"Infinitesimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was infinitesimal. Ever since man learned how to liberate intra-atomic energy, the vortices of disintegration had been breaking out of control. Such accidents had been happening, were happening, and would continue indefinitely to happen. More ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality, would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees—as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute as fatal ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... and at last they saw, far to the north, what seemed to be an almost infinitesimal bulge on the horizon. They reached it two days later; a land of rolling green hills, scarred here and there with ragged outcroppings of rock, and a land that climbed slowly and steadily higher as it went ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... to foot the little body in his arms stiffened suddenly. As one who saw the supreme achievement of a life-time swept away by some one careless joggle of an infinitesimal part, the Little Girl stared up agonizingly into her father's face. "Oh, I don't think—'buzzed' was the word!" she began convulsively. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... fingers were tearing the note now into infinitesimal shreds, and, with it, the newspaper clipping. The newspaper itself he crumpled up and tossed into the corner. He crossed the room, replaced the make-up box in its hiding place, put back the movable section of the base-board, turned out the ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... definition and investigation of curve lines (1637), constitutes an epoch in the history of the mathematical sciences. Two years previously, Cavalieri's work on Indivisibles had appeared. This method was improved by Torricelli and others. The way was now open, for the development of the Infinitesimal Calculus, the method of Fluxions of Newton, and the Differential and Integral Calculus of Leibnitz. Though in his possession many years previously, Newton published nothing on Fluxions until 1704; the imperfect notation he employed retarded very much the application ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... I took possession of his sword, which was a very beautiful and valuable weapon, the hilt ornamented by a quantity of massive and richly-chased gold, and a great number of tiny diamonds and rubies,—infinitesimal gems, set in pretty, quaint devices, with a larger stone here and there. This trophy I brought away with me from Port Arthur, but when in Liverpool at the beginning of the year of grace 1896, the pressure of financial exigency compelled me to entrust it to the temporary care of the universal ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... quietude, after struggling in his grasp, when Clara laid her hand on the boy: and from that infinitesimal circumstance he deduced the boy's perception of a differing between himself and his bride, and a transfer of Crossjay's allegiance from him to her. She shone; she had the gift of female beauty; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inconveniencia, unsuitability, impropriety inconveniente, inconvenience indemnidad, indemnity, signed guarantee indemnizacion, indemnity (compensation for loss) indicar, to indicate, to point out indigena, native industria, industry inercia, idleness, inertia infeliz, unhappy infimo, infinitesimal infinidad, an infinite number informe, report informes, information(s), references informar (de), to inform of, to acquaint with ingeniero, engineer ingratitud, ingratitude ingresos netos, net revenue inmaturo, verde, unripe inmediato, immediate ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... Bernard Cavanagh, which transferred him to one of those Elysiums of brick and mortar, the "Poor Law Union." Here, as he himself expresses it, the fearful fallacies of his past system were made beautifully apparent; he felt as if existence could be maintained by the infinitesimal process, so benevolently advocated and regularly prepared, that one step more was all that was necessary to arrive at dietary perfectibility. That step he took, it being simply, instead of next to nothing, to live on nothing at all; and now, such was his opinion of the condiments ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... particular practice of Art in letters is the best for the perusal of the Book of our common wisdom; so that with clearer minds and livelier manners we may escape, as it were, into daylight and song from a land of fog-horns. Shall we read it by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal, or pointed with examples and types under the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence, which is the Comic Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that there is a constant tendency ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and its frictional inertia when running in the form of wind cause the current to proceed on its course after a very slight check, which in point of time is momentary and in its effects almost infinitesimal. This being the case, and the principal expense attendant upon the construction of ordinary wind-engines being due to the need for providing a large diameter of wind-wheel, with all the attendant complications ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... then, barely 10 per cent. of the total energy. The most convinced flesh eaters, those who buy 400 grs. of meat a day for their consumption, must learn, willingly or unwillingly, that the animal element enters only in an infinitesimal part into their ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... sometimes I've felt quite miserable. Do you see the difference, or does it sound nonsense? Let me explain. I've only felt miserable, but I was happy. Gladys, I do believe it's It. It does make one feel so infinitesimal, and so immense." ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... the incredibly quick withdrawal of the man's hand combined to form the infinitesimal space which separated Gavin from agonizing death. The snake's striking head missed the fast-retreating fingers by less than a hair's breadth. The fangs met on the wards of the rusty key Brice had caught up in his fingertips. The force of the stroke knocked ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... earthquake? The room was full of a great noise and scramble. It seemed ever so long before Bel could comprehend and turn her face toward the centre of it; a second of time has infinitesimal divisions, all of which one feels and measures in such a crisis. Then she and Aunt Blin came together at a sharp angle of incidence in the middle of the room, the kindlings scattered about the carpet; and ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... yellow; for another, violet. Changes in the speed of air waves meet with specific response in the brain patterns tuned to receive impressions through the aural nerves, and so we distinguish differences in sound pitch. If we can realize the infinite delicacy of the mechanisms adapted to these infinitesimal variations in the speed and intensity of invisible and intangible stimuli, it will not be difficult to conceive the variations of brain patterns which render possible the specific responses to the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... they are. The cabinet will fall amid a general outcry, there will be a few riots, but we shall have peace ... and peace, as you, monsieur, were saying a moment ago, peace without dishonour, at the price of an infinitesimal sacrifice of self-esteem, which will make France greater ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... of the universe stand in awe and fear before this brain-benumbing aspect. Modern astrophysics, to one who attempts to comprehend its vastness, imposes on the mind but a faint comprehension of the vastness of the universe in space, time, and size; but imposes a deep conviction of the infinitesimal meaning of our planet Earth, both as to size and its relation to the millions of related heavenly bodies. The evolution of man on our planet in this broad conception of space and time is most infinitesimal. It has been just a few hours ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the sooner. From the realms of the dark, where all the birds of night build their nests, lining them with their own sooty down, the sweet odorous filmy dusk of the summer, haunted with wings of noiseless bats, began at length to come flickering earthward, in a snow infinitesimal of fluffiest gray and black: I crept out into the garden. It was dark as wintry night among the yews, but I could have gone any time through every alley of them blind-folded. An owl cried and I started, for my soul was sunk in its own love-dawn. ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... to the infinitesimal noises of the night, straining their ears in the stillness. The river wound past them with a faint, sibilant sound like a child chuckling in its sleep; an owl hooted somewhere in the far-off sanctuary of the trees. Betty ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... appears in all its glory. This strange phenomenon has long puzzled philosophers, and they are still divided. It is generally considered to be produced by a continuous zone of infinitesimal asteroids. The majority place this zone beyond the orbit of the earth, and concentric with the sun. But Rev. George Jones, of Philadelphia, who has spent several years in observing this light, including eight months in Quito, considers it geocentric, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... the impregnable fortress; each foe has his special tactics, contrived with appalling skill. See, an egg is inserted by means of a probe beside the torpid larva; or else, in the absence of such an implement, an infinitesimal grub, an atom, comes creeping and crawling, slips in and reaches the sleeper, who will never wake again, already a succulent morsel for her ferocious visitor. The interloper makes the victim's cell and cocoon his own cell and his own cocoon; and next year, instead of the mistress of the house, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... revelation of life,—the eternal battle of man between the spirit and the flesh, between the seen and the unseen, the struggle infinite and always. Where life is, that must be. And the vision of man's little, misshapen existence,—the incomplete and infinitesimal unit he is,—and also the significance of him,—this material atom, the symbol, the weapon of the spirit, shone forth before them. This the woman had felt in giving herself to him, that the spirit within was freed by the touch ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... loose one hundred meter cable that attached it to its anchor, and which had had fifteen meters of slack when the ship first began its infinitesimal movement, was Project ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... Tuesday.—Your infinitesimal correspondence has reached me, and I have the honour to refer to it with scorn. It contains only one statement of conceivable interest, that your health is better; the rest is null, and so far as disquisitory unsound. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... daubs the head of the person three times with it. Then he rests the end of the notched stick against the man's head and rasps three long strokes from end to end, throwing out his hand far into the air after each stroke. The dust produced by the rasping, infinitesimal though it be, is powerful in giving health and life. Now he turns toward the rising Sun, holding out his implements to him; and, quickly rubbing up and down a few times at the lower end of the notched stick, he makes a long stroke from end to end, passing the hand far ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... no light. And illusions came to Lieutenant Fevrier, such as will come to the bravest man so long as he listens hard enough in the dark—illusions of stealthy footsteps on the floor, of hands scraping and feeling along the walls, of a man's breathing upon his neck, of many infinitesimal noises ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Alexandrian nose. And here he was, he, Robert Warburton, in New York, simply because he happened to be in the booking office of the Gare du Nord one morning and overheard a very beautiful girl say: "Then we shall sail from Southampton day after to-morrow." Of a truth, it is the infinitesimal things that count heaviest. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... the use of gold and silver as a medium of exchange, it followed that they should approximate in all nations to a common degree of fineness; and though this is not uniform even in coins, yet the proportion of alloy in silver, and of carats alloy to carats fine in gold, has been reduced to infinitesimal differences in the bullion of commerce, and is a prime element of value even in gold and silver plate, jewelry, and other articles of manufacture. Bullion, whether in the form of coins, or of bars and ingots stamped, is subject, as a general rule of the London market, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ordinary ones, but their prison was no ordinary cage. Fair-sized and square, it was made of fine white bars of ivory. The underside was also ivory, square and unblemished, and would have made an ideal hairpin-tray; it stood upon ebony feet inlaid with infinitesimal precious stones. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... is in the case of the boy who, after promising not to drive over thirty miles an hour, goes speeding on the highway and gets arrested. The fine which has to be paid by father is an infinitesimal part of the harm and hurt which ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... mask with which he covered his inmost heart even before God would have discovered this: that at the very time Barkilphedro had begun to feel finally convinced that it would be impossible—even to him, the intimate and most infinitesimal enemy of Josiana—to find a vulnerable point in her lofty life. Hence an access of savage animosity lurked in his mind. He had reached the paroxysm which is called discouragement. He was all the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... latest resultant of the two forces of ennui and dissipation acting on a Society that is willing to spend money and desires to kill time. She has played many parts, some (of infinitesimal proportions), on the burlesque stage, others in the semi-private life of her own residence in the South-west district of London. Her versatility has gained for her many admirers and a precarious income, but so long as she possesses the former she scorns to live upon the latter. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... was impending over him. Perhaps Theo intended to stay longer; to come to Markland altogether; to interfere with the boy's evenings as he had done with his mornings. Or perhaps—but when he for a moment asked himself what he feared, his thoughts all fled away into vague alarms, infinitesimal in comparison with the reality, which was far too big, too terrible, for his mind to grasp. Mamma was afraid of it too, he had thought, this morning. She had looked, as the sky looks sometimes when the clouds ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... several times to pull the house down, by her violence in this condition. She had strength like a lion, and no man could manage her. I saw the same thing in the hospital later. This aunt is now healthy; not cured by her own prescriptions or the magnetic or infinitesimal doses of Dr. Arthur Lutze, but by a strong emotion which took possession of her at the time of my great-aunt's death. She is not sorry that she has lost all these strange powers, but heartily glad of it. When she afterwards ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... educated were four young girls from Philadelphia, older than the newcomer by two years, and who, also, had left America for the first time. They brought with them the unconquerable aversion to negro blood and that wonderful keenness in discovering it, even in the most infinitesimal degree, which distinguishes real Yankees. Little Lydia Chapron, having been entered as French, they at first hesitated in the face of a suspicion speedily converted into a certainty and that certainty into an aversion, which they could not conceal. They would not have been children had they ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... Marguerite had no very wide field of investigation to explore. Her common sense told her that her task would merely consist in carefully watching the behavior of the General and his wife, in noting their expenditure, and so on. It was a matter of close attention, and of infinitesimal trifles. Nor was she much encouraged by her first success. It was, perhaps, important; and yet it might be nothing. For she felt that the real difficulties would not begin until she became morally certain that the General had stolen the millions that were missing from the count's escritoire. Even ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... collected by the husband; property and inheritance laws between husband and wife were absolutely unequal; fathers were sole guardians of their children and at death could appoint one even of a child unborn; the age of consent was 12 years and it was legal for a girl to marry at 12. An infinitesimal number of women had a bit of School suffrage. In the rest of that century, under the leadership of Miss Laura Clay, with the able assistance of such women as Mrs. Josephine K. Henry, Mrs. Eliza Calvert Obenchain and many others, much was accomplished in the improvement of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... the speed of light. The young man's mental revolution was over and done with in a second's time; the pause was infinitesimal. Almost as she finished her last remark, Mr. Carstairs's daughter turned from the rail and took a step forward upon the deck, as though to jog her host toward that promised tour of the yacht which had now ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... We have to strip ourselves of all that, and to seek perfect passionless tranquillity. Then we may hope to die. Meditation, if it be deep, and long, and frequent enough, will teach even our practical Western mind to understand the Hindu mind in its yearning for Nirvana. One infinitesimal atom of the great conglomerate of humanity, who enjoys the temporal, sensual life, with its gratifications and excitements, as much as most, will testify with unaffected sincerity that he would rather be annihilated altogether than remain for ever what he knows himself ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... somehow, there is no other side of the ocean. And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in our own hearts where alone we can hear the voice of God, and where, ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... contained a great number of people. Despite the 1,500 millions amongst whom we 'live and move and have our being' we are apt to think that we alone are important, which is not conceit but a mere proposition demonstrating that man is a universe in himself while being but an infinitesimal ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the whole universe of worlds, and the illimitable void of space beyond all worlds; next he is to consider (3) what he himself is—he is confined within the day and night of our planet, and, even within those restricted limits, he is but an infinitesimal point. After he shall have realised this to himself, and after the tension of his soul in ranging through the universe and through space shall have kindled hope after hope, wonderment and aspiration after aspiration and wonderment, then indeed will he need to keep his heart light, ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... moment she had caught back her own poise; she watched sidelong, noting with an odd precision exactly how he looked, how his brown skin glistened a little in the sun, so close to her that she could see the infinitesimal criss-cross of lines upon the backs of his hands and the stronger seams upon his reddened neck. She saw the glisten of a few grey hairs in the dark thick patch above his ear; she could see the texture of his lip as it pouted beneath the sideways hang of his pipe. She wondered why anyone ever really ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... accumulating mud of centuries has filled up the lakes, so that they now are only shallow ponds. But this by no means removes the difficulty, for then, as now, the waters of the southern laguna flowed into Tezcuco, conveying with them the infinitesimal infusion of tequisquite that had instilled itself into the Chalco. Had the volume of Chalco and Xochimulco been increased several feet, then the slight Indian barriers and the long grass would no longer have been ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Word we must believe, as Dan Crawford has tersely and beautifully expressed it, that "The God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal." ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... usual superstition attributed its good effects to some mysterious healing power in water itself. Therefore, when the patient was not able to undergo the usual process, or when his medical attendant was above the vulgar and routine practice of his profession, it was administered on the infinitesimal system. The quack muttered a formula over a gourd filled from a neighboring spring and sprinkled it on his patient, or washed the diseased part, or sucked out the evil spirit and blew it into a bowl of water, and then scattered the liquid ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... been enough. But guilt has terrors unknown to innocence. One day I caught a small boy peering through an infinitesimal crack in the fence, and, remembering the window grilled with iron with which Bela had replaced the cheerful casement in my den of punishment, I realised how easily an opening might be made between the boards for the convenience of a curious eye anxious to penetrate ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... had need of rest, for the calm lasted a week, during which time their water ran out, and for more than two days they had not a single drop, although they reduced their allowance to such an infinitesimal quantity that their final draught did not amount to more than ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly the instructions that had been given him, the man's mind was a blank. His aquiline profile ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period and hesitated ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... when, at twenty-four years of age, he took up arms, at the head of only one hundred and thirty men, in connection with the treacherous murder by a rival chieftain of his father and grandfather, who had ruled over a petty principality of almost infinitesimal extent; and he finally succeeded three years later in securing from the Chinese, who had been arrayed against him, not only the surrender of the murderer, but also a sum of money and some robes of honour. He was further ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... by little to the more highly civilised nations. To these alone—of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian—are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... this image, would be to contradict one's self; since these two images, the outer world and the intra-cerebral movement, have been supposed to be of the same nature, and the second image is, by the hypothesis, an infinitesimal part of the field of representation, while the first fills ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... with you there," he replied; "you are getting your own infinitesimal world confused with the real overwhelming majority; you haven't an idea how it feels and, in particular, of what it thinks of you, smoking and gambling and damning your fate. It may be largely envy—personally I am ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is not actually present to the mind—and the present is an infinitesimal fraction of knowledge—is reproduced by the memory, and this is effected by the molecular movements of the human brain, and by what may be called the ethereal modifications which took place when the sensations, perceptions, and acts first occurred. ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... face the divorced condition of the educated world to-day. There seem to be, for the most part, but two kinds of men living in it, living on opposite sides of the same truths glaring at each other. On the one hand the anaemically spiritual, broad, big, pallid men, and on the other the funny, infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to write my book. I always did want to know how many ways love can be made in, which, of course, I can never know, for there are as many ways, I guess, as there are men to make it, and the variations on the main theme are as infinitesimal as the tongues that tell the story. It is truly wonderful how differently the same words can be trimmed up and handed out, and I like the crescendoes and diminuendoes and shades of feeling which give emphasis ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of the prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preserved by sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possess is only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tears leaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds. How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the "Song of Deborah" were chanted only to be forgotten! ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute to them any great power of vision. Besides, what good would those short-sighted lenses be in the absence of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... darkness, and God is not to be found for searching. "It is not by our feet or change of place that men leave Thee nor return unto Thee." The quietness of habit is more conducive to spirituality than the progress whose gain is so infinitesimal, and whose heavy price is the destruction of the habit of faith. It is better to believe a falsehood than to doubt a truth. The habitual attitude of the soul, its upward gaze is more important than the quality of the veil through which it discerns the Eternal. ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... physical matter; and it is chiefly by means of vibrations in that vast sea of matter that impressions reach us from the outside. This much we all know, but it may perhaps never have occurred to many of us that the number of these vibrations to which we are capable of responding is in reality quite infinitesimal. ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... the garden, reading day-old editions of the "Glasga He-rald" from the front page to the last, while his wife made pilgrimages to the village shop to buy infinitesimal articles of drapery, and exchange details of domestic history with the good lady in charge of ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... possess the qualities which in his judgment go to constitute a parable. Some that are included can scarcely be distinguished by logical definitions from some that are excluded; but so far am I from considering this a defect, that I deem it a necessary result of the impalpable infinitesimal graduation by which the fully-formed parable glides down into the brief detached metaphorical aphorism, in the words of the Lord Jesus during the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... on the moss and the sun grew warmer and warmer, shining dappled in amongst the small green leaves. All seemed still but for the winged insects flashing through shafts of the sunlight out of the gloom of the trees and disappearing again like infinitesimal meteors. But our concern is with the thoughts of man, of which deeds are but the shadows: wherever these are active it is wrong to say all is still; for whether they cast their shadows, which are actions, ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... our life is a matter of indifference. A portion might be termed satisfaction, and a minute balance, an infinitesimal part, termed—if there is ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... what name you will, Gabriel Tar, or Gibraltar, that infinitesimal scrap of territory over which the Union Jack floats, is supremely unpalatable and insolently insulting to the Spaniard. It is a bitter pill to swallow, an adamantine nut to crack. I suppose he is welcome to take it—when he can; but he knows better than to try. It ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... motion, is an immense mass-meeting. Look sharper, and you will see a mite brandishing his mandibles in an excited manner. That is the great Mr. Soandso, defining his position amid tumultuous and irrepressible cheers. That infinitesimal creature, upon whom some score of others, as minute as he, are gazing in open-mouthed admiration, is a famous philosopher, expounding to a select audience their capacity for the Infinite. That scarce discernible pufflet of smoke and dust is a revolution. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... alien; coldly, deadly, alien. He was a tiny spark of life in a hostile sea of Nothing and there was no one to help him. The Nothing outside was waiting day and night for the most infinitesimal leak or crack in the walls; the Nothing that had been waiting out there since time without beginning and would wait for time ...
— The Nothing Equation • Tom Godwin
... causes this liquefaction escapes my endeavors to detect it. The worms must disgorge it in infinitesimal doses, while the spikes in their throats, which are in continual movement, emerge a little way from the mouth, reenter and reappear. Those piston thrusts, those quasi-kisses, are accompanied by the emission of the solvent: at least, that is how I picture it. The ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Intellectual Life" was a perfect surprise to me when I first opened my presentation copy: the secret had been well kept. I felt grateful and honored to be thus publicly associated by my husband in his work, though my share had been but humble and infinitesimal—more sympathetic than active, more encouraging than laborious. Our common dream had been to be as little separated as possible, and he had attempted soon after our marriage to rouse in me some literary ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Unfortunately, however, this is an optical impossibility and the field is always spherical in shape. Some makers succeed in giving a larger central area that is in focus at one time than others, and although this may theoretically cause an infinitesimal sacrifice of other qualities, it should always be sought for. Successive zones and the entire peripheral ring should come into focus with the alteration of the fine adjustment. This simultaneous sharpness of the entire circle is an indication of the perfect centering of the whole of ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... themselves invaded by the universal tremor, oblivious to all that but a short time before had constituted their lives. They forgot the presence of the city on the other side of the mountain; the existence of humanity, of which they were infinitesimal parts.... Completely alone, penetrating each other through their pupils! Thus, thus forever! There was a crackling sound in the dark, like dry branches ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... braces and hove the vessel to so as to steady her as they worked, but she still labored heavily in the sea, and beneath them they could hear the leaden swish of water in the floor of the hold beneath. Their labor was having its effect, and by infinitesimal gradations they were counteracting the list and getting the ship upright; but the wind was worsening, and it seemed to them also that the water was getting deeper under their feet, and that ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... find, suppose that this earth belongs to them,—to the human race alone. It does not,—no more than the United States belong to Rhode Island. Human life is not a ten-thousand-millionth of the life on the planet, nor the race of men more than an infinitesimal fraction of the creatures which it nourishes. A swarm of summer flies on a field of clover, or the grasshoppers in a patch of stubble, outnumber the men that have lived since Adam. And yet we assume the dignity of lords and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... again; for the wise man is aware that we retain spiritual qualities only as we give them away. Let your light shine. To him that hath shall be given. The exercise of wisdom brings wisdom; and at the last the infinitesimal quantity of man's knowledge, compared with the Infinite, and the smallness of man's Sympathy when compared with the source from which ours is absorbed, will evolve an abnegation and a humility that will lend a perfect Poise. The Gentleman is a man with perfect ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... head doubtfully, and tried to fix her attention again upon her book, but presently it came again; a prick so small and fine that it strained consciousness; an infinitesimal point of torture, and this time Ellen, turning with a swift flirt of her head, caught the culprit. It was that faithful little girl, who held a black-headed belt-pin in her hand; she had been carefully separating ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... those in command of a ship becomes swayed—largely unconsciously, no doubt—in favour of taking risks which the smaller liners would never take. The demand on the skipper of a boat like the Californian, for example, which lay hove-to nineteen miles away with her engines stopped, is infinitesimal compared with that on Captain Smith. An old traveller told me on the Carpathia that he has often grumbled to the officers for what he called absurd precautions in lying to and wasting his time, which he regarded as very valuable; but after hearing of the Titanic's loss he recognized ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... alloying or compounding of the parts of these three together. In this theory of the threefold division of the primitive elements lies the earliest germ of the later distinction (especially in the Sa@mkhya school) of pure infinitesimal substances (tanmatra) and gross elements, and the theory that each gross substance is composed of the atoms of the primary elements. And in Pras'na IV. 8 we find the gross elements distinguished from their subtler natures, e.g. earth (p@rthivi), ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... toward that obscure quarter of the town where human beings who could not afford to rest or to dine might at least secure a corner in which to "lodge" and the right, if not the appetite, to "eat," for an infinitesimal sum; for it was in this quarter that strange as it might, seem, her instinct told her her search must be made—in this quarter that Edgar Poe, the rich merchant's pampered foster-child, Edgar Poe, the poet, the scholar, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... friend. We shall nevermore meet the upright figure, the blue eye, the hearty laugh, upon these Cambridge streets. But in that wider world of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours forms so infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and their missions here will continue in some way to be represented, and that ancient human loves will never ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum ad infinitum would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be called infrahuman, because the sort of omniscience ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... inter-stellar space is, of course, absolutely black and devoid of any form of light save the faint twinklings of the far-off stars. Without the surface of some globe to reflect the sun's rays, no light of any kind would be possible; so that if life were conveyed across space, from star to star, upon infinitesimal specks of dust, under the influence of light pressure, as postulated by Arrhenius (Worlds in the Making, pp. 212-30), this life must exist, and in a sense originate, in the blackness of inter-stellar space.[10] And, finally, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... the white-haired one again, "I have examined every bit of the infinitesimal mechanism in the ball on this tympanum. It is perfect. You are a genius, Naka Machi. There is only ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... occur in ordinary plants might not be further exhibited by means of visible mechanical response, thus fully removing the distinction commonly assumed to exist between the 'sensitive' and supposed 'non-sensitive.' Dr. Bose invented 'special apparatus of extreme delicacy,' which detected infinitesimal tremors, and showed that ordinary plants, usually regarded as insensitive, gave motile responses, which had hitherto passed unnoticed. His later investigation shows that "all plants, even the trees, are fully alive to changes of environment; they respond visibly to all stimuli, even ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Roman empire and established a new civilization on its ruins, and was to wait centuries longer until it should reconstruct itself into a whole—been reduced by subdivision, disintegration, the perpetual dissolvent of religious dispute, and the selfish policy of infinitesimal dynasties. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... further discounted, for everybody except Mr. Dillon, by the fact that in the classic case—Adams v. Dunseath—tried out in accordance with Mr. Gladstone's panacea, Adams, after repeated lawsuits, improved his financial position by an infinitesimal sum per annum without becoming an owner of his farm. It was also agreed that the Estates Commissioners appointed to administer the Act, should be administrative officials under the Government, and not amateur ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... profile. Though not quite in the front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed her to great advantage. Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart- burning, and almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company. Mrs. Hob had said her say at Cauldstaneslap. "Daft-like!" she had pronounced it. "A jaiket that'll no meet! Whaur's the sense of a jaiket that'll no button upon you, if it should come to be weet? What do ye ca' thir things? Demmy brokens, d'ye say? They'll ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regains his ordinary state of health instead of lingering along with frequent returns of the disease for generally two seasons, as he does when quinine is used. Old cases of intermittent fever are frequently cured promptly by infinitesimal doses of homoeopathic remedies. I have never seen Allopathic doses of Quinine do any good in typhoid fevers. And, as to the use of cathartics, from my observation I soon became satisfied that a vast number of lives have ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... for use in detecting and measuring infinitesimal degrees of temperature, however remote, and its conception followed Edison's researches on the carbon telephone transmitter. Its principle depends upon the variable resistance of carbon in accordance with the degree of pressure to which it is subjected. By means of this instrument, pressures ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... seemed to us, an unappeasable curiosity as to what we were going to see. It was not a very big ship, in spite of the grandiloquent descriptions in the advertisements, or the lithograph wherein she cut grandly and evenly through huge waves to the manifest discomfiture of infinitesimal sailing craft bobbing alongside. She was manned entirely by Germans. The room stewards waited at table, cleaned the public saloons, kept the library, rustled the baggage, and played in the band. That is why we took our music between meals. Our staterooms were very ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... its actual termination, to the whole order of subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country, recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena, which follow inevitably ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... as we pass from printed matter to life itself, as soon as we throw a glance at society, we are struck by the infinitesimal part played by the Government. Balzac already has remarked how millions of peasants spend the whole of their lives without knowing anything about the State, save the heavy taxes they are compelled to pay. Every day millions ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... with any degree of logic assume that a function so universal, so all-pervading, and also so inspiring, as that of Sex, has its beginning and its termination on the physical plane—a manifestation of life which even physicists are bound to concede is an infinitesimal ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... air of the hold had glowed dull-red at the moment of the explosion. In the twinkling of an eye, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second since the first tilt of the bench, I was sprawling full length on the cargo. I picked myself up and scrambled out. It was quick like a rebound. The deck was a wilderness of smashed timber, lying crosswise like trees in a wood after a ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... done, which can be done from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes, because it must see all things; and there are things no eyes can see but these, no other hands do. This point is an infinitesimal part of the whole; but without its full and proper functioning, the Whole falls short in that much:—because of your or my petty omissions, the Universe limps and goes lame.—Into this position, as into all others impartially, the One Life which is Tao flows, adapting itself through ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... fixity of the gaze, the aristocratic slenderness of the hands and the features, surprises and startles the spectator. "By nature and by education," says M. Paul Bourget, "M. Ed. de Goncourt possesses an intelligence, the overacuteness of which verges on disease in its comprehension of infinitesimal gradations and of the infinitely subtle creature." Mr. Rothenstein has made this intelligence flash from ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... to be knowing and philosophical, and—Havelock Ellish, Martin, dear," she admonished him, pending a minute operation with an infinitesimal hairpin. "It isn't your lay a bit. Just concentrate your mind on one thing, and that's being ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... an infinitely small distance, of course. You will find the matter fully discussed in my work on the Infinitesimal Calculus. ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... ministry of symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation which the eye of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it about. Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Bengali schoolboys, who appreciated his manners, and sent him with urbanity flat baskets of mangoes and ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to justice. Very nice, and I wished it could be done that way. Except where was he? A battleship may be gigantic on some terms of reference, but in the immensity of the galaxy it is microscopically infinitesimal. As long as it stayed out of the regular lanes of commerce, and clear of detector stations and planets, it would never ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... proportion of these substances is almost infinitesimal; but they are pretty general constituents of the atmosphere, and are apparently derived from the decomposition of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... undulating hills to the west; to the east, by sharper peaks. The scant growth was blackened or partly covered with sand, and it fringed the distant uplands like a stubbly beard. The little ravines were darkened with hot shadows, but the bald slopes presented areas, shining with infinitesimal particles of quartz and mica, to a savage sun and an almost unendurable sky. From somewhere to the barren north the wind came like a breath of flame, ash-laden and drying. There was nothing of the cool, damp river breeze in this. They were in the hideous heart of the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... small as scarcely to be detected, but what there is in the soil next to the walls is absorbed by the latter, rising doubtless by capillary attraction to a height of a foot or more from the ground. This portion of the wall being then more moist than the remainder, although possibly only in an infinitesimal degree, is more subject to erosion by flying sand in the windstorms so frequent in this region, and gradually the base of the wall is eaten away until the support becomes insufficient and the wall falls en masse. The plan shows that in some places the walls have been eaten away at the ground ...
— The Repair Of Casa Grande Ruin, Arizona, in 1891 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... quiet rambles with Angela, in the midst of a landscape transfigured by that vernal beauty which begins with the waning of April, and is past and vanished before the end of May, Denzil loved to expound the wonders of the infinitesimal; the insect life that sparkled and hummed in the balmy air, or flashed like living light among the dewy grasses; the life of plant and flower, which seemed almost as personal and conscious a form of existence; since it was difficult to believe there was no sense of struggle or of joy in those ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... on our rights," Dora informed me. "I have never heard him say an angry word to a nurse. He just has a way of smiling at one, as if he were beholding an infinitesimal infant totally incapable of understanding. The sarcasm of it is utterly fierce and the nurse goes off, red and shaken, and feels like killing him. Don't you think we've got just as good a right as any whipper-snapper of a new intern to be ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... of The Sahara have no idea of separate joints or choice parts, the heart, perhaps, excepted, which is highly prized; or, if you will, they like a bit of every part of the carcase, and cut it up into these infinitesimal divisions in order that they may obtain this aggregate of delicate minutiæ. But as this is all cooked together, there can never be that separate taste of separate parts which distinguishes the meat as killed and cooked by Europeans. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... live in uncertainty;" such were finally Mr. Challoner's words. "What you have to say concerns Edith?" The pause he made was infinitesimal in length, but it was long enough for a quick disclaimer. But no such disclaimer came. "I will hear it," ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... seemed assured, and it is amazing to think what an influence has been exerted upon the destinies of the human race by the instinctive fear of crossing the narrow boundary between right and wrong. The time occupied in such reflection is often only infinitesimal. It has been called the psychological moment, and if the definition means that it is the instant during which the soul suggests, it is a true one. It is then that our natural repulsion for evil asserts itself; it is then that the consequences ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... any check to the motion of bodies revolving round a centre of attraction causes them to draw closer to it, thus shortening their periods and quickening their circulation. If space were filled with a resisting medium capable of impeding, even in the most infinitesimal degree, the swift course of the planets, their orbits should necessarily be, not ellipses, but very close elliptical spirals along which they would slowly, but inevitably, descend into the burning lap of the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... throat ailments, more or less serious, occurs with startling frequency, and no other reason is assigned for it than the irresponsible, indefinite one that the voice broke down under training. Of the infinitesimal number of successful students—that is to say, of those who, having completed their studies, come before the public as professional singers—so few escape the common lot that it would almost appear as if a fatality attended the following of the vocal art; yet from a health point of view, singing ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... the universe, we seem to be like one standing on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer when he declares that "the universe ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... routine of work in progress - horrible work at the best, if you please; but, so much the greater reason why it should be made the best of. I don't know (I think I have observed, my name is Bull) that a Parisian of the lowest order is particularly delicate, or that his nature is remarkable for an infinitesimal infusion of ferocity; but, I do know, my potent, grave, and common counselling Signors, that he is forced, when at this work, to submit himself to a thoroughly good system, and to make an Englishman very heartily ashamed ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... 'The higher knowledge is this by which the Indestructible is apprehended. That which cannot be seen nor seized, which is without origin and qualities, without eyes and ears, without hands and feet, the eternal, all-pervading, omnipresent, infinitesimal, that which is imperishable, that it is which the wise regard as the source of all beings' (Mu. Up. I, 1, 5; 6).—Here the doubt arises whether the source of all beings which is spoken of as characterised by invisibility, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... and slowly, it is true, and with frequent stoppages. None the less, we moved; progress was definitely being made in the direction of the seaboard, and in contemplation of this fact one found an infinitesimal measure of consolation, gleaming, so to speak, against a dark cloud of forebodings, like one lone starry orb in a storm-envisaged firmament. During the early part of our journey I could not fail to give heed to the amazing attitude maintained by the young ladies. Repeatedly, as ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... altogether negative, as Dr. Osler implies. The discovery of the minute cell as the basis of the human organism on the one hand and of the unlimited divisibility of matter on the other hand explains the rationality of the infinitesimal dose. Health and disease are resident in the cell; therefore, the homeopath doctors the cell, and the size of the dose has to be apportioned to the size ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... were ever dosed before they took to globules! It will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
