"Complexity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Shaw made for strength but also created limitations, "Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is admirable." Where he fails is in being unable to see and embrace the full complexity of life. "His only paradox is to pull out one thread or cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be made ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the marvellous complexity of our bodily organization, it seems a miracle that we should live at all; much more that the innumerable organs and processes should continue day after day and year after year with so much regularity and so little friction that we are sometimes ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... by the complexity of the brain—though this complexity is the condition of faculty, as a rule—insects such as ants, bees, and spiders, whose brains are nothing but simple nerve ganglia, display prodigies of foresight, architectural ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... purposes, we are as free as possible from all complexity. We use glycerine for making what may be called our tinctures, and in my clinique I am introducing a series of 'waters'—aqua ferri, aqua chloroformi, aqua opii, aqua quinae, and so on—to form the menstruums of other active drugs when they are called ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!"[2:1] So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... losing these precious ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn something of the mystery and complexity ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... their integrity of the existing organisations. The Roman Church has never hesitated to utilise in this sort of manner new spiritual forces, and, without many alterations of the old, to make new additions to her ecclesiastical machinery at the risk of increasing its complexity. The Church of England might in this respect have followed the example of her old opponent to very great advantage. But neither in the plan of 1689, nor in any of those which preceded or followed it during the period which elapsed between the Act of Uniformity and the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... that the elaborate and very interesting researches of the Marquis Corti, which have revealed such singular complexity of structure in the cochlea of the ear, had done more to clear up its doubtful physiology; but I am afraid we have nothing but hypotheses for the special part it plays in the act of hearing, and that we must say the same respecting the office of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... recognition is another. A stimulus occurring once has a certain effect; occurring twice, it has the further effect of recognition. Thus the phenomenon of recognition has as its cause the two occasions when the stimulus has occurred; either alone is insufficient. This complexity of causes in psychology might be connected with Bergson's arguments against repetition in the mental world. It does not prove that there are no causal laws in psychology, as Bergson suggests; but it does prove that the causal laws of psychology are Prima facie very different from ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... over in her mind some previous matters of which the threads still remained untangled. In this respect there was change. The old Mary Louise had been as open as a wild rose, as freshly and sweetly receptive to whatever wind came along. She had gathered complexity, was more serious, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... tenuous, tremulous, transparent inner man, or ghost—does not exist. The Oriental Ego is not individual. Nor is it even a definitely numbered multiple like the Gnostic soul. It is an aggregate or composite of inconceivable complexity,—the concentrated sum of the creative thinking of previous lives ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... not a great while to wait. The scrip and staff of a New Mexican traveller of Pedrillo's kind is of no great bulk or complexity. It takes but a short time to prepare it. A few tortillas and frijoles, a head or two of chile Colorado, half a dozen onions, and a bunch of tasojo—jerked beef. Having collected these comestibles, and filled his xuaje, or water gourd, Pedrillo reports himself ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... marriage vow sat but lightly on her in the early days of their separation. Her husband appears to have been for a short time more constant, but, convinced of her fickleness, to have become as unfaithful as she. And yet the complexity of emotions—ambition, self-interest, and physical attraction—which seems to have been present in both, although in widely different degree, sustained something like genuine ardor in him, and an affection sincere enough often ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... prominent place in the new flow onwards, it is unlikely that much can come of any attempt to leave the turbulent waters, go backwards, and start again; they can only flow onwards. To speak more plainly, the complexity of modern art influences may make it necessary to call attention to the primitive principles of expression that should never be lost sight of in any work, but hardly justifies the attitude of those anarchists in art who would flout ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... more natural or more congruous with all the analogies of experience than that animals should feel and think. The relation of mind to body, of reason to nature, seems to be actually this: when bodies have reached a certain complexity and vital equilibrium, a sense begins to inhabit them which is focussed upon the preservation of that body and on its reproduction. This sense, as it becomes reflective and expressive of physical welfare, points more and more to its own persistence and harmony, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... ample. As the writer had the honor for some years to be a prosecuting attorney for the United States Government and therefore has some familiarity with the trial of criminal causes, his opinion may possibly have some value in suggesting that the complexity of different issues when tried together, and the difficulty of distinguishing between various testimony, naturally increases with the simultaneous trial of a large number of defendants. Where each defendant is tried separately, the full force of the testimony ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... entrance into a new life, and she did not wish to speak of it, to lower that feeling with inexact words. But even later, on the morrow, and on the third day, she not only could find no words for expressing the whole complexity of these feelings, but she could not find even thoughts, in revolving which she might clearly define to herself whatever was going on ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... saw the complexity unravel itself, and the knot in his head began to loosen, but he did not quite like to reflect that he owed his relief to Tom, and that Tom had seen his agitation. Accordingly, when a proof of the poster was brought, he was ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" — a result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... apart from anything that they may mean or represent, are expressive of moods—the colors of a painting have a stimmung, so have tones and words, when rhythmically composed. The simplest aesthetic experiences, like the beauty of single musical tones or colors, are of no greater complexity; yet almost all works of art contain further elements; for as a rule the sensations do not exist for their own sakes alone, but possess a function, to represent things. The colors of a landscape painting are not only interesting ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... points of the organization. The brain of man, which exceeds that of all other animals in complexity of organization and fulness of development, is, at one early period, only "a simple fold of nervous matter, with difficulty distinguishable into three parts, while a little tail-like prolongation towards the hinder parts, and which had ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... that I'm giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course one acts as one can—as one must, perhaps—pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn't pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives—that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody's reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson's visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions—but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... of Protein.—Because of its complexity in composition, protein is capable of being used by the body in a greater variety of ways than starch, sugar, or fat. In addition to producing heat and energy, protein serves the unique function of furnishing material for the construction ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... beginning any more than we can conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... world had brought him down here, just the time-honored search for treasure. In all particulars the adventure had seemed the usual one, two men undertaking to share whatever lay ahead, expense, danger or loot. And through no fault of his own Kendric saw simplicity altered into complexity. There were Barlow's changed attitude, the desires and ambitions of Zoraida, the absurdity of Bruce West's infatuation, the interference of Ruiz Rios and finally the situation in ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... security in historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life—all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... ourselves have paid. No one will, of course, pretend that such a reconciliation of the facts of sin with the axiom or intuition of Divine all-goodness is other than incomplete; we merely urge that, having regard to the magnitude and the complexity of the subject it could not be otherwise. A theory, without accounting for all the facts, may be true so far as it goes, correctly indicating the way which, if we could pursue it further, would lead us into more and fuller truth. No doubt, when that which is perfect is come, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... whence it was transmitted by telegraph to Paris. The Emperor, surprised but not disconcerted by this intelligence, received it at St. Cloud on the 11th of April, and two hours after he was on the road to Germany. The complexity of affairs in which he was then involved seemed to give a new impulse to his activity. When he reached the army neither his troops nor his Guard had been able to come up, and under those circumstances he placed himself at the head of the Bavarian troops, and, as it were, adopted ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... a perfect labyrinth of complexity. But it was the labyrinth for which the earlier economist held, so he thought, the thread. No matter how dark the passage, he still clung tight to it. And his thread was his "fundamental equation of value" whereby each thing and everything is sold (or tends to be sold) under ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... categories are, no doubt, unphilosophical in the ultimate sense, but they are proximately convenient and significant. Now, if progress be thus defined, we can see for ourselves that life has truly advanced, not merely in terms of anatomical or physiological—i. e. mechanical or chemical—complexity, but in terms of mind. The facts of nutrition teach us that the first life upon the earth was vegetable; and though the vegetable world displays great complexity, and that which, on some definitions, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... cooling the bearings and other parts liable to attain high temperature. Although the water used for cooling the bearings indirectly supplements the action taking place in the separate oil coolers, it is of necessity a separate auxiliary service in itself, and the complexity of the system is thus added to. A carefully constructed water service, however, is hardly likely to give trouble of a mechanical nature. The more serious deficiencies usually arise from conditions inherent to the design, and as such must ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... the double lines represent the fissures partially filled with oxide of iron and agate: the curvilinear lines show the course of the innumerable, concentric, concretionary zones of different shades of colour and of coarseness in the particles of tuff. The symmetry and complexity of the arrangement gave the surface an elegant appearance. It may be seen how obviously the fissures determine (or have been determined by) the shape, sometimes of the whole concretion, and sometimes only of its central parts. The fissures also determine the curvatures of the long undulating zones ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... a tableau at that moment such as never has been equaled on the stage under all the complexity of colored lights. It was a scene never to be forgotten by any of the witnesses, a scene awful in its intensity of dramatic effect. The woman suddenly appeared to become frozen with horror. The men removed their masks ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... action to be noticed are:—1. Want of action; 2. Want of expression of countenance; 3. A stiff, or a careless, attitude; 4. Want of appropriateness; 5. Excess of motions of the hands and arms; 6. Too great violence of action; 7. Too great complexity; 8. A mechanical uniformity; 9. Tardiness, the action following the utterances when it should accompany it, or slightly ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... into a variety of subdivisions. To the acute and patient observer, it will appear that the operations of Nature are contrived with admirable simplicity; but man, in his endeavours to explain them, has generally resorted to a mysterious and discouraging complexity. Thus, as might be expected, the same faculty, according to different authorities, has dissimilar energies,—one is detected to encroach on the boundary of another, and when the mechanism of mind, fabricated ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... developed as could be entrusted to go to distant parts in charge of fellow-workmen and erect the finished engines. A union of many qualities was necessary here. Managers of erection had to be managers of men, by far the most complicated and delicate of all machinery, exceeding even the Watt engine in complexity. When the rare man was revealed, and the engine under his direction had proved itself the giant it was reputed, ensuring profitable return upon capital invested in works hitherto unproductive, as it often ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... suggested by Mr. Wallace and by other critics that we have been too exclusively preoccupied with the idea of telepathy, that we have tried to force into that category phenomena which need a different or a further explanation. Considering the complexity of these phenomena there may well be some truth in this criticism, yet we should surely be unwise if we relaxed our insistence on the importance of telepathy, or the transference of thought or feeling from mind to mind without the agency of the recognized ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... and bursting shells, and were doubtful what to make of it all. Telephone wires trailed across the ground for miles, were cut into short lengths by shrapnel and high explosive. Accidents happened as part of the inevitable blunders of war. It was all a vast tangle and complexity of strife. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... "It stuck and broke ve dish to get it out. Good-bye. Vis is where I live." And he clattered up the steps and vanished, hoop and all, through the front doorway, leaving the stranger to marvel at the precocity of western children and at the complexity of ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... out of the complexity of his emotions, he fully realized that he was angry at himself and that his anger at himself was growing more acute from the fact that he realized that the anger was justified. For he woke to the knowledge that he had allowed himself to grow selfish. He resented ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... bony frame, are illustrated by the various individuals comprising this moving throng. But what a wonder it is, this snatch at the central life of a mighty city as it rushed by in all its multitudinous complexity of movement! Hundreds of objects in this picture could be identified in a court of law by their owners. There stands Car No. 33 of the Astor House and Twenty-Seventh Street Fourth Avenue line. The old woman would miss an apple from that pile which you see glistening on her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... critics and expositors of the twentieth century. Simple explanations of ancient beliefs are often by reason of their very simplicity highly improbable. Recognition must ever be given to the puzzling complexity of religious thought in Babylonia and Egypt, and to the possibility that even to the priests the doctrines of a particular cult, which embraced the accumulated ideas of centuries, were invariably confusing ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... in touching the goal; but somehow these smart hits disturbed rather than amused her. Knight's complexity was a puzzle to her. She could not understand, despite his explanations, why these fireworks of dexterity were worth while. Knight was a brave figure of romance. She did not want her hero turned into an intriguer, no matter how ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Economics exchange is exactly balanced by the respective advantages of the exchangers; just as in pure dynamics you have the parallelogram of forces. In the immense complexity of the real world material, friction, and a million other things affect the ideal parallelogram of forces; and in economics other conscious passions besides those of mere avarice affect exchange: there ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... movement and further introductions. Davies was led to the stepmother, and I found myself confronting the daughter with quickened pulses, and a sudden sense of added complexity in the issues. I had, of course, made up my mind to ignore our meeting of yesterday, and had assumed that she would do the same. And she did ignore it—we met as utter strangers; nor did I venture (for ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... only the author's life and thought but also the spirit of the age and the ideals of the nation's history. The third aim is to show, by a study of each successive period, how our literature has steadily developed from its first simple songs and stories to its present complexity in prose and poetry. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... progress of science it is universally found that complexity leads to simplicity, and in narrating the history of scientific research it is often advisable ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... throttle, pushed the levers back and forth, and listened to clicking sounds high up in the complexity of the engines. He knew that every lever threw long systems of vents and valves in and out of play. A wrong combination would easily wreck all this powerful machinery. He was tackling a delicate job—like juggling a ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... laid down in the freedom manifesto, and boldly entered upon the policy of reaction and repression that it has ever since pursued. It now finds itself confronted by social and political problems of extraordinary difficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic cooeperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might, perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost universal ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... which its acquisitions are combined together, wherein inherited qualities are crossbred, wherein special traits have accumulated in such a way as to produce the most original and the most sensitive of beings. As civilization increases, so does his complexity: with the result that man's originality strengthens and his sensitivity become keener; from which it follows that the more civilized he becomes, the greater his repugnance to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... height, but as it drew nearer, the wall resolved itself into a wild array of columns, and eddies, and whirlpools, and great full-bosomed clouds, that rolled and swam and rose and fell with maddening complexity. Then came a breath of deadly chillness, and then a horror of great darkness—a darkness that could be felt. The skipper himself took to the fore rigging, and placed one of the watch handy to the wheel; finally he called all hands up very quietly, and the ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... my readers should not be intimidated by the apparent vastness and complexity of this enterprise of forming the literary taste. It is not so vast nor so complex as it looks. There is no need whatever for the inexperienced enthusiast to confuse and frighten himself with thoughts of "literature in all ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... ends that met us at every turn in street and chapel and hall—that old Cambridge is as dead as the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The new Cambridge, with its bustling syndics for ever on the move—its bewildering complexity of examinations—its "sweet girl-graduates with their golden hair," its delightful "notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement," its glorious wealth of collections and appliances and facilities for every kind of study and research, is alive ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... those who regard Fiesco's inconsistency as an artistic complexity of motive going to show that Schiller had progressed in the knowledge of life and become aware that human heroism is apt to be more or less mixed with base alloy. One writer[45] thinks it shows "how intelligently he had studied the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... interfere with each other that all shall fail, or they may combine, and by cooperation raise their efforts against nature to a higher power. This latter method is industrial organization. The crisis which produces it is constantly renewed, and men are forced to raise the organization to greater complexity and more comprehensive power, without limit. Interests are the relations of action and reaction between the individual and the life conditions, through which relations the evolution of the individual is produced. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... rate, had ceased to expect much affection in his wife for him; but he thought she was sensible, and equal to any complexity of circumstances, or even to disaster. He thought this, not on any positive evidence; but he concluded, somewhat absurdly, that her coldness meant common sense and capacity for facing trouble courageously and with deliberation. He had ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the name of mamma's first husband. Then I'm not a Callingham at all!" I cried, unable to take it all in at first in its full complexity. "I'm really a Wharton!" ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... more lively and more demonstrative in youth, and thus it is that in youth the reform spirit is at its height and recedes as time goes on. What we call "experience" chills enthusiasm and passion, but though hope deferred and a realization of the complexity of human affairs has a moderating, inhibiting result, there is as much or more importance to be attached to bodily changes. If you could attach to the old man's experience and knowledge the body of youth, with its fresher arteries, more resilient muscles and joints, its exuberant glands ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... The resolution and self-reliance of an American were his, and so was the individuality. That such enterprises are not now conducted single-handed is owing not to a lack of courage but to the greater complexity of life, the more constant sense of interdependence, the existence of greater solidarity in intellectual pursuits. Webster was unable to believe that a company of scholars could ever be formed who should carry forward a revision of the Bible, and therefore he made the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... and more readily precipitated than others. From this cause there is in complex metal deposits a rearrangement of horizontal sequence, in addition to enrichment at certain horizons and impoverishment at others. The whole subject is one of too great complexity for adequate consideration in this discussion. No engineer is properly equipped to give judgment on extension in depth without a thorough grasp of the great principles laid down by Van Hise, Emmons, Lindgren, Weed, and others. We may, however, briefly examine some of the theoretical effects ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... to tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at her in a ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... has what Bacon would call two inconveniences. The first is complexity. The various ways in which the formal rhythms of verse combine with the infinitely modulated rhythms of natural prose produce a resultant which is complicated to the last degree and which almost precludes orderly exposition. No system ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... of a game and a musical joke which lasts forty-five minutes, and has given the author, the executants, and the public a good deal of tiring work. These symphonic poems are most difficult to play on account of the complexity, the independence, and the fantastic caprices of the different parts. Judge for yourself what the author expects to get out of the music by these ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... dirty fragments. Was there a black rag, and was there a white, or were both rags parti-coloured? To take only the one point of the children, it would seem a very simple matter to determine whether a man has five daughters or two; and yet the more I looked into it, the more I saw the complexity. Even if three little girls were produced for my inspection, it was utterly impossible for me to tell whether they really were the model's. Nor was it open to me to repeat the device of Solomon and have them hacked in two to see whose heart ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... "Subject the complexity of life to a thought harmonious and clear, a constant mark of the Latin genus, for a group of trees as well as an entire nation, an entire religion—Catholicism. It is the contrary in the races of the North. Significance of the word: the ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... the most valuable kind of unity, attempts to join with other Christians outside her borders in considering a basis of union with them are unwise at least at the moment, as tending to increase the complexity and the difficulties of the position within, and as therefore to be deprecated in the interests of unity itself. I do not think so, but believe that assistance may thus be obtained in reaching a satisfactory settlement even of ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... paragraph is ordinarily from fifty to three hundred words, depending on the importance or complexity of the thought. In exposition, the paragraphs should be long enough to develop every idea thoroughly. Scrappy expository paragraphs arouse the suspicion that the writer is incoherent, or that he has not given sufficient thought to ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... long years by different men in far distant lands, the discussion of their probable errors, and their reduction to a common standard. The latter requires the use of the most refined methods of mathematical analysis; it is, as Newcomb says, "of a complexity beyond the powers of ordinary conception." In works on celestial mechanics a single formula ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... order of phenomena that admit of being classed as visions are the "Number-Forms" to which I have just drawn attention. They are in each case absolutely unchangable, except through a gradual development in complexity. Their diversity is endless, and the Number-Forms of different persons are mutually unintelligible. These strange "visions," for such they must be called, are extremely vivid in some cases, but are almost ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... is congenial, and I feel guilty of selfishness in answering it in this way. But he must be a poor workman, whether artisan or artist, who does not welcome an excuse now and then for shutting out the fascinating and maddening complexity of this shining world to concentrate his random wits on some honest and self-stimulating expression of ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military zone had been declared, because as yet there was no war! When would the declaration ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... the law of the inclinations of the head, a law which derives from its very complexity the fertility of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of almost any condition that may be classed under the head of "hip lameness" is not easy except in cases where the cause is obvious, as in wounds of the musculature and certain fractures. To the complexity which the gait of the quadruped contributes, because of its being four-legged, there is added the complicated manner of articulation of the bones of the hind leg. This involves the hip in the manner of diagnostic problems ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... were to attempt to describe and define the characteristics, with reference to dissolved mineral content and temperature, which make a given water more desirable than another, we should enter a field of the most amazing complexity and one with many surprising contradictions. For the most widespread use, the most desirable water is a cold water as free from mineral content as possible, and especially one lacking an excess of lime ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Cup Miss Ellen Terry made the strongest impression, her part being noble and sympathetic, while Sir Henry Irving had the ungrateful part of the villain. To be sure, he was a villain of much complexity; and Tennyson thought that his subtle blend of Roman refinement and intellectuality, and barbarian, self-satisfied sensuality, was not "hit off." Synorix is, in fact, half-Greek, half-Celt, with a Roman education, and the "blend" is rather too remote ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... What a complexity of strange coincidences combined, coming out of nothing as it were, advancing like spirits summoned on to the stage, all to effect this end! Think of the American Colonies; with one little exception they were perhaps the most completely ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... sake; that is a Christian product. Everything in that old world would appear to have been clean and obvious. A good man was a good man; a bad man was a bad man. For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel; for the novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant landscape unpleasant. Hence ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... come. He was troubled, and prayed at random for the dying—thinking of the dead. At the same time he felt himself the chief of sinners and knew that there was a devil in him capable of repeating his nocturnal act. Never before had he gathered so vital a knowledge of the complexity of man. He saw the threads of him all ravelled up. When he finished his prayers at the bedside, the invalid watched him with ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... delight here are almost barbarous in their simplicity. There is a surfeit of assonance—all, shore, shore, lord; heart, Arthur; ways, safe, pain. The alliteration is without complexity,—a dreary procession of sibilants. Worst of all are the monotonous incidence of the stress, and the unrelieved, undistinguished, crowded ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... me to seek complexity in so simple a soul as was that of this young Hungarian peasant girl. Elsa Kapus had no thought of self-analysis; complicated sex and soul problems did not exist for her; she would never have dreamed of searching the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... a planet like Marduk would have to be something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the Sword-Worlds. Maybe this Goldberg-ocracy of theirs had been forced upon them by the sheer complexity of the ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... per cent of those already naturalized, with their American children. The principle here seems to be that we can assimilate from any land in, and only in, proportion to the number already assimilated from that land. But the difficulty of applying such a test lies in the complexity of the assimilative process. No measure yet exists for assimilation. Anthropologists are convinced that various strains in the populations, for example of France, or Great Britain, which have been dwelling together for centuries, are not by any means assimilated. Mere naturalization is not a sufficient ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... columns of like character are erected. Metal forms of various patterns are made by firms manufacturing concrete block molds and can be purchased from stock or made to order. Where the column is to be molded in place form construction becomes a matter of pattern making, the complexity and cost of which depends entirely upon the architectural form and ornament to be reproduced. The molding of ornament and architectural forms in concrete is discussed in Chapter XXIII, and the two examples of ornamental column ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... from these rights, which one may safely say will never be exercised, the financial arrangements will from their very complexity be a constant source of trouble. All taxes levied in Ireland are to be paid into the English Exchequer (or as it is called in the Bill "The Exchequer of the United Kingdom"). Some of the objects ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... but the same many-folded sand upon the sun-bright bottom of the bay. Yet the terrace to which I was then holding was as thick with strong sea-growths as a tuft of heather, and the cliff from which it bulged hung draped below the water-line with brown lianas. In this complexity of forms, all swaying together in the current, things were hard to be distinguished; and I was still uncertain whether my feet were pressed upon the natural rock or upon the timbers of the Armada treasure-ship, when the whole tuft of tangle came away in my hand, and in an instant I ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hipparchus ever intended that theory as anything more than a geometrical fiction. It is not to be regarded as a representation of the actual celestial motions. And, as might be expected, for such is the destiny of all unreal abstractions, the theory kept advancing in complexity as facts accumulated, and was on the point of becoming altogether unmanageable, when it was supplanted by the theory of universal gravitation, which has ever exhibited the inalienable attribute of a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... considered the brute is the image of man just as much as man is the image of God, the difference being quantitative and not qualitative. Evolutionists claim that "man's superiority over the brute results from greater complexity and superior development of the brain." Now if man, as they say, once lived the life of the brute, and his superiority now is simply quantitative, why is it that his inferiors of to-day are not passing into real manhood? They are far superior to any creature which is "not ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... still. The laws of growth and development pushed him on. Whether he would or not, he was compelled to move forward, just as the acorn, obeying the law of its being, changes its form, its size, and adds to its complexity. Little by little man, obeying these inexorable laws, began to develop. His mental, his moral, and his physical natures gradually assumed new forms—new needs and desires were born. More and more his vision became expanded until he could see into and ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... acknowledging nevertheless some correct rules of morality, as an external practical concern, had the advantage of enjoining them, as far as it chose to do so, with the force of superstition, a stronger authority with a rude conscience than that of plain simple religion. That system exercised a mighty complexity and accumulation of authority, all avowedly divine; by which it could artificially augment, or rather supersede, the mere divine prescription of such rules, making itself the authority and prescriber; and thus could infix them ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... psychological memory, seeing that the analogies between them are so numerous and precise. Consciousness is but an adjunct which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency of repetition, complexity of operation, or other causes, involve what I ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... established between its most popular and essential creations, and those of any other faith; but because, even all that it borrowed it rapidly remodelled and naturalized, growing yet more individual from its very complexity, yet more original from the plagiarisms which it embraced; Secondly, that it differed in many details in the different states, but under the development of a general intercourse, assisted by a common language, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... At the present time Germany is buying and selling and trading with the outside world, cables from Berlin are being sent almost as freely to New York as cables from London and German merchants are making contracts, maintaining connections of very considerable complexity. But if this machinery of non-intercourse were organized as it might be, there would be virtually no neutrals, and its effect in our world today would be ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... he was after, made his working hours an absorbing pleasure rather than an exasperating penance. And through his secluded life, with its singleness of purpose, its absence of the social ambitions of his youth, and the complexity of life in the world, the restlessness and agitation of his earlier devotion to his art disappeared. He was content to forget the expression of himself—that youthful longing—in contemplating and enjoying the created matter. In other words, the art of creation was ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... of chemical composition of saponin is admirably adapted for the nutrition of the plant, and it is associated with the corresponding complexity of the morphological elements of the plant's organs. According to M. Perrey,[44] it seems that the power of a plant to direct the distribution of its carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to form complex glucosides is indicative of its higher ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... eastern quarters, where immense craters like Tycho and Copernicus are visible to a keen eye, gleaming like polished buttons. With a telescope, even of moderate power, the surface of the moon presents a scene of astonishing complexity, in which strangeness, beauty, and grandeur are all combined. The half of the moon turned earthward contains an area of 7,300,000 square miles, a little greater than the area of South America and a little less than ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... difficulty in this world is that the simple things are sometimes very hard to bring about. It is true in a certain sense that if we bring to a man something that is difficult and complex it catches the mind by its very complexity and strangeness. But if we come to him and say that mud is one of his worst enemies it seems hard to him that it could be as bad as it really is, as he is sort of friendly toward the mud. So many are familiar with the ...
— Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... POOR LOUDON," it began, "I labour far into the night getting our affairs in order; you could not believe their vastness and complexity. Douglas B. Longhurst said humorously that the receiver's work would be cut out for him. I cannot deny that some of them have a speculative look. God forbid a sensitive, refined spirit like yours should ever come face to face with a Commissioner ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... understand it as we understand electricity, even, but that doesn't warrant our saying it is something special, something different in kind and distinct from everything else in the universe—do you think it does? May it not be that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the same order as the activities we already know in science? I don't see, really, why we should imagine there is a special order of life, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... another thing I wish you to notice specially in these statues —the way in which the floral moulding is associated with the vertical lines of the figure. You have thus the utmost complexity and richness of curvature set side by side with the pure and delicate parallel lines, and both the characters gain in interest and beauty; but there is deeper significance in the thing than that of mere effect in composition; significance ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... spirit-case, lay open a once handsome workbox,—no silks now on the skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by use, in its nest of tarnished silk slept the golden thimble. There, too, in the corner, near a music-stand piled high with musical compositions of various schools and graduated complexity from "lessons for beginners" to the most arduous gamut of a German oratorio, slunk pathetically a poor lute-harp, the strings long since broken. There, too, by the window, hung a wire bird-cage, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sensible proceeding, on the part of our rulers at home, would be to consider this country in the light of a recent conquest. Instead of declaring, as now, that the natives are to be treated in every way as British subjects — thus making them amenable to the English law in all its complexity, whilst their own laws and habits are so entirely opposite in character — it would be better to pass a few simple ordinances, in the nature of military law, which would be intelligible to the natives themselves, and which would avoid the difficulty of applying the cumbrous machinery of our ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... for similar reasons, may also prescribe the action to be taken, in considerable detail. Examples occur during operations of unusual complexity, or when the personnel factors call for special care ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... violence of his shock and his excitement. It was clear that he had never seen anything quite like Philippa Tarrant before, and that he found her incredibly and ambiguously interesting. Ambiguously—no other word did justice to the complexity of his facial expression. He did not know all at once what to make of Philippa, and, from further and more furtive manifestations of Furnival's, Straker gathered that the young man was making something queer. He had a sort ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... assizes, and a university—whose college of medicine was famous in the days of Rabelais. It has the modern attributes of steam-heated, electric-lighted hotels and restaurants, a tramway system that is appalling and dangerous to all other traffic by reason of its complexity, and an Opera House and a Hotel de Ville that would do credit to a city ten ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... we associate money questions with that which is unhappy, unfortunate, down-at-the-heel, with fear and misery? Barring mere accidents, it is because we are careless, shiftless; because we do not face the problem manfully, practice reasonable self-restraint, consider the subject in its complexity and decide upon, and carry out, a constructive programme. Even if one happens to possess wealth, he is not exempt. Indeed, large wealth involves still greater necessity for care in the conduct of one's ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... nonsense. But life intoxicates me by its wonderful complexity, by the variety of its phenomena, which at times seem like a miracle to me. Perhaps we are too sparing in the expenditure of our feelings. We live a great deal in our thoughts, and that spoils us to a certain extent. We estimate, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... various recesses of his waistcloth admittedly melts the austerity of the superficial of both sexes. But can you, beneath the undeceptive light of day, turn a sere and unattractive hag into the substantial image of a young and beguiling maiden, and by a further complexity into a fruitful fig-tree; or induce a serpent so far to forsake its natural instincts as to poise on the extremity of its tail and hold ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... cadet officers' school at the same time, chance made them roommates and choice soon made them chums. They had in common cleverness and the abundant energy that must continually express itself in action, and a mutual attraction in the very complexity of dissimilar traits that wove ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... The complexity of life began to weigh upon Freddie. Life was like one of those shots at squash which seem so simple till you go to knock the cover off the ball, when the ball sort of edges away from you and you miss it. Life, Freddie ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... as laborious in modern science, starting as it does from multiplicity, as in Thomas Aquinas, who started from unity; and it is necessarily less successful, for its true aims, as far as it is science and not disguised religion, were equally attained by reaching infinite complexity; but the assertion or assumption of ultimate unity has characterized the Law of Energy as emphatically as it has characterized the definition of God in theology. If it is a reproach to Saint Thomas, it is equally a reproach to Clerk-Maxwell. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple, profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steam utilization could be worked out. If one studies Stephenson's "Rocket" in detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existence de novo, however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... that the complexity of the individual during adolescence is due to the fact that at this time the brain and the whole body become at last awakened to their manifold capacities, and that the child now is not only capable of ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... fascinating kind of work, as will be found upon a trial. The simplest patterns look very interesting when woven, and, on the other hand, the work can be carried to any degree of complexity that the worker desires. For a first trial a piece might be done with no attempt at shading; even one such as that illustrated at fig. 186 would be suitable. This example happens to be a form particularly easy for carrying out in weaving. The worker should begin at the ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... has been felt that some explanation is required to account for the extreme complexity and artificiality of troubadour poetry in its most highly developed stage. Some nine hundred different forms of stanza [8] construction are to be found in the body of troubadour poetry,[5] and few, if any schools of lyric poetry ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood or habit of our mind we exclaim, how lucky! or, how providential! The co-presence of numberless phaenomena, which from the complexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the co-existence of these with any regular or necessary phaenomenon (as the clouds with the moon for instance), occasion coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... having little significance for Western men of affairs. Yet even so they had not silenced the voice of this persistent rebel; for he rose in equal rebellion against the ideals, methods, and standards of European cities. Wealth, commerce, industrial development, inventions, luxuries, and all the complexity of civilisation were of no more account to him than the toys of kings and the tag-rag of the churches. Other rebels had preached the gospel of pleasure to the poor, and had themselves acted on their precepts. Other reformers, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Realist and psychologist, symbolist and mystic by turns, and first and always a poet, he has been compared successively to Bourget and Maupassant, Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, Theophile Gautier and Catulle Mendes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Baudelaire. Such complexity of style is the outcome of his cosmopolitan taste in literature, and his tendency to assimilate for future use whatever pleases him in each successive author. Shakespeare and Goethe, Keats and Heine, Plato and Zoroaster, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer exists—the bit, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... But it was not so ordered by Providence. At that time the world was not in the stage of development when this particular direction of intellect could have been favored. The development of the physical sciences, with their infinite multiplicity and complexity, required more centuries of observation, collection and collation of facts, deductions from known phenomena, than the ancients had had to work with; while the more ethereal realms of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... difficult mathematical and physical analyses,—in which all so-called attractions and repulsions whatever will be resolved into results or phenomena of motion; ethereal, atomic, molecular, and massive motions; whose mutual reactions and momenta make the infinite complexity of the universe. Towards such a conclusion, serviceable contributions were made many years since, by three American cosmologists, Norton, Pliny Chase, ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... very recent years, Canada had been more anxious to get new railways than to control old ones, and, besides, the worse forms of discrimination which stirred indignation in the United States had not been widely practised in Canada. But with the growing complexity of the industrial organization, and the recognition that competition could not solve the difficulties, a demand rose for more efficient regulation. The Dominion government, acting upon an able and thorough report ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... poetical, if done in a certain spirit, as the work of the poet. It is essentially poetical, because the deeper that the man of science dives into the mystery, the darker and more bewildering it becomes. Science, instead of solving the mystery, has added enormously to its complexity by disposing of the old comfortable theory that man is the darling of Nature and that all things were created for his use. We know now that man is only a local and temporary phenomenon in the evolution of some dim and gigantic law; that he perhaps represents the highest ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... irregular mass of convolutions, differing so much in different brains, that any systematic arrangement would seem impossible. But by studying the subject more extensively and considering the structure of the simpler brains of animals, in which the complexity of the human brain is reduced to simpler forms, a mode of grouping and classifying the convolutions has been adopted by anatomists which is illustrated by the engraving, in which we see, not the numerous convolutions of a well developed human brain, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... young woman, tall, slender, in a white frock, with a white cloak, an indescribable complexity of soft lace and airy ruffles, round her shoulders. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where it caught the light, in a kind of crinkly ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... magnates of the city bourgeoisie—was quite without any cultural direction at all. The chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity, and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so that devotion to a theory or a candidate became translated ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... with windrows of dead leaves and pine-spills, and with the litter from myriads of birds'-nests that sheltered themselves on achitraves and galleries, and on the lofty capitals of the fluted pillars which rose, vistalike, a hundred feet above the clear-story, spraying out into a wondrous complexity of ribs to sustain the marvelous concrete vaultings full two hundred feet ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... include the shells? If shells are discarded a number of problems would be solved, such as the cleaning of the nuts and adjustments for shrivelled and empty nuts. Also, why reduce any of the weights or measures to percentages which only add to the complexity of the score? The actual amount of kernels recovered reflects both the size of nuts and the yield of kernels. Plumpness of the kernels is reflected in the total weight of kernels and does not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... celebrated writer on the law of evidence has wisely said: 'In criminal cases, the statement made by the accused is of essential importance in some points of view. Such is the complexity of human affairs, and so infinite the combinations of circumstances, that the true hypothesis which is capable of explaining and reuniting all the apparently conflicting circumstances of the case, may escape the acutest penetration: but the prisoner, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... country accessible. Only those who have had the fortune to travel through this country can realize how difficult this endeavor has been and must continue to be, chiefly because of the great local complexity of the mountain system, but also because of the severely destructive storms of this region, with consequent torrential violence of the streams affected. But little money, too, can be, or has been, spent for the necessary road-work. In spite of the difficulties involved, however, ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... successive examples or any single extensive example without consciousness of a severe mental strain, followed by corresponding mental fatigue, are exceptions to a general rule. These troubles are due to the quantity and complexity of the matter with which the mind has to be occupied at the same time that the figures are recognized. The sums of pairs of numbers from zero up to nine form fifty-five distinct propositions that must be borne in memory, and the "carrying" is a further ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments, that a man cannot make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the pomp and sumptuousness of the world's history was simple in the truest sense. It was born ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... an illustration of a physiological diffusion of properties, and of the physical conditions of primitive volition, and traces in the evolution of mind and its organs, as in the evolution of other functions and their organs, a progressive specialization and increasing complexity." ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... choicest examples of those who have had it, and by the side of which the ordinary exhibitions of the divine history are pale and feeble. To few, indeed, as it seems to us, has it been given to feel, and to make others feel, what in all the marvellous complexity of high and low, and in all the Divine singleness of His goodness and power, the Son of Man appeared in the days of His flesh. It is not more vivid or more wonderful than what the Gospels with so much detail tell us of that awful ministry in real flesh and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... that morality, like politics, is a matter in which, owing to the complexity of circumstances and motives, one can not establish any principles (p. 563), and in this he agrees with Bacon and Aristotle—there are no positive religious and moral laws which may create principles for correct moral conduct ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... as it were, the bases of all pleasures and happiness. But these are few in number; they are hardly ever met with in a perfectly pure state; and their effect, when they are so met, is either momentary, or far from vivid. As a rule they are found in combinations of great complexity, fused into an infinity of new substances by the action of beliefs and associations; and these two agents are often of more importance in the result than are the things they act upon. Take for instance a ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Frank was almost incapable of reflection. He dwelt on an event which might happen, but which he dared not name; and if it should happen! Pictures of his father, his home his father's friends, Fenmarket, the Hopgood household, passed before him with such wild rapidity and intermingled complexity that it seemed as if the reins had dropped out of his hands and he was ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... little Millicent's complicity in that romance, and John's sinister secrets, and her own ineffectual repining—as she thought of these five antagonistic preoccupied souls and their different affairs, the pathos and the complexity of human things surged over ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... of action. In the same proportion we may assume a growing and more direct regard to casuistry; which is precisely the part of ethics that will be continually expanding, and continually throwing up fresh doubts. Not as though a moral principle could ever be doubtful. But that the growing complexity of the circumstances will make it more and more difficult in judgment to detach the principle from the case; or, in practice, to determine the application of the principle to the facts. It will happen, therefore, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... who wished to understand the personality of Acton could not do better than take the published Bibliography and read a few of the articles on "contemporary literature" furnished by him to the three Reviews. In no other way could the reader so clearly realise the complexity of his mind or the vast number of subjects which he could touch with the hand of a master. In a single number there are twenty-eight such notices. His writing before he was thirty years of age shows an intimate and detailed knowledge of documents and authorities which with most ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the battle of Leipzig will never be known, partly because of the extent and complexity of the area over which fighting continued for several days, and partly because of the immense number of troops of different nations which took part in this memorable encounter. It is principally the documents relating to the French army which are missing, because ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... coherent within themselves and more definitely marked off. The process parallels completely that by which the parts of an individual organism pass from their initial state of simplicity to their ultimate state of complexity. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... observe the Guru's main commands, especially the prohibition to smoke and cut the hair. Lastly, there are a considerable number who profess a respect for the Guru but follow Hindu beliefs and usages wholly or in part. Sikhism indeed reproduces on a small scale the changeableness and complexity of Hinduism, and includes associations called Sabha, whose members aim at restoring or maintaining what they consider to be the true faith. In 1901 there was a tendency for Sikhs to give up their peculiarities and describe themselves as ordinary ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... bedroom into which Leila had again and again apologized for having been obliged to squeeze her. The room was bigger and finer than any in her small apartment in Florence; but it was not the standard of affluence implied in her daughter's tone about it that chiefly struck her, nor yet the finish and complexity of its appointments. It was the look it shared with the rest of the house, and with the perspective of the gardens beneath its windows, of being part of an "establishment"—of something solid, avowed, founded on sacraments and precedents and principles. There was nothing about ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... phases of the ludicrous—those of pleasure and of hostility—containing small complexity, and a large proportion of emotion, are to a certain extent felt by the lower animals. Dr. Darwin has observed an approximation to the laughter of pleasure in monkeys, but he does not connect it with intelligence, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... who will tell them a story, with abundance of details and plenty of colour, and a realistic assurance that it is no mere make-believe. Macaulay never stops to brood over an incident or a character, with an inner eye intent on penetrating to the lowest depth of motive and cause, to the furthest complexity of impulse, calculation, and subtle incentive. The spirit of analysis is not in him, and the divine spirit of meditation is not in him. His whole mind runs in action and movement; it busies itself with eager interest in all objective particulars. He ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley |
