage is made. Some well-known brands of black tea are China congou, or English breakfast, Formosa, oolong, and the various pekoes. The English are especially fond of black tea, and the people of the United States ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... upon the long sweep of wrinkled black water that reflected lights and palaces and the flitting glow of steamboats, and by that time we had talked ourselves past our despair. We perceived that what was splendid remained splendid, that what was mysterious remained insoluble for all our pain and impatience. But it was clear to us the thing for us two to go upon was not the good of the present nor the evil, but the effort and the dream of the finer order, the fuller life, the banishment ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... membership. How to increase the latter from without, and how to transfer recruits from the passive to the active list, are problems that have taxed the ingenuity of not a few and have not infrequently been abandoned as insoluble. It has so long been said, "This missionary work always has to be carried on by a few," that the expression has come to have something of the force of axiomatic truth which, of course, no one dares assail. And so the missionary society lives on, decade after decade, ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various
... power of Christian life can cope with it, and though this process may be slow, it is sure. Christian missions alone can deal with the opium traffic, now that it has attained such gigantic dimensions, and the despised missionaries are solving a problem which to statesmen is insoluble. Those, therefore, who recognise the evils of opium- smoking will most effectually stay the plague by supporting Christian Protestant ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... leaves and dissolved in the water; and as a second feature of the fermentation the soluble material is changed in its chemical nature into indigo proper. As this change occurs the characteristic blue colour is developed, and the material is rendered insoluble in water. It therefore makes its appearance as a blue mass separated from the water, and is ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn |
