"Microcosm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... far from his organs of prehension, so much above his horizontal line of vision, so much ampler than his immediate surroundings, that there is, between him and all these big things, a gap to be filled only by a microcosm of playthings which give him his first object-lessons. In proof of which let him see a lady richly dressed, he hardly notices her; let him see a doll in similar attire, he will be ravished with ecstasy. As if to show that it was the disproportion of the sizes ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... to the size of the universe,—and yet every star is dependent upon every other star,—as every atom in the body is dependent upon every other atom for its true life and action. This principle of balance in the macrocosm and the microcosm is equally applicable to any community of people, whether large or small. The quiet study and appreciation of it will enable us to realize the strength of free dependence and dependent freedom in the relation of persons to one another. The more truly we can help one another in ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... orator who could apply all the resources of a burnished rhetoric to the elucidation of figures; who could make pippins and cheese interesting and tea serious; who could sweep the widest horizon of the financial future and yet stoop to bestow the minutest attention on the microcosm of penny stamps and post-horses. The members on the floor and ladies in the gallery of the House listened attentively and showed no signs of weariness throughout." A contemporary awarded to him the palm for unsurpassed fluency and choice of ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... indeed the very reason why, in the lesser towns of the empire, the sports of the amphitheatre were comparatively humane and rare; and in this, as in other respects, Pompeii was but the miniature, the microcosm of Rome. Still, it was an awful and imposing spectacle, with which modern times have, happily, nothing to compare—a vast theatre, rising row upon row, and swarming with human beings, from fifteen to eighteen ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Scotland seemed to offer a centre. In an assemblage of the clergy, the King had once congratulated himself on living at a time when the light of the Gospel was shining; and in the same spirit his Chancellor gave Lord Burleigh to understand, that this British microcosm, severed from the rest of the world, but united internally by language, religion, and the friendship of its princes, could best oppose the bloodthirstiness ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... I no wish's sway Rebuilds the vanished yesterday; For plated wares of Sheffield stamp We gave the old Aladdin's lamp; 'Tis we are changed; ah, whither went 51 That undesigned abandonment, That wise, unquestioning content, Which could erect its microcosm Out of a weed's neglected blossom, Could call up Arthur and his peers By a low moss's clump of spears, Or, in its shingle trireme launched, Where Charles in some green inlet-branched, Could venture for the golden fleece 60 And dragon-watched Hesperides, Or, from its ripple-shattered fate, Ulysses' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... duties of the regular monastic routine to follow. He was encouraged to become a man of the world, and to mix freely with society. And thus, while he resigned himself, he lived the large life of a complex microcosm. Nor were men of resolute ambition without the prospect of eventually swaying an authority beyond that possessed by princes; for any one of the professed might rise to the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... made to form one universe. He believed that by virtue of an inward energy monads develop themselves spontaneously, each being independent of every other. In short, each monad is a kind of deity in itself—a microcosm representing all the great features of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... at once the sweetest blossom that ever perfumed the bowers of Paradise, and the most poignant thorn that grows in the empoisoned shadows of everlasting Pain! But for thee, mad sorceress, every individual life were a microcosm, complete within itself. We would live but our own life, suffer our own pangs, and dying, descend without a sigh to ever dreamless sleep; but thy soft fingers do sweep the human harpsichord, the ego doth "pass ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the Count. "This citadel is a microcosm of what the world might be, if men were reasonable. Not all men! A great proportion must be good enough to remain what they are. We could not live without those whose business it is to bring the reasonableness of the few into its proper relief. Were it otherwise, there ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... all that some day. Only remember now, that there is nothing wonderful in the world outside you but has its counterpart of something just as wonderful, and perhaps more wonderful, inside you. Man is the microcosm, the little world, said the philosophers of old; and philosophers nowadays are beginning to see that their old guess is actual ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... "There goes my English microcosm, all my new English friends with whom I was going to pass the rest of my life, peaceful and contented, as a village surgeon. Pretty dream, two years long! Truly man hath no sure abiding place here. I will go back to P——, and see if they are ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... express substances under ceremonies." But it must be always remembered that the ceremony is not the substance. It is but the outer garment which covers and perhaps adorns it, as clothing does the human figure. But divest man of that outward apparel, and you still have the microcosm, the wondrous creation, with all his nerves, and bones, and muscles, and, above all, with his brain, and thoughts, and feelings. And so take from Masonry these external ceremonies, and you still have remaining its philosophy and science. These have, of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... I told you, once on a time that you 'knew nothing of me'? whereat you demurred—but I meant what I said, and knew it was so. To be grand in a simile, for every poor speck of a Vesuvius or a Stromboli in my microcosm there are huge layers of ice and pits of black cold water—and I make the most of my two or three fire-eyes, because I know by experience, alas, how these tend to extinction—and the ice grows and grows—still this last is true part of me, most characteristic ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Lawyer Clippurse at the Hall occasioned much speculation in that portion of the world to which Waverley-Honour formed the centre: but the more judicious politicians of this microcosm augured yet worse consequences to Richard Waverley from a movement which shortly followed his apostasy. This was no less than an excursion of the Baronet in his coach-and-six, with four attendants in rich liveries, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,—life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... those which occur on the earth; minerals and metals live, as animals and plants live; all pass through corruption towards perfection." In another aspect the saying meant "the human being is the world in miniature; as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm; to know oneself is to know all ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... all its aspects, is a microcosm of European religion. It reflects almost every phase of thought and feeling from crude magic and superstition to the speculative mysticism of Eckhart, from mere delight in physical indulgence to the exquisite spirituality and tenderness of St. Francis. Ascetic and bon-vivant, mystic ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Truth! I am the Truth!" we hear the God-drunk gnostic cry "The microcosm abides in ME; ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... revealed to me by the contents of that basket, as the packer wrapped up and protected one article after another. I had been compelled to abandon a visitation of the West and of the small communities everywhere, and I was sorry. But here in a microcosm I thought I saw the simple reality of the backbone of all America, a symbol of the millions of the little plain people, who ultimately make possible the glory of the world-renowned streets and ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover system was a little working-model—and not so very little either—of the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... these circumstances, then, I cannot but regard it as fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient Microcosm: a biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the Kosmos, its untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection and its profound and hearty intention to go on existing as long ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... nights their clothing is hung out of doors to rid it of certain parasites not unknown in civilization. Benumbed with, frost, the insects lose their hold and fall into the snow, to the great comfort of those who nursed and fed them. The body of a Koriak, considered as a microcosm, is ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... citizen proper. Other elements of the population were the foreigners. At Rome these were exceedingly numerous, and the city may in this respect be called—as indeed it was called—a microcosm, a small copy or epitome of the Roman world. Gauls, Africans, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, and Egyptians were perhaps the most commonly to be seen, but particularly prominent were the Greeks and the Jews. The Greeks were recognised above all as the clever men, the artists, the social entertainers, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... susceptible, one would have said, of refinements of difference infinitely more various than anything that could have existed more than two hundred years ago; yet one cannot but feel that this observer would have been fully equal to drawing our microcosm as well as his own. Earle's is a penetrating observation which is always fresh—so fresh that no archaism of phrase in him, and no cheery optimism in ourselves, can disguise the fact that it is our weaknesses he is probing, our motives he ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... the food we eat is valuable or otherwise as a life sustainer, in proportion to the amount of life it contains. We are so complex in our organization that, we require a great variety of the different elements to sustain all the active functions and powers within us. Man, being a microcosm, or a miniature universe, must sustain that universe, by taking into the system the various elements, which combine to make up the Infinite Universe of God. Animal flesh is necessary to certain organized ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... It bred in Illinois statesmen a disposition to compromise for the sake of political harmony and economic progress, a passionate attachment to the Union as the sine qua non of State unity, and a glowing nationalism. Illinois was in short a microcosm: the larger problems of the nation existed ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... human being discovers that he himself is this will, and that the world exists only for him does so in relation to his consciousness. Thus each human being is himself in a double aspect the whole world, the microcosm. And that which he realizes as his own real being exhausts the being of the whole world, the macrocosm. So, like man, the world is through and through will, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... be greeted by the soul of Chatterton, just as the body of Adonais has to be caressed and bewailed by Urania. Using language of a semi-emblematic kind, we might perhaps express something of Shelley's belief thus:—Mankind is the microcosm, as distinguished from the rest of the universe, which forms the macrocosm; and, as long as a man's body and soul remain in combination, his soul pertains to the microcosm: when this combination ceases with the death of the body, his soul, in ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... formed and upon principles developed: how infinitely more powerful must the influence of such communion be upon a youthful heart, ardent, innocent, and unpractised! As Vivian was not to figure in the microcosm of a public school, a place for which, from his temper, he was almost better fitted than any young genius whom the playing fields of Eton or the hills of Winton can remember, there was some difficulty in fixing ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the sea where men float about for years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy from Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... which are sufficiently civilized to boast of cooks, these artists, toiling in their fiery element, have a privilege to be testy and impatient. He therefore retreated from the torrid region of Mrs. Dods's microcosm, and employed his time in the usual devices of loiterers, partly by walking for an appetite, partly by observing the progress of his watch towards three o'clock, when he had happily succeeded in getting an employment more serious. His table, in the blue parlour, was displayed with two ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... in broad daylight. I've heard invisible feet tramping all about my chair in a vividly lighted room.' I didn't believe him, of course. The fact is, we don't know our own capacity for being deceived. We are each a microcosm—a summing-up of all our forebears, and in the obscure places of our brains are the cells of cavemen, nooks troubled by shadows and inhabited by strange noises. If you come at me in the right way you ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... his time is spent in sighs, burdened with unutterable grief, and long drawn through the funnel. He amuses himself, too, with repeating all the whispers, the moans, and the louder utterances or tempestuous howls of the wind; so that the stove becomes a microcosm of the aerial world. Occasionally there are strange combinations of sounds,—voices talking almost articulately within the hollow chest of iron,—insomuch that fancy beguiles me with the idea that my firewood must ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... principles held good with stakes of value, he seemed to enter upon the possession of a veritable gold mine. The peculiar traits that his one unique experience of the world had developed—his coolness, his courage, his discernment of strategic resources—stood him in good stead, and long after the microcosm of the hotel lay fast asleep the cards were dealt and play ran high in the little building called the casino, ostensibly devoted to the milder ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the University. It is not probable that the place will vary, in essential character, from that which has all along been its own. We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... a microcosm of English society, from the lower middle class upwards, with all its respectabilities and incompatibilities and disabilities—its narrownesses and meannesses and snobbishnesses, its gossipings and backbitings and toadyings and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists; and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of that other world, called the microcosm, which is man. And at some of the hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy Scriptures: first, in Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles of the Apostles; and then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there could be no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm this summary of the day's news had presented, even to that last unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a damning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle of world-wide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy of Mephistopheles, ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... in at heart was nothing more or less than an unfathomable Nature, a Natura naturans of infinite resource, connected with which, as a microcosm, is man, who has also within him infinite powers, which he can learn to master by cultivating the will, which must be begun at least by the aid of sleep, or letting the resolve ripen, as it were, in the ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... contrasted oddly with the brief, hurried entries further on. He found himself, as he had anticipated, in a society composed of some of the most heterogeneous elements. Stillwater, viewed from a certain point, was a sort of microcosm, a little international rag-fair to which nearly every country on earth had contributed one of its shabby human products. "I am moving," wrote Mr. Taggett, "in an atmosphere in which any crime is possible. I give ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... volume of this issue. They form a fairly complete survey of English history from the time of Elizabeth to the later years of the reign of George III, and are fitly introduced by the Essay on Hallam's History, which forms a kind of summary or microcosm of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... vengeance. It was therefore, not surprising that when my turn came, I did to others as I had been done by. Jackson had no excuse for his treatment of me, whereas I had every excuse for retaliation. He did know better, I did not. I followed the ways of the world in the petty microcosm in which I had been placed. I knew not of mercy, of forgiveness, charity, or good-will. I knew not that there was a God; I only knew that might was right, and the most pleasurable sensation which ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... should be 'polite', congruous in tone with the smooth river beyond it—this was the irresistible problem the Brothers set themselves and slowly, coolly, perfectly solved. So long as the Adelphi remains to us, a microcosm of the eighteenth century is ours. If there is any meaning in ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... still wandering, the day wore away, till he found himself in one of the lanes that surround that glittering Microcosm of the vices, the frivolities, the hollow show, and the real beggary of the gay City—the gardens and the galleries of the Palais Royal. Surprised at the lateness of the hour, it was then on the stroke of seven, he was about to return homewards, when the loud voice of Gawtrey sounded ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Avocations of Pedantry and Pedagogism will give him an Interval from Wrath and Contention, he will set apart a Moment to consider human Nature Deviliz'd, and give us a Mathematical Anatomical Description of it; with a Map of Satan's Kingdom in the Microcosm of Mankind, and such other Illuminations as to him and his Contemporaries —— and, —— &c. in their great Wisdom ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... it is almost as certain she would never have gone had it not been for the unpaid bills haunting her consciousness, a combination of demon and ghost. The misery had all the time been growing upon her, and must have had no small share in the subversion of her microcosm. When that was effected, the evil thing that lay at the root of it all rose and pounced upon her. Wrong is its own avenger. She had been doing wrong, and knowingly for years, and now the plant of evil was blossoming towards its fruit. If one say the evil was but a trifle, I take her judgment, ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... case, certainly, because it was Sunday; but there was tribulation awaiting her as soon as she could recollect her overdue analysis of the Major's concealed facts. She had put it off till leisure should come; and now that she was only looking at a microcosm of the garden seen through the window, and reflected upside down in the tea-urn, she had surely met with leisure. Her mind went back tentatively on the points of the old man's reminiscences, as she looked at her own thoughtful face in the convex of the urn opposite, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... very strange. The city had now become not only the centre of faith but, in a sense, a microcosm of it. It was divided into four huge quarters—Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Teutonic and Eastern—besides Trastevere, which was occupied almost entirely by Papal offices, seminaries, and schools. Anglo-Saxondom occupied ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the literature of theosophy, and naturally so, for it is a succinct statement of a fundamental and far-reaching truth. The scientist recognizes it now and then and here and there, but the occultist trusts it always and utterly. To him the microcosm and the macrocosm are one and the same in essence, and the forth-going impulse which calls a universe into being and the indrawing impulse which extinguishes it again, each lasting millions of years, are echoed ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... across the ages, is a microcosm which has, like the world itself, successive stages of youth, maturity, and old age; but it never dies—it renews itself perpetually. It is not like a perfect circle; it is like a spiral, and in its growth is always mounting higher. I believe in making students follow ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... a new microcosm was revealed. Every cell was found to contain a spherical body called the nucleus (fig. 46a). Within the nucleus is a network of fibres, a sap fills the interstices of the network. The network resolves itself into a definite number of threads at each division of the cell (fig. 46 b-e). ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... capacity of playgoer, as indeed in almost every other capacity, Pepys presents himself to readers of his naive diary as the incarnation, or the microcosm, of the average man. No other writer has pictured with the same lifelike precision and simplicity the average playgoer's sensations of pleasure or pain. Of the play and its performers Pepys records exactly what he thinks or feels. He usually ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... therefore, that this sensible world, which is called the macrocosm—that is, the long world—enters into our soul, which is called the microcosm—that is, the little world—through the gates of the five senses, as regards the apprehension, delectation, and distinction of these sensible things; which is manifest in this way:—In the sensible world ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... largely borrowed their points of departure from the new interest in Greek literature. As Windelband has said, the new science of nature was the daughter of humanism. The favorite notion of the time was that man was in microcosm that which the universe ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... God" are one and the same thing. The emphasis in "Nature Mysticism" lies not so much on this direct pathway to God through the soul as upon the symbolic character of the world of Nature as a visible revelation of an invisible Universe, and upon the idea that man is a microcosm, a little world, reproducing in epitome, point for point, though in miniature, the great world, or macrocosm. On this line of thought, everything is double. The things that are seen are parables of other things which are not seen. They are like printed ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... reflections which the fact of it awoke in me. There are other reflections connected with Yva and the marvel of her love and its various manifestations which arise also. But these I keep to myself. They concern the wonder of woman's heart, which is a microcosm of the hopes and fears and desires and despairs of this humanity of ours whereof from age to age she is ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... silent places, a river of uncertain droughts, a river of overwhelming floods, a river no one who would escape drowning may afford to ignore. Moreover, it is the very axis and creator of our world valley, the source of all our power in life, and the irrigator of all things. In the microcosm of each individual, as in the microcosm of the race, this flood ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... half of the nineteenth century two men became rulers of musical emotion, Richard Wagner and Frederic Francois Chopin. The music of the latter is the most ravishing gesture that art has yet made. Wagner and Chopin, the macrocosm and the microcosm! "Wagner has made the largest impersonal synthesis attainable of the personal influences that thrill our lives," cries Havelock Ellis. Chopin, a young man slight of frame, furiously playing out upon the keyboard his ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... organism, all the parts of which are connected through an unceasing exchange of molecules of effluvia. The stars, inexhaustible generators of energy, constantly act upon the earth and man—upon man, the epitome of all nature, a "microcosm" whose every element corresponds to some part of the starry sky. This was, in a few words, the theory formulated by the Stoic disciples of the Chaldeans;[26] but if we divest it of all the philosophic garments with which it has ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... of them. They answered their Batuschka (little father) without embarrassment. In Russia the family is the microcosm of the State. All power rests with the father. All theories of representative government in Russia are pure nonsense. "How can human statutes circumscribe the divine right of a father?" asks the Russian. So that the unlimited power in the hands of the Emperor is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... strength and fulness, it is dragged up from its secret lurking-places, and confronted with its celestial antagonist. In all its self-contradiction and cowering unreason, it is set face to face with its celestial umpire, and subjected to her unrelenting criticism. There are depths in this microcosm which this torch only has entered, silences which this speaker only has broken, cries which he only knows ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the younger married couple, and the grandchildren, and a big dog vociferously taking care of them. A lighted glimpse, a few hearty words of direction, and we were out in the night again; for though, indeed, this was Dutch Hollow, its simple microcosm did not include an hotel. For that we must walk on another half-mile or so. O those country half-miles! So on we went again, and soon a lighted stoop flashed on our right. At last! I mounted the steps of a veranda, ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... taken a general survey of the great world, and descended from the intelligible to the sensible universe, let us still, adhering to that golden chain which is bound round the summit of Olympus, and from which all things are suspended, descend to the microcosm man. For man comprehends in himself partially everything which the world contains divinely and totally. Hence, according to Pluto, he is endued with an intellect subsisting in energy, and a rational soul proceeding from ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... often chances that the biologist, while gazing stoically through his microscope, may discover things in his microcosm that bear very closely upon the practical interests of the most unscientific members of the human family, it would be a mistake to suppose that it is this class of facts that the worker is particularly seeking. The truth is that, as a rule, the pure biologist is engaged in work for the love of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... as embodied in all living forms; as dwelling in them; as being that power in them whereby they have learnt to fashion themselves, each one according to its ideas of its own convenience, and to make itself not only a microcosm, or little world, but a little unwritten history of the universe from its own point of view into the bargain? From everlasting, in time past, only in so far as life has lasted; invisible, only in so far as the ultimate connection ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... fatal to the living inhabitants of the planets. Then will begin the greatest of cosmic events: a drama that has doubtless been played numbers of times already on the stage of the universe: the last stand of the wonderful microcosm against the brute force of the macrocosm. . . ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... of Wales is the Bismarck of London society: he is also its microcosm. All its idiosyncrasies are reflected in the person of His Royal Highness. Its hopes, its fears, its aspirations, its solicitudes, its susceptibilities, its philosophy, its way of looking at life and of appraising character—of each of these is the Heir-Apparent the mirror. If a definition ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... a far inferior way, every man is a poet to himself. In the microcosm of his own small round, every one has the power to vivify old incident, every one raises bawbles of the desk and drawer, not only into life, but into life they never had. With the flower whose leaves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... is that man is a Microcosm, in which is germinally (potentially) contained everything that exists in the Macrocosm of the universe. [An unproved hypothesis.] As the will and thought of that universal and divine internal power, which is called ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... immediately around Arrowhead Village, every day must have its local gossip as well as its general news. The newspaper tells the small community what is going on in the great world, and the busy tongues of male and female, especially the latter, fill in with the occurrences and comments of the ever-stirring microcosm. The fact that the Italian teacher had, or thought he had, seen Maurice ten years before was circulated and made the most of,—turned over and over like a cake, until it was thoroughly done on both sides and all through. It was a very ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the State. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... she had in view, that of compassing her ends, she could also be as frigid as an icicle, when it likewise so suited her purpose. "Respectability" and "position" were her gods:—the "world"—her world!—her microcosm. ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... statement seems to be the last word in the matter. There is one sentence in it, however—namely: 'I protest strongly against the insufferable and entirely dogmatic assertion that each separate id is a microcosm possessed of an historical architecture elaborated slowly through the series of generations.' Have you no desire, in view of later research, to modify this statement? Do you not think that it is over-accentuated? With your permission, I would ask the favor ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pianoforte is as old as music itself, and that scientific learning, inventive ingenuity, and mechanical skill, tributary always to the genius of the art, have worked together for centuries to apply this principle, until the instrument which embodies it in its highest potency is become a veritable microcosm of music. It is the visible sign of culture in every gentle household; the indispensable companion of the composer and teacher; the intermediary between all the various branches of music. Into the study of the orchestral conductor it brings a translation of all the multitudinous ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am not without sympathy for Christian feeling—or rather for what you mean by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.—so ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... microcosm, and one can suit himself with any sort of society within a radius of a mile. To a large portion of the people who frequent Washington or dwell where, the ultra fashion, the shoddy, the jobbery are as utterly distasteful as they would he in a refined ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... assigned emblems to the chief painters of the Renaissance, he gave to Michael Angelo the dragon of contemplation, and to Mantegna the serpent of sagacity. For Raphael, by a happier instinct, he reserved man, the microcosm, the symbol of powerful grace, incarnate intellect. This quaint fancy of the Milanese critic touches the truth. What distinguishes the whole work of Raphael, is its humanity in the double sense of the humane and human. Phoebus, as imagined by the Greeks, was not more radiant, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... pronounce, as the apostle says, relatively to a particular phenomenon, "whether it is in the body, or out of the body." Be it however where or what it may, it is this which constitutes the great essence of, and gives value to, our existence; and all the wonders of our microcosm would without it be a form only, destined immediately to perish, and of no greater account than as a ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... In the beginning love arose in the passion for perpetuation; to-day, the passion for perpetuation arises in love. Just as we put ourselves in the way of natural selection, pitting the microcosm against the macrocosm in a passion of ethical feeling, just so do we reverse for ourselves processes that seem indeed to have all the force of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... revelation was poured, has never quite disappeared from the Church, and in times of excitement and upheaval it tends to reassert itself. The maturest Greek philosophy regards eternity as the divine mode of existence, while mortals are born, live, and die in time. Man is a microcosm, in touch with every rung of the ladder of existence; and he is potentially a 'participator' in the divine mode of existence, which he can make his own by living, so far as may be, in detachment from the vain shadows and perishable goods of earth. That ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... such it may truly be said, that their wisdom is foolishness—for none truly wise ever felt, in the researches of man, any ground of arrogance, while pursuits of philosophy serve only to teach humility!—But to what purpose tend such observations? Every man is his own microcosm, and his case, in his own view, is that of no other man! Pride will always find food in self-love, which in spite of exhortations, it will devour with ravenous appetite! If men were immortal, how intolerable would be existence from the ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... from face and body, but from understanding and will; therefore by the natural man and the spiritual man is meant that man's understanding and will are either natural or spiritual. The natural man in respect to his understanding and will is like the natural world, and may be called a world or microcosm; and the spiritual man in respect to his understanding and will is like the spiritual world, and may be called a spiritual world or heaven. From which it is evident that as the natural man is in a kind of image a natural world, so he loves those ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... unbearable, I realized that my infinite immensity was lost. Once more I was limited to the humiliating cage of a body, not easily accommodative to the Spirit. Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... commonest supernatural motive in the writing of all Gaels, either Alban or Irish. Sharp introduced "second sight" into "The Son of Allan" (1881); it is in "Pharais" (1894), the first of his "F.M." work; it is developed at some length in "Iona" (1900), which is a microcosm of all his writing. In "Iona," Sharp puts himself on record as holding stoutly belief in the reality ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... bibliomania *Bios life biology, autobiography, amphibious *Cheir hand chiropody, chirurgical, surgeon *Chilioi a thousand kilogram, kilowatt *Chroma color chromo, achromatic Chronos time chronic, anachronism *Cosmos world, order cosmopolitan, microcosm *Crypto hide cryptogam, cryptology *Cyclos wheel, circle encyclopedia, cyclone *Deca ten decasyllable, decalogue *Demos people democracy, epidemic *Derma skin epidermis, taxidermist *Dis, di twice, doubly dichromatic, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... in dwelling on the peculiarities of a man's own character, it is rather an agreeable literary ingredient. Sir Thomas defines his point of view with his usual felicity. 'The world that I regard,' he says in the spirit of the imprisoned Richard II., 'is myself: it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.' That whimsical inversion of the natural order is the key to the 'Religio Medici.' We, for the nonce, are to regard Sir Thomas Browne as a ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... colourless. Not infrequently it is set with needles or hairs, like a cactus. Often we find a mass of foreign bodies—stone, sand, fragments of mussel-shells, etc.—worked into the mantle. This has earned for the Ascidia the name of "the microcosm." ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... gave the name, Till both their nation and their arts did come A welcome trophy to triumphant Rome; Then whereso'er her conqu'ring eagles fled, Arts, learning, and civility were spread; And as in this our microcosm, the heart Heat, spirit, motion gives to every part, So Rome's victorious influence did disperse All her own virtues through the universe. Here some digression I must make, t'accuse Thee, my forgetful, and ingrateful Muse: Couldst thou from Greece to Latium take thy flight, And not to thy great ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... into a cup of ink to read destinies. Now, twelve hours afterwards, let us step down below into the centre of the city, when the limelight of a glaring, cloudless sun is turned full on it—when the living microcosm of its active life is thrown on the magic-lantern screen of our retina. Now we are at the base of these high buildings, and no city in Europe can show anything like them. It is difficult to know what to compare them to. We cannot compare Broadway to an ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... completion. This is not to be done at will. According to his idea, a romance is born in a manner that is, in some sort, necessary, with all its chapters; a drama is born with all its scenes. Think not that there is anything arbitrary in the numbers of parts of which that whole, that mysterious microcosm which you call a drama or a romance, is composed. Grafting and soldering take badly on works of this nature, which should gush forth in a single stream and so remain. The thing once done, do not change your mind, do not touch it up. The book once published, the sex of the work, whether virile ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... only show that appealed to Washington. He went to the circus when opportunity offered, gave nine shillings to a "man who brought an elk as a show," three shillings and ninepence "to hear the Armonica," two dollars for tickets "to see the automatum," treated the "Ladies to ye Microcosm" and paid to see waxworks, puppet shows, a dancing bear, and a lioness and tiger. Nor did he avoid a favorite Virginia pastime, but attended cockfights when able. His frequent going to ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... to see that, as had been told him long before, the kingdoms of this world were already passing into the hands of a higher dominion—and this was the significance of this microcosm of those kingdoms that now lay before ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... the benefit of inquiring minds with a preference for the oracular. He added that cosmos was a condition of grovelling minds, and that while the thoughts, faculties, and emotions of an ordinary member of society might fitly be summed up in the epithet 'microcosm.' his own nature could be appropriately described only by that of 'microchaos.' In which opinion the ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... indeed a god, they are playing strange tricks with his works and sayings; while, if he be indeed a mere man, they forget to explain how it is likely that the human race will ever look back to a single dead Jew as the moral microcosm, the consummate spiritual flower of humanity, the beacon of ideal life to every generation of voyagers on the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... I feel as though, like another SIMONIDES, I could fly with him from this inhospitable Northern house of SCOPAS, to the refuge of some more generous DIOSCURI. In the present macrocosm, to which we have come from our former home's microcosm, my brother is persistently maligned, even by Mr. BUMSTEAD, who may yet, if I am any judge, meet the fate of ANACREON, as recorded by SINDAS; though, in his case, the choking will not be accomplished by a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... prophet of nationalism that this man compels our particular attention. The prophecy is embodied in a play entitled "The Comet, a Play of Our Times," brought out as far back as 1908. The play is a microcosm of American life. The chief character is a college president, and he it is that is chosen to expound the true nature of nationalism and to give voice and utterance to the principle of self-determination. (Is ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... all this, it will be safest, as always, to follow the course of nature, and begin where God begins with us. For as every one of us is truly a microcosm, a whole miniature world within ourselves, so is the history of each individual more or less the history of the whole human race, and there are few of us but pass through the same course of intellectual ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... a microcosm—a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the I AM in the universal. It is the same Power working in the smaller sphere of which the individual is the centre. This is the great truth which the ancients set forth under the figure of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, the lesser I AM reproducing the precise image of the greater, and of which the Bible tells us when it speaks of man as the ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... most wonderful and the most fascinating of all the fields of science. As the chapters of the preceding book carried us out into a macrocosm of inconceivable magnitude, our present studies are to reveal a microcosm of equally inconceivable smallness. As the studies of the physicist attempted to reveal the very nature of matter and of energy, we have now to seek the solution of the yet more inscrutable problems of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... dip into statistics can no longer be evaded. We must map out the microcosm, and allot to each sovereign power its quota of the surface. The great European states which have assumed within the century the supreme direction of human affairs are assigned a prominent central position in the Main Building. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... importance in its bearing upon our subject, but also because no one has hitherto considered it in that relation.' It was also pointed out that the coherence and correspondence of the macrocosm of the universe with the microcosm of the human mind can be accounted for by the fact that the human mind is only one of the products of general evolution, its subjective relations necessarily reflecting those external relations of which they themselves are ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... practice prevailed in the Old World during the greater part of the seventeenth century. The first held to the old methods of Galen: its theory was that the body, the microcosm, like the macrocosm, was made up of the four elements—fire, air, water, earth; having respectively the qualities hot, dry, moist, cold. The body was to be preserved in health by keeping each of these ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... we may say, the primary social structure. Because it contains both sexes and all ages it is capable of reproducing itself, and so of reproducing society. For the same reason it contains practically all social relations in miniature. It has therefore often been called, and rightly, "the social microcosm". The relations of superiority, subordination, and equality, which enter so largely into the structure of all social institutions, are especially clearly illustrated in the family in the relations of parents ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We sit at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing or walking, we love to take brains easy. If ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... some account has been added of the vicissitudes of literary labour undergone in the interval, as complete a representation of the man will be afforded as could be taken from any period of his career. Of the larger life whereof it is part, the Lausanne life is indeed a perfect microcosm, wanting only the London streets. This was his chief present want, as will shortly be perceived: but as yet the reader does not feel it, and he sees otherwise in all respects at his best the great observer ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... his or her life as a single cell—a fertilised egg-cell, a treasure-house of all the ages. For in this living microcosm, only a small fraction (1/125) of an inch in diameter, there is condensed—who can imagine how?—all the natural inheritance of man, all the legacy of his parentage, of his ancestry, of his long pre-human pedigree. Darwin called ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the friction of life, not in ease and quiet. Man is, further, a being composed of cells, tissues, and organs, which were successively developed for him by the lower animal kingdoms. The old view, that man was the microcosm, had in it a certain amount of every important truth. We need to be continually reminded of our indebtedness in a thousand ways to the lowest and most ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... crack-brained among us—take to themselves a weight and dignity from the presence behind them of this cosmic purposelessness. The less the universe matters, the more humanity matters. The less meaning there is in the macrocosm the more tenderly and humorously must every microcosm be treated. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Greek intellectual activity shifted to Athens, the leading minds [70] concentrated their attention upon ethical problems. Forsaking the study of the macrocosm for that of the microcosm, they lost the key to the thought of the great Ephesian, which, I imagine, is more intelligible to us than it was to Socrates, or to Plato. Socrates, more especially, set the fashion of a kind of inverse agnosticism, by ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... life is like the single dewy star That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,— A microcosm where all things ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... arteries and veins, of capillaries and nerves; of the blood, with the millions of millions of blood corpuscles, each a microcosm ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... purity or save her from her wrong done against herself. It is a poem of moral stress and strain, imagined with great intensity. Browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of passion, and studies it, with its shifting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of culmination. For once in James Lee's Wife (named in the first edition by a stroke of perversity James Lee), he represents in a sequence of lyrics a sequence ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... growing thing showed me, by its shape and colour, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out. My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and macrocosm were at length atoned, at length in harmony! I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me. To be aware of a thing, was to know its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at home—was to know that we are all what we are, because Another ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... was laid in a small town in California, a microcosm of the stupidities of civilization and of the United States of America in particular. The celebrated "atmosphere" of the state was ignored. The town and the types were "American"; it would seem that merely some unadmitted tenuous sentiment had set the scene in the state ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these days, is rather a shaded life. Absence from home, a strange land, a land, too, that sits in mourning over the great relics of the past,—all this tends to make it so. More material still is what passes within the microcosm, and I am not yet well. Not that I am worse, for I am continually better. But—but, in short, not to [175] speak too gravely, if a man feels as if one of the snakes of Medusa's head were certainly in his brain,—I have seen a horrible ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... dead fragments of his body, and then the higher nature, the eternal soul (Horus) will be born, which can progress to Osiris life. The man who is aspiring to the highest kind of existence must repeat in himself, as a microcosm, the macrocosmic universal Osiris process. This is the meaning of Egyptian initiation. What Plato (cf. p. 80) describes as a cosmic process, i.e., that the Creator has stretched the soul of the world on the body of ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... We do not believe the enterprise of Mr. Barnum will stop at white whales. It will embrace sperm whales and mermaids, and all strange things that swim or fly or crawl, until the Museum will become one vast microcosm of the animal creation. A quarter seems positively contemptible weighed ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... upon by her fury and the suggestion of Don Inocencio. The scene where they work him up to rebellion and assassination is a compendium of the history of intolerance; as the mean little conceited city of Orbajosas is the microcosm of ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... patient enough to wait for it as he does. I think it is in this way .that he comes to be so void of extravagance in his style and material. He does not meddle with the clear, true picture that is painted on his mind. He lifts the curtain, and we see a microcosm of nature, so cunningly portrayed that truth itself seems to have been the agent of its appearance. Thus his taste is genuine—the most faultless I ever knew. Now, behold! all unforeseen, a criticism upon the genius ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of the 1840's, where Lola found herself cast adrift, was a curious microcosm and full of contrasts. A mixture of unabashed blackguardism and cloistered prudery; of double-beds and primness; of humbug and frankness; of liberty and restraint; of lust and license; of brutal horse-play passing for "wit," and of candour marching with cant. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... classes of idea about government in the modern world depending upon our conception of the political capacity of the common man. We may suppose he is a microcosm, with complete ideas and wishes about the state and the world, or we may suppose that he isn't. We may believe that the common man can govern, or we may believe that he can't. We may think further along the first line that he is so wise and good and right that we only have to get out of ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... reply. Our silence endured for some miles, till the country with open fields, or shady woods and parks, presented pleasant objects to our view. After some observations on the scenery and seats, Raymond said: "Philosophers have called man a microcosm of nature, and find a reflection in the internal mind for all this machinery visibly at work around us. This theory has often been a source of amusement to me; and many an idle hour have I spent, exercising my ingenuity in finding resemblances. Does not Lord Bacon say that, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... only discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks behind ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... creation, universe, cosmos; globe; planet; macrocosm, microcosm. Associated Words: cosmology, cosmologist, cosmography, cosmogony, cosmographer, cosmogonist, cosmometry, cosmoplastic, cosmic, cosmolatry, cosmopolite, cosmopolitan, cataclysm, ante-mundane, secularize, secularization, secularist, supermundane, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sentiment can be not merely unconsciously present in both its highest and lowest stages, but may also manifest itself openly, and even artistically. The modern man, like the man of antiquity, is in this respect too a microcosm, which the medieval man was not and ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... that our ideas are judged from internal events. It is our microcosm opposed to the macrocosm. It is the individual opposed to the social. Looking at an external object, we remain in communion with our fellows, for we receive, or think we receive, identical sensations. At all ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... against it. We have heard of men who consider life under the idea of a wilderness—dry as "a remainder biscuit after a voyage:" and who consider a day under the idea of a little life. Life is the macrocosm, or world at large; day is the microcosm, or world in miniature. Consequently, if life is a wilderness, then day, as a little life, is a little wilderness. And this wilderness can be safely traversed only by having relays of fountains, or stages for refreshment. Such stages, they ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Jennings School was a perfect microcosm, as the scientists would say, of the human race—the serious very few, toiling more or less successfully toward a definite goal; the many, compelled to do something, and imagining themselves serious and purposeful as they toiled ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... passed without yielding much beyond a livelihood. Meantime, Melbourne was his microcosm: he made a systematic study of its life from the purlieus of Little Bourke and Lonsdale streets to the palace of his 'model legislator' on Eastern Hill. Like Balzac, one of his favourite novelists, he made observation a severe ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... littleness &c. adj.; smallness &c. (of quantity) 32; exiguity, inextension[obs3]; parvitude[obs3], parvity[obs3]; duodecimo[obs3]; Elzevir edition, epitome, microcosm; rudiment; vanishing point; thinness &c. 