"Coherent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all this written on her face, stumbled, stammered, but was unable to find coherent speech; although he saw plainly enough the subterfuge with which even now the girl sought to hedge herself against prying eyes that would have read her secret. She began again, to ask him of his family, the same questions. "Is anything ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... green when thrown into indigo water. Suppose it to diminish in size, until it reaches an almost microscopic magnitude. It would still behave substantially as the larger plate, sending to the eye its modicum of green light. If the plate, instead of being a large coherent mass, were ground to a powder sufficiently fine, and in this condition diffused through the clear sea-water, it would also send green light to the eye. In fact, the suspended particles which the home examination reveals, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... precaution Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets instead of one, to choose the wrong sentence where two were written together, and to discover his own handwriting suddenly illegible. When he found himself possessed of a coherent passage, he shook it at his audience almost aggressively, and then fumbled for another. After a distressing search a fresh discovery would be made, and produced in the same way, until, by means of repeated attacks, he had stirred his audience to a degree of animation quite ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... convincingly set forth certain factors in the origin of ornament and clothing, a subject which many writers imagine to cover the whole field of modesty. More recently Ribot, in his work on the emotions, has vaguely outlined most of the factors of modesty, but has not developed a coherent view of their origins ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... coherent out of him, Johnson withdrew; evidently disappointed in the scientific interest of the case. Soon after his departure, the doctor sat up; and upon being asked what upon earth ailed him, shook his head mysteriously. He then deplored the hardship of being an invalid in such ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... exuberant, extravagant, almost, as it were, "showing off." The flavour is sharp and arresting. The Four Men, which we believe to be the present climax of Mr. Belloc's literature, is, Heaven knows, vigorous, exuberant and extravagant enough. But it is also graver, deeper, more artful, more coherent. ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... friends, and nothing beyond; but after that day in the workshop it was impossible for Richard and Margaret to be anything but lovers. The hollowness of pretending otherwise was clear even to Mr. Slocum. In the love of a father for a daughter there is always a vague jealousy which refuses to render a coherent explanation of itself. Mr. Slocum did not escape this, but he managed, nevertheless, to accept the inevitable with very fair grace, and presently to confess to himself that the occurrence which had at first taken him aback was the most natural in the world. That Margaret and ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... seen the wrinkles around the Bishop's mouth. The beet red colour of his face had gone down several degrees. The freckles were coming back. He was now coherent. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... and therefore unexpected portion of the enemy's coast; that was a conception so daring, aye, and so quixotic in some of its aspects, that even now I was half incredulous. Yet it must be the true one. Bit by bit the fragments of the puzzle fell into order till a coherent whole was adumbrated. [The reader will find the whole matter dealt with in ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... bits still scattered round us—that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... there might be in Italian and English) a modell of the former, and therefore as good cause so to entitle it. If looking into it, it looke like the Sporades, or scattered Ilands, rather than one well-joynted or close-joyned bodie, or one coherent orbe: your Honors knowe, an armie ranged in files is fitter for muster, then in a ring; and jewels are sooner found in severall boxes, then all in one bagge. If in these rankes the English outnumber the Italian, congratulate the copie and varietie of our sweete-mother toong, which under this ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... question of universal ownership. We have a chief executive who sees what the evils are and dares to face them. Yet the courage involved is not his highest gift; but, rather, the intelligence with which he has so stated and grouped the issues as to give us a coherent administrative policy that works toward equality and not ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... distribute its force. The vertical stanchions between both tiers of beams and between the lower beams and keelson are admirably adapted for this latter object. All are connected together with strong knees and iron fastenings, so that the whole becomes, as it were, a single coherent mass. It should be borne in mind that, while in former expeditions it was thought sufficient to give a couple of beams amidships some extra strengthening, every single cross beam in the Fram was stayed in the manner ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... me?" he whispered. Or perhaps he only thought he enunciated the phrase, for although Norma answered, it was not audibly. Neither of them ever remembered anything coherent of that first five minutes, in which momentous questions were settled between Norma's admiring comment upon Wolf's new coat, and in which they laughed and cried and clung together in shameless indifference to ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... now ran to the house in an agony of terror, and uttering unintelligible screams. It was at first believed that the child was drowned, but finally the distracted parents gleaned from the girl's half-coherent words that she had left him in safety at some distance from the shore, for a single minute, while she stepped to the water's edge for a drink. When she returned he had disappeared, nor was there any answer to ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... that has been said upon it, up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just epitomized, he so carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything in it, with certain serious gaps now for the first time fill'd, that it becomes a coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far as there can be any answer) to the foregoing question—a system which, while I distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to, revise, and even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth to-day, in its entirety, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Pantheist, Determinist? If life were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative. But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy proper Emerson made ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... was to be found in disobedience and revolt from God. They appear as disconnected scenes of a once grand drama that in olden times riveted the attention of mankind, and of which, strange to say, the clearest synopsis and the most coherent recollection are, so far, to be found in Polynesian traditions. It is probably in vain to inquire with whom the legend of an evil spirit and his operations in Heaven and on earth had its origin. Notwithstanding the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... ultimate results of the work to which the last few days had been devoted—to mark the gradual but certain progression of civilization and christianity—and to breathe forth, unwitnessed and uninterrupted, the scarce coherent words of thankful adoration for the providential care which had hitherto sustained and ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... our most pressing INTELLIGENT needs just now is to get our records into coherent form. The books have been most outrageously unkept. Mrs. Lippett had a big black account book into which she jumbled any facts that happened to drift her way as to the children's family, their conduct, and their health. But for weeks at a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... details. His narratives were constructed with so much skill, and rehearsed with so much energy, that all the effects of a dramatic exhibition were frequently produced by them. Those that were most coherent and most minute, and, of consequence, least entitled to credit, were yet rendered probable by the exquisite art of this rhetorician. For every difficulty that was suggested, a ready and plausible solution was furnished. Mysterious voices had always a share in producing the ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... results," Harnosh was exulting. "I'll grant that the boy might have picked up some of that stuff telepathically from the carnate minds present here; even from the mind of Garnon, before he was discarnated. But he could not have picked up enough data, in that way, to make a connected and coherent communication. It takes a sensitive with a powerful mind of his own to practice telesthesia, and that boy's almost an idiot." He turned to Dallona. "You asked a question, mentally, after Garnon was discarnate, and got an answer that could have been contained only ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... as most of the crew of the Pandora were, ever since the discovery about the water, in a state of half-intoxication. Even at that moment it was evident that both mate and captain were nearly drunk, and gave but half-coherent replies to the eager inquiries of the men—who were still under apprehensions from the cries of fire that ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... happiest of men, and to have a head-ache when compelled to think, even he would have taken so much for granted. That it would be well that wise men should govern, wise after the Platonic standard, bringing, that is to say, particular details under coherent general rules, able to foresee and influence the future by their knowledge of the past:—there is no paradox in that: it belongs rather, you might complain, to the range of platitudes. But, remember! the hinge of Plato's whole political argument is, that the ruinous divisions of Athens, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... by a layer of colourless, circulating protoplasm; but this can be seen with much greater distinctness after the process of aggregation has been partly effected than before. The purple fluid which exudes from a crushed tentacle is somewhat coherent, and does not mingle with the surrounding water; it contains much flocculent or granular matter. But this matter may have been generated by the cells having been crushed; some degree of aggregation having been thus ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... in the modern survivals of these Dances is that the Dance proper is combined with a more or less coherent dramatic action. The Sword Dance originally did not stand alone, but formed part of a Drama, to the action of which it may be held to have given a ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... slowly and perhaps after the lapse of a generation, the directors of labour and the distributors of food, peaceful Janissaries of the new order, would form themselves into a caste, very close, very coherent, and (unlike legislators for whom an executive council can always be substituted), quite indispensable, and would close their ranks round a chief who would give them unity and the strength ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one can only approve the practice, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... ground floor came semi-coherent snatches of surly comment, like growls of a thunderstorm passing off ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... at the top of his voice and dancing ecstatically in the mud. Olga, equally dishevelled but somewhat more coherent, was seated on the gate-post, ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... herself to give him a coherent account. The sight of her forced calmness, with those eyes, was ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... here is covered over with well-rounded shingle and gravel of granite, gneiss with much talc in it, mica schist, and other rocks which we saw 'in situ' between the Kafue and Loangwa. There are great mounds of soft red sand slightly coherent, which crumble in the hand with ease. The gravel and the sand drain away the water so effectually that the trees are exposed to the heat during a portion of the year without any moisture; hence they are ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... at an early date that the one chance of the house was to get together before the house-matches and play as a coherent team, not as a collection of units. Combination will often make up for lack of speed in a three-quarter line. So twice a week Dencroft's turned out against ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... force of much looking and tracing and joining and separating, first objects and then groups are discovered in their proper identity and relation, until the whole stands out, clear, true, and informing in its coherent significance of light and shade. Thus, by slow processes, as one whose sight has been imperceptibly restored, I awoke to a clearer and truer sense of the life within "the city of the beautiful and ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... edition of which more or less contradicts the other? Allow me to create chasms ad libitum, and ad libitum to fill them up with imagined facts and incidents, and I would almost undertake to harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a coherent and consistent narrative. What, I say, could have tempted grave and pious men thus to disturb the foundation of the Temple, in order to repair a petty breach or rat-hole in the wall, or fasten a loose stone or two in the outer court, if not an assumed necessity arising out of the ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... impatience for speedy retribution sufficiently subsides for intelligent survey of the situation. From the nature of the case, time, patience, and much discretion are required. Isolated circumstances shall find coherent connections, chasms of time and ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... the first coherent words he had spoken since first she had met him here in this lonely part of the garden, and his voice was perfectly steady, conventional and cold. An icy pang shot through Marguerite's heart. It was as if she had been abruptly wakened ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... infrastructure, an uncertain legal framework, corruption, and lack of transparency in government economic policy remain a brake on investment and growth. A number of IMF and World Bank missions have met with the new government to help it develop a coherent economic plan but associated reforms ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... critic Boutmy, "have left the different parts of their constitution where the waves of history have deposited them; they have not attempted to bring them together, to classify or complete them, or to make of it a consistent or coherent whole."[51] ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... former footing of equality. In spite of as brave a spirit and as good a conscience as woman need have, Mrs. Lapham cringed inwardly, and tremulously wondered what her visitor had come for. She turned from pale to red, and was hardly coherent in her greetings; she did not know how they got to where Mrs. Corey was saying exactly the right things about her son's interest and satisfaction in his new business, and keeping her eyes fixed on Mrs. Lapham's, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... layman to give any coherent account of an affair where a whole country's coast-line was background to battle covering geographical degrees? The records give an impression of illimitable grey waters, nicked on their uncertain horizons with the smudge and blur of ships sparkling with fury against ships ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... what compensations there may be in the English system, or how far its evils might be avoided by judicious arrangements. But it is sufficiently clear what impression will be made upon anyone who tests a piece of legislative machinery by its power of turning out finished and coherent work which will satisfy legal experts rather than reflect ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... sounding of bugles, at the post, as they rowed towards the shore. He did not learn the cause. Captain Baird was most anxious to learn if the gentleman had safely reached his destination. Cram replied that he had, but in a state bordering on delirium and unable to give any coherent account of himself. He could tell he had been aboard the Ambassador and the Tampa, but that was ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... priest, with the rank of apostolic protonotary. Writing on March 28, 1492, to Muro, the dean of Compostello he observed: Ad Saturnum, cessante Marte, sub hujus sancti viri archiepiscopi umbra tento transfugere; a thorace jam ad togam me transtuli. In the coherent organisation of society as it was then ordered, men were classified in distinct and recognisable categories, each of which opened avenues to the ambitious for attaining its special prizes. Spain was ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... you to see what a large, coherent plan we are trying to work out, and I want you to believe that the object of the plan and the results of it will be to make us a stronger as well as a happier nation. I was reading the other day some of the speeches made by Bismarck—a man who, perhaps ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... for my lord was quite sunk into a state bordering on pervigilium, watching the woods with a rapt eye, sleeping scarce at all, and speaking sometimes not twenty words in a whole day. That which he said was still coherent; but it turned almost invariably upon the party for whom he kept his crazy look-out. He would tell Sir William often, and always as if it were a new communication, that he had "a brother somewhere in the woods," and beg that the sentinels should be directed "to inquire for him." "I am anxious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alert and keen . . . possessed of an absolute conviction of her cause . . . with industry and courage sufficient to avail herself of them [all diplomatic possibilities. He praised the "most admirable, coherent, logical and forceful way" in which she discussed with him the purpose ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... her altered demeanour, embarrassed by an avalanche of words. A hundred questions were burning upon his lips. It was by a great effort of self-control that he remained coherent. ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and he was in a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid and smooth and unshining; a knot of men passed shouting hoarsely, and a wave of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his mind partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former were a disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... mouth of the Thames when a sudden storm came on, she was driven out of her course, and, in the darkness of the night, she struck on the Goodwin Sands. The captain, losing his presence of mind, seemed incapable of giving coherent orders, and it is probable that the vessel would have become a total wreck, had not one of the passengers suddenly taken the command and directed the working of the ship, himself taking the helm while the danger lasted. The vessel was saved, and the stranger ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... detail as possible, each in its proper place within the whole. For the students' knowledge of the subject is vague and general; he is trying to place it, and many other new things, in some kind of a coherent setting; in fact, he is in college largely for the very purpose of working out some sort of rudimentary scheme of things. The duty of the college teacher is to help him in this quite as much as to teach him a particular subject. And, besides, each particular ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... shade more French and a touch less Parisian in look, more mature and maternal, yet after all, Jeanne, her former maid. Woman fashion, these two now met, not without feminine tears, and forgetful of late difference in station, although Jeanne dutifully kissed the hand held out to her. The first coherent speech, as in the case of Hector, was regarding this most extraordinary infant, whose arrival seemed to be thus far regarded as a matter of national importance. In this view also shared Madame Fournier the elder, mother of Hector, who ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... portion of the ileum, a foreign substance, just where the hardened intestine was to be felt. I drew the intestine out, in order to examine it more minutely. The intestine was neither inflamed nor expanded, but it contained in its cavity a soft coherent and compact mass, which at its upper part was somewhat compressed, and thus felt harder than the rest. So far as I could follow this part of the intestine, this contained matter was to be felt: I also here immediately detected an intus-susception, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... next day or two Darcy plied his friend with many questions, objections and criticisms on the theory of life and gradually got out of him a coherent and complete account of his experience. In brief then, Frank believed that "by lying naked," as he put it, to the force which controls the passage of the stars, the breaking of a wave, the budding of a tree, the love of a youth and maiden, he had succeeded in a ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... still less is he interested in checking up the author's statements to see if the author is consistent with himself. He takes such consistency, even if unwarrantedly, for granted. A continuous reading of the original Ethics, even on a single topic, is impossible. The subject-matter is coherent, but the propositions do not hang together. By omitting the formal statement of the propositions; by omitting many of the demonstrations and almost all cross-references; by grouping related sections of the Ethics (with selections from the Letters and the Improvement of the Understanding) ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... lovely, but oh! so still, I cannot get myself to believe it. The circumstances concerning her death, too, were awfully sad, so sad that it simply goes beyond any words I have to describe them. I will try to be coherent; but, though I shall give you an account of what happened, I cannot begin to convey the impression upon my ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... made sure, for one thing, that this is a universe; that all its forces are coherent; that the same laws are in operation in every part of it. The principles of mathematics are everywhere applicable; gravitation controls all the worlds and every particle of matter in every one of them, and the spectroscope assures us that the same chemical elements ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... who had died. "I thought I should find him," I heard him say. "Oh, that my mother could have lived to have seen him again! Oh, that I could once more be with him! If he were here now, I am sure that I should soon get well." These words were said at intervals, between other less coherent remarks. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... friendly garrulousness of an old man whose powers are failing. Remove your unwholesomelooking person from my sight and convey the decrepit vehicle of your spirit to San Diego. It is but a gesture; I expect no coherent words from your clogged and sputtery pen; but while I am sufficiently like yourself to deceive the public into thinking you have written what they read, I am not yet great enough scoundrel to do so without your visiting the scene of your presumed labors. Go—and do not stop on the way to draw expensemoney ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... through the night Sabre was numb to coherent thought, numb to any realisation of the meaning to himself of this that had befallen him. The roof had crashed in upon him; but he lay stunned. As one pinned beneath scaffolding knows not his agony till the beams are being lifted from him, so stupefaction ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... idea. In this theory, also, the suggestion comes from the heavenly bodies. With the increasing study of the nebulae, many forms of these interesting bodies have been discovered. A very common type consists of a great coherent central mass, with two or more arms extending from opposite sides in the form of a spiral. This is as if gaseous revolving nebulae had come into comparatively close proximity to a passing body. The visitor, by its attraction, drew from the nebula a wisp of gas. The revolving motion ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... learnt from an Index and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's Treasure. To boast a Memory (the most that these pedants can aim at) is but an humble ostentation. 'Tis better to own a Judgment, though but with a Curta Supellex of coherent notions, than a Memory like a sepulchre furnished with a load of broken and discarnate bones.' Thus far the fascinating Glanvill, whose mode ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... heated impatience. But she had spoken truly, for after the daily fear of years, the personal danger of encountering the robbers assuredly seemed nothing in comparison with having to do with the police. She told Perine where she was to sit, and tried to extract more coherent details, but only as to the figures was Perine clear. These she repeated again and again, while more than once Jean's sharp whisper reached his wife's ears. "Make haste, make haste!" and ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... a sharp, half-coherent exclamation and stepped quickly to the door. "Peck!" he said, as he ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... him feel that he was having his leg pulled. In a brand new dinner jacket with a black tie poked under the long points of a turned-down collar, which, in his innocence, he had accepted as the mode of gentlemen and not, as he rightly supposed of waiters, he had done his best to give coherent answers to a rapid fire of difficult questions. The most uneasy man on earth, he had committed himself to statements that he knew to be unsound, had seen his untouched plate whisked away while he was floundering among words, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... "Don Giovanni" has influenced my life like a revelation. It stands in my thoughts as an incarnation of dramatic and musical impeccability,' and lesser men will be content to echo his words. The plot is less dramatically coherent than that of 'Le Nozze di Figaro,' but it ranges over a far wider gamut of human feeling. From the comic rascality of Leporello to the unearthly terrors of the closing scene is a vast step, but Mozart is equally at home in ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Simple and coherent as this sequence seems to be, it is, in reality, on closer inspection, very perplexing. Ch. i. 1-4 reveals a picture of confusion within Judah, but it is impossible to say whether it is foreigners who are oppressing Judah as a whole, or powerful ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... that a picture so precise in its outlines, and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous details, should have had behind it something, probably a great deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented to us of the Homeric ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense, which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm. The positive side of his creed remains precious, not because it was logical, or scientific, or coherent, but because it was an ideal, fervently felt, and penetrated with the whole life-force of an incomparable nature. Such ideals are needed for sustaining man upon his path amid the glooms and shadows of impenetrable ignorance. The form the seal and pledge of ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... understand it, must have rendered the previous existence of any living beings impossible, but also that the completeness of the Animal Kingdom in those deposits where we first find organic remains, its intelligible and coherent connection with the successive creations of all geological times and with the animals now living, affords the strongest internal evidence that we have indeed found in the lower Silurian formations, immediately ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... descending scale of owners, each of whom possessed his separate right, which the law guarded and none might violate; yet no one of whom, again, was independent of an authority higher than himself; and the entire body of the English free possessors of the soil was interpenetrated by a coherent organisation which converted them into a perpetually subsisting army of soldiers. The extent of land which was held by the petty freeholders was very large, and the possession of it was jealously treasured; the private estates of the nobles and ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... of situation and motion which several bodies bear to each other; and, finally, because he has not explained in particular how all things arose from the concourse of corpuscles alone, or, if he gave this explanation with regard to a few of them, his whole reasoning was far from being coherent, [or such as would warrant us in extending the same explanation to the whole of nature]. This, at least, is the verdict we must give regarding his philosophy, if we may judge of his opinions from what has been handed down ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... services rendered by my father to the study of Natural History is the revival of Teleology. The evolutionist studies the purpose or meaning of organs with the zeal of the older Teleology, but with far wider and more coherent purpose. He has the invigorating knowledge that he is gaining not isolated conceptions of the economy of the present, but a coherent view of both past and present. And even where he fails to discover the use of any part, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Chrystler's Farm, with two thousand regulars at his disposal, he was unmercifully beaten. Both Wilkinson and Morgan Lewis were flat on their backs, too feeble to concern themselves with battles. The American troops fought without a coherent plan and were defeated and broken in detail. Almost four hundred of them were killed, wounded, or captured. Their conduct reflected the half-hearted attitude of their commanding general and some of his ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... entire property (which is) the body (the self consisting of) bones (tanwas), vital heat (ushtanas), aerial form (keherpas), knowledge (tevishis), consciousness (baodhas), soul (urwanem), and spirit (frawashem), to the prosperous, truth-coherent (and) ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... time to drag a coherent story from her. Annie had told Elizabeth in her room, and then had told Margaret. She had gone to Elizabeth at once, to see what she could do, but Elizabeth had been in her closet, digging among her clothes. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... must be clearly understood. Form often is most expressive when least coherent. It is often most expressive when outwardly most imperfect, perhaps only a stroke, a mere hint ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... looking at her and listening. She rambled on in half-coherent speech. She had not heard him cry out her name; or if she had heard him it had been only a part of her fevered dreams. And this was the crowning bitterness: that he should want to speak to her, to tell her that he loved her, and ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... comprehensive and scientific, certainly a novel, method of treatment, and I had gone so far as to sketch out several of my groups, when I was confronted by difficulties, and saw that it was not a system which was thoroughly coherent throughout the whole of the collections, and I finally abandoned it, on the advice of Dr. Sclater, the originator, I believe, of the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... She gave no coherent answer, but smiled always, then leaned forward and stroked Mrs. Benson upon her personable cheek. "Dear old thing, let me do as I like. It's much better for everybody," she ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... coherent thought he ran shouting across the field, stumbling and falling over the slippery and uneven surface, but always picking himself up and flinging his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... and gradually became calmer. But he was so eager to tell his news that he could not wait long enough to be quite coherent. ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... last state there was no tradition, no ordered philosophy; only a jumble and a scramble, and a passing of examinations. Such a system or lack of system must fall a prey sooner or later to some educational movement based on a coherent and defensible doctrine. ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... existing in any other European army of the time. For both, their regiment was a home, and the military service a lifelong profession. They had entered it young, and they hoped to die in it. Their relation to each other had become a part of the structure of their minds; a condition of coherent thought. A soldier might rise from the ranks and become a lieutenant, or even a captain, but such promotion was infrequent; few common soldiers had the education or the means to aspire to it. On the other hand, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... driver, from the first, was suspicious of the box. His suspicions were increased when, upon returning to my apartment hotel, where I now decided to keep the box until I could think out a coherent plan of action, the manager of the hotel made inquiries. The manager had seen the box brought in, and taken out again, before. Its return struck him as odd. He offered to store it for me in the basement. I took alarm at once. Naturally, he questioned me more closely. I was unready in my answers. ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... simply pure delirium. The journey from Somaliland, and his meeting with his friend Mr. Dillon, appeared to have had the worse effects on his sanity. He opened with the statement that he was a tea-pot: and that was the only really coherent remark he made. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... cadences of bubbling mirth Too quick for bar or rhythm! What ecstasies, too full to keep Coherent measure with them! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... This was the first coherent sentence, if such it can be called, which escaped the terrified woman, while she was being undressed and freshly clothed in the warm ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... Coleridge) non-sequacious. Eloquence resides not in separate or fractional ideas, but in the relations of manifold ideas, and in the mode of their evolution from each other. It is not indeed enough that the ideas should be many, and their relations coherent; the main condition lies in the key of the evolution, in the law of the succession. The elements are nothing without the atmosphere that moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine. Now Hazlitt's brilliancy is seen ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of the war in October 1748 the naval policy of the British government, without reaching a high level, was yet more energetic and coherent. A closer watch was kept on the French coast, and effectual means were taken to intercept communication between France and her American possessions. In the spring information was obtained that an important convoy for the East and West Indies was to sail from L'Orient. In the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... huddled himself up in a wardrobe," Vera explained. "He seems so paralysed with fear that I could not get anything like a coherent account of what had happened. Anyway, I will go back to my room now. You need not be ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... coherent thought, could only stammer in what was half a shout: "But you're speaking my language. You're talking the way we talk on earth. Am I crazy? Stark, ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... work so large and so coherent, completed with no less perfection than it is conceived, it is difficult by mere quotation to give any adequate idea. This, however, may serve as an example of its narrative power. The passage describes the visit of Thiodolf to ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... extraordinary for the nature of the subject, than for the admirable art with which the whole is conducted. The work is founded upon the traditions and theogony of the ancients, which consisted of various detached fables. Those Ovid has not only so happily arranged, that they form a coherent series of narratives, one rising out of another; but he describes the different changes with such an imposing plausibility, as to give a natural appearance to the most incredible fictions. This ingenious production, however ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... the fifth century, and barbaric kingdoms and principalities had promptly arisen on the ruins of the Roman power. But few of these had any permanency, and none of them consolidated the rest, or any considerable number of the rest, into one coherent and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... to gather speech or coherent thought, the five Socialists stood staring. Then, after a moment, Craig made ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... said was something not very coherent about being very glad and its being very good of her, and almost simultaneously she gasped out that she was glad, and wouldn't he come in. She held out her hand to him, politely, and he, compensating for an imperceptible hesitation ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... leaned against the wall. He had the sensations of one who comes suddenly into the presence of a chef-d'oeuvre. Perhaps his first coherent thought was that almost universal one on such huge occasions: "Why couldn't I have ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... consolidate, congeal, coagulate; curd, curdle; lopper; fix, clot, cake, candy, precipitate, deposit, cohere, crystallize; petrify &c (harden) 323. condense, thicken, gel, inspissate^, incrassate^; compress, squeeze, ram down, constipate. Adj. dense, solid; solidified &c v.; caseous; pukka^; coherent, cohesive &c 46; compact, close, serried, thickset; substantial, massive, lumpish^; impenetrable, impermeable, nonporous, imporous^; incompressible; constipated; concrete &c (hard) 323; knotted, knotty; gnarled; crystalline, crystallizable; thick, grumous^, stuffy. undissolved, unmelted^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... skeleton of a story.; and have arranged it so artfully, that unless I am deceived by being too familiar with it, it will be -very intelligible to the audience, even if they have not read the original fable; and you have had the address to make it coherent, without the marvellous, though so much depended on that part. In short, you have put my extravagant materials in an alembic, and drawn off ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and eaten, Dudley made the best show of the three. He had a flask, of course,—when had he not? He dosed Paulette and me with what was left in it, but even with the whisky limbering my parched throat I hadn't sense to ask a coherent question. Dudley looked from Paulette to me and spoke pretty ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... coherent passion did not beat him into helpless acquiescence; but, instead, he found himself at once replying, "You don't see fairly. You exaggerate it all. She was unhappy with your father. For years he made her unhappy. And now, if she can care for a man who can make her happy, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... always some admixture of sadness, the most poetical of all themes being the death of a beautiful woman. Moreover, the pleasure derived from the contemplation of this higher beauty should be indefinite; that is, true poetic feeling is not the result of coherent narrative or clear pictures or fine moral sentiment, but consists in vague, exalted emotion. Music, of all the arts, produces the vaguest and most "indefinite" pleasure; consequently verse forms should be chosen with the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Characters of Men, in which Pope enlarges on his theory of a ruling passion, affords a significant example of his incapacity for sustaining an argument, since Warburton, to use his own words, entirely changed and reversed the order and disposition of the several parts to make the composition more coherent. That he has succeeded is doubtful, that he should have ventured upon such a task shows where Pope's weakness lay as a philosophical poet. It is the least interesting of the Essays, but is not without lines that none but Pope could have written. The Characters of Women, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... over his body and gnawing at his vitals. In the paroxysm of frenzy he lay down on the cabin floor and tried to bury his head from the sight of the demons that he imagined pursued him. He cried out in pitiful accents to be shielded from them, and in the effort lost complete capacity for coherent speech. The crew were thrown into a condition of chilly fear. A consultation was held, and it was decided to have him carefully watched and occasional doses of brandy administered. For three days a fine westerly breeze had raced over the dappled ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Richard Kenton remained in sight they scarcely found words coherent enough for question, and when they did, Bittridge had nothing but confused answers to give to the effect that he did not know what it meant, but he would find out. He got into a hack and had himself driven to his hotel, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... riddles. I have not yet told you of her; and yet speak of fire and death. I will try to be more coherent, if only to show that the years have brought me some mastery over myself. One day—it was a fall day and beautiful as limpid sunshine and a world of yellowing woods could make it—I went to Miss Dudleigh's house to apologize ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... her story, from the not very coherent preamble, to the warm and unqualified endorsement of Frederic Chilton's credentials, and her moved mention of the mutual attachment of the youthful pair, and never changed his attitude, or manifested any inclination to stay the narration by question or comment. When she ceased ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... are soft and friable, and the cone is a prettily shaped dome. On the southern slope there are excavations into the indurated and coherent cinder mass, constituting chambers, often 10 or 12 feet in diameter and 6 to 10 feet in height. The chambers are of irregular shape, and occasionally a larger central chamber forms a kind of vestibule to several smaller ones gathered about it. The smaller ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... Men live amid the ruins of the systems constructed by their ancestors, and each one attempts to form for himself, out of the scattered fragments, a combination which may serve him as a sufficiently coherent rule of thought, and, especially, of life. Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism, the "Orientalizing Hellenes," and the "Hellenizing Orientals," all by their restless, nervous, frequently erratic and aimless activity, bear witness to the ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... the continued existence of body. If sometimes we ascribe a continued existence to objects, which are perfectly new to us, and of whose constancy and coherence we have no experience, it is because the manner, in which they present themselves to our senses, resembles that of constant and coherent objects; and this resemblance is a source of reasoning and analogy, and leads us to attribute the same qualities ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... crew have taken you past these Sirens, I cannot give you coherent directions {100} as to which of two courses you are to take; I will lay the two alternatives before you, and you must consider them for yourself. On the one hand there are some overhanging rocks against which the deep blue ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are one in principle—the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas—that is to say, into inability to think at all, or at any rate to think as ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... that already had the chill of the grave in its limp fingers, into his own. As for kissing those bloodless lips, so eager, so strained, which he could see was what she wanted him to do, he was unable to bring himself to it. Luckily he was not obliged to talk, since her mind couldn't follow coherent sentences. It was enough for her to have him sit by the bed while she worked her hands gropingly toward him, saying, "Oh, Chip! oh, Chip!" and murmuring broken things in Swedish. It was incredible to him that this poor worn thing, this ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... against them, so that I wouldn't interfere with your Art. Then, when you accused me of gallivanting off with—" But Bertram swept her back into his arms, and not for some minutes could Billy make a coherent ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... his voice quavered. " It isn't anything. Really, it isn't anything." He had not known of these wonderful wounds, but he almost choked in the joy of Marjory's ministry and her half coherent exclamations. This proud and beautiful girl, this superlative creature, was reddening her handkerchief with his blood, and no word of his could have prevented her from thus attending him. He could hear the professor and Mrs. Wainwright fussing near him, trying to be ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... this philosophy of the absolute consists. First, there is a healthy faith that the world must be rational and self-consistent. 'All science, all real knowledge, all experience presuppose,' as Mr. Ritchie writes, 'a coherent universe.' Next, we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and that only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth be found. Third, the substituted ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... often, and was noted, last month, as seen in copper (Plate VI, 3); it revolves with extreme rapidity around its longitudinal axis, and looks like a pencil sharpened at both ends, or a cigar tapering at both ends; we habitually spoke of it as "the cigar." It appears to be strongly coherent, for, as will be seen below, its six atoms remain attached to each other as meta-compounds and even when divided into two triplets as hyper-compounds, they revolve round ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... naive dance-forms were too short. The content had to be as poignantly expressive, as direct in its appeal, as a folk-song; the different passages uttering the different moods had somehow to be welded together into a coherent whole—in one way or another dramatic climaxes and changes had to be arranged in an unbroken, logical, apparently inevitable sequence. I do not say the composers knew what they were after; on the contrary, as in the ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... is perhaps the most successful of recent methods of raising revenue—the death duties. The principle of the graduated death duties was Harcourt's; but it was Milner who worked out the elaborate system which rendered his ideas coherent, and enabled them eventually to be put into effect. Academic distinctions, however ample, cannot be said to-day to afford a definite assurance of pre-eminent capacity for the service of the State. Yet it was certainly no disadvantage ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... of an early Roman epos analogous to the Homeric poems, but preserved in a less coherent shape, has met with a close investigation at the hands of scholars, but is almost universally regarded as "not proven." The scanty and obscure notices of the early poetry by no means warrant our drawing so wide an inference as the Niebuhrian theory demands. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Michael went on. "I'm playful, but quite coherent. See here, Pitman: follow me one half minute. I mean to profit by the refreshing fact that we are really and truly innocent; nothing but the presence of the—you know what—connects us with the crime; once let us get rid of it, no matter how, and there is no possible ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... accommodate; graduate; adjust &c (render equal) 27; dress, regulate, readjust; accord, harmonize, reconcile; fadge^, dovetail, square. Adj. agreeing, suiting &c v.; in accord, accordant, concordant, consonant, congruous, consentaneous^, correspondent, congenial; coherent; becoming; harmonious reconcilable, conformable; in accordance with, in harmony with, in keeping with, in unison with, &c n.; at one with, of one mind, of a piece [Fr.]; consistent, compatible, proportionate; commensurate; on all fours. apt, apposite, pertinent, pat; to the point, to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... longest and most orderly that has yet been granted to any large portion of the world—gave time for the expansion of Roman speech and manners, for the extension of the political franchise, the establishment of city life, the assimilation of the provincial populations in an orderly and coherent civilization. As the importance of the city of Rome declined, as the world became Romeless, a large part of the world grew to be Roman. It has been said that Greece taught men to be human and Rome made mankind ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... didn't feel well enough to go to the embassy, but you could go and play poker. That sounds as if you cared a lot for your sister. And you wanted to stay at home the first night, because you had almost forgotten how the inside of a private dwelling looked. Very good; very coherent." ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... of the events that had left him so befuddled. Jerry got water and bathed and dressed the deep cuts and bruises as best he could. The shock of the cold water restored the man's faculties in some measure and he finally managed a coherent statement. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... of view the Talmud is a great maze and apparently the simplest roads lead off into strange, winding by-paths. It is hard to deduce any distinct system of ethics, any consistent philosophy, any coherent doctrine. Yet patience rewards the student here too, and from this confused medley of material, he can build the intellectual world of the early mediaeval Jew. In the realm of doctrine we find that "original sin," "vicarious atonement," and "everlasting punishment," ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... living faith; and it followed almost certainly that, could I but penetrate the mystery with which it was hedged about so carefully by them still faithful to it, I would find all that I sought—of living customs, of coherent traditions—wherewith to exhibit clearly to the world of the nineteenth century the wonderful social and religious structure that the Spaniards of the sixteenth century had blotted out, but had not destroyed. What my fellow-archaeologists had accomplished in ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... is widely accepted under the name of Pantheism, I venture to think it differs from Pantheism with all the difference that exists between a coherent, intelligible conception and an incoherent unintelligible one. I shall therefore proceed to examine the doctrine called Pantheism, and to show how incomprehensible and valueless ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... not to serve as an example of good or of evil? But the examples which the slow train of events presents to us are scattered and incomplete. They lack always a tangible and visible coherence leading straight on to a moral conclusion. The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man. All systems of philosophy have sought in vain to explain it, ceaselessly rolling up their ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... by, lost his unsteady foothold and rolled helplessly on the sofa. Here, after one or two unsuccessful attempts to regain his foothold, he remained, uttering from time to time profane but not entirely coherent or intelligible protests, until at last he succumbed to the exhausting quality of his emotions, and the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Helena was left alone with the farm people, who made much of her, and poured into her ears more or less coherent accounts of the rioting and its causes. A few discontented soldiers, an unpopular factory manager, and a badly-handled strike:—the tale was a common one throughout England at the moment, and behind and beneath the surface events lay the heaving of that "tide in the affairs of ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... show but two or three united. The reddish variety, vinous or scarlet-black in color, is remarkably fasciate. Some clusters show twenty or more stipitate, globose sporangia, conjoined by their distinct but coherent stems. In such fruitings the sporangia are small, .5 mm. In the brown sporangia the dehiscence, as stated, is often definitely prefigured; in the multiple, red, obscurely, if at all. As presented in collections from the eastern United ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... or substance. All that we gain is another problem which we add to the problems we already possess. We increase our burden without enlarging our comprehension. If, on the other hand, it is said that we need an all embracing formula that will make our conception of the universe coherent, it may be replied that we have that in such a conception as the persistence of force. And it is surely better to keep to a formula that does at least work, than to devise ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... captain told us a more coherent story than Smart had been able to give us, and said within a fortnight of their leaving us they were made prisoners by the pirates; that they dragged out lengthened days of misery, want, and ill-usage, only held up by the knowledge that our ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... which I am sure is, that the distinction between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the breaking up of an association or corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them; and that, therefore, what we call the inorganic ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... the museums of the curious, which appear at first to be mere incongruous assemblages of unconnected and unmeaning figures, till they are regarded from one particular point of view, when these figures immediately mass themselves into a regular form, and the whole picture assumes a coherent and symmetrical appearance. To discover in each system this point of view; to cultivate that peculiar form of imagination which makes it possible to realise how different forms of opinions are held by their more intelligent adherents, appeared to me the first condition ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... naked upon a rock, ready to dive into Lake George. This memory stands at the end of a diminishing vista; the extreme point of coherent recollection. My body and muscular limbs reflected in the water ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... a long time remained scattered, in the shape of fragments; only isolated sciences have existed or bits of science. About the middle of the eighteenth century these separate parts became united and have formed one body, a coherent system. Out of this, formerly called philosophy, that is to say a view of nature as a whole, consisting of perfect order on lasting foundations, a sort of universal network which, suddenly enlarged, stretches beyond the physical world to the moral world, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Germains, and of others, who had, to his knowledge, formed secret hoards of arms and ammunition. His simple oath would not have been sufficient to support a charge of high treason; but he produced another witness whose evidence seemed to make the case complete. The narrative was plausible and coherent; and indeed, though it may have been embellished by fictions, there can be little doubt that it was in substance true. [538] Messengers and search warrants were sent down to Lancashire. Aaron Smith ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... soon after daybreak. What, then, was his astonishment, on going on deck, to find the ship under all sail, standing away from the island, and to be told that we had not come back. The captain might have been a party to the act, but he was already perfectly tipsy, and could make no coherent remark; and when the first mate came on deck, he said that the ship had been driven off the island by a sudden squall, and that he had no doubt our boat had been swamped in attempting to come off. The doctor ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... meaning of the look on Blair's face, "I know how you feel about such things, but just reserve judgment until you hear our experiences. We bought a Board, and mother and I tried to use it alone. We had no success at all. It would spell nothing coherent,—only meaningless jumbles of letters,—or simply refuse to move. Of course, you understand, we had no thought that our boy was—was in any danger,—but we had been told that sometimes living persons communicated by such means. So we persevered, but ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... and at last brought out of Pisander a tolerably coherent account of the conversation which he had heard between Valeria and Pratinas. Then, indeed, the merry slave-boy was troubled. Accustomed to a rather limited ambition in life, he had attached himself with implicit ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... dead! Gordon straightened up. Simultaneously two ideas flashed into his mind—Lettice and Hollidew's gold. Then they grew coherent, explicable. Lettice and the gold were one; she was the gold, the gold was Lettice. He recalled now, appositely, what Bartamon had told him but a few days before ... Hollidew would consent to make no will; there were no other children. The money would automatically go, principally, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... himself, with the poet quartermaster, was on hand, and all Fort Frayne seemed to rouse, and Mrs. Gregg had come with Mrs. Wilkins, and these two had relieved the doctor of the care of the cook, now talking volubly; and, partly through her revelations, but mainly through the more coherent statements of Mrs. Dade, were the facts made public. Margaret, the cook, had a room to herself on the ground floor adjoining her kitchen. Belle, the maid, had been given the second floor back, in order ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... place, the one thing that a dramatic reporter must have when he begins to write his copy after the performance is some positive idea about the play, some definite criticism, upon which to base his whole report. It is impossible to write a coherent report from chance jottings and to confine the report to saying "This was good; that was bad, the other was mediocre." The critic must have a positive central idea upon which to hang his criticism. This central idea plays the same part in his report as the feature in a news story—it is the ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... state,"[37] or better in a state of chaos. It consisted of an amalgamation of disparate legends, of an aggregate of particular cults, as Egypt herself was an aggregate of a number of districts. This religion never formulated a coherent system of generally accepted dogmas. It permitted the coexistence of conflicting conceptions and traditions, and all the subtlety of its clergy never accomplished, or rather never began, the task of fusing those irreconcilable ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... might have been foreseen, was fatal to coherent and prompt co-operative action, and the result was properly described by Grant himself as comparable only to the work of a "balky team." It was in the nature of things impossible to make either the armies or the separate army-corps work harmoniously ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... could not frame a coherent question with his pale frightened lips: "you don't—you ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... to her," the Professor replied. Mrs. Rheinholdt's story, by frequent repetition, had become a little more coherent, a trifle more circumstantial, the perfection of simplicity and utterly incomprehensible. Quest listened to it without remark and finally made his way to the conservatory. He requested Mrs. Rheinholdt to walk with him through the door by which ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the extremities of any body or space, it has that idea we call FIGURE, which affords to the mind infinite variety. For, besides the vast number of different figures that do really exist in the coherent masses of matter, the stock that the mind has in its power, by varying the idea of space, and thereby making still new compositions, by repeating its own ideas, and joining them as it pleases, is perfectly inexhaustible. And so it can multiply ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... she was coherent again, she began that pitiful confession, and he listened; at first walking up and down; then coming nearer; sitting beside her; then kneeling; then lifting her and holding her against his breast. When, relaxing in his arms like a tired child, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... appointed; he drove in marvellously conceived traps in company with most engaging damsels. When, finally, he reached Los Angeles again he carried with him, as standing for California, not even the heterogeneous but fairly coherent idea one usually gains of a single commonwealth, but an impression of ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... us hope that Nature will be a little more coherent to-morrow than she was last night, and that Evelyn will do the right thing. Women generally marry when it is pressed upon them sufficiently, don't you ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... or Genealogy of Krishna[10] and in it were provided all those details so manifestly wanting in the epic itself. The exact nature of Krishna is explained—the circumstances of his birth, his youth and childhood, the whole being welded into a coherent scheme. In this story Krishna the feudal magnate takes a natural place but there is no longer any contradiction between his character as a prince and his character as God. He is, above all, an incarnation of Vishnu and his immediate purpose is to vanquish ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... these maps, as upon chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy against the Central European powers. Very probably he had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan. ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the youth, with mild depreciation; "everything here is free. Everything is his who will take it, without exception. What else is the good of a coherent society and a Government if it cannot provide you with so rudimentary a thing as ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold |
