"Mechanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conversation turned upon music, and a guest regretted the mechanical performance of the ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... that they are making fifty per cent. annually on their whole capital, and yet cannot supply one tenth of the demand for their production. The result of only ten per cent. duties in excluding products from abroad, would give life and impetus to mechanical and manufacturing industry, throughout the entire South. Our people understand these things, and they are not afraid of results, if forced to declare Independence. Indeed I do not see why Northern Republicans should wish to continue a connection ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... with dried-up cigars, and an ill-smelling pipe—Archie hated pipes—and a box of cigarettes. A number of scientific magazines lay about and a forbidding array of books on mechanics and chemistry overflowed the shelves. He threw open a cabinet filled with blue prints illustrating queer mechanical contrivances. They struck him as very silly and he slammed the thing shut in disgust, convinced that Congdon was a crank, or he wouldn't have indulged in such foolishness. In a drawer of the desk was an automatic pistol and a box of cartridges. At ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... initiative but no endurance, and others with endurance but no initiative. Lastly, there are men, and a great many of them, who appear to be quite incapable of coherent thought, yet can handle machinery or any mechanical device to a marvel. Yes, we ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... He would not stay, however; he had bad news which compelled him to move on quickly—as quickly as possible. And then, with a certain whiteness about the lips, and a look of perplexed pain in his eyes, he picked up the papers as they lay strewn upon the grass, bowed to Gretchen with mechanical politeness, and made his way to the door by which he had come in. One thing he forgot; he never thought of it until long afterwards; the sweet, frail rose that Brother Dino had placed within his hand when he bade him God-speed. In less than an hour he was in ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... most useful inventions, are not those which reflect the greatest honor on the human mind. It is to a mechanical instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... ask, Sirs, what in the world is so dear as this power to see whether it be the beautiful or the foul that is disclosed? Need I, indeed, tell you of the way this flame spreads its feelers, and delicately darts and hovers in the darkness, conjuring things from nothing? This mechanical summoning, Sirs, of visions out of blackness is benign, by no means of malevolent intent; no more than if a man, passing two donkeys in the road, one lean and the other fat, could justly be arraigned for malignancy because they were not both fat. This, reverend ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Lungs is, as everybody knows, respiration, which may be considered from a mechanical or a chemical point of view. In this little work we are only concerned with the mechanical part of the subject. If we examine the lungs of a calf, which are very similar to those of a human being, we find that they are soft and elastic to the touch, giving out when pressed ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... Fanny washed the dishes with mechanical swiftness. Her mother had asked her if she would come to prayer meeting, and walk home with her afterwards. Not that Mrs. Dodge was timid; the neighborhood of Brookville had never been haunted after nightfall ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... were old enough to appreciate and enjoy the sight, they went into the Gymnasium, which they found furnished with every kind of machine and mechanical means for developing the muscles and increasing the strength of both ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... divided into three classes,—Theorists, who by study and reflection have made themselves acquainted with all the rules or maxims of the art they profess; Martinets, who have confined their attention merely to the mechanical part of the trade; and Practical men, who have no other or better guide than their own experience, in either branch of it. This last description is in all services, excepting our own, the most numerous, but with ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... progress; and you haven't. Dear, listen to me; what you honestly believe to be unselfish and high-minded adherence to principle, is nothing but the circling reasoning of a hurt mind—an intelligence still numbed from shock, a mental and physical life forced by sheer courage into mechanical routine. . . . Wait a moment; there is nobody else to say this to you; and if I did not love you I would not interfere with this great mistake you are so honestly making of your life, and which, perhaps, is the only comfort left you. I say, 'perhaps,' for I do not believe that life holds nothing ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of Richard's blow, and the leader of the gang, whom Hunterleys still held by the throat. Richard, with a clasp-knife which he had drawn from his pocket, cut the cord which they had tied around Mr. Grex's wrists. His action, however, was altogether mechanical. He scarcely glanced at what he was doing. Somehow or other, he found the ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by no means simple, and required all his attention; but there is a blessing even in mere mechanical labour, that soothes the torment of the mind. In the particular occupation upon which he had been engaged there was, moreover, a hidden touching element. It was work for the helpless dead, work for ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... unaccountable condition of things, however, connected with the prepuce that does not exist with the other vestiges of our arboreal or sylvan existence. Firstly, the other conditions have nothing that interferes with their disappearance; whereas the prepuce, by its mechanical construction and the expanding portions which it incloses, tends at times rather to its exaggerated development than to its disappearance. Again, whereas the other vestiges have no injury that they inflict by their presence, or danger that they cause their possessors to run, the prepuce is from ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... by means so purely non-mechanical or physical, gave the Black Snake a pre-eminence in "medicine" which he has ever since maintained. It was useless to suggest poison, deception, or collusion, to explain the occurrence. The firm belief was that the spiritual power of the Black Snake ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... soon after midnight, crept from my bed and followed him. I overtook him at a village some twenty miles distant, where he was remaining a day or two, and easily procured an engagement with him, since I desired nothing but to serve him and be taught the mechanical details of his art. My father had no clue whatever to my direction, for he had not dreamed of anything unusual in my thoughts or plans. He was now entirely alone. But I knew that I was helpless against the phantom which was leading me forth; it also contained a stimulant which was able ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... illustration which I am setting before you, to imagine what cannot be. I say, let us imagine a project for organizing a system of scientific teaching, in which the agency of man in the material world cannot allowably be recognized, and may allowably be denied. Physical and mechanical causes are exclusively to be treated of; volition is a forbidden subject. A prospectus is put out, with a list of sciences, we will say, Astronomy, Optics, Hydrostatics, Galvanism, Pneumatics, Statics, Dynamics, Pure Mathematics, Geology, Botany, Physiology, Anatomy, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... mechanical reply, "to endow a bed in some hospital. And there is no escape, no hope unless we drag the shameful secret from him. Bit by bit and drop by drop, and then I shall die and you and ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... of Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature, compiled the Eloquence of the British Senate, wrote a reply to Malthus's Essay on Population, and even composed an elementary English Grammar. It would be a mistake to suppose that these labors were performed according to a system of mechanical routine. Hazlitt impressed something of his personality on whatever he touched. His violent attack on the inhuman tendencies of Malthus's doctrines is pervaded by a glow of humanitarian indignation. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... which in half an hour a blaspheming costermonger "gets religion" and becomes a saint of God—nothing is more certain than that the human mind can like this, at a flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good coming to the top, the bad going to the bottom. Mechanical pressure on the cortex of the brain can bring this state of things about, even as it can convert a saint of God into a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... American, Miss Falconer? You were born in the States? You are going to Italy—and then home again?" The questions came in a reassuringly mechanical fashion; the man was doing his ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... d. Mechanical details. Indent headings that are coordinate (that is, of equal value) an equal distance from the margin. One inch to the right is a good distance for successive subordinate headings. Use Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and small letters to indicate the comparative ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... coalesce into one, without anything being lost except the plurality of subsistence, inasmuch as the one substance would contain the degree of reality of all the former substances. Perhaps, indeed, the simple substances, which appear under the form of matter, might (not indeed by a mechanical or chemical influence upon each other, but by an unknown influence, of which the former would be but the phenomenal appearance), by means of such a dynamical division of the parent-souls, as intensive quantities, produce other souls, while the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Accident, the Ideot continued to strike and count the Hour without the help of it, in the same manner as he had done when it was entire. Though I dare not vouch for the Truth of this Story, it is very certain that Custom has a Mechanical Effect upon the Body, at the same time that it has a very extraordinary Influence ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the table] like this. And somehow it just began to run—I don't want to claim that there was anything mystical—anything of a spiritualistic nature back of it—for that kind of thing I don't believe in! It was a wholly unreasoned, mechanical process—my copying of that beautiful autograph over and over again. When all the clean space on the letter was used up, I had learned to reproduce the signature automatically—and then—[throwing away the penholder with a violent gesture] then I forgot all about it. That night I slept long ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... after the legislative chambers, are the Navy-yard, the President's mansion, the National Exhibition, connected with the patent-office, containing specimens of mechanical inventions either original or considered such by their industrious projectors, and lastly the offices for the department ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... thirty. It is the conditions of women's work which need changing in order that they may become, like those of primitive women, so various that they develop the mind and fortify the body. This, however, is an evil which will be righted by the development of the mechanical side of industry, for machines tend constantly to become larger, heavier, speedier, more numerous and more automatic, requiring fewer workers to tend them, and these ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... that the mechanical and agricultural employment of civilized life require a kind of exertion altogether too steady and sustained to agree with an indolent people like the Polynesians. Calculated for a state of nature, in a climate providentially adapted ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... letters. I have endeavored to present the Christian character, and the duties required of the followers of Christ, in the light of God's word. I know, however, that I have done it with much imperfection. But, do not rest with the mere mechanical performance of the duties here recommended. Do not engage in any of them with the hope of meriting God's favor. Use them only as the means of promoting your spiritual progress; depending on the ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... a stranded ship, whether invented or improved by him I am not prepared to say, nor whether the projectile was a rocket or a shot, or both, fired from a gun. Hollis, the eldest of our party, who had considerable mechanical talent, seemed clearly to ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... the hive"—where does it reside? It is not like the special instinct that teaches the bird to construct its well planned nest, and then seek other skies when the day for migration returns. Nor is it a kind of mechanical habit of the race, or blind craving for life, that will fling the bees upon any wild hazard the moment an unforeseen event shall derange the accustomed order of phenomena. On the contrary, be the event never so masterful, the "spirit of the hive" still will follow it, step by step, like an ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... he were going to be watched, he would be watched no matter where he went; but he ate his supper in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and sat in the lobby talking with a couple of facetious drummers until the mechanical piano in the movie show across the street ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... somewhat less judicial and more "impressionist," but also more general and less buckrammed out with abstracts of particular works.[4] There appeared to me to be more than one reason for this, all such reasons being independent of, though by no means ignoring, the mechanical pressure of ever-lessening space. In the first place, a very much larger number of readers may be presumed to be more or less familiar with the subjects of discussion, thus not only making elaborate "statement of case" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... enough, we do not often find in houses of more aspiring habit, where it would he of even greater value. It is amazing to me that housekeepers will go on tugging trunks, coal-hods and heavy merchandise of all kinds up stairways, day after day and year after year, when a simple mechanical contrivance, moved by water, or weights and pulleys, would save us from all these heavy burdens. Think of the bruised knuckles, the trembling limbs that stagger along with the upper end of a Saratoga 'cottage,' the broken plastering at the sides, the paper patched with bright ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... any of these obsolete European Governments effect against a nation which was really a vast secret society of forty-five millions, directed by a sacred chief, and wielding all the mechanical resources of the West with the almost inhuman subtlety and ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke 'and the numbers came'; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... who had nothing else to do, either looked after the young, and taught them what was useful, or themselves learned such things from the old. For ample leisure was one of the blessings with which Lykurgus provided his countrymen, seeing that they were utterly forbidden to practise any mechanical art, while money-making and business were unnecessary, because wealth was disregarded and despised. The Helots tilled the ground, and produced the regular crops for them. Indeed, a Spartan who was at Athens while the courts were sitting, and who learned ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... from end to end. And from end to end, and back again and over again, she read the letter—at first in expectancy, lips parted, colour brilliant, then with the smile still curving her cheeks—but less genuine now—almost mechanical—until the smile stamped on her stiffening lips faded, and the soft contours relaxed, and she lifted her eyes, staring into space with a wistful, questioning lift ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the self-conceit, effrontery, and aplomb of a strong-brained fellow in liquor, threw in his remarks somewhat peremptorily; and his aims having been what they were for so many years, everything the others said turned upon his tongue, by a sort of mechanical craze, to the subject of scholarship and study, the extent of his own learning being dwelt upon with an insistence that would have appeared pitiable to himself in his ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... of Colonel Lloyd wore the appearance of a country village. All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed here. The shoemaking and mending, the blacksmithing, cartwrighting, coopering, weaving, and grain-grinding, were all performed by the slaves on the home plantation. The whole place wore a business-like aspect very unlike the neighboring ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... Allies, he walked a little down the street and stood in the same position staring into the Repos du Poilu, where a large sign "American spoken" blocked up half the window. Two officers passed. His hand snapped up to the salute automatically, like a mechanical signal. It was nearly dark. After a while he began to feel serious coolness in the wind, shivered and started to ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... are excluded from all power of advancing in real excellence. Whilst boys, they are arrived at their utmost perfection; they have taken the shadow for the substance; and make that mechanical facility the chief excellence of the art, which is only an ornament, and of the merit of which few ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... (natural philosophy) I could not understand why so many of the so-called "mechanical powers" were assumed, and why several of them were not reduced to cases ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... her white, still face, the big light violet eyes resting on him stonily. She had not uttered a sound. She faced him, steadying herself on the corner of the piano with one extended hand. The other went on rubbing with mechanical persistency the place his lips ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... gamesters, and the hollow laughter of hollow hearts. There was a hired singing-girl with a lute at one end of the room, babbling of Cupid and Daphne, and green meadow and larks. But she was poorly dressed and indifferent looking; and she sang with a sad, mechanical air, as if her thoughts were far off. Hyde would have passed her without a glance; but, as he approached, she broke her love-ditty in two, and began to sing, with ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... His hopes were fixed on the Emperor Rudolph, who was not only fond of science, but who was especially addicted to alchemy and astrology, and his friend Rantzau promised to have him introduced to the Emperor by proper letters. When Tycho learned that Rudolph was particularly fond of mechanical instruments and of chemistry, he resolved to complete and to dedicate to him his work on the mechanics of astronomy, and to add to it an account of his chemical labours. This task he soon performed, and his work appeared in 1598 ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... art we often contrast the useful or mechanical arts with the Fine Arts; by these terms we denote the difference between the arts which are used in making such things as are necessary and useful in civilized life, and the arts by which ornamental ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... Colonel Wright, who had them marched to the upper landing of the Cascades, where, after a trial by a military commission, nine of them were sentenced to death and duly hanged. I did not see them executed, but was afterward informed that, in the absence of the usual mechanical apparatus used on such occasions, a tree with a convenient limb under which two empty barrels were placed, one on top of the other, furnished a rude but certain substitute. In executing the sentence each Indian in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... tranquility of mind. On the events of the next few days hovered the fearful chance that was soon, either for misery or happiness, to influence irretrievably the years of his future life. Round and round the mighty walls he watched with mechanical and useless anxiety. Every stone in the building was eloquent to his lonely heart—beautiful to his wild imagination. On those barren structures stretched for him the loved and fertile home; there was the shrine for whose glory his intellect had been enslaved, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... some sort is essential to the growing of plants in pots or boxes, both because of the plant-food it adds to the soil, and because it improves its mechanical condition and sponginess or water-holding quality. Thoroughly rotted horse manure or horse and cow manure mixed is by far the best. Cow manure alone, or pig manure, is lumpy and cold, and hen, sheep, pigeon or other special manures are not safe in the ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... gone off, for she raised her head and came out of the coach in the slowest and most mechanical way, lifting her hand and pushing back her hair with a weary sort of gesture as he spoke. So weary her face was, so utterly subdued, it might have touched anybody to see it. It never seemed to occur to her that the question needed ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... of Stukeville. The smile on the elongated face of the pelican, who is scratching his left ear with a broad web flipper, reflects in mummied perpetuity the gratitude hidden behind the quiet exterior of the studious Emil Stuffer, ornithologist and mechanical engineer—but principally the latter, when he received word from the expert that ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... taken by erecting forts upon many of the great rivers of their neighborhood; of the ulterior intentions she thus announced to circumscribe their pastoral lands, until they would all be obliged to renounce their flocks, and to collect in towns like Sarepta, there to pursue mechanical and servile trades of shoemaker, tailor, and weaver, such as the freeborn Tartar had always disdained. 'Then again,' said the subtle prince, 'she increases her military levies upon our population every year; we pour out our blood as young men in her defence, or more ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... men and boys who annually take the field in the United States in the pursuit of birds and quadrupeds, is enormous. People who do not shoot have no conception of it; and neither do they comprehend the mechanical perfection and fearful deadliness of the weapons used. This feature of the situation can hardly be realized until some aspect of it ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... trip a mechanical defect of the calibration of the time-power carried the Ceres off its course, light years beyond the segment of the Galaxy occupied by ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... gas. Just before election you could go into your private office, throw in a large dose of campaign whisky, light a campaign cigar, fasten your buttonhole to the wall by an elastic band, so that there would be a gentle pull on it, and turn the electricity on your mechanical thought supply. It would save time and money, and the result would be the same as it is now. This would only be the beginning, of course, and after a while every qualified voter who did not feel like exerting himself so much, need only give his name and proxy to the salaried ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... drop of water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide the one drop into ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... believed, after his long seven years of waiting, fruition had come in the matter of the type machine. Paige, the inventor, seemed at last to have given it its finishing touches. The mechanical marvel that had cost so much time, mental stress, and a fortune in money, stood complete, responsive to the human will and touch —the latest, and one of the greatest, wonders of the world. To George Standring, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of parties, now the merits of "American Writers," which afforded his 'prentice hand the requisite practice in the use of the pen. He had already acquired a perfect knowledge of typesetting and the mechanical makeup of a newspaper. During his apprenticeship he took his first lesson in the art of thinking on his feet in the presence of an audience. The audience to be sure were the members of a debating club, which ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, and is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one character which needs any long rehearsal, that of the dog Fido, and luckily this is one which can easily be supplied by mechanical means, as by the use of a toy dog of sufficient size which barks upon the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... marvel which is growing behind her; her limbs are used only for support; they take no part in the building of the nest. The nest is built, if we may say so, automatically. It is not the result of industry and the cunning of instinct; it is a purely mechanical task, which is conditioned by the implements, by the organisation of the insect. The nest, complex though it is in structure, results solely from the functioning of the organs, as in our human industries a host of objects are mechanically fashioned whose perfection ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... in forming this Establishment, and which will be attended to as soon as the measures for feeding the Poor, and giving them employment, are carried into execution, is the forming of a grand repository of all kinds of USEFUL MECHANICAL INVENTIONS, and particularly of such as relate to the furnishing of houses, and are calculated to promote domestic ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... of two heavily upholstered and matronly ladies who spoke, in a voice of many underscorings. The Doctor, who had removed his hat with a purely mechanical motion, knew himself a prey, identified his captor, and ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... he's mixed up with Schwen. From the looks of him I should say that this Simpson, as he calls himself, is the directing head of the whole business. He looks to be the moneyed man, and the brains of the plotters. Blakeson is smart, in a mechanical way, and Schwen is one of the best machinists I've ever employed. But this Simpson strikes me as being the slick one ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... were set with a look of strong determination. "I can't—I can't be poor," she was repeating to herself with a mechanical monotony. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act—a scene from which Miriam was absent—Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... he answered slowly, "is much more sensitive, I think, than any mechanical or electrical eavesdropper that has ever been employed before. It is the detectaphone—a new ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... Midsummer Day by turning a wheel rapidly about an oaken pole, though it is not said that the new fire so obtained is used to light a bonfire. However, we must bear in mind that in all such cases the use of a wheel may be merely a mechanical device to facilitate the operation of fire-making by increasing the friction; it need not ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... ages and countries where mechanical ingenuity has but few outlets it exhausts itself in the constructions of bits, each more peculiar in form or more torturing in effect than that which has preceded it. I have seen collections of these instruments of ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... blue sky, and the green sea, and the white foam, and the everlasting hills, and the rivers which flow out of their bosoms. They will abolish themselves when their work is done, but not before. And we, who, with all our boasted scientific mastery over Nature, are, from a merely mechanical and carnal point of view, no more than a race of minute parasitic animals burrowing in the fair Earth's skin, had better, instead of boasting of our empire over Nature, take care lest we become ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... lying everywhere outside the cities for those who have eyes to see. Even the toy department in an ordinary shop abounds in treasures that never seem to reach England: queer cheap toys made of wood, and not mechanical. It must be a dull child who is content with a mechanical toy, and it is consoling to observe that most children break the mechanism as quickly as possible and then play sensibly with the remains. Many of the toys ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... better. The author of Westward Ho!, considering the Spanish and English navies of ELIZABETH'S time, found precisely the same contrasted elements of autocracy and brotherliness producing just those results that we find respectively in the German and French forces of to-day—on the one hand a mechanical perfection of command, on the other an informed equality which, somehow, does not make against efficiency whilst fostering individuality. Mr. IRWIN hardly refers to our own Army; but one is thankful to remember that discipline by consent, one of the virtues of true democracy, is not the exclusive ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... papers. The silence around him became oppressive, and suddenly looking up, he encountered the glance of both Mr. Whitney and the detective, the former with an expression of triumph in his keen eyes. Perplexed and bewildered, Scott exclaimed in a mechanical tone,— ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... all very natural thoughts, and such, no doubt, as would actually pass through the mind of the young lady, in the candour of desolation; but the mechanical iteration of her mode of putting them renders them irresistibly ludicrous. It reminds us of the wager laid by the poor queen in the play of Richard the Second, when she overhears the discourse ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... help, and still retain to the full one's own individuality. The strawberry is no more a plagiarist than the smilax, nor the grape than the nettle. If the vine clings to the cedar, the connection is but mechanical. Its spirit and life are as independent of the savin as of the planet Jupiter. Even the dodder, which not only twines about other weeds, but actually sucks its life from them, does not thereby lose an iota of its native character. If a man is only original to begin with,—so the ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... concluded with a concert of mechanical music: I cannot explain how it was produced, but the effect was pleasing. Madame Duval was in ecstasies; and the Captain flung himself into so many ridiculous distortions, by way of mimicking her, that he engaged the attention of all the company; and, in the midst of the performance ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... had been hitherto dependent on her niece for one of the few pleasures she could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical contrivances of all sorts, and he introduced improvements in Mrs. Carbury's couch, and in the means of conveying her from the bedchamber to the drawing-room, which alleviated the poor lady's sufferings and brightened her gloomy life. With these ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... With all the talent and industry of the native Egyptians, who must naturally depend upon the waters of the Nile for their existence, it is extraordinary that for thousands of years they have adhered to their original simple form of mechanical irrigation, without improvement. ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... puzzle and bother me, "Pray without ceasing." But it has become a great help to me. It puzzled me because I didn't see any practical way of doing it. It didn't seem to mean the repetition of prayers, with little mechanical helps, such as some use. It surely doesn't mean staying on your knees a long time. But, as I tried to pray my way into its meaning, it came to mean four distinct things to me. And I would not be surprised to find more yet ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... goodness to inquire for me among your readers and contributors, for the titles of any works on—or references to good articles in encyclopaedias or dictionaries on—or for remarkable isolated passages relating to—Aerostation, or the arts of, or attempts at, flying, either by means of mechanical wings, &c., or by the aid ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... to birds, lo! an astounding thing has happened. That there were flying reptiles in the fossil ages we know, and there are flying beasts in our own. But the wings of these are simple mechanical alterations, which the imagination of a child, or a savage, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... these replies is determined by the knowledge at our disposal. The difference is not in nature but in man. The answers given by primitive man to these eternal questions are a complete inversion of those of his better informed descendants. The conception of natural force, of mechanical necessity, is as yet unborn, and the primitive thinker everywhere assumes the operation of personal beings as responsible for all that occurs. This is not so much the product of careful and elaborate philosophising, it is closer akin to the naive thinking of a child ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... Rajah, astute colonel of industry, had not left himself defenseless. On the contrary, he had provided for this precise contingency by leaving McGrath's fireman in mechanical command on the Rosemary. If Winton should attempt to build around the private car, the fireman was to wait till the critical moment: then he was to lessen the pressure on the automatic air-brakes and let the car drop back ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... old mill. The stone flume and the adjoining ruins are commonly ascribed by the people of Cuzco to-day to the Incas, but do not look to me like Inca stonework. Since the Incas did not understand the mechanical principle of the wheel, it is hardly likely that they would have known how to make any use of water power. Finally, careful examination of the flume discloses the presence of lead cement, a substance unknown in ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Remedies. 1. A Cure if Taken in Time.—"If taken in time a felon may be cured without lancing, but if poultice or liniment is used it is important that they should be bound on tightly as the mechanical compression is more essential than the application. A good remedy is finely pulverized salt, wet with spirits of turpentine bound tightly and left two or three days, wetting with the turpentine when dry ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Perhaps the forefathers of one-fourth of our Anglo-Saxon thegns held the plough, or followed some craft mechanical." ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... —Embattled walls. "Another essential basis of mechanical unity in the poem is the construction of the rampart. This takes place in the seventh book. The reason ascribed for the glaring improbability that the Greeks should have left their camp and fleet unfortified ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... his mother for a few hairs from her fur coat to make paint brushes, and actually devising a ball and socket joint for a small windmill he was building. Everything he could lay his hands on he turned to some mechanical use, and all his thoughts seemed bent in ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... by this New Standard instead of by the old race-standard that constitutes the real New Thought. The New Thought which gives New Life to the individual will never be realized so long as we think that it is merely the name of a particular sect, or that it is to be found in the mechanical observance of a set of rules laid down for us by some particular teacher. It is a New Fact in the experience of the individual, the reason for which is indeed made clear to him through intellectual perception of the real nature of the Creative Process, but which can become an actual experience ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... mirror did not answer this question, Mr. Gorby lathered his face, and started shaving in a somewhat mechanical fashion, for his thoughts were with the case, and ran on ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Abyssinian pumps, for which I had vainly applied at Cairo, would doubtless discover the prime necessary in the Wadys, many of the latter being still damp and muddy. Moreover, the crible continue grilles filtrantes, the invention of MM. Huet and Geyler, introduced, we are told, into the mechanical treatment of metals, a principle which greatly economizes fluid. Founded upon the fact that sands of nearly the same size, but of different densities, when mixed in liquid and subjected to rapid vertical oscillation, range themselves by order of weight, the heavier sinking and not allowing ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... time and again to offer an adequate explanation of the phenomenon of wind and storm but have failed signally, nor can they succeed while they seek a mechanical solution to what is really a manifestation of life. Could they see the hosts of sylphs winging their way hither and thither, they would know who and what is responsible for the fickleness of the wind; could they watch a storm at sea from the ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... them in pursuance of a deliberate purpose; but at that time he found himself in a mental condition similar to that above described. We may neither be magnetized nor hypnotized, nor put to sleep in any fashion, and yet the brain may remain alien to our mechanical productions. Its cells are functionally agitated, and doubtless act by a reflex impulsion on the motor nerves. We all then believed that Jupiter was inhabited by a superior race. These communications were the reflections of opinions generally held. In these days, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... it was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... of the 13th century, a French poet (quoted by Weber) looks forward with disgust to the supercession of the feats of chivalry by more mechanical methods of war:— ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... machines, not organisms. They have no inherent life of their own, no power of growth and renewal. In this they differ from animate creation because the highest achievement of the creative faculty in man in a mechanical way lacks the life principle possessed by the plant. And as the most perfect machine is inferior in this respect to the humblest flower that grows, so is the highest product of the vegetable kingdom inferior to man himself, the maker of the machine; for he can reflect upon his own and the ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... of the ancients, who, by virtue of congenial talents and cultivation have walked in their path and worked in their spirit, have ever been as rare as their mechanical spiritless copyists are common. Seduced by the form, the great body of critics have been but too indulgent to these servile imitators. These were held up as correct modern classics, while the great truly living and popular poets, whose reputation was a part of their nations' glory, and to whose ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... from the engine force a piston back and forth, which communicated with the warping levers and automatically accomplished what had up to that time, Bud went on to say, been done by the hand of the busy aviator. Thus a mechanical balancer had been arranged, so that the pilot need never bother himself as to whether a stiff gale were blowing or not, since practically ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... desperate resolve to do his duty, and make his animosity tell when he struck. A dangerous man under whom to sail, gentleman of the Randolph, and a dangerous man to meet, as well. He could not forget Kate, and, except in the distraction of a combat, life was a mere mechanical routine for him. But because he had been well trained he went ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Uncle John is an engineer now, and even as a little boy he had a great turn for mechanical inventions. Well, he pondered over some means by which such a sudden interruption to the enjoyment of his schoolfellows might be prevented in future; and I will ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Guistiniani, whom he calls a false historian, an inconsiderate, partial, or malignant compatriot, for having, in his psalter, traduced his father, by saying, that in his youth he had been employed in mechanical occupations. ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... marvelous right-arm and fingerboard control, which enables him to produce at will the finest and most subtle tonal nuances in all bowings. Then, too, he overcomes the most intricate mechanical problems with seemingly effortless ease. And his tone has well been called "golden." His own definition of tone is worth recording. He says it should be "In music what the heart suggests, and the ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... bridge to facilitate a future coming together. But a bridge is not possible, nor if possible, necessary. There is no doubt that since the New Testament was written there have been great improvements in bridge building, both mechanical and theological; but between equal manhood on one side and race prejudice on the other, "there is a great gulf fixed," and no bridge can span the chasm. The Negro must surrender his manhood or the white man his prejudice. There is no half way. But when either is surrendered, there is no gulf, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 10, October, 1889 • Various
... sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery—the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in Tristram is one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... of the death of Alboin is recognisable even when it is stated in the most general terms, as a mere formula; the story of Waltharius retains its life, even in the Latin hexameters; the plot of Hamlet is interesting, even in Saxo; the story of the Niblungs, even in the mechanical prose paraphrase. This gift of shaping a plot and letting it explain itself without encumbrances is not to be mistaken for the whole secret of the highest kind of poetry. But, if not the whole, it is the spring of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... faculty (I can write music).—Now that I see the uselessness of such jealousy, and am for loosing and letting it go, it may be cramped possibly. Your music is more various and exquisite than any modern writer's to my ear. One should study the mechanical part of the art, as nearly all that there is to be studied—for the more one sits and thinks over the creative process, the more it confirms itself as 'inspiration,' nothing more nor less. Or, at worst, you write down old inspirations, what you ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the grain so as to expose the greatest possible surface to the action of the digestive fluids; this is accomplished in several ways; by the formation of air cells through the medium of acetous fermentation, as in yeast bread; by the mechanical introduction of carbonic acid gas, as in aerated bread; by the mixture with the flour of a gas-generating compound, which needs only the contact of moisture to put it in active operation; and by the beating into the dough of atmospheric ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... pounds out of the biggest cans—a twenty and a ten. There's your opener," he added, pointing to a rather complicated mechanical can-opener fastened to the bulkhead. "Open everything ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... at heart a Catholic,' she returned in a mechanical tone; 'but while my boy lived I was content that his Church should be mine. All my life I have had a leaning to the older faith; now in my desolation I mean to shelter in the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church. She receives all penitents; ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was his true self only when under the conditions of his slavery. He had toiled a few years longer than he should have done, to attain the ability to keep his head above the waters of life without toil. The mechanical motion of his hands at their task of years was absolutely necessary to him. He had become, in fact, as a machine, which rusts and is good for nothing if left long inactive. Henry was at once pitiable and terrible when he came in sight of the many-windowed building ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... nearly insane from suffering, and after eight years of doctoring I found myself steadily growing worse. For four years I did not have a normal action of the bowels, and it was only by extreme effort and by resort to powerful drugs or mechanical means, with resultant suffering, that any action whatever could be ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... a subject which is hourly becoming of greater practical interest. Evidently it would have been altogether beside the purpose of this essay to have entered deeply into the abstract science, or closely into the mechanical detail, of construction: both have been illustrated by writers far more capable of doing so than I, and may be studied at the reader's discretion; all that has been here endeavored was the leading him to appeal to something like definite principle, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and millions ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the material organic world may be so constituted that the simultaneous action upon it of all known forces, mechanical, physical, chemical, magnetic, terrestrial, and cosmical, together with other as yet unknown forces which probably exist, may result in changes which are harmonious and symmetrical, just as the internal nature of vibrating ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... never forgive Lloyd George. It remains to be said that they are taking a narrow and immediate view of a drama so immense that its proper perspective will only be available many years hence. They are trying to test men's souls under strain in a small mechanical balance. Forces were at work such as are only met with once or twice in centuries. You cannot bring a puny, every-day judgment to bear on issues which may mean misery or happiness to millions of people, and life or death to a great proportion of them. In such circumstances the raw strength of ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... ambassador, to recommend him to your notice, and to expatiate on his misfortunes. Though he himself can scarcely move, his friend, who is often a little ragged boy or girl, light of weight and made for a chase, pursues the carriage and prolongs the whine, repeating, with a mechanical iteration, "Signore! Signore! datemi qualche cosa, Signore!" until his legs, breath, and resolution give out at last; or, what is still commoner, your patience is wearied out or your sympathy touched, and you are glad to purchase the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... certainly, the Queen was never found wanting in those days. In "natural curiosity" she was a veritable daughter of Eve, and granddaughter of George the Third. She was interested not only in the scientific discoveries, new mechanical inventions, and agricultural improvements which so interested her husband, but in odd varieties of animals and human creatures. She accepted with pleasure the gift of a Liliputian horse, supposed to be ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... of Edgar Poe was a familiar one in the office of the Evening Mirror. Neither in his character of Edgar the Dreamer nor that of Edgar Goodfellow was he especially known there, but simply as a modest, industrious sub-editor, doing the work of a mechanical paragraphist as quietly, as unobtrusively, as a machine. With rarely a smile and rarely a word, he stood from morning till night at his desk in a corner of the editorial room—pale, still and beautiful as a statue, punctual and efficient and ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the practice of some of the poets ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... whose surface could easily accommodate their plane. If they had needed further proof of some guiding intelligence behind all this, that cleared space was it. They were being deliberately lowered to a landing place through a portion of the "rind" made soft in some mechanical way to allow the weight of their plane to ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... and invention; but idle hands make active heads. Science and the Arts are themselves the children of luxury, and they discharge their debt to it. The work which they do is to perfect technology in all its branches, mechanical, chemical and physical; an art which in our days has brought machinery to a pitch never dreamt of before, and in particular has, by steam and electricity, accomplished things the like of which would, in earlier ages, have been ascribed to the agency of the devil. ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... therefore the influence of the different kinds of literature; he would also be driven to study the machinery for making books, the history of printing, illustrating, and binding books, and all the mechanical processes connected with the manufacture of books. The subject might take quite another turn, and be the development of fiction or drama; it might be a discussion of the influences, political or social, that have moulded literature; it ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... see a little TK here in the lab right along," she said. "At least, there are those who seem to have a small genuine edge on the cards that we can explain no other way. It's small, but apparently exists. But precognition? That's not simply mechanical or kinetic, like TK. PC is something terrifyingly different." Her voice hushed as she said it. "It's a kind of sensitivity that has nothing to do with mere kinetics. It defies time!" She looked back at me. "I simply find it comical that you thought ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... his back went one of those ingenious mechanical contrivances familiarly in vogue at fairs, which are designed to impress upon the victim to whom they are applied, the pleasing conviction that his ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... species; and even in modern Europe, to which we owe the great principle of representation, no example is seen of a government wholly popular, and founded, at the same time, wholly on that principle. If Europe has the merit of discovering this great mechanical power in government, by the simple agency of which the will of the largest political body may be concentred, and its force directed to any object which the public good requires, America can claim the merit of ...
— The Federalist Papers
... that is best within him, and not to depend upon one thing and reject another, favour one opinion, and oppose or even disregard another. And those in the school who first realised this, determined not to submit to the guiding and moulding of this mechanical institution, but to look at the world around and outside them—its beauty, its methods, its effects, its possibility, its wonder and its joy, and to develop for themselves, under the guidance and suggestion of those whom they trusted, their own powers, with their own principles to guide ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... self-improvement with the positive advance of the world. At present Lenny's genius had no bias that was not to the Positive and Useful. It took the direction natural to its sphere, and the wants therein,—namely, to the arts which we call mechanical. He wanted to know about steam-engines and Artesian wells; and to know about them it was necessary to know something of mechanics and hydrostatics; so he bought popular elementary works on those mystic ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... looked upon as being physiological. Excitement, strange surroundings, fatigue, and hot weather may all cause loss of appetite. Where there is cerebral depression, fever, profound weakness, disorder of the stomach, or mechanical difficulty in chewing or swallowing, the appetite is diminished or destroyed. Sometimes there is an appetite or desire to eat abnormal things, such as dirty bedding, roots of grass, soil, etc. This desire usually comes from a chronic ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... reader with popular and connected views of the actual progress and condition of the Physical Sciences, both at home and abroad. The Mechanical Arts, Dietetic Chemistry, the Structure of the Earth, Electricity, Galvanism, Gas, Heat, Light, Magnetism, the Mathematical Sciences, Philosophical Instruments, Rain, Steam, the Cometary System, Tides, Volcanoes, &c., have, among many others, been developed in original communications and ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... there is a great part of every one's life which is mechanical, instinctive, and all but involuntary. Habits and emotions and passing impulses very seldom come into men's consciousness, and an enormously large proportion of everybody's life is done with the minimum of attention, and is as little ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have heard from various men engaged in the inquiry,—that certain persons among the community of thieves are very much at loggerheads with each other,—the higher, or creative department in thiefdom, accusing the lower or mechanical department of gross treachery in having appropriated to its own sole profit plunder, for the taking of which it had undertaken to receive a certain stipulated price. But then it may be the case that his lordship and her ladyship have set such a rumour abroad for the sake ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... surface of the water may reach the temperature of congelation, but the agitations due to the action of strong winds soon breaks up the thin pellicle of ice, which is quickly melted by the heat generated by the mechanical action of the waves. Nevertheless, in shallow and detached portions of the Lake, which are sheltered from the action of winds and waves—as in Emerald Bay—ice several inches ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... hesitation. Yes! She had even reached the level of being religiously proud of them! But now her bullied and crushed conscience leaped up again, and in the swift alarm of the shock her heart was once more violently beating. Yet amid the wild confusion of her feelings, a mechanical intelligence guided her hand to follow Arthur Dayson's final sentences. And there shone out from her soul a contempt for the miserable hack, so dazzling that it would have blinded him—had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the Executive Part of an Army, and indeed of the Gross of Mankind in general; but none of these Men of Mechanical Courage have ever made any great Figure in the Profession of Arms. Those who are formed for Command, are such as have reasoned themselves, out of a Consideration of greater Good than Length of Days, into such a Negligence of their Being, as to make ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... read through the "Cid" and "Rodogune." My impression is still a mixed and confused one. There is much disenchantment in my admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my enthusiasm. What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish tone of the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of listening to gigantic marionettes, perorating through a trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power in it, but we have before us heroic ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... other, and resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Wonderful Lamp, I knew he would have trimmed it and lighted it, and delivered a lecture over it on the qualities of sperm-oil, with a glance at the whale fisheries. He would so soon have found out—on mechanical principles—the peg in the neck of the Enchanted Horse, and would have turned it the right way in so workmanlike a manner, that the horse could never have got any height into the air, and the story couldn't have been. He would have ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... long, straight hollows. They are the so-called "canals" discovered by Schiaparelli in 1877. The term "canal" is an unfortunate one. The word implies the existence of water and the presence of beings of sufficient intelligence and mechanical ability to construct elaborate works. Flammarion in France and Lowell in the United States claim the word is correctly used, i.e., that these markings are really canals and that Mars is actually inhabited. The consensus of opinion ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... and knew even more than the girl about the masters and their works. There was a player attachment to the piano, and the girl and Gowan had a contest, playing the same selections in turn, to see which could get the most expression by means of the mechanical apparatus. If anything, the girl came out second best. At least she said so; but Ashton would ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... forms of music may be considered in two aspects, the texture of the music from moment to moment, and the shape of the musical design as a whole. Historically the texture of music became definitely organized long before the shape could be determined by any but external or mechanical conceptions. The laws of musical texture were known as the laws of "counterpoint" (see COUNTERPOINT and HARMONY). The "contrapuntal" forms, then, are historically the earliest and aesthetically the simplest in music; the simplest, that is to say, in principle, but not necessarily the easiest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... Hopelessly and drearily he accepted this as a fact even while with all his might fighting that tiger skin. So sure was he, indeed, of this, so implicitly had he accepted it as an unalterable certainty, that in time even his efforts to fight it became almost mechanical and unconscious in their stern round of ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party ticket with mechanical precision. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... they address, dealing only with what is of momentary interest, or if the question be deep, they move on the surface, lest the many-eyed crowd lose sight of them. The preacher gets an audience and pay on condition that he stoop to the gossip which centres around new theories, startling events, and mechanical schemes for the improvement of the country. If to get money be the end of writing and preaching, then must we seek to please the multitude who are willing to pay those who entertain and amuse them. Will not our friends, even, conceive a mean opinion of our ability, if we ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... friends advised me to do no work; but not wishing to eat the bread of idleness—although the bread was little now, as I had little appetite—I made it a rule to go every morning to the workhouse, and occupy myself for two or three hours with some light, mechanical task which put no strain on me, physical or mental. Even this playing at work fatigued me. Then, after changing my dress, I would repair to the music-room to resume my search after hidden knowledge in any books that happened to be there; for I could read now, a result which my sweet schoolmistress ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... new wind is getting up. We call it Labour versus Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... great advantages over most of his adventurous competitors; one was a heavy bank account, representing his earnings in the commission business, and the other a partner, Samuel Andrews, who was generally regarded as a mechanical genius in the production of illuminating oil. At the beginning, therefore, Rockefeller had the two essentials which largely explain his subsequent career; an adequate liquid capital and high technical resources. In the first few years the Rockefeller houses—he rapidly organized three, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... you that God gave the male-germ life. It is necessary now to explain the character of this life. It is very brief; it is estimated that they are active for two hours, and then become inactive, or die. The best way to explain the brief activity to your daughter, is to liken the spermatozoa, to a mechanical toy, which is wound up to go for a certain time. After it runs out it becomes inactive; this is exactly what happens to the little human tadpole. If during this brief life none of them has happened to reach the female egg, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... a brief account of the curious manner in which I became possessed of it. As to my capacity for repeating the story correctly, I can answer for it that my memory may be trusted. I may claim it as a merit, because it is, after all, a mechanical one, that I forget nothing, and that I can call long-past conversations and events as readily to my recollection as if they had happened but a few weeks ago. Of two things at least I feel tolerably certain before-hand, in meditating over its contents: first, that I can repeat correctly all that ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... private picture gallery. Raphael's celebrated gallery in the Vatican at Rome was exactly repeated here with the most accurate copies of all the paintings, corner pieces and other ornaments of the same size and in the same situations. Medals, engravings, curious pieces of art, models of mechanical inventions and collections of specimens of minerals and of objects of natural history crowded the cabinets. Chambers were arranged for all species of amusements. A pleasure garden was constructed upon arches, with furnaces beneath them ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... washing is connected with that of mechanical purification, trituration, dismemberment in the parable, grinding (mill), and with the bath and solution (dissolution of the bridal pair). "Bath" is, on the other hand, the surrounding vessel, water bath. Arnold (Ros., I, 9): "The true beginning, therefore, is the dissolution and solution of the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... out of a job. What to do? Don't want to study, like you. Can't crochet, like Peg. Darned if I'll sit cross-legged on a pillow and eat candy, like that Titian blonde over there on the floor. I know what—I'll build me a mechanical educator and teach Shiro to talk English instead of that mess of language he indulges in. How'd ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... land may have attained. The rights of the mill, that old European appanage of the lord of the soil, were also reserved to the seigneur, who alone can build mills within his domain, or use the waters within his boundaries for mechanical purposes; but he must erect them at convenient distances, and must make and repair roads. The miller, therefore, takes toll of the grist, which is another source of seignorial revenue, although not a very great one, for the toll is, excepting the miller's thumb ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle |