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy[obs3], Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon[obs3], urchin, elf; atomy[obs3], dandiprat[obs3]; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my- thumb[obs3]; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling[obs3], cock-sparrow. animalcule, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Handel. These verses are, I think, meant to intimate the great harmonious order and procession of the natural and moral universe, as Pythagoras intimated them by his 'Music of the Spheres'—those eternal laws against which man, that tiny microcosm, so ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... sweet and homelike the world is reflected, In the chalice green of Rhinewine Rummer. And how the dancing microcosm Sunnily glides down the thirsty throat! Everything I behold in the glass— History, old and new, of the nations, Both Turks and Greeks, and Hegel and Gans, Forests of citron and big reviews, Berlin ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to their hearts' content, laughing and pushing each other about like some boarding school mad with glee over the absence of the teacher. Nothing, truly, could surpass in unalloyed gaiety this carnival of youngsters, this assemblage of miniature men and women—akin to a veritable microcosm, wherein the fashions of every people mingled with the fantastic creations of romance and drama. The ruddy lips and blue eyes, the faces breathing love, invested the dresses with the fresh purity of childhood. The scene realized to the mind the merrymaking of a fairy-tale to which trooped Cupids ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... of buddhi-movement as life. The individual aha@mkaras and senses are related to the individual buddhis by the developing sattva determinations from which they had come into being. Each buddhi with its own group of aka@mkara (ego) and sense-evolutes thus forms a microcosm separate from similar other buddhis with their associated groups. So far therefore as knowledge is subject to sense-influence and the ego, it is different for each individual, but so far as a general mind (kara@na buddhi) apart from sense knowledge is concerned, there is a ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... deprived just there of too great liberty by the word "Atlantic." And I remember thinking, as I read, that in each breaking wave was some particle which had visited every shore in all the world—that in each sparkle of hot sunlight stealing that bright water up into the sky, was the microcosm of all change, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... basis of every "cycle of life" is found the egg or germ, that strange microcosm which appears to contain within itself the entire organism from which it proceeds and which seems capable of manifesting it in its entirety. The first embryologic discovery we make as the result of this study—a discovery of the utmost importance—is that germs are one in essence, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... explorer was straightway lost to the outer world! No human need but might find its contentment therein. Spread forth in its alluringly illustrated pages was the whole universe reduced to the purchasable. It was a perfect and detailed microcosm of the world of trade, the cosmogony of commerce in petto. The style was brief, pithy, pregnant; the illustrations—oh, wonder of wonders!—unfailingly apt to the text. He who sat by the Damascus Road of old marveling as the caravans rolled dustily past ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. It may seem an audacious proposal thus to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm, and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends; but I venture to think that the great intellectual difference between the ancient times with which we have been occupied and our day, lies in the solid foundation we have acquired for the hope that ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... circumstances, possesses so much of the form and character of some prior one, that we are very soon reconciled to the idea of a variety composed of a mere mutation of the mixture of old elements. The mind, looked upon as a microcosm peopled by the representations of things that be—of the past and possible, of the future and probable—is held to be our own little world, with which, and all its inhabitants, we are or may be familiar; we forget ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... sheltered spots; such wild flowers as can flourish there bloom and decay; the poplars shed their leaves, and nourish by imperceptible degrees the fibres of the moss; some hardy grasses take root; and at length a scanty greensward appears. By such means slowly, in the microcosm of the dunes, have been evolved out of the changing sands places fit for men to live in, until now along the strip which guards the coast of Flanders there are green glades gay with flowers, and shady dells, and gardens sheltered from the wind, plots of pasture-land, cottages ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... to each disease, to each part of the body, its particular workman; for that part was more properly and with less confusion cared for, seeing the person looked to nothing else. Ours are not aware that he who provides for all, provides for nothing; and that the entire government of this microcosm is more than they are able to undertake. Whilst they were afraid of stopping a dysentery, lest they should put the patient into a fever, they killed me a friend, —[Estienne de la Boetie.]—who was worth more than the whole of them. They ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... before him. At the far end a ramp angled upward to a higher level. Sutter walked forward slowly, aware in a vague way that he had entered another plane that was at once a microcosm and a macrocosm. On the second level the way ahead divided. After a moment's hesitation he chose the left-hand passage, passing through a keyhole-shaped archway into a broad amphitheater, empty of furnishings, with a kind of terrace or ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... that of a regiment, which itself is less hearty than that of seminaries. As a man advances in life he grows more selfish; egoism develops, and relaxes all the secondary bonds of affection. A government office is, in short, a microcosm of society, with its oddities and hatreds, its envy and its cupidity, its determination to push on, no matter who goes under, its frivolous gossip which gives so many wounds, and its ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... are cursorily perusing a novel which has made a great sensation, and you come upon the following sentence: "Eighteen millions of years would level all in one huge, common, shapeless ruin. Perish the microcosm in the limitless macrocosm! and sink this feeble earthly segregate in the boundless rushing choral aggregation!" This is in Augusta J. Evans Wilson's story "Macaria", and many equally extraordinary examples ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... is in itself lovely, or that has lived in the past, and caught a brighter glow from its rainbow reflections. One spot of ground may content the naturalist, or the Buddhist sage, for one can find a world of wondrous thought in the smallest leaf—a microcosm in a dew-drop; and the other can send his soul off on aerial pilgrimages, though his body may be in chains! But we are not all either natural or transcendental philosophers; our appetite requires not one leaf, but many, for our powers ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... he, "your plan is to take up some one section of the subject, and thoroughly exhaust that. Universal laws manifest themselves only by particular instances. They say, man is the microcosm, Mr. Locke; but the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way. It exemplifies, directly or indirectly, every physical law in the universe, though it may not be two lines long. It is ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al |
