"Inorganic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its heat and dust the desert has its charms. The desert dust is dusty dust, but not dirty dust. Compared with the awful organic dust of New York, London, or Paris, it is inorganic and pure. On those strips of the Libyan and Arabian deserts which lie along the Nile, the desert dust is largely made up of the residuum of royalty, of withered Ptolemies, of arid Pharaohs, for the tombs of queens and kings are counted here by the hundreds, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... structure, which is so difficult to explain in its details, is not accidental, but a consequence of the nature of the materials that served to produce the coal of this region. In the midst of a mass of blackish debris, a, organic and inorganic, and immersed in an amorphous and transparent gangue, we find a few recognizable fragments, such as thick-walled macrospores, b, of various sizes, bits of flattened petioles, c, pollen grains, d, debris of bark, etc. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... encompass an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course, continuous with its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic being is not concerned in the influences which affect it. On the other hand, some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... forces, materialism remained a singularly crude and unsatisfying position. But now that science has shewn all that we call matter—the most solid metals and the most attenuated vapours, the most stable and resisting inorganic bodies, and the unstable tissues of living bodies—to be alike in restless, orderly motion, to be, in fact, motion itself and not the thing moved, to be changeable but indestructible, passing through phases but eternal, there seems less difficulty in assuming it to be the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... conceptions of atoms and molecules had not been as yet generally established. Now, this want of comprehensive views of chemical reactions, their why and wherefore, was bad enough as it affected the study of inorganic and metallic compounds, but what must have been the conditions for studying the complex compounds of carbon, so widely spread in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Their number is so enormous that, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... The new discoveries in inorganic power and their application to industrial enterprise are possibly more far reaching in their effect on the adjustment and relationships of men than they have been at any other time in the last century and a half. Whatever the world owes to these discoveries and ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... reason purely abstract. Human reason, as we know it to-day, is not a creation, but a growth. Its history goes back to the primordial slime that was quick with muddy life; its history goes back to the first vitalized inorganic. And here are the steps of its ascent from the mud to man: simple reflex action, compound reflex action, memory, habit, rudimentary reason, and abstract reason. In the course of the climb, thanks to natural selection, instinct was evolved. Habit is a development ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly from generalization to generalization after the fashion of the chemist or physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that the inorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps after all be TRUER than the experimental, in spite of the difference in practical value in favour of the latter. It was, and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... to the heavenly host, the Psalmist calls first on the forms of inanimate and inorganic existence. These things, of which he enumerates a few, praise the power of God. The crags and headlands, jarred and worn by the billows they breast; the granite peaks, bald and grey, under light and tempest, with the silent host of rocky ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... almost the lowest tribe of South Africa, have the same star- lore and much the same myths as the Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, and Eskimo. According to Dr. Bleek, 'stars, and even the sun and moon, were once mortals on earth, or even animals or inorganic substances, which happened to get translated to the skies. The sun was once a man, whose arm-pit radiated a limited amount of light round his house. Some children threw him into the sky, and there he shines.' The Homeric hymn to ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... would be so great as to make the country uninhabitable. Fortunately, however, this inevitable process breaks down the structure of all organic material, partly converting fiber and pulp into gas, partly liquefying the material and converting the remainder into inorganic matter which is of vast importance as food for plant life. A cycle is thus formed which may be best illustrated in the case of cows which feed on the herbage of a meadow, the manure from the cows furnishing food for the grass which ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in almost every quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has made of Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless matter; dismal to your mind, and barren as a continent of Brandenburg sand!—Enough, he could do no other: I have striven to forgive him. Let the reader now forgive me; and think sometimes what probably ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... function of it. Matter, then, is not an effect, but a cause. It is not caused; it is from eternity and of necessity. The cardinal point in Holbach's philosophy is an inexorable materialistic necessity. Nothing, then, is exempt from the laws of physics and chemistry. Inorganic substance and organic life fall into the same category. Man himself with all his differentiated faculties is but a function of matter and motion in extraordinary complex and involved relations. Man's imputation to himself of free will and unending consciousness apart from his machine is an idle ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... the horns of a snail. It appeared white, very short, and cylindrical. Under the pincers was a little half coagulated seminal fluid at the bottom of the vulva. Though much could be expressed, there was none pure; it was almost liquid, but soon coagulated, and formed a whitish inorganic mass. This observation carefully made removed all our doubts, and demonstrated that what we had taken for the penis of males was nothing but the seminal fluid, which had coagulated and assumed the interior figure of the vagina. The only hard part introduced by the male, was ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... risen by stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things. Why has it risen? Why did it not keep on the same level, and go through the cycle of change, as the inorganic does, without attaining to higher forms? Because, it may be replied, it was life, and not mere matter and motion—something that lifts matter and motion ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... various procedures. The reader who desires a more extended discussion of the fundamental theory and its uses is referred to such books as Talbot and Blanchard's !Electrolytic Dissociation Theory! (Macmillan Company), or Alexander Smith's !Introduction to General Inorganic ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... to suppose that Nature has still a mine of undiscovered treasure in the mind and constitution of man, as well as in inorganic nature? No, friends, these things are as natural as the physical senses, and not a whit more of a miracle. It is only that we are accustomed to one, and not to the other, that makes the astral senses seem more wonderful than the physical. Nature's workings are all wonderful—none ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... combinations of these elements, two general classes may be recognized, organic and inorganic bodies. While it is impossible, owing to the dependence of all organized matter upon inorganic matter, to give an absolute definition, we at once recognize the peculiarities of organic or living bodies as distinguished from inorganic or ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... back into the great, wild crowd that lifts the team to its shoulders; worship is not for him, no, nor remembrance either, in that hour of homage. Such men, to the bleachers, are but working material for the 'Varsity; the scrub player is part of an inorganic thing—until his chance comes. ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... outside, some bringing in the pupae of ants, others the legs and dissected bodies of various insects. I was surprised to see in this living nest tubular passages leading down to the centre of the mass, kept open just as if it had been formed of inorganic materials. Down these holes the ants who were bringing in booty passed with their prey. I thrust a long stick down to the centre of the cluster, and brought out clinging to it many ants holding larvae and pupae, which probably were kept warm by the ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... follow the child's wrong-doings are constant, direct, unhesitating, and not to be escaped. No threats; but a silent rigorous performance. If a child runs a pin into its finger, pain follows; if it does it again, there is again the same result; and so on perpetually. In all its dealings with inorganic nature it finds this unswerving persistence, which listens to no excuse, and from which there is no appeal; and very soon recognising this stern though beneficent discipline, it soon becomes extremely careful not to transgress. These general truths hold throughout adult life as well as ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... whole so wondrous a spectacle of universal law and perfect order, this doctrine is but indirectly concerned. Nevertheless, it is of course fundamentally concerned with them to the extent that it seeks to bring the phenomena of organic nature into line with those of inorganic; and therefore to show that whatever view we may severally take as to the kind of causation which is energizing in the latter we must now extend to the former. This is usually expressed by saying that the theory ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... must be made internally homogeneous in these same terms. There awaits solution, in the first place, the serious problem of the genesis and maintenance of life within a nature that is originally and ultimately inorganic. The assimilation of the field of biology and physiology to the mechanical cosmos had made little real progress prior to the nineteenth century. Mechanical theories had, indeed, been projected in the earliest age of philosophy, and proposed anew in the seventeenth century.[245:14] Nevertheless, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... mammifers of S. America, Australia and Europe should be clearly related to their ancient and exterminated prototypes; and so on with other facts. But it is absolutely opposed to every analogy, drawn from the laws imposed by the Creator on inorganic matter, that facts, when connected, should be considered as ultimate and not the direct consequences of more ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... not a double personality—he was an intermittent reincarnation, vibrating between the inorganic and the essence of vitality. In a reasonable scheme of earthly things he filled the niche of a giant green tree-frog, and one of us seemed to remember that the Knight Gawain was enamored of green, and so we dubbed him. For the hours of ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... birthplace vivacious young children with bones like india-rubber had grown up to be stable men and women, men and women had dried in the skin, stiffened, withered, and sunk into decrepitude; while selections from every class had been consigned to the outlying cemetery. Of inorganic differences the greatest was that a railway had invaded the town, tying it on to a main line at a junction a dozen miles off. Barnet's house on the harbour-road, once so insistently new, had acquired a respectable mellowness, with ivy, Virginia creepers, lichens, ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... as described, and applicable to microscopes, will perhaps enable Ehrenberg to verify the opinions he has lately formed concerning the atmosphere—namely, that it is not less full of organic and inorganic life than the ocean, or any other ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... aqueous humor, as has been pointed out by Uribe-Troncoso (Pathoginie du Glaucome 1903) contains a greatly increased quantity of albuminoids and inorganic salts in glaucoma. In acute glaucoma the increase of albuminoids (blood proteids) is greater than in chronic glaucoma. The aqueous humor becomes slightly turbid in acute attacks, coagulating more readily than the normal. The plastic principle contained in the aqueous is rarely ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... the Absolute, and in that case the Absolute cannot be Absolute for there is something outside of itself. And so it becomes of the greatest importance to examine into the evidences of the presence of Life in all things, organic or inorganic. The evidence is at ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... things useful to art, or to science, the systematic record, by drawing, of phenomena of the sky. But I am quite sure that your work cannot in any direction be more useful to yourselves, than in enabling you to perceive the quite unparalleled subtilties of colour and inorganic form, which occur on any ordinarily fine morning or evening horizon; and I will even confess to you another of my perhaps too sanguine expectations, that in some far distant time it may come to pass, that young Englishmen and Englishwomen may think the breath of the morning sky pleasanter ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... uprooted by the wind, and against the sun, which is liable to dry up the rich soil around the roots. This soil is different from the soil on the open lawn. It consists of an accumulation of decayed leaves mixed with inorganic matter, forming, together, a rich composition known as humus. The trees also aid each other in forming a close canopy that prevents the rapid evaporation of water from ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... is a law in chemistry, that the more complex a substance becomes, the less stable is its constitution, or the sooner is it affected by disturbing influences. Hence organic substances are more readily decomposed than inorganic. How striking, for instance, are the changes easily wrought in a few grains of barley! They contain a kind of starch or fecula; this starch, in the process of malting, becomes converted into a kind of sugar; and from this malt-sugar or transformed starch, may be obtained ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... individual, social, moral, and intellectual life. Look which way you will, you find antagonistic elements fiercely warring. There is a broken cog somewhere in the machinery of this plunging globe of ours. Everything organic, and inorganic, bears testimony to a miserable derangement. There is not a department of earth where harmony reigns. True, the stars are serene, and move in their everlasting orbits, with fixed precision, but they are not of earth; here ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... matter, soluble in dilute hydrochloric acid, is (with the exception of the alumina it may contain) composed of fertilising material. The substances found in the soluble inorganic matter of soils are lime, magnesia, alumina, silica, phosphoric acid, oxide of iron, oxide of manganese, potash and soda. The insoluble mineral matter is nearly all silica. There is very little clayey matter in any of the soils—not more than about five per cent. All the soils ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... is a tool as soon as this happens, and, if thrown away immediately the nail has been driven home, the stone is a tool no longer. We see, therefore, matter alternating between a toolish or organic state and an untoolish or inorganic. Where there is intention it is organic, where there is no intention it is inorganic. Perhaps, however, the word "tool" should cover also the remains of a tool so long as there are manifest signs that the object was a ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... see that this human idea of purpose recurs in many forms, suggesting that man has often tried to explain how organic evolution has taken place by an appeal to the method which he believes he makes use of himself in the inorganic world. ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... necessary alternative, that all these varied species have been evolved from pre-existing crocodilian forms, by the operation of causes as completely a part of the common order of nature, as those which have effected the changes of the inorganic world. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Divine Reason. Nature could only be understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements. The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at heart a ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the crystal to a needle. They are composed of the phosphate and oxalate of lime; but there is great difference of opinion as to their use in the economy of the plant, and one of the French philosophers endeavoured to prove that crystals are the possible transition of the inorganic to organic matter. The differences, however, between the highest form of crystal and the lowest form of organic life known, viz., a simple reproductive cell, are so manifold and striking, that the attempt to make crystals the bridge over which inorganic matter passes into ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... for its demonstration, upon human impressibility. Impressibility in its general sense, or the power of being affected by external agents, is proportional to the development of life. Inorganic matter is affected only mechanically or chemically—vegetation is powerfully affected by causes which would have no perceptible influence on stones or metals, and animals are affected by remote objects, by ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... base called 'protyle,' from which everything is derived. But this fellow Prescott goes much further than any of the former theorists. He does not stop with matter. He believes that he has the secret of life also, that he can make the transition from the inorganic to the organic, from inert matter to living protoplasm, and thence from living protoplasm to mind and what we call soul, whatever that ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... plaid is not only "cut off" from natural sources, as Ruskin says of Oriental design—the plaid is not only cut off from nature, and cut off from nature by the yard, for it is to be measured off in inorganic quantity; but it is even a kind of intentional contradiction of all natural or vital forms. And it is equally defiant of vital tone and of vital colour. Everywhere in nature tone is gradual, and between the ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... its will, to recognise the operation of secondary causes in events where ignorance beheld an immediate intervention of a higher power? And when we know that living things are formed of the same elements as the inorganic world, that they act and react upon it, bound by a thousand ties of natural piety, is it probable, nay is it possible, that they, and they alone, should have no order in their seeming disorder, no unity in their seeming ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... other virtually at the bottom of it. The Scientist acknowledges no mind beyond that of man; he seeks the impulse to life within itself, and can therefore only track it through the descending scale of being into the region of inorganic atoms and blind force. The believer refers that impulse to a conscious external First Cause, and is content to live surrounded by its mystery, entrenched within the facts of his own existence, guided ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to the close of her seventeenth year: the other two had pursued culture at a still more pretentious institute until they were eighteen. All could "play the piano"; all declared—and believed—that they "knew French." Beatrice had "done" Political Economy; Fanny had "been through" Inorganic Chemistry and Botany. The truth was, of course, that their minds, characters, propensities, had remained absolutely proof against such educational influence as had been brought to bear upon them. That they used a finer ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... been sent to Ehrenberg of Berlin, that celebrated savant, after a microscopical examination, laid an account of his inquiry before the Akademie der Wissenschaften, in May 1844, in which he shewed that the dust, so far from being inorganic, contained numerous specimens of a species of flint-shelled animalcules, or infusoria, known as polygastrica, and minute portions of terrestrial plants. The investigation led him to certain conclusions: '1. That meteoric dust-rain is of terrestrial origin. 2. That the same ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... the economy involved in the welding of physiological processes for the phenomenon of physiological memory, wherein we see reflected, as it were, in the development of the organism, the association of inorganic restraints occurring in nature which at some previous period impressed itself upon the plastic organism. We may picture the seedling at Upsala, swayed by organic memory and the inherited tendency to an ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... the matter a little closer, we see at the very outset that the existence of inorganic matter is being constantly attacked by chemical forces which eventually annihilates it. While organic existence is only made possible by continual change of matter, to keep up a perpetual supply of which it must consequently have help from without. ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... not incompatible with religious association and with organisation upon the basis of a common faith. It is possible to regard God as a Being synthetic in relation to men and societies, just as the idea of a universe of atoms and molecules and inorganic relationships is analytical in relation ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... phylogeny. Let us not forget that the cell or cells which accidentally acquired the attributes of life, had accidentally to shape themselves from dead materials into something of a character wholly unknown in the inorganic world. If one seriously considers the matter it is—so it seems to me—utterly impossible to subscribe to the accidental theory of which the immanent god—the blind god of Bergson—is a mere variant. One must agree with the late Lord Kelvin that "science positively affirms ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Canon and in ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... and formulating the law of the mystery which is a mystery no longer. It is our way. You worship the idea; I believe in the fact. If the stone fall, the wind blow, the grass and green things sprout; if the inorganic be vitalised, and take on sensibility, and perform functions, and die; if there be passions and pains, dreams and ambitions, flickerings of infinity and glimmerings of Godhead—it is for you to be smitten with the wonder of it and to memorialise ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of the sweet-tasted swans and other ingenious white shapes crunched by the small teeth of that rising generation, I am glad to remember that a certain amount of calcareous food has been held good for young creatures whose bones are not quite formed; for I have observed these delicacies to have an inorganic flavour which would have recommended them greatly to that young lady of the Spectator's acquaintance who habitually made her dessert on the ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... that transmutation of species, the geologic development of the earth, and other like phenomena do not present features conflicting with ordinary experience. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Darwin would be greatly astonished to be told that their theories of inorganic and organic evolution involved any agencies not known to exist in the present course of nature. The great achievement of these writers has been to show that all past changes of the earth and its inhabitants are to be explained as resulting from the continuous action of causes like those now in ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... been largely deprived of its food salts. Giving children lime water, with the idea that the body can convert it into bone (as a hen makes her egg shells out of old mortar) is an entire mistake. The human system cannot use such inorganic material. The men of best bone, so far as we can judge, are those who have been nourished in great ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... V, Butler wrote: "In the articles above alluded to ("God the Known and God the Unknown") I separated the organic from the inorganic, but when I came to rewrite them I found that this could not be done, and that I must reconstruct what I had written." This reconstruction never having been effected, it may be well to quote further from ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... likewise—I cannot deny it. They deal each of them, with realms of Nature. Geology is, literally, the natural history of soils and lands; chemistry the natural history of compounds, organic and inorganic; meteorology the natural history of climates; astronomy the natural history of planetary and solar bodies. And more, you cannot now study deeply any branch of what is popularly called Natural History—that is, plants and animals—without finding it necessary to ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... which causes cohesion among the parts of the solid substances such as bones and sinews, that make up our frame. In the same way the world-soul displayed itself in rational beings as intellect, in the lower animals as mere souls, in plants as nature or growth, and in inorganic substances as 'holding' or cohesion. To this lowest stage add change, and you have growth or plant nature; super-add to this phantasy and impulse and you rise to the soul of irrational animals; at a yet higher stage you reach the rational ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... the Blood. Fibrine, Albumen. Inorganic Substances. Isomerism of Fibrine, Albumen, and elements of nutrition. Relation ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... line we have prescribed to ourselves. But before opening the fourth volume, in which he treats of social physics, it will not be beside our object to take a glance at the method itself, as applied in the usual field of scientific investigation, to nature, as it is called—to inorganic matter, to vegetable and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... indications of pleasure or displeasure; then syllables, at first to some extent spontaneously articulated without meaning, afterward such as express desire, pleasure, etc.; not until much later imitated sounds, and often the imperfect imitation of the voices of animals, of inorganic noises, and of spoken words. The mutilation of his words makes it seem as if the child were already inventing new designations which are soon forgotten; and as the child, like the lunatic, uses familiar words in a new sense after he has begun to learn to talk, his ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and as life, according to the occult doctrine, is the one energy acting, Proteus-like, under the most varied forms, the occultists have a certain right to use such phraseology. Life is ever present in the atom or matter, whether organic or inorganic—a difference that the occultists do not accept. Their doctrine is that life is as much present in the inorganic as in the organic matter: when life-energy is active in the atom, that atom is organic; when dormant or latent, then the atom ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... both in the laboratory and field experiments are small—from 0.7 to 1.3 per cent. The absorption is without doubt chiefly due to the organic matter of the peats, and in all the specimens on which these trials were made, the proportion of inorganic matter is large. The results therefore become a better expression of the power of peat, in general, to absorb ammonia, if we reckon them on the organic matter alone. Calculated in this way, the organic matter ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... contains the sense organs, consists of a membranous bag, the chief parts of which are the utriculus, the sacculus, the lagena, and the three semicircular canals. The cavity of this membranous labyrinth is filled with a fluid, the endolymph; and within the utriculus, sacculus and lagena are masses of inorganic matter called the otoliths. The auditory nerve terminates in eight sense organs, which contain hair cells. There is no cochlea as in the mammalian ear. The assumption commonly made is that vibrations in the water or air by direct contact cause ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... the deeps My thoughts have strayed, where silence dwells, Where the old world encrypted sleeps,— Myriads of forms, in myriad cells, Of dead and inorganic things, That neither live, nor move, nor grow, Nor any change of atoms know; That have neither legs, nor arms, nor wings, That have neither heads, nor mouths, nor stings, That have neither roots, nor leaves, nor stems, To hold up flowers ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... intervals one above the other. Now there is no mineral body which presents any structure comparable to this, and the conclusion suggested itself that the Belemnites must be the effects of causes other than those which are at work in inorganic nature. On close examination, the saucer-shaped partitions were proved to be all perforated at one point, and the perforations being situated exactly in the same line, the chambers were seen to be traversed by a canal, or siphuncle, which thus connected the smallest or aphical ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... portions of infinite space were filled with finely diffused nebulous matter, heated to an intensity that is altogether inconceivable. The particles of this "fire mist," as it is appropriately called, were the true primordia rerum,—the elements of the universe,—the principles of all the forms of inorganic matter and all organic things. At the outset, the Creator endowed these particles with certain qualities and capacities, and then stood aside from his work, as there was nothing farther for him to do. The subsequent ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... well observe, while apprehensively at ease With an Art that's inorganic and is anything you please, That anon your newest ruin may lie crumbling unregarded, Like an old shrine forgotten in a ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of To-day, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years.' Ste. Beuve, in his 'Nouveaux Lundis' (iv. 295), has a similar remark: 'Pour un petit nombre d'arbres qui s'elevent ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... action of natural causes now in operation. The mind that will ultimately reject Darwin must (to be consistent) reject Lyell also. The same arguments of apparent stability which are thought to disprove that organic species can change will also disprove any change in the inorganic world, and you must believe with your forefathers that each hill and each river, each inland lake and continent, were created as they stand, with their various strata and their various fossils—all appearances and arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. I ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... or David Hume. Now, Principal Shairp's recent volume, although I believe no one will read it without respect and interest, has this one capital defect - that there is imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the critic and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of HOLY WILLIE'S PRAYER, Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was ever written." To the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doctrine, the motions of the "Monads"—animistically conceived units of which the entire universe, organic or inorganic, was held to be constituted—were (by the fiat of God at the creation of the world) bound in a preordained sequence, in such a manner that all these motions constitute a comprehensive, harmonious series. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... in the inability of man to raise himself from the temporal to the spiritual plane, from the lower kingdom to the higher. In this conception we are not without analogies in the natural world. We recognize a fundamental distinction between inanimate and living matter, between the inorganic and the organic, between the lifeless mineral on the one hand and the living plant or animal on the other. Within the limitations of its order the dead mineral grows by accretion of substance, and may attain a relatively perfect condition of structure and form as is seen in the crystal. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... but for this book I'd be bones at the bottom of the sea. Yes, ladies and gents, bones, of which there is one hundred and ninety-eight in the full grown human skeleton, composed of four-fifths inorganic and ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... have that nebulous and confused frame of mind to which all things, animate or inanimate, human, animal, vegetable, or inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and reason. The savage, at all events when myth-making, draws no hard and fast line between himself and the things in the world. He regards himself as literally ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... The spontaneous generation of animals and vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic elements. (2) That kind of generation in which the parent, whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in structure or habit from itself, but in which after one or more generations the original ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of the inorganic natural substances found upon or in the earth, such as earths, salts, metals, &c., and which are called by ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... accordance with or symbolical of His laws. And, for material, we shall therefore have, first, the abstract lines which are most frequent in nature; and then, from lower to higher, the whole range of systematised inorganic and organic forms. We shall rapidly glance in order at their kinds; and, however absurd the elemental division of inorganic matter by the ancients may seem to the modern chemist, it is one so grand and simple for arrangements of external appearances, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... formation of this compound, being generated, the writer thinks probable, "by the joint action of moisture and organic matters, viz., of substances used in fixing to walls papers impregnated with arsenic." In some of our chemical manuals, Dr. Kolbe's "Inorganic Chemistry," for example, it is also stated that arseniureted hydrogen is formed by the fermentation of the starch-paste employed for fastening the paper to the walls. It is perfectly obvious that the fermentation of the starch-paste must cease after ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... viewed as standing over against nature, this last being thought of as static and permanent. On the contrary, the personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the organic, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the non-moral to the moral, as these are at last seen in man. Of course, it was the life of organic nature which first suggested this notion to Schelling. An organism is a self-moving, self-producing whole. It is an ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the ministers who have the appearance of governing really govern the country only to a very limited extent. Strictly limited and circumscribed, their power is exercised principally in speeches which are hardly noticed and in a few inorganic measures. ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... which induce variability, excess of food, whether or not changed in nature, is probably the most powerful. This view was held with regard to plants by Andrew Knight, and is now held by Schleiden, more especially in reference to the inorganic elements of the food.[612] In order to give a plant more food it suffices in most cases to grow it separately, and thus prevent other plants robbing its roots. It is surprising, as I have often ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... combustion of a certain amount of material which has been already assimilated in the microscopic cellular laboratories of our body. Every vital activity is manifested at least through chemical and physical forces. And the elements of the fuel for our engines we receive through plants from the inorganic world. For the plant, as we have seen, stores up as potential energy in its compounds the actual energy of the sun's rays. And thus man lives and thinks by energy, obtained originally from the sun. But man not only consumes food and fuel. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... however, no brilliant void into which I looked. On every side I beheld beautiful inorganic forms, of unknown texture, and coloured with the most enchanting hues. These forms presented the appearance of what might be called, for want of a more specific definition, foliated clouds of the highest rarity; that is, they undulated and broke into vegetable formations, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... are handy, and we know more or less what they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about 'Renaissance poets,' 'the Elizabethans,' 'the Augustan age.' But such terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples the terms 'inorganic,' 'mammal,' 'univalve,' 'Old Red Sandstone' are scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it is not: you cannot say as assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan. We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little Order, where he found the opposite? Nay your very Daymoth has capabilities in this kind; and ever organises something (into its own Body, if no otherwise), which was before Inorganic; and of mute dead air makes living music, though only ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... opera, there is that within me that tells me that when my time does come the convulsion will be tremendous! When I love, it will be with the accumulated fervour of sixty-six years! But I have an ideal—a semi-transparent Being filled with an inorganic fruit jelly—and I have never yet seen the woman who approaches within reasonable distance of it. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... dares? for I would hear that curse again. Ha, what an awful whisper rises up! 'Tis scarce like sound: it tingles through the frame As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike. Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice 135 I only know that thou art moving near And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, remained in his position at the window. The old woman sat with her implacable face, unchanging like a thing insensible and inorganic. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the normal salt, Ca3(PO4)2, is the most important. It is the principal inorganic constituent of bones, and hence of the "bone-ash" of commerce (see PHOSPHORUS); it occurs with fluorides in the mineral apatite (q.v.); and the concretions known as coprolites (q.v.) largely consist of this salt. It also constitutes the minerals ornithite, Ca3(PO4)2.2H2O, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... anything connected with them. As with skin and bones to-day, so with protoplasm to-morrow. Protoplasm is mainly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; if we do not keep a sharp look out, we shall have it going the way of the rest of the body, and being declared dead in respect, at any rate, of these inorganic components. Science has not, I believe, settled all the components of protoplasm, but this is neither here nor there; she has settled what it is in great part, and there is no trusting her not to settle the rest at any moment, even if she ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... carbonate, enters into the composition of the hard parts, such as bones and shells, of all living animals, it is an interesting physiological fact to find substances harder than the enamel of teeth, and coloured surfaces as well polished as those of a fresh shell, re-formed through inorganic means from dead organic matter—mocking, also, in shape, some of the lower vegetable productions. (1/6. Mr. Horner and Sir David Brewster have described ("Philosophical Transactions" 1836 page 65) a ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... for the principle that in the explanation of natural phenomena it is universally agreed to begin with the simplest suppositions, the first hypotheses of the nature and cause of the geminations have for the most part put in operation only the laws of inorganic nature. Thus, the gemination is supposed to be due either to the effects of light in the atmosphere of Mars, or to optical illusions produced by vapors in various manners, or to glacial phenomena of a perpetual winter, to which it is known all the planets will be condemned, or to double cracks ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... FOR ITS DEVELOPMENT." This last assertion of M. Traube's is entirely disproved by those fermentation experiments in which, after suppressing the presence of albuminous substances, the action, nevertheless, went on in a purely inorganic medium, out of contact with air, a fact, of which we shall give irrefutable proofs. [Footnote: Traube's conceptions are governed by a theory of fermentation entirely his own, a hypothetical one, as he admits, of which the following is ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... probably for me to repeat that, although the present essay deals with certain diseases of timber due to fungi, there are other diseases brought about entirely by inorganic agencies. Some of these were touched upon in the last article, and I have already put before the readers of Nature some remarks as to how trees and their timber may suffer from the roots being ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... are akin(388.210). As Professor Robertson Smith has said: "The same lack of any sharp distinction between the nature of different kinds of visible beings appears in the old myths in which all kinds of objects, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, appear as cognate with one another, with men, and with the gods" (535.85). Mr. Hartland, speaking of this stage of thought, says: "Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions of living beings; they speak, they eat, they marry and have children" ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopher—still passes today!... I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans.... Didn't Kant see in the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic? Didn't he ask himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the good" could be explained, once and for all time? Kant's answer: "That is revolution." ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... from its crystallized cycle of matter, now rapidly evolves into states, though material, yet entirely different. Its previous arc, from Libra to Capricorn, has been amid inorganic matter. It is now rushing with lightning speed upon its weird, toilsome, upward, journey through purely organic forms, from vegetable to animal; and, as all organic forms have their primary origin in water, so does this celestial urn express the primary conception of this physical ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... possibly afford any proof of the synchrony of the deposits which contain them; on the contrary, it is demonstrably compatible with the lapse of the most prodigious intervals of time, and with the interposition of vast changes in the organic and inorganic worlds, between the epochs in which ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... frequently copper. They are usually found combined with other elements in the form of oxides or salts of various acids. Silicates, carbonates, sulphides, and sulphates are the most abundant salts. All inorganic substances occurring in nature, whether they contain a metal or not, are called minerals. Those minerals from which a useful substance can be extracted are called ores of the substance. These two terms are most frequently used in connection ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... of Pasteur's career brought him at once to the front among the scientific men. He followed them with a profound investigation into the symmetry and dissymmetry of atoms, and reached the conclusion that in these lay the basic difference between inorganic and organic matter, between the absence of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... the whole universe, he attributes to each special object, and then to the whole, a soul, spirit, or genius presiding over it; pursuing this inductive process of apotheosis from the highest summit of Nature, which is society, down to the humblest forms of life, to inanimate and inorganic matter. From his collective me, taken as the superior pole of creation, to the last atom of matter, man EXTENDS, then, the idea of God,—that is, the idea of personality and intelligence,—just as God himself EXTENDED HEAVEN, as the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... diminishes absolutely and relatively in proportion to the diminution of the energy of the metabolic process. A table prepared from adults of both sexes, twenty-five years of age, of the average weight of sixty kilograms, shows a larger proportion both of inorganic and organic substances in the urine of men.[66] Milne Edwards has found that the bones of the male are slightly richer in inorganic substances than those ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... circumference. It was thus passing through one of the remote eras of its existence. It was then young, just emerging, as it were, from nothingness, growing into form, assuming shape, and gathering attributes of fitness for exterior vitality, preparing the way for higher existences than mere inorganic matter. How long this era existed, science has failed to demonstrate, but it passed away, and solid land marked the next era of the earth's progress. It was surrounded by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; an ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... recognized the general character of mathematics as "symbolic logic." He is indeed credited with understanding the most general principle on which depends all mathematical deduction.[1] Some of the most remarkable anticipations of modern science were made by Cardan. He believed that inorganic matter was animated, and that all nature was a progressive evolution. Thus his statement that all animals were originally worms implies the indefinite variability of species, just as his remark that inferior metals were unsuccessful attempts of nature to produce ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds, on the other—earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they are; but all are delicate feeders in ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... aggregation, having no periodical or otherwise defined limit, and subject only to laws of cohesion and crystallization, as in inorganic matter. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin |
