"Potentially" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people may have chosen for Mr. Spencer. Here is a conscientious investigator who finds duty everywhere, who labors to give men truths which shall elevate and reform their lives; but he believes that the hope of humanity was potentially shut in an egg, and never in an ark. And there is the "reader upon the sofa,"—church-member he may be,—who tosses aside "Vanity Fair" with the reflection that a gossiping of London snobs is human life, and that the best thing to be done is to pay pew-rates and lie still and gird at it. Which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... Infinite, and he says: "That a man can be conscious of the Infinite is, then, a supposition which, in the very terms in which it is expressed, annihilates itself.... The Infinite, if it is to be conceived at all, must be conceived as potentially everything and actually nothing; for if there is anything in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... is therefore evident that all ticks are potentially dangerous. Any tick now commonly infesting some wild animal, may, as its natural host becomes more uncommon, attach itself to some domestic animal. Since most of the hosts of ticks have some blood-parasites, the ticks by changing the host ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... Their bodies were cushioned and protected with every ingenious device known to those who had placed them there so many weeks earlier. Their minds were free of the ship, roving into places where men had not trod before, a territory potentially more dangerous than any ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... existence. We know we're here—but we don't know where 'here' is, and won't until after we get back. This is really Terra Incognita. The location of Earth, or even of our part of the galaxy, is something that has to be concealed at all costs, until we're sure we're not going to turn up a potentially dangerous, possibly superior alien culture. What we don't know can't hurt Earth. No conceivable method could get that information out of us, any more than it could be had from the squeak-box that ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... as happily as I should desire. Where the Greeks had their paideia, the Romans their humanitas, we have the more elastic and accommodating word culture. I use it in this address in the sense of drawing out and developing the nobler powers that are potentially in fallen humanity. It is not so much the development of all the faculties in man to their highest extent, as the directing and training of the better ones to their true end. We are dealing here with beginnings, not endings. The perfection ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... not the cavilling hair splitter, but, on the contrary, the single-eyed servant of truth, that is most likely to insist upon the limitation of expressions too wide or too vague, and upon the decisive election between meanings potentially double. Not in order to resist or evade my brother's directions, but for the very opposite purpose—viz., that I might fulfil them to the letter; thus and no otherwise it happened that I showed so much scrupulosity about the exact value and position ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of lovers had been added another, and as the quarry of four strongly contrasted men, each possessing more than average persistence of character, she must have excited pity and sympathy in the breasts of women less fatally attractive, but scarcely one thrill of envy. She recognized in the priest potentially the fiercest lover of them all; a man of only two or three ideas, this one of cruel, hopeless, unattainable passion for herself would easily dominate him and render him, fresh to the emotions and therefore ignorant of how ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... succeeding? One grain more of faith in his energy, and Diana might have been mated to the right husband for her—an open-minded clear-faced English gentleman. Her speculative ethereal mind clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day. She would have vowed that it was the sole potentially heroical. Even Brisby partook of the reflected rays, and he was very benevolently considered by her. She dismissed him only when his recounting of the stages of Bertha's journey began to fatigue her and deaden the medical efficacy of him and his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Events had outridden our national development. Whether it could have been avoided or not I do not know. Whether our education was at fault, or whether materialism had made us blind—these things I cannot tell you. I only know that this war found us potentially a nation, but actually a babel of tongues. Without philosophy and humanitarianism this nation could not go to war—and in those two things we were ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the Supreme Being as clouds are an emanation of the sea, and that the relationship between God and man is not merely that of father and son but also that of ocean and raindrop. This conception makes man a part of God, having potentially within him all the attributes and powers of the Supreme Being. It is the idea that nothing exists except God and that humanity is one portion of Him, and one phase of His being, as clouds are one expression of the waters ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... characterized as containing harmful levels of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide; acid rain is damaging and potentially deadly to the earth's fragile ecosystems; acidity is measured using the pH scale where 7 is neutral, values greater than 7 are considered alkaline, and values below 5.6 are considered acid precipitation; note - a pH of 2.4 (the acidity of vinegar) ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... twelfth century, Peter Lombard, in his theological summary, The Sentences, so powerful in moulding the thought of the Church, emphasized the distinction between animals which spring from carrion and those which are created from earth and water; the former he holds to have been created "potentially" the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... were at least in Washington—and busy. The desire to be admitted into the Union had developed into a yearning to be considered a part of the Union, had ripened into the conviction that the State was, potentially at least, actually a part of the Union, a yearning and a conviction that became almost pathetic in their intensity. The Legislature adjourned, and for nearly five months the population of San Francisco assembled on the Plaza on the arrival of every Panama steamer, ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... carbide is almost as inert a body as it is possible to imagine: for it will not take fire, and cannot in any circumstances be made to explode. Hence it may be urged that a non-automatic generator, with its holder always containing a large volume of the actually inflammable and potentially explosive acetylene, must invariably be more dangerous than an automatic apparatus which has less or practically no ready-made gas in it, and which simply contains water in one chamber and unaltered calcium carbide ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... of fifty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, we can cut down, and which, during the intervening time, have done nothing but cast shade, drop leaves and retain the soil. My doctrine is that the potentially greatest crop-producing plants are not those on which we now depend for our food, but are the trees,; that the greatest engines for production are not the grasses, but the trees. Our agriculture is an inheritance from the savage, and the savage found that he could do better with annual ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... from ridicule. A well-directed critical outburst freezes them. Such has been the Harvey method of approach. Having reduced his subjects to a state of terror, he flatters them, cajoles them, and finally makes terms with them; but he always remains a more or less unstable and uncertain quantity, potentially explosive. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... it passed from private rights to public rights of the people in their national character, wholly pertaining to political questions, entirely beyond the province of the court, legally, judicially, or potentially. It had no legal right as a court to decide or comment upon what was not before it; it had no judicial power to make any decree to enforce public or political rights, nor yet to enforce, by any instrumentalities or judicial machinery,—fines, jails, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Pythagoras grant that all bodies are passible and divisible into infinity. Others hold that atoms and indivisible parts are there fixed, and admit not of a division into infinity. Aristotle, that all bodies are potentially but not actually ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... it was pointed out that even in the mathematical sciences one may be forced to reflect upon the significance of one's symbols. As I write this, a pamphlet comes to hand which is concerned to prove that "every cause is potentially capable of producing several effects," and proves it by claiming that the square root of four ([square root symbol]4) is a cause which may have as effect either two (2) ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... of the whole Mississippi Valley, therefore, the members of this Association are studying the origins of that portion of the nation which is admitted by competent Eastern authorities to be the section potentially most influential in the future of America. They are also studying the region which has engaged the most vital activities of the whole nation; for the problems arising from the existence of the Mississippi Valley, whether of movement of population, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man. Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice brings nearer the hour of his awakening; ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... with Dick's. Dick was a poor weakling. But Felicia's death had saved him. Dick was a man now. If Felicia had seen him attack Ernest, she would have run away to her death, just as she had for Dick's frenzy. Potentially, he was a murderer too. But now he was a failure and as far as his red devil was concerned, Felicia had ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Verb, or active energy, reproducing in action what the Substantive is in essence. On the other hand there must be something for this active principle to work in; and since there can be nothing anterior to the Universal Life or Energy, both these factors must be potentially contained in it. If, then, we represent this Eternal Substantive Life by a circle with a dot in the centre, we may represent these two principles as emerging from it by placing two circles at equal distance below ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... with Castles (CASTILLO GRANDE, 'Castle Grand,' the chief of them), with War-Ships sunk or afloat, and miscellaneous obstructions: beyond all which, at the farther shore, some five miles off, Carthagena itself does at last lie potentially accessible; and we hope to get in upon Don Blas and it. There ensue five days of intricate sea-work; not much of broadsiding, mainly tugging out of sunk War-Ships, and the like, to get alongside of Castle Grand, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... affect the social or the individual form. Thus, in rudimentary organisms consisting of a single cell, we already find that the apparent individuality of the whole is the composition of an undefined number of potential individualities potentially associated. But, from top to bottom of the series of living beings, the same law is manifested. And it is this that we express when we say that unity and multiplicity are categories of inert matter, that the vital impetus is neither pure unity nor pure multiplicity, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... is enough to say that on Saturday morning, July 23, 1904, he was furnished with the proper credentials and given instructions to proceed at once to New Orleans, Louisiana, and "locate," if it were humanly possible to do so, Charles F. Dodge, under indictment for perjury, and potentially the chief witness against Abraham H. Hummel, on a charge of conspiracy. He was told briefly and to the point that, in spite of the official reports from the police headquarters of both New York City and New Orleans to the contrary, there was reason to believe that Dodge ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and civilisation potentially the ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... to anything in human shape that has two rows of buttons. Here was a human shape, but so utterly buttonless that it exhibited not even a rag to which a button could by any earthly possibility be appended, buttonless even potentially; and my blameless Ethiopian presented arms to even this. Where, then, are the theories of Carlyle, the axioms of "Sartor Resartus," the inability of humanity to conceive "a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?" Cautioning my adherent, however, as to the proprieties ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... how true Romance can never die, how Wonder is all about even the Wall Street clerk and the five-o'clock commuter. He put forward the claim that modern New York was as potentially picturesque, as alluringly labyrinthine, as olden Bagdad itself. He argued that the Thousand and One Tales were nightly recurring in our very midst, only we had neither the eyes nor the leisure to observe them. He told of the strange ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... harmony with any predominant appetite, desire, or affection, they at once intensify it, and prompt acts by which it may be gratified. Thus, for instance, a sumptuously spread table gives the epicure a keener appetite, and invites him to its free indulgence. The opportunity of a potentially lucrative, though hazardous investment, excites the cupidity of the man who prizes money above all things else, and tempts him to incur the doubtful risk. The presence of the object of love or hatred adds strength to the affection, and induces expressions or acts of kindness or malevolence. 2. An ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Rumanians were obliged to withdraw troops from their Transylvania advance, which up to this time had been highly successful. These withdrawals represented the difference between an offensive and a defensive, and the Transylvania campaign potentially failed when Bucharest ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... at least he had been within his rights. She had never even heard of the new doctrine of liberty for women. There was nothing in her training to teach her revolt. She was engaged to Harvey; already, potentially, she belonged to him. He had interfered with her life, but he had had ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in world development. Of those who have not yet begun to live many are suspicious, violent, melancholy, with little instinct for making life more or fuller, for living and letting live; in business unenterprising and indisposed for work. The Serbs are potentially gifted for literature, art, and thought; they are sincere and real in temperament, but despite their efforts probably not gifted for modern civilization ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... of being active in compost piles, but another class of microbes is. Called azobacteria, these free-living soil dwellers also make nitrate nitrogen. Their contribution is not potentially as great as rhizobia, but no special provision must be made to encourage azobacteria other than maintaining a decent level of humus for them to eat, a balanced mineral supply that includes adequate calcium, ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... heat running through her, she set her pretty teeth and fell to pelting the pea-hens and chicks mischievously, breaking up all their aristocratic reserve and making them jump and squeak to some purpose. For this precious, this very masterpiece of a drama was not only here potentially, but actually. It was alive. She had felt it move under her hand—or under her heart, which was it?—yesterday evening. Again this morning, just now, she had noted signs of its vitality, wholly convincing to one skilled in such matters. Impatience, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... skylight with dingy panes diffused a dull blue glimmer which discovered a yawning door at her elbow, a pocket of black mystery beyond, and on the uppermost steps of the staircase her patient yellow shadow, his upturned eyes inscrutable but potentially revolting with their very concealment ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... five men of the rear guard fully understood its every detail and all had sworn to carry it out to the letter. Their morale remained perfect; their discipline, under the command of Grison—left alone as they were in the midst of potentially hostile territory and with overwhelming masses of Mohammedans close at hand—held them as firmly as did that of the advance guard now whirling up the wide, paved road to the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the field of generation, and ought, therefore, to be the more particularly taken care of (for as the seeds of plants can produce no plants, nor sprig unless grown in ground proper to excite and awaken their vegetative virtue so likewise the seed of man, though potentially containing all the parts of the child, would never produce so admissible an effect, if it were not cast into that fruitful field of nature, the womb) I shall proceed to a more particular description of its parts, and the uses for which ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... career came at a time and in a manner to furnish me with strong arguments wherewith to support my contention that so-called madmen are too often man-made, and that he who is potentially mad may keep a saving grip on his own reason if he be fortunate enough to receive that kindly and intelligent treatment to which one on the brink of mental chaos is entitled. Though during this second period of elation I was never in a mood so reckless as that which obtained immediately after ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... man is a hero to his valet is obviously of masculine manufacture. It is both insincere and untrue: insincere because it merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is potentially a hero to everyone else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate man himself, is likely to be the last person in the world to penetrate his master's charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet who didn't envy his master wholeheartedly? who wouldn't willingly change places ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... inclined to speculation or philosophic analysis that by the word "neuter" we may mean any one or all of three things: (a) neither male nor female; (b) both male and female, as yet undifferentiated, or (c) potentially either male or female. Clearly, the above explanation assumes a certain germinal specialization of the female to reproduction, in addition to the body specialization for the intra-parental ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... Mohammedan would rise against their oppressors. Unfurl the sacred banner of the Prophet, and millions of murderous fanatics would erase the raids of Goth and Visigoth from the memory of mankind. Turkey, jeered at even by Spain, flouted even by Italy , yet potentially the most powerful nation for evil upon the earth, would spread as by magic over Roumania and Austro-Hungary, and pour through the Alpine passes like a torrent of fire upon Germany and France. Back ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... said in almost a breathless whisper. "There is nothing in California I am afraid of except a Jap, and I am afraid of them, not potentially, not on account of what all of us know they are planning in the backs of their heads for the future, but right here and now, personally and physically. Don't antagonize Oka Sayye. Don't be too precipitate about what you're trying to do. ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of English manhood explained by such an inheritance? From the drunken brawler in his hovel to the English gentleman "taking his pleasures sadly," all are accounted for; and Hampden, Milton, Cromwell, John Bright, and Gladstone existed potentially in those fighting, drinking ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... Music excellent—the congregation large—the Sermon, so far as I could judge, had nothing bad in it. Yet there was an Eleventh-Century air about the whole which strengthened my conviction that the Anglican Church will very soon be potentially summoned to take her stand distinctly on the side either of Romanism or of Protestantism, and that the summons will shake not the Church only but the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... more pages and suddenly stopped. "Here it is!" he exclaimed. "And say—look at this!" He handed the journal over to Strong who began to read quickly. "'... conclusive proof found today in hills surrounding farming area of Hyram Logan. Potentially the biggest hot metal strike I've ever seen. Am going to make a report to Vidac today. This could mean the beginning of a new era in space travel. Enough fuel to send fleets of ships on protracted voyages to any ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... what I know. In self-consciousness these are merged in one; for Spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realize itself; to make itself actually what it is potentially. According to this abstract definition it may be said of universal history that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. And as the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree and the taste and form of its fruits, so ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... fallen in any and all kinds of dangers at all times. I was not to be trusted with robust health, and even after all the mercies and blessings God has showered upon me I do not trust myself. I still remain the sinner, fundamentally and potentially at every step the sinner. But Love and Grace surround the sinner. Love and Grace save the sinner from himself: Love and Grace can beautify and make ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... speculations, he became relatively sane and an efficient citizen. If Freud had emphasized the point that this later formulation was more than a vehicle for the cruder thoughts, that it contained components which were potentially of social value, which implied a broader contact with the world—had he done this—then the present paper would ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... possible mistake in the opinion that those experiments in creative expression, which we call variations, are necessarily inherent in the male, rather than in the female. Speaking biologically, we may regard woman, in common with man, as a potentially creative agent with a striving will, and thus able to change under the ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... through the giant king's strictures against civil liberty for religious dissenters (II, vi). He recommends this passage as a proper explanation of the principle restricting the civil liberty of potentially subversive dissidents, adding, furthermore, that "the Sectaries" themselves were "averse to all the Modes" of religion and ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... be he what he will, be he as unbookish as he pleases, so he is only eminent enough, so he holds a conspicuous place in the eyes of his countrymen, potentially belongs to us, and if not in life, then after he is gone, will be enrolled among us. The public insist on being admitted to his history, and their curiosity will not go unsatisfied. His letters are hunted up, his ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... its spirit by luxury. Kings, priests, and nobles had somehow established this unnatural order; and to sweep them away summarily was the way of bringing the natural order into full activity. The ideal system was already potentially in existence, and would become actual when men's minds were once cleared from superstition, and the political made to correspond to the natural rights of man. To this Malthus had replied, as we have seen, that social inequality ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing comparisons, boldness, bitterness, brevity, grace, ease of expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic or naive manner, and the like. But if these qualities are already in us, exist, that is to say, potentially, we can call them forth and bring them to consciousness; we can learn the purposes to which they can be put; we can be strengthened in our inclination to use them, or get courage to do so; we can judge by examples the effect of ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... intermittent dabbler in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that role in Churchton. No alumnus himself, he viewed, year after year, the passing procession of undergraduates who possessed in their young present so much that he had left behind or had never had at all, and who were walking, potentially, toward a promising future in which he could take no share. Most of these had been commonplace young fellows enough—noisy, philistine, glaringly cursory and inconsiderate toward their elders; but a few of them—one now and then, ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... years, was potentially a woman physically and mentally, but not yet come into rounded conclusions as to life and her place in it. The great situation which had forced her into this anomalous position was from one point ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... inorganic, plants came into existence, from some germ or property existing in matter. The origin of animal life is explained in various ways by the so-called theistic evolutionists. Some hold that the primordial plant life contained potentially the lowest and simplest principles of animal life, and from it the simplest animal forms were evolved; that from these latter were evolved forms a little higher, until, after long ages, all the gradations were passed through until man, the highest form, was the result. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... better than she knew; that is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred. The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs. Rance struck him as potentially bristling, were not of a sort, really, to be met by one's self. And the possibility of them, when his visitor said, or as good as said, "I'm restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and also because I'm proud and refined; but if it WASN'T for Mr. Rance and for my refinement and my ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... United States actually and potentially affect the state of the Union to a degree not widely realized and hardly surpassed by any other factor in the welfare of the whole Nation. The position of the United States in the moral, intellectual, and material relations of the family of nations should be a matter of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... "Decidedly," returned Mrs. Brimmer potentially. "It would be most unpolite, not to say insulting, if we did not accept the invitation. You have no idea of the strictness of Spanish etiquette. Besides, he may have heard of ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other THAT SHAPE AM I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... society and opposed to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought, not discoverable anywhere, because not real. And, on the other hand, society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is potentially in every part—an ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... it will not seem likely that, in such a writer as Shakspere, we should find many indications of present and operative art, of which he was himself unaware. Some truths may be revealed through him, which he himself knew only potentially; but it is not likely that marks of work, bearing upon the results of the play, should be fortuitous, or that the work thus indicated should be unconscious work. A stroke of the mallet may be more effective than the sculptor had hoped; but it was intended. In the drama ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... also his mentor,(2) was a famous shaman. My informant implied that his uncle's spirit (wegeleyo), from which his power was derived, was the Water Baby, and his own carefully guarded statement implied that the creature was potentially his own spirit. His view of the Water Baby was quite the reverse of other informants. "Some people think the Water Baby will hurt them, but he won't. If they see him by accident he won't do nothing. But if he has given you his power ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few hours or a few days. If they do not learn within that time they will never be of any use to us. These men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is required before they are taken on is that they should be potentially able to do enough work to pay the overhead charges on the floor space they occupy. They do not have to be able-bodied men. We have jobs that require great physical strength—although they are rapidly lessening; we have other jobs that require no strength whatsoever—jobs ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... expected to perform that ceremony to anything in human shape that has two rows of buttons. Here was a human shape, but so utterly buttonless that it exhibited not even a rag to which a button could by any earthly possibility be appended, button-less even potentially; and my blameless Ethiopian presented arms to even this. Where, then, are the theories of Carlyle, the axioms of "Sartor Resartus," the inability of humanity to conceive "a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords"? ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... their network-like character, most systems for transportation and water and power generation and distribution, as a whole, are resistant to failure, despite potentially severe local damage. These systems would suffer serious local outages, particularly in the first several days after the event, but would resume service over a few weeks to months. The principal difficulty ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various
... himself rightly insists on character as the root of the matter. Still character alone does not make a man great. There are thousands of men in common life, of sound and forceful character, who never become great, who are not even potentially great. To make them such, great abilities are needed, as well as favoring circumstances. In his absolute manner—a manner caught perhaps partly from Macaulay, for whose qualities as a writer he had a high and, I think, well-justified regard—he pronounces Cromwell the greatest ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... idealism is one of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, and assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist. I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world. We forecast the future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves? Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, because ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... a readjustment of our trade. Money will have become actually or potentially scarce because of the previous vast expansion of our business, and all the banking power of our country will be requisite to prevent a crashing panic. The Reserve Banks will have gotten fully to ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... leaders: despite a constitutional ban against religious-based parties, the technically illegal Muslim Brotherhood constitutes MUBARAK's potentially most significant political opposition; MUBARAK tolerated limited political activity by the Brotherhood for his first two terms, but has moved more aggressively in the past six years to block its ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the plane, since we see nothing to be gained by sabotage. We speculate that the chase was to frighten us, not primarily to harm us, the reason being that we rushed the ghost during the ghost act and are therefore potentially dangerous. We reach this conclusion because the ghost picked a side of the quarry where we would land in the water, which is plenty deep by the way, and ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... herself, obtain colonial possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it, and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass from a potential position of this kind to an ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... preachments. The plain truth is that there is a physiological "reason" or explanation, although not a justification for failure of self-control. Even if we accept the improbable statement of some writers that boys and girls are in early adolescence potentially equal in sexual instincts and assuming that they may be protected equally against vicious habits, we must not forget that every normal boy passes in early puberty through peculiar physiological changes that arouse his deepest instincts. ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... removed from the original to be quite producible as evidence. It is one of the earliest speculations as to the ontological relation between the Father and the Son. In the beginning God was alone—though all things were with Him potentially. By the mere act of volition He gave birth to the Logos, who was the real originative cause of things. Yet the existence of the Logos was not such as to involve a separation of identity in the Godhead; it involved no diminution in Him from whom the Logos issued. Having been thus ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... of these was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos. It is clear that just as in every thousand human beings there will be statistically so many artists, so many athletes, so many thinkers, and so many potentially good soldiers, so there will be so many potential organizers in times of emergency. In point of fact, not only in the great city, but in the outlying towns, these natural ordermakers, whether amateurs or officials, came to the front immediately. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... to suppose that millions of years ago there appeared a nebulous mass possessing a rotary motion, and unequally distributed through space. This is what science calls a beginning, and may assert that every physical event of a hundred million of ages existed potentially in that nebulous mass. But this is really no explanation of the ultimate and real cause of anything. Reason demands the cause of this beginning, the source that gave to the nebulous mass its rotary motion; the power that distributed the matter in space; ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... preferred—to keep a friendly independent state upon her borders rather than be compelled to take over the burden of administration. The former involves less labour and more profit; it retains moreover a barrier between the British boundaries and those of any potentially hostile Power upon the other side. England has shown this in India itself and in Afghanistan. She tried to show it in South Africa. She has shown it in Thibet. More conclusively than anywhere perhaps she has shown it in the Federated ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words,—words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that I want," he said. "I want you to emerge from your background as if you had bloomed out of it that very moment. Oh! I've got you at your hour, you know! The prescient maternal—that's what I want. The conscious moment when a woman becomes aware that she is potentially a mother. Sheila's done that for you. She's brought it out in you. It was ready, it was waiting there before, but now it's ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... again, to be wrong who describe the aesthetic state to be the most productive in relation to knowledge and morality. They are perfectly right, for a state of mind which comprises the whole of humanity in itself must of necessity include in itself also—necessarily and potentially—every separate expression of it. Again, a disposition of mind that removes all limitation from the totality of human nature must also remove it from every social expression of the same. Exactly because its "aesthetic disposition" ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... returned easily. "You mean, about this gentleman? If you ask me, I think he'd be far less potentially mischievous facing the wall." ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... "Our consciousness can only grasp one quite clear idea at once. All other ideas are for the time somewhat obscure. They are really existing, but only potentially for consciousness, i.e., they hover, as it were, on our horizon, or beneath the threshold of consciousness. The fact that former ideas suddenly return to consciousness is simply explained by the fact that they have continued psychic existence: and attention is sometimes voluntarily ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's natures. Upon the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected, perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through languishing prostration in ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... his reward, none the less sweet to his strange nature, in that it was only potentially earned. And joy, like a warm flood, crept up again to his heart. He sat on the hillside and held his small love close. One of his arms moved stiffly, and he groaned a little. She rubbed it ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... exaggerate the difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can't picture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Men with great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always very advanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty they see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficulty of convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability and practicability. A great many Conservatives, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... shaped largely by others. Her mother's death, the particular enterprise in which her father's little capital had been invested, Martin's peculiar temperament—these had moulded and were moulding Rose Wade. At the time she came to Martin's shack, she was potentially any one of a half dozen women. It was inevitable that the particular one into which she would evolve should be determined by the type of man she might happen to marry, inevitable that she would become, to a large degree, what he wished and expected, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... with the government at Budapest. Both the one movement and the other naturally evoked great alarm and emotion in the Austrian and Hungarian capitals, as they were seen to be genuinely popular and also potentially, if not actually, separatist in character. In October 1906 Baron Achrenthal succeeded Count Goluchowski as Minister for Foreign Affairs at Vienna, and very soon initiated a more vigorous and incidentally anti-Slav foreign policy than his predecessor. What was now looked on as the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... air fellows, they were; big lovers, big haters, good laughers, eaters, drinkers—and every one of them potentially a ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... her and raising her eyes she smiled at him as though, on the basis of last night's encounter, she took him for granted as potentially a friend. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... many people have them, potentially. They don't have to have been "changed," as I was. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... know about winter," he of the Easy Chair said, "but in an opera which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out of tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the decline of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... world, and was thirty years old; and, lastly, your humble slave of the pen, being an American,—at the prospect of such a heterogeneous assembly of men and women, you will suppose, my dear lady, that I am about to embark upon the cerulean waters of a potentially platonic republic, humbly steering my craft by the charts of a recent voyager, who, after making a noble but ineffectual attempt to discover the Isles of the Blessed, appears to have stumbled into the ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... compare these three or four rights with each other, we find that property bears no resemblance whatever to the others; that for the majority of citizens it exists only potentially, and as a dormant faculty without exercise; that for the others, who do enjoy it, it is susceptible of certain transactions and modifications which do not harmonize with the idea of a natural right; that, in practice, governments, tribunals, and laws do not respect it; and ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... is generally understood, and as I shall use it, are words in the same language with slight differences either already established between them, or potentially subsisting in them. They are not on the one side words absolutely identical, for such, as has been said already, afford no room for discrimination; but neither on the other side are they words only remotely similar to one another; for the differences between these last ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Reasoning from the evidence available, and from analogous cases, the variety would, even under such extreme circumstances, be able to last as long as any other good variety or elementary species. And it seems to me that this explanation makes clear how it is possible that varieties, which are potentially rich in their peculiar monstrosity, are discovered from time to time among plants when ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... the dog; but he ministers effectually to his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of the environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as such that he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the owner's ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... haunted him, is the rendering of that resigned, bewildered, semi-hypnotic, vaguely and yet intensely longing spiritual expression to be noted by those who have the eyes to see it in the faces and attitudes now of the peasant laborer, now of the city pariah. All his peasant women are potentially Jeannes d'Arc—"Les Foins," "Tired," "Petite Fauvette," for example. The "note" is still more evident in the "London Bootblack" and the "London Flower-girl," in which the outcast "East End" spiritlessness ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... She was chock-full of worldly wisdom, though living in the utmost monastic retirement, only allowing herself to browse in two wide regions,—the woods and literature. She knew the latest news from the papers, and the oldest classics alongside of them. She was potentially, we thought, rather hazardous, or perverse. But language refuses to explain her. Her brother seemed not to dream of this, yet no doubt relished the fact that a nature as unique as any he had drawn sparkled in his sister. She was a good deal unspiritual in everything; but all besides in her ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... an urgent-business motion to appoint a committee to investigate BuPsychHyg, this morning. The motion passed, and this is the reaction to it. The Organization's scared. Just as Dalla predicted, they don't want us finding out how people with potentially criminal characteristics missed being spotted by psychotesting. Salgath Trod is being sacrificed to ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... the conflict of Europe, and its existence was almost unnoticed and unfelt. The people were too backward in the scale of wealth or knowledge or civilisation to obtain influence even on their neighbours. Potentially the most formidable force on earth, practically they were forgotten and unknown. In a single reign, by the action of one man, Russia passed from lethargy and obscurity to a dominant position ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... smaller force, as every military student knows, harasses, and may even paralyze offensive movements. When such a force is extremely mobile, as a fleet of armored cruisers may be, its power of mischief is very great; potentially, it is forever on the flank and rear, threatening the lines of communications. It is indeed as a threat to communications that the "fleet in being" is ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... expected that it was from the 'mystic' bond uniting man with the world which is not only around him but of which he is part, and in which he lives and moves and has his being. To say so, however, would be to admit that in totemism there was something not only 'mystic' but potentially religious. And Sir James Frazer does not follow that line of thought, so dangerous in his view. On the contrary, he maintains that 'the aspect of the totemic system, which we have hitherto been accustomed to describe as religious, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... even to the present day. He would not have been so old as my brother-judge, Lord Glenlee, or Lord Lynedoch, or a dozen others that one meets daily in society. And what a creature, not only in genius, but in nobleness of character, potentially at least, if right models had been put ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... that give piquancy to the novel. Yet the peculiar qualities of mind, and the special faculty of workmanship of which this turn of thought and trick of style were the product, must of course have been potentially present from the beginning. Men do not blossom forth as wits, humourists, masterly delineators of character, and skilful performers on a highly-strung and carefully-tuned sentimental instrument all at once, after ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... the grand creator, and there can be no power 143:27 except that which is derived from Mind. If Mind was first chronologically, is first potentially, and must be first eternally, then give to Mind the 143:30 glory, honor, dominion, and power everlastingly due its holy name. Inferior and unspiritual methods of healing may try to make Mind and drugs coalesce, but the two will 144:1 not ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... 'Associated Press'; perhaps inspired by a reference in the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up, Doc?"] n. An algorithm for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage even more efficiently than by passing it through a {marketroid}. You start by printing any N consecutive words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step you search for any random occurrence in the original text of the last N ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... the precision of chemical law. But even these factors are all within the bounds of the species. There is not a shred of scientific evidence that either natural or artificial devices have originated a single genetic factor that was not all the time potentially latent in the ancestry, capable of being produced at ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... before the perpetual mirror of some curiosity or admiration or wonder—some spectatorship that she perceived or imagined in the people about her. Interested as he had ever been in the profession of which she was potentially an ornament, this idea startled him by its novelty and even lent, on the spot, a formidable, a really appalling character to Miriam Rooth. It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... a working representative of the absolute goal. Both start from the conception of a whole—an absolute—which is "immanent" in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is not a mere ideal; it is operative here and now. But it is present only implicitly, "potentially," or in an enfolded condition. What is termed development is the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up. Froebel and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes referred to, have different ideas of the path by which the progressive realization ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... they contain those essential elements of the cell which endow the daughter-cells with their distinctive characters. Therefore, where the parent-cell is an ovum, it follows from this view that all hereditary qualities of the future organism are potentially present in the ultra-microscopical ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... terminating Rays, and all the intermediate ones which come from any part of the luminous body, are suppos'd by some sufficient refraction before they enter the eye, to have their pulses made oblique to their progression, and consequently each Ray to have potentially superinduc'd two proprieties, or colours, viz., a Red on the one side, and a Blue on the other, which notwithstanding are never actually manifest, but when this or that Ray has the one or the other side of ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... tongue. All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of all helps and helpers when he has learned to teach himself. His emancipation, once fairly purchased, confers on him potentially the freedom of the empire of thought; and, as evermore, the freeman toils harder than the slave. The strong stimulus of such a self-moved activity, thoroughly aroused, becomes in Choate or Gladstone the fountain of perpetual youth, and forms the solid basis of the titanic scholarship ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... so many years and such endless labor to introduce into the Sahara sufficient water to transform its potentially rich soil into arable land that the thought of any sudden superabundance of that element was far from the minds of the industrious agriculturalists. They had heard of the inundations caused by the melting of the mountain snows ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... word he turned and walked with her up the street, there to miss Constance by three moments, which, potentially, might have been ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... of the beautiful and sublime; the characteristic faculties are in all mankind; it is education which elicits them. Nay, would you not stare at a man who should affirm that education was not itself a species of "revelation," simply because the truths thus communicated were all "potentially" in the mind before? The fact is, that education is of coordinate importance with the very faculties without ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... "highest character and blessedness, which we, individually and collectively, are capable of reaching and realizing." Let us, then, call it what it is—the power of God unto salvation. And how are we to get it into our possession? The answer is, it needs no getting in. Potentially it is there. "The kingdom of God is within you," says Jesus, and it is ours to bring it out in all its actual reality. It is the greater which includes the less, of the gracious possessions God has put in our being, ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... a universal indignation that amazed the author, there is no doubt a true side. It is worth remembering, for instance, that all penal legislation, in so far as deterrent and not merely vindictive, assumes in all who come whether actually or potentially within its sphere, the very doctrine that covered Helvetius with odium. And there is more to be said than this. As M. Charles Comte has expressed it: If the strength with which we resent injury were not in the ratio of the personal risk that we run, we should hardly have the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... single source, and so when the act is recorded by which that condition is effected, the division of light and darkness is again noticed. The sun and the moon are set in the firmament of heaven to divide the light from the darkness. But that division was potentially effected when the motion of ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... to see Portia that morning. Even if there had been no other reason, being found in bed at half past ten in the morning by a sister who inflexibly opened her little shop at half past eight, regardless of bad weather, backaches and other potentially valid excuses, was enough to make one feel apologetic and worthless. Rose could truthfully say that she was feeling wretched. But Portia would sit there, slim and erect, in a little straight-backed ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... be their successor. This is already potentially mine. In a few months, if I please, I shall be walking this house as mistress—its ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
