"Formative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... could think what she would have done if Judith had not been there; but then, Judith was one of the formative elements of her life—as much as was the food she ate or the thoughts she had. What she did was to turn as quickly and unhesitatingly as though she had always meant to do it, put her arm through Camilla's and draw her rapidly towards the gate where the surrey ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... his life, Bedient learned what America liked to read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had access only to a few noble books in their formative years. And Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has grown ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... of great world changes, before Time has fully done his work, is difficult. While mighty events are still in their formative period the future is obscure. But our inability to outline the future cannot blind us to the unmistakable trend of the evolutionary forces at work. One thing that is clear is that our boasted Christian ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... below the graft. This can easily be explained. The growth of the trunk or stem of all exogenous plants, or those which increase in size on the outside of the stem, is brought about by the descent of certain formative tissue called cambium, elaborated by the leaves and descending between the old wood and the bark, where it is formed into alburnum or woody matter. Some think that it is also formed by the roots and ascends from them ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... if one fit to own things could not at pleasure enter upon all, and incorporate them into himself or herself; Of vista—suppose some sight in arriere through the formative chaos, presuming the growth, fulness, life, now attain'd on the journey, (But I see the road continued, and the journey ever continued;) Of what was once lacking on earth, and in due time has become supplied—and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... of children about three thousand years ago; but the progress of truth in the world is proverbially slow. When parents and teachers, legislators and lawgivers, are at last heartily convinced of the inestimable importance of the first six years of childhood, then the plays and occupations of that formative period of life will no longer be neglected or left to chance, and the exercise of story-telling will assume its proper place ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... power was established in Media, the country had been—as in all nations in their formative state—ruled by chieftains, who acknowledged as their supreme lord the King of Assyria, who reigned in Nineveh. Among these chieftains was a remarkable man called Deioces, so upright and able that he was elected king. Deioces reigned fifty-three years wisely and well, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... possible to average human nature. Men are eternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, and praiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And in process of ages they have the power of making faithful and formative creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and de-formative. And this distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and evermore benedicti, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and evermore maledicti, is one going through all humanity; ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... eager, observant, reflective, aspiring, and always original young woman whose formative years have been divided between the stifling restrictions of the 'Pale' and the glorious freedom of America. The infectious optimism and high courage of the book, as well as the vigor and picturesqueness of its style, with its frequent ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Hartford began a new era in Harriet's life. It was the formative period, and it is therefore important to say a few words concerning her sister Catherine, under whose immediate supervision she was to continue her education. In fact, no one can comprehend either Mrs. Stowe or her writings without some knowledge of the life ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous, world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the street, "I have need of a great ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... He's not old, but he's bald. His eyes screw into you. His nose," another formative gesture, "is like that. A nawful big nose. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... This great critic also said, "Only with difficulty do we spell out from that which nature presents to us, the DESIRED word, the congenial. Men find what the artist brings intelligible and to their taste, stimulating and alluring, genial and friendly, spiritually nourishing, formative and elevating. Thus the artist, grateful to the nature that made him, weaves a second nature—but a conscious, a fuller, a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... still passing before our eyes. Rocks of eruption, sedimentary rocks, changed (metamorphosed) rocks, conglomerates — compound rocks are definite associations of cryctognostically simple fossils. There are four phases in the formative condition; rocks of eruption, p 20 endogenous (granite, sienite, porphyry, greenstone, hyperathene, rock, euphotide, melaphyre, basalt, and phonolithe); sedimentary rocks (silurian schist, coal measures, limestone, travertino, infusorial ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... on History,' 'Formative Influences,' 'Madame de Stael,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the Forum—the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in the ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... interesting period in the history of any country is the formative period; and through the mass of recently published original material on America the opportunity to tell its story well has been of late years greatly increased. In the preparation of this work I have endeavored to consult the original sources, ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... They had grown much, not only physically, but there had been development mentally and morally that would tell for good in the oncoming years. To have been under the guidance of such a couple as Mr and Mr Ross in such a formative period of their young lives was of incalculable value. Happy are the boys who have such guardians; happier still if their own parents are of ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... strongly formative period in Huxley's life. He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation: History ancient and modern, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... that conserve the body. Susan had not been so apt a pupil of Fanny Warham's as was Ruth, because Susan had not Ruth's nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional. But during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life Susan Lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium and prostitution to disintegrate them until the general break-up should come. In all her wanderings every man or woman or girl she ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... to the realisation of that oneness as the very end and goal of all discipline and growth. I suppose that we have to think here of the manifold and sad differences existing in Christian men, in regard to the depth and constancy and formative power of their faith. There are some who have it so strong and vigorous that it is a vision rather than a faith, a trust, deep and firm and settled, to which the present is but the fleeting shadow, and the unseen the eternal and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... observation he made to me one spring morning in 1919 when the Republican attitude toward the League of Nations was still in the formative process. Borah was "convinced" that Elihu Root and Will H. Hays were conspiring to induce the Republicans to accept the League and he said, quite seriously, that he had about come to the conclusion that it would be necessary to wreck the Republican ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... musing upon Tommy Ashe and Tommy's words and attitude, and began to take stock of himself. It seemed to him that Tommy Ashe felt ashamed of himself, whereas by all the precepts of his earlier life and the code he had assimilated during that formative period he, Wesley Thompson, was the one who should suffer a sense of shame. And he felt no shame. On the contrary he experienced nothing more than an astonishing feeling of exhilaration. Why, he could not determine. It ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... from what it actually was. Herder's general views were already incipient in him; and what Herder did was to deepen and intensify them.[82] Nevertheless the collision for the first time with a mind that revealed to him his own immaturity was for Goethe, as for every youth, a formative influence of the highest import and an epoch in his mental history. Yet in his association with Herder one fact has to be noted: Goethe was not subjugated by him. He frankly recognised Herder's superiority to himself in knowledge and experience, but he ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... enforced upon the adult mind its two master methods of advance by reasoning. But our children have their knowing also to attain to, their discoveries to make, their logic of proof, on occasions, to employ. Shall we lavish all the treasures of method on those who have passed the formative stage of mind, and acquired the bent of its activities? Rather, we think, the true intellectual method—combining both Baconian induction and Aristotelian deduction—yet waits to realize some of the best of the application and work ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... substances from the blood, thus altering the composition of the latter and perhaps stimulating the production of these substances in some other organ of the body. These substances may be provisionally called sexual formative substances. Smith's theory therefore is that the action of the testes in metabolism is rather to take something from the blood than to add something to it, and that it is this subtractive effect which influences the development of somatic ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... mythology must carefully weigh all these formative agents, and assign each its value. They are all present in every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... any other subject, her knowledge of him of the Chiltern she had married—was still wofully incomplete, and that in proportion to the lack of perfection of that knowledge her danger was great. Perhaps the Chiltern she had married was as yet in a formative state. Be this as it may, what she saw depicted on his face to-night corresponded to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... material vulgarity. We have laughed too heartily at the dinner of the ancients in 'Peregrine Pickle,' to wish to lead back the age to a classic model; and yet on all subjects connected with taste, there are some things to be learned from that people whose formative genius is still the wonder of the world. The meal of society among the Greeks consisted of only two courses, or, to speak more strictly, of one course and a dessert; and the first or solid course was in all probability made up of small ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... Teutonic? One needs to correct the Teutonic bias, and it is just there that the gymnastic of the classics comes in; it gives one a standard—a criterion in fact. One must have a criterion, mustn't one, or it is all loose, and indeed, so to speak, illusive? I am all for formative education; and it is there that women—I speak frankly in the presence of three intelligent women—it is there that they suffer. Their education is not formative enough—not formal enough, in fact! Now, I have tried ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "The formative stage of inebriety continues for a longer or shorter period, when, as is well known, more frequent repetitions of the practice of drinking are to be observed. The impulse to drink grows stronger and stronger, the will-power is overthrown ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... the Sessions, and to show the Chinese as soon as possible that we were one with them, and he succeeded. There was an enthusiasm and warmth distinguishing these early days of the Amoy church that were formative in a very high degree, and that ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... affected the earlier drama of England to a considerable extent[104], although good examples of Terentian comedy are not found until the 16th century. Humanism again comes forward as an important literary formative element. The part which the student class took in the development of European drama as a whole has as yet scarcely been appreciated. It is to scholars that the birth of the secular Drama must be attributed. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... in an organism we have these three things— formative matter, formed matter, and the forming principle or life; so in the soul we have the old nature, the renewed nature, and. the transforming Life. Natural ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... things that are naturally generated from seed cannot be generated naturally in any other way. It ought, then, rather to be said that in the natural generation of all animals that are generated from seed, the active principle lies in the formative power of the seed, but that in the case of animals generated from putrefaction, the formative power of is the influence of the heavenly bodies. The material principle, however, in the generation of either kind of animals, is either some element, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... pathological change would be proportioned to the size of the tumor, and that as the dimensions increase the resulting lameness would be the greater in degree. This, however, is not the fact. A small tumor while in a condition of acute inflammation during the formative stage may cripple a patient more severely than a much larger one in a later stage of the disease. In any case the lameness is never wanting, and with its intermittent character may usually be detected when the animal is cooled off after labor or ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... for some time, I found it desirable to limit it to events which had a distinctly formative influence on the development of European States. On questions of motive and policy I have generally refrained from expressing a decided verdict, seeing that these are always the most difficult to probe; and facile dogmatism on them is better fitted to omniscient leaderettes than to ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... to a close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck—the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... cosmical processes are out of the range of astronomical observation. We can only observe those indicated by light, and gravitation; but how small a proportion of the formative processes of our own world indicate themselves by these two classes of phenomena! How few of the chemical, vegetative, animal, moral, social, or even geological processes, now progressing under our own observation, could give us notice ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... ever fresh wonder on this marvellous contexture of human life, and on Him that moulds it all to His own perfect purposes. Let us bring the highest and largest principles to bear on the smallest events and circumstances, for you can never tell which of these is going to turn out a revolutionary and formative influence in your life. And if the highest Christian principle is not brought to bear upon the trifles, depend upon it, it will never be brought to bear upon the mighty things. The most part of every life is made up of trifles, and unless these are ruled by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... become vain. It may not be so in future; but the architecture we endeavoured to introduce is inconsistent alike with the reckless luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the squalid misery of modern cities; among the formative fashions of the day, aided, especially in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it indeed obtained notoriety; and sometimes behind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may detect the pathetic discord of its momentary grace, and, with toil, decipher its floral carvings choked with ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... set ourselves, with the inexhaustible diligence of hope, to the business of the spiritual life. We are to bring all the treasures of a manifested and possessed Redeemer to bear upon the passing hour, and to let Him be seen in us, "Christ our Life," always formative and empowering. ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... the Pope, the princes and nobility were all giving themselves with ardor to this higher culture. Under Dante the Italian language assumed new perfection. This period was to Vittoria one of intense stimulus, and it must have had a formative influence on her gifts and her mental power. Having no children, she adopted a young cousin of her husband, the Marchese del Vasto, to educate and to be the heir of their estates. In 1515, Pescara again returned and the entire island of Ischia ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Jersey who lived to be a minister, and for many years was in charge of a church at Berkeley. This youth was sensitive, delicate, and far from strong. His faith in human nature received a shock, and his disposition was warped at the most receptive and formative period of his life, by the terrible scenes of suffering on the one hand, and relentless cruelty on the other, that he witnessed in that fatal place. He wrote, in his memoir many years after: "I have since found that the whole world is but one great prison-house ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... imagined. Nor, again, can it be maintained that the denotative power of words with regard to accomplished things may be ascertained in the way of our inferring either the meaning of one word from the known meaning of other words, or the meaning of the radical part of a word from the known meaning of a formative element; for the fact is that we are only able to infer on the basis of a group of words known to denote a certain thing to be done, what the meaning of some particular constituent of that group may be.—Nor, again, when a person, afraid of what he thinks to be a snake, is observed to dismiss his ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... THE AUTHOR.—At the time of Mr. Ellis' visit to Hawaii the orthography of the Hawaiian language was still in a formative stage, and it is said that his counsels had influence in shaping it. His use of r instead of l in the words hula, alaapapa, and palaoa may, therefore, be ascribed to the fact of his previous acquaintance with the dialects of southern Polynesia, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... half a century with which these volumes are concerned may properly be regarded as the formative age of the Huguenots of France. It included the first planting of the reformed doctrines, and the steady growth of the Reformation in spite of obloquy and persecution, whether exercised under the forms of law or vented in lawless violence. It saw the gathering ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... anterior to the Civil War, was a species of golden age in our American annals. On the contrary, it was, as I remember it, a phase of development very open to criticism; and that in many respects. It was crude, self-conscious and self-assertive; provincial and formative, rather than formed. Socially and materially we were, compared with the present era of motors and parlor-cars, in the "one-hoss shay" and stove-heated railroad-coach stage. Nevertheless, what is now referred to as "predatory wealth" had not yet begun to accumulate in few hands; ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... this period went through an experience almost equally formative. Two years older than Bernard, she was also more mature for her years and had developed more evenly, and from the outset her engagement and marriage had meant more to her then to Bernard, because her girlhood had been unhappy and they provided a way of escape. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... He has so entirely established himself in that ideal that he no longer needs strivingly to assert it,—any more than Nature needs to pin upon oak-trees an affirmation that the idea of an oak dwells in her formative thought. Nature affirms the oak-idea by oaks; the consummate poet exhibits the same realism. He embodies. He lends a soul to forms. The real and ideal in Art are indeed often opposed to each other as contraries, but it is a false opposition. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... within it wonderful contributions were thus made. In the eleventh century Avicenna accounted for the fossils by suggesting a "stone-making force";(129) in the thirteenth, Albert the Great attributed them to a "formative quality;"(130) in the following centuries some philosophers ventured the idea that they grew from seed; and the Aristotelian doctrine of spontaneous generation was constantly used to prove that these stony fossils possessed powers of reproduction like ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... ideas through reading had become in his case a curious phenomenon," so Honore de Balzac has recorded in Louis Lambert, in which he has painted in the person of his hero his own formative years in the college school of Vendome. "His eye would take in seven or eight lines at once, and his mind would grasp the meaning with a velocity equal to that of his glance; sometimes even a single word in a phrase was enough to give him the essence of it. His memory was prodigious. He retained ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... he died on the 15th of April 1844. Bulfinch's work was marked by sincerity, simplicity, refinement of taste and an entire freedom from affectation, and it greatly influenced American architecture in the early formative period. His son, Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch (1809-1870), was a well-known Unitarian clergyman ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... none holds a truer picture of the time. Governor Dudley and Simon Bradstreet were both concerned in the whole course of the matter, which must have been discussed at home from day to day, and thus there is every reason for giving it full place in these pages as one of the formative forces in Anne Bradstreet's life; an inspiration and then a warning. There are hints that Anne resented the limitations that hedged her in, and had small love of the mutual criticism, which made the corner stone of Puritan life. That she cared to write had already excited the wonder of her ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... with its long appendage. Within this speck of matter are hidden the multifarious forces which, under certain favorable conditions, result in organization. Magnify this infinitesimal atom a thousand times, and no congeries of formative powers is perceived wherewith to work out the wonders of its existence. Yet it contains the principle, which is the contribution on the part of the male toward the generation of ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... is there to be said about her? Well, she does not leave; she stays here to complete the picture of the woman Torsen, child of the middle class who has read schoolbooks all through her formative years, who has learned all about Artemis cotula, but undernourished her soul. That is what she ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... is to stamp the young mind with right views of life; then comes book-learning—words, figures, and maps—but stories that educate morally are the primer of life. Christ taught spiritual truths by parables. I teach formative ideas by parables. The teacher should be a story-teller. In my own country all children go through fairy-land. Here they teach the young figures first, as though all of life was a money-market. It is all unnatural and wrong. I must ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the creative, formative and ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... not stellar. Two dark channels running almost parallel to each other and to the axis of the nebula have been observed by Bond; these, when prolonged, form into curves which terminate in two great rings. They are wide rifts which separate streams of nebulous matter, and are indicative that some formative processes may be ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while his zoologically human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There {258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going on. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... been ascertained that the legend of Arthur was familiar among the Normans before Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his books, and it certainly had an incalculable formative influence on European literature, much of which can be "traced back directly or indirectly to these legends." It was also a vehicle for that element which we call chivalry, which the church infused into it to fashion and mould the rude soldiers of feudal times into Christian knights, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... Hartford, he had started in 1857, in conjunction with other leading citizens, a paper called the Evening Press. It was devoted to the advocacy of the principles of the Republican party, which was at that time still in what may be called the formative state of its existence. This was a period in which for some years the dissolution had been going on of the two old parties which had divided the country. Men were changing sides and were aligning themselves anew according to their views on questions ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the present, one aspiration struck her as quite as innocent as the other. Stoddard had not yet emerged from the starry constellations among which she set him, to take form as a young man, a person who might indeed return her regard. Her emotions were in that nebulous, formative stage when but a touch would be needed to show her whither the regard tended, yet till that touch should come, she as unashamedly adored Gray as any child of five could have done. It was not till they were well down the road to Cottonville ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... which, of course, necessitates the opening of the mouth and free movement of the lips. It is remarkable how many excellent men suffer from this handicap, and how almost impossible it is to correct this after the formative years of life." ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... ears as the sound of their own voices. It was the common, the universal tongue. Not alone on Germany, not alone on Europe, but on every quarter of the globe that had developed coal-power civilization, the music of Wagner descended with the formative might of the perfect image. Men of every race and continent knew it to be of themselves as much as was their hereditary and racial music, and went out to it as to their own adventure. And wherever music reappeared, whether under the hand of the Japanese or the semi-African ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... men confirmed in Lanier a natural religious fervor. But the man who was destined to have a really formative influence over him was James Woodrow, of the department of science. A native of England and during his younger days a citizen of Pennsylvania, he had studied at Lawrence Scientific School under Agassiz, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... writings, and the innumerable controversies in which he was engaged throughout his life. I have not discovered in all this mass of material a single trace of Jewish influence. He had no Jewish friends or associates during the formative years, the period in which the Socialist ideas and ideals shaped themselves. His Socialism was the direct outcome of his experience as a successful manufacturer. He was not in any sense a man of books. From time to time he required large sums of money for his enterprises. Surely, if those enterprises, ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... cannot destroy the unfit, nor do we desire to do so, for from the educational point of view unfitness is merely bad adjustment. There is a place for every man in the world and it is the educators business to see that he reaches it, if not by formative, then by selective processes. This selection is badly made in our present state of civilization. It depends to a large extent upon circumstances remote from the training itself—upon caprice, either that of the person to be trained ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... that it is profitless to study the formative periods of English literature before trying to get acquainted with it in its present condition. One should work backwards, and not forwards, in this study. The practice of beginning with Anglo-Saxon writers, and studying down to nineteenth-century ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... though, may be assumed, that a man so animated by high principles as John Jay must have felt amply justified in taking the course he did. Of all distinguished New Yorkers in the formative period of the government, John Jay, perhaps, possessed in fullest measure the resplendent gifts that immortalise Hamilton. Nevertheless, it was the purity of his life, the probity of his actions, the excellence of his public purposes, that commended him to the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... extent of that limited development which can be made after maturity by persistent effort; but in the case of the young and growing child the information given in time, is a thousand fold more valuable, because it is in that formative, plastic condition where it is like the clay of the potter in the hands of the skillful parent or teacher. And when parents ask me how young a child may receive the benefits of an examination, I answer as soon as you are able to bring them to me, the younger the ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... warm from the stamping press of the mint, is more sharply impressed with its image and superscription than was the formative period of our government by the genius and personality ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... Russell Conwell's life in these formative days of boyhood who unconsciously had much to do with the course ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... 8. Contemplate the formative principles [forms] of things bare of their coverings; the purposes of actions; consider what pain is, what pleasure is, and death, and fame; who is to himself the cause of his uneasiness; how no man is hindered by another; ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... permanently established. The English Bible, on the other hand, was the growth of centuries. But to the contributions of able hands through many generations, during which the English language itself passed through a wonderful formative development, the incomparable beauty of King James' version owes its existence, and our literature ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... waters, would give to the spectator a vivid conception, in miniature, of the westward movement. But certain basic elements in the grand procession, revealed to the sociologist and the economist, would perhaps escape his scrutiny. Back of the individual, back of the family, even, lurk the creative and formative impulses of colonization, expansion, and government. In the recognition of these social and economic tendencies the individual merges into the group; the group into the community; the community into a new society. ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... unless we can discover some other ground, unless we know that the figure can be cogitated under the conditions upon which all objects of experience rest. Now, the facts that space is a formal condition a priori of external experience, that the formative synthesis, by which we construct a triangle in imagination, is the very same as that we employ in the apprehension of a phenomenon for the purpose of making an empirical conception of it, are what ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... odd jobs before he can obtain employment that offers any promise of future advancement. These years are often more than wasted, as he not only learns nothing of value from such casual jobs, but misses the healthy discipline of steady, orderly work, which is of so great importance during these formative ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... to the language of the Constitution that the President was soon repelled from using the Senate as his privy council and was thrown back upon the aid of the heads of the executive departments, who were thus drawn close to him as his Cabinet.[Footnote: In this formative process the Postmaster-General was left outside in Washington's time, since his functions were purely of a business nature, not directly affected by the issues on which Washington desired advice. The Postmaster-General did not become a member of ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... the body politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead formula on men's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... state it more broadly as the agency of the cell in all living processes. It seems at present necessary to abandon the original idea of Schwann, that we can observe the building up of a cell from the simple granules of a blastema, or formative fluid. The evidence points rather towards the axiom, Omnis cellula a cellula; that is, the germ of a new cell is always derived from a preexisting cell. The doctrine of Schwann, as I remarked long ago (1844), runs parallel with the nebular ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... but tentatively and with uncertain hands that scholars are trying to separate the racial strains in the folk-traditions of Europe, and here I can hardly do more than point out three formative elements in Christian customs: the ecclesiastical, the classical (Greek and Roman), and the barbarian, taking the last broadly and without a minute racial analysis. So far, indeed, as ritual, apart from mythology, is concerned, there seems to be a broad common ground of tradition among the Aryan-speaking ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period ...
— Progress and History • Various
... in at least one obvious and important particular from the careers of her sister colleges, Smith, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr,—in the swift succession of her presidents during her formative years. Smith College, opening in the same year as Wellesley, 1875, remained under President Seelye's wise guidance for thirty-five years. Vassar, between 1886 and 1914, had but one president. Bryn Mawr, in 1914, still followed the lead of Miss Thomas, first dean and then president. In 1911, Wellesley's ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... world were a mere expression of formative forces, then this song would be pathetic in its presumption. But why is there beauty at all in creation—the beauty whose only meaning is in a call that claims disinterestedness as a response? The poet proudly says: "Your flute could not have its music of beauty if your delight were not in my ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... represented in the Government, the weakness of the administration was such that only a bare majority of the House of Representatives was secured after a vigorous and aggressive campaign on the part of the Republican Party. Thus do the circumstances and incidents of the formative period in Mr. Lincoln's career illustrate and adorn the events that distinguished the man, the ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... the past to the Hellenic mind, whither the person who aspires to know the antecedents of himself and his culture must travel; or, he must learn of those who have been there, if he cannot go himself. Egyptian lore, which had a great influence upon the early Greek world in its formative period, must have some reflection in this primitive Greek book of education. So Telemachus, to complete his discipline, must reach beyond Greece into the Orient, he must get far back of Troy, which was merely an orientalizing Hellenic city; he must learn of ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... when no principle is sacrificed thereby and a point of contact with the masses can thus be established, so that the truth symbolized by the rite of baptism can be shown forth through the action of those formative, purifying, spiritual forces that sustain to the psychical realm the same relation that water ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... allusion to the seven activities or changes which water goes through to produce form; Water being the formative power which Fire, itself formless and the moving ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... were first published. The problem of the future is plainly the problem of China and no thoughtful person can afford to be indifferent to the vast transformation which is taking place as the result of the operation of the great formative forces ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... something worth remembering; and if he did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme example of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as grist, later to refine it for the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... great change in the fortunes of the Barrett family, and may be said to mark the end of the purely formative period in Elizabeth Barrett's life. Hitherto she had been living in the home and among the surroundings of her childhood, absorbing literature rather than producing it; or if producing it, still mainly for her own amusement and instruction, rather ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... fine advantage. It has become so respectable, too, you know. Yet few do excel, though many attempts are made. Try it, you are very susceptible to every personality; you have a very retentive memory with large formative powers. Just the requisites with your mentality for doing good to poor humanity. As a wise ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... observation and reasoning. Reflection on processes of nature, guided sometimes by fortunate or unfortunate accidents, may have led to the establishment of methods of procedure for gaining social and individual ends; and, as at this formative period the whole life of the community was permeated by religious conceptions, the procedures either were originally religious or speedily took ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals; and being constrained by necessity cannot act otherwise than as reason, which is its helm, ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... country community is producing for itself men and women of inferior resources as compared with their natural possibilities. Even the supposed social wholesomeness of earlier marrying in the country must be scrutinized with the value of sex sublimation during the formative years clearly ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... called ambrit), n. Mineral [from amber ite, mineral formative, 'O.E.D.'], a fossil resin found in masses amidst lignite coals in various parts of New Zealand. Some identify it with the resin of Dammara australis, generally ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... In this formative period Ben Sansome was, however, a very important figure in the woman's world. Social construction was a ticklish matter. There were so many things to be decided; small items of etiquette, the "proper thing" —procedure, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... consuming passion for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen—after the death of his father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father returned in him. He could draw in those days with great skill and vigour—it will seem significant to many ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... males, with appetencies just, Produce a formative prolific dust; With apt propensities, the Styles recluse Secrete a formative prolific juice; These in the pericarp erewhile arrive, Rush to each other, and embrace alive. —Form'd by new powers progressive parts succeed, Join in one whole, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... definite sign of their existence is perceptible; "protyle" seems likely long to evade recognition; and the only intelligible underlying principle for the reasonings employed—that of "one line, one element"—implies a throng beyond counting of formative material units. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... old the lad was taken from school and set to work under his father. But his education was by no means ended. There is a temptation to dwell on these early formative years because he himself was so fond of deducing lessons from the little occurrences of his boyhood; nor do I know any life that shows a more consistent development from beginning to end. There is, too, a peculiar charm in hearing the world-famous philosopher discourse on these petty ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... from the outset (and, of course, far, far more unrecorded,) I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps to my own character, now solidified for good or bad, and its subsequent literary and other outgrowth—the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for one, (doubtless the best)—the subterranean ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... alternative theory to offer. I do not think science can, at present, account wholly for national character. Climate and economic circumstances account for part, but not the whole. Probably a great deal depends upon the character of dominant individuals who happen to emerge at a formative period, such as Moses, ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... revisioning planned. The book is an accurate portrait of the Tuskegee of to-day, and reasonably forecasts the hopes for the institution of to-morrow. It tells with forceful directness and graphic precision the formative work that is being done for this generation, and supplies a fulcrum upon which there may justly rest a prophecy of greater things for the ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... I will show you that it is so in some detail, in the second of my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one of the things, and the most important of all things, I can positively declare to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances. And the best skill that any teacher of art could spend here in your help, would not ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... remarkable existence; his experience has been eminently formative," replied Desprez. "If I had had to choose an education for my son, I should have chosen such another. Beginning life with mountebanks and thieves, passing onward to the society and friendship of philosophers, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... swelled by the addition of a little girl, the daughter of John Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman of small property and fewer friends. He had met Joseph only once, at a lecture-hall in Holloway; but from that formative experience he returned home to make a new will, and consign his daughter and her fortune to the lecturer. Joseph had a kindly disposition; and yet it was not without reluctance that he accepted this new responsibility, advertised for a nurse, and purchased a second-hand perambulator. Morris ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... respectabilities in his serious dissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with his friend Priestley, perhaps the only English Nonconformist preacher who has ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcet refers to him as one of the formative ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... in which all knowledge was to be co-ordinated. He has, however, left enough poetry of such excellence as to place him in the first rank of English poets, and enough philosophic, critical, and theological matter to constitute him one of the principal intellectually formative forces of his time. His knowledge of philosophy, science, theology, and literature was alike wide and deep, and his powers of conversation, or rather monologue, were almost unique. A description of him ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... with one another quite so goldenly; or tell the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new and impossible ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... for Tennyson; I think my father's did not, though his head applauded. My mother, for her part, was entranced by the goldsmith's work of the noble poet, and by the gems enclasped in its perfection of formative art,—perfections within the pale of convention and fashion and romantic beauty which make lovely Tennyson's baronial domain. Henry Bright wrote verses, too; and he was beginning to be successful in a certain profound interest which customarily absorbs young men of genuine feeling who are not ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... winter of 1852-3, when a student at Poughkeepsie, N. Y., while the spot on which we now stand was Indian country as yet untouched by the formative power of national legislation, I listened to Miss Susan B. Anthony, Miss Antoinette Brown and others in the advocacy of the rights of women. It seems a strange fortune that brings now, nearly thirty years ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... American civilization dates. It is an important point to remember about America, and especially about the English colonies which were to become the United States, that they have had no memory of the Middle Ages. They had and have, on the other hand, a real, formative memory of Pagan antiquity, for the age in which the oldest of them were born was full of enthusiasm for that memory, while it thought, as most Americans still think, of the Middle Ages as a mere ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... Like a certain water insect, the reader instinctively selects from the outspread world of books the building materials for the house of his soul. He chooses here and rejects there, and remembers or forgets according to the formative desire of his nature. Yet it often happens that he forgets much that he needs to remember, and thus the question of ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... embraces three general periods. The first is the formative period, and extends to the Persian wars, 500 B.C. The second period covers the flourishing era of Greece, from 500 B.C. to 359 B.C. The third is the Macedonian period, when the freedom of Greece was lost,—the era of Philip and Alexander, and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of the present day would have equal force if based on the assumption that everybody knows the Biblical stories. Indeed it is a common remark made by professors of English in the higher institutions of learning that pupils know little of the Bible as a distinctly formative and conservative element in English literature. In the texts authorized for the study of English classics, Biblical allusions are very common. These have little meaning to pupils who have not read the Bible, unless the passage is pointed ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... certain principles which it enunciates, together with that part which deals with the technique of their practical application, are not of a general character, but have special reference to the particular case of the child from three to seven years of age, i.e., to the needs of a formative period ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... her husband in some passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good deal cut ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... How similar are the creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote! We see in this similarity only an evidence of the existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according to the formative pressure of external circumstances. The materials of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.' And then Mr. Nash points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... child has forced upon him a hint of any ulterior motive that may be in the mind of his teacher, the pleasure is spoilt for him and the intrinsic value of the play is lost. In bringing children into school during their play period, probably the most important formative period of their lives, and in utilising their play consciously, we are interfering with one of their most precious possessions when they are still too helpless to resent it directly. Too many of us make play a means of concealing the wholesome but unwelcome morsel of information in jam, and ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... formed from the blood, and are subjected to several changes before they are perfected. At their early formative stage, they are cartilaginous. The vessels of the cartilage, at this period, convey only the lymph, or white portion of the blood; subsequently, they convey red blood. At this time, true ossification (the deposition of phosphate and carbonate of lime) commences at certain points, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... rural school to the state university. The system in every state is quite complete and more or less efficient to accomplish its objects. The entire system is due to the presence of the Bible in our land, and especially during the formative period of our government. The states have deemed it necessary to train the young and rising generation in the interest of ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections, as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump rotundity, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... false, their opinion in this case must of necessity be likewise. I shall therefore conclude this chapter by observing that although a strong imagination of the mother may often determine the sex, yet the main agent in this case is the plastic or formative principle, according to those rules and laws given us by the great Creator, who makes and fashions it, and therein determines the sex, according to the council of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... claimed for it just that no other method for boys was so splendidly general, but they had, I judge, their own sense of the matter—which would have been that it all depended on what was meant by this. The truth was, above all, that to them the formative forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very definite by their measure and intention; there were "advantages," generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other matters, conceptions of character and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... reform throughout her vicissitudes did not show a bolder, more determined front to the foe than did her great citizen his own enemies and detractors. Dominique Ingres and his life-story favour those physicists who discern in native soil and surroundings the formative influences of aptitudes and character. The man and his birthplace matched each other. Indomitableness characterized both, and to understand both we must know something of their respective histories. To Montauban Henri Martin's great history does ample justice, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... social intercourse with men, but the excitement thus produced is not relieved by that natural collapse which should follow a state of vital turgescence. After referring to the biological facts which show the effect of psychic influences on the formative powers of the ovario-uterine organs in animals, Tilt continues: "I may fairly infer that similar incitements on the mind of females may have a stimulating effect on the organs of ovulation. I have frequently known menstruation to be irregular, profuse, or abnormal in type during courtship ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... some one has foolishly called "the mere handiwork, the furnisher's business, of the poet." It is the delight of the true artist that the product of his talent should be wrought to a high technique equally by the shaping brain and the dexterous hand. Browning is great because of his formative energy: because, despite the excess of burning ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... me. "Do you mean to imply," said he, with raised eyebrows, "that any woman would admit the possibility of acquaintanceship with any particular man's having had a formative influence on her character? After school-days, I mean ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... representatives duly chosen by the people of China in the elections that are now being held, has been called to meet in January next to adopt a permanent constitution and organize the Government of the nascent Republic. During the formative constitutional stage and pending definite action by the assembly, as expressive of the popular will, and the hoped-for establishment of a stable republican form of government, capable of fulfilling its international obligations, the United States is, according to precedent, maintaining full ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... of the instruction in college is to give the student access to vital and formative knowledge by studying man and his works, and nature and her works. He is thus led to know himself and to know the world, and the laws which govern nature, and man as a part of nature. He comes to see things as they are and ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... the one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending—the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring tends to resemble its parent or parents, more ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... contributed the main streams of settlement and social influence to the West. Even in Ohio political power was soon lost by the New England leaders. The democratic spirit of the Middle region left an indelible impress on the West in this its formative period. After the War of 1812, New England, its supremacy in the carrying trade of the world having vanished, became a hive from which swarms of settlers went out to western New York ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the comic supplements of the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with this matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that despite the narrowness of our outlook, the primitive conditions were ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... of the wine-press and the ploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the healthfully excited brain.—"It is wonderful," says ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... /n./ In the history of computing, 1961—1971 — the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when ferrite-core {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... realize, was opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some more modern, more divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize our typelessness and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had been easy—how easy it had been!—to catch the likeness of those formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the triumph and the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid commonplace of a society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated, electric-lighted ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... truly fathered by what is formative and expansive in his country and times than was Whitman. Not by the literature of his country was he begotten, but by the spirit that lies back of all, and that begat America itself,—the America that Europe ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... T'ien-t'ai school has some originality, and native and foreign ideas were combined by the followers of Bodhidharma. But the remaining schools were all founded by members of Indian sects or by Chinese who aimed at scrupulous imitation of Indian models. Until the eighth century, when the formative period came to an end, we have an alternation of Indian or Central Asian teachers arriving in China to meet with respect and acceptance, and of Chinese enquirers who visited India in order to discover the true doctrine and practice ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Morphology we should not speak of Gestalt or fixed form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of Bildung. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a bildende Kraft or Bildungstrieb, which works out the idea of the organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an idea. They are Nature's works of art—and so, incidentally, they require ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... reasonably be expected of him, and that he must depend upon his family for everything, he will grow up helpless, selfish and awkward, and no amount of later training will entirely counteract the pernicious effect produced in these early, formative years. When placed in school with other children, he will be very sensitive to correction, and may become morbid and unhappy, thus giving a wrong impression of the blind in general. If, on the other hand, the child is taught to be self-helpful, ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... fecundate, impregnate; procreate, progenerate[obs3], propagate; engender; bring into being, call into being, bring into existence; breed, hatch, develop, bring up. induce, superinduce; suscitate|; cause &c. 153; acquire &c. 775. Adj. produced, producing &c. v.; productive of; prolific &c. 168; creative; formative, genetic, genial, genital; pregnant; enceinte, big with, fraught with; in the family way, teeming, parturient, in the straw, brought to bed of; puerperal, puerperous[obs3]. digenetic[obs3], heterogenetic[obs3], oogenetic, xenogenetic[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... conclusion of Washington's second term drew near, he left no doubt as to his intentions. Though some of his best friends urged him to stand for reelection, he firmly declined. He felt that he had done enough for his country in sacrificing the last eight years to it. He had seen it through its formative period, and had, he thought, steered it into clear, quiet water, so that there was no threatening danger to demand his continuance at the helm. Many persons thought that he was more than glad to be relieved of the increasing abuse of the scurrilous editors. No doubt ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... their combinations, from which the artist cannot readily free himself. Models furnished by nature, as they are usually graceful, do not interfere with the preceding agencies, and all these forces united tend to give symmetry, grace, and the unity that belongs to simplicity. Taste which is in a formative state can but fall in with these tendencies of the art, and must be led by them, and led in a measure corresponding to their persistency and universality. If the textile art had been the only one known to man, ideas of the esthetic in shape would have been in a great measure formed through ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... with the inch rule of the archaeologist. Nor yet did Eastlake confine himself to the external forms of art and nature; he then laid the foundation of that intimate knowledge of the arts, be they called formative, architectural, plastic, or pictorial, the able elucidation of which renders his writings so valuable. Thus, whilst all the technical skill of ancient colorists is found in his style of painting, all the principles on which Dutch and Venetian masters proceeded ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... by consciousness: or it is understood as association of unconscious elements. In this case we remain in the world of sensation and of nature. Further, if with certain associationists we speak of an association which is neither memory nor flux of sensations, but is a productive association (formative, constructive, distinguishing); then we admit the thing itself and deny only its name. In truth, productive association is no longer association in the sense of the sensualists, but synthesis, that is to say, spiritual activity. Synthesis may be called association; but with ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... schoolboy; he came out the first soldier in the colonies, and one of the leading men of Virginia. Let us pause a moment and look at him as he stands on the threshold of this momentous period, rightly called momentous because it was the formative period in the life of such ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... men by certain particular causes, as leprosy, epilepsy, and the like; and these defects are sometimes brought about by the fault of the man, e.g. from inordinate eating; sometimes by a defect in the formative power. Now neither of these pertains to Christ, since His flesh was conceived of the Holy Ghost, Who has infinite wisdom and power, and cannot err or fail; and He Himself did nothing wrong in the order of His life. But there are some third defects, to be found amongst all men in common, by ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... the less he liked its atmosphere. And the closer his contact with Jay Gould the more doubtful he became of the wisdom of such an association and perhaps its unconscious influence upon his own life in its formative period. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... belonging to the higher Castes are kept in strict seclusion. During these formative years they are shut up within the courtyard walls to the dwarfing life within, and as a result they get dwarfed, and lose in resourcefulness and independence of mind, and above all in courage; and this tells terribly in our work, making ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael |
