"Negative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forward to by the country; at the same time that it is one as to which there has been much doubt: but your lordships should bear in mind, that there is not one clause of this bill upon which you can make an amendment, or in which you can give a vote, except in the negative or the affirmative, without committing a breach of those conventional rules which have been established for the conduct of the business between you and the House of Commons. On the other hand, my lords, suppose you ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great fragment of the chalk cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach; and that many people found swallows among the rubbish; but, on my questioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, to my no small disappointment, he answered me in the negative; but that others ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... excitedly on all sides; but every answer was in the negative, and we stood there by our troopers and chargers in the darkness, listening to the wild excitement from ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... category of those entailing punishment. Murder must sometimes be expiated by a pilgrimage to the Ganges, but other criminal offences against the person and property are not taken cognisance of by the caste committee unless the offender is sent to jail. Both in its negative and positive aspects the category of offences affords interesting deductions on the basis of the explanation of the caste system already given. The reason why there is scarcely any punishment for offences against ordinary morality is that the caste organisation has never developed any responsibility ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... he was married. She was a well-meaning girl, though her piety, as with most people, was of the negative order; and her antipathy to things evil much stronger than her sympathy with things good. For a much longer time than I had expected she kept him straight—perhaps, a little too straight. But at last there came ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... for which they have been engaged. They received the support of a large portion of the conservative members of the storthing as well as the unanimous support of the liberal and radical parties, only twenty votes being cast in the negative. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... Charles Bradlaugh or agnostics like Herbert Spencer, whilst Communism claims Jesus as an exponent; still, if the question be raised as to whether any of the Fabian Essayists attended an established place of worship regularly, the reply must be in the negative. Indeed, they were generally preaching themselves on Sundays. To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly; but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... prompted me to devote much time and thought to a difficult but important inquiry in a debatable region of inference and conjecture, where (I am afraid) evidence on either side can never be absolutely conclusive, and where, especially, the absolute demonstration of a universal negative cannot ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... things may be asserted of all his exotic idioms—1st, That they express what could not have been expressed by any native idiom; 2d, That they harmonize with the English language, and give a coloring of the antique, but not any sense of strangeness to the diction. Thus, in the double negative, "Nor did they not perceive," &c., which is classed as a Hebraism—if any man fancy that it expresses no more than the simple affirmative, he shows that he does not understand its force; and, at the same time, it is a form of thought so ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... promised, and a crooked one fraudulently substituted,—and so on, though a good deal more of such quaint casuistry, in which the Landgrave was accomplished. The amount of his answer, however, to the marriage proposal was an unequivocal negative, from which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... purely negative considerations by inquiring how much light we actually get from the invisible stars of our system. Here we can make a definite statement. Mark out a small circle in the sky 1 degree in diameter. The quantity of light which ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... position is simply negative, though it may be noticed by anticipation that she has recently (1913) expressed her disposition to accept the proportion of ten German to sixteen English first-class battleships suggested by Sir Edward Grey in 1912 as offering the basis of a possibly permanent arrangement. At the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... for saying something, when there's nothing to be said." Mr. Burney then asked him whether he had seen the letter which Warburton had written in answer to a pamphlet addressed "To the most impudent Man alive[981]." He answered in the negative. Mr. Burney told him it was supposed to be written by Mallet. The controversy now raged between the friends of Pope and Bolingbroke; and Warburton and Mallet were the leaders ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... biologically and morally alike, healthy restraint is needed for "the flourishing of the spirit" quite as much as healthy exercise; that bracing as well as relaxing is part of the soul's hygiene; that the directive force of a fine asceticism, exerted towards positive and not towards negative ends, is an essential part of ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... live?" asked the vintner, whose belief in prescience till this hour had been of a negative quality. ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... to draw from this ruler all that he himself believed, tells him to keep the Law. The Law, however, is insufficient, and it is noteworthy that the ruler felt it to be so. To begin with, it is largely negative: there are three negatives in this twentieth verse for one affirmative, and negations cannot redeem us. The law is also external. As a proof that it is ineffectual, I ask, Have you ever rejoiced in it? Have you ever been kindled by it? Have all its precepts ever ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... appeared within forty yards of him, he bounded to the saddle, and with his servant galloped off to the right. The rhinoceros came to a standstill for a few moments as though it were wondering whether it dared attack these strange creatures, then making up its mind in the negative, rushed on and vanished. When it was gone, the white man and the Kaffir, who had pulled up their horses at a distance, returned to the fallen buck, cut its throat, and lifted it on to the Kaffir's horse, then ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... where a friend must have concealed you, and that you must be there still. He then took us to the fort, which was closed for the night. As soon as my eyes lighted on the ruined cottages I asked him if he had searched them and received an answer in the negative. "Why," said he, "they are, as you see, all open to the day, without roof, doors or windows, and no one would think of hiding in them." "You are a fool," I replied. "Give me your lamp and come with me." After a look around and seeing how easily any person could ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... opposed to the Jesuit methods. They were determined, by all means at their disposal, to transform the Low Countries into an advance citadel of Roman Catholicism. Their policy was far more positive than negative. They were far more bent on bringing to the Church new converts and stimulating the zeal of their flock than on eradicating Protestantism. They thought that the only means to obtain such a result was to attract the people by pleasant surroundings and not to rebuke ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... intervention of Parliament. It thus authorized both the past acts of the Salandra Ministry and its future course. The measure, undebated, was voted on secretly. And it is significant that of more than five hundred Deputies present only seventy-two voted in the negative. Of these seventy-two who voted against the Government, some were out-and-out neutralistas, and some few were Socialists who had the courage of their convictions. The great majority of the Giolittians must have voted for war. Had they seen a great light since the piazza raised ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... you may turn them again by verbal Nouns and Participles. 6. And last of all, when we have chang'd Adverbs into Nouns, and Nouns sometimes into one Part of Speech, and sometimes into another; then we may speak by contraries. 7. We may either change affirmative Sentences into negative, or the contrary. 8. Or, at least, what we have spoken indicatively, we may speak interrogatively. Now for Example Sake, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... and expostulations of her mother's friend to have her reveal the cause of her sadness. Marianne only shook her head in a negative manner, and ever a fresh flow of tears started from her eyes, ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... 15, is obtained by the addition of the rows, columns, and two diagonals. In the second case you get the constant, 5, by subtracting the first number in a line from the second, and the result from the third. You can, of course, perform the operation in either direction; but, in order to avoid negative numbers, it is more convenient simply to deduct the middle number from the sum of the two extreme numbers. This is, in effect, the same thing. It will be seen that the constant of the adding square is n times that of the subtracting square derived from it, ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... give it tonight, and take it back to-morrow, according to the mood I am in, according to whether I believe it myself or not, at the moment?—You think a thing must either be true or not true? You are wrong. Do you believe, when you answer a question in the affirmative or the negative, that you are actually telling the truth? No, my friend, to be perfectly truthful one would need to lose oneself in a maze of explanation, such as no questioner would have the patience to listen to. One would need to take into account the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... region—all served to contribute to the sylvan effect. But the glister of the hardwood floor, waxed and polished; the luxury of the easy chairs and sofas; the centre-table strewn with magazines and papers, beneath a large lamp of rare and rich ware; the delicate aroma of expensive cigars, were of negative, if not discordant, suggestion, and bespoke the more sophisticated proclivities and training of ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Armand he could glean no satisfactory news, only the negative probability that he was not detained in any of the larger prisons of Paris, as no register which he, Ffoulkes, so laboriously consulted bore record of the name of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Brigitte. I quietly closed the window and sat down as if I had not heard her; but I was so furious with rage that I could hardly restrain myself. That cold silence, that negative force, exasperated me to the last point. Had I been really deceived and convinced of the guilt of a woman I loved I could not have suffered more. As I had condemned myself to remain in Paris, I reflected that I must compel Brigitte to speak at any price. In vain I ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... A peculiar use of the preposition de, allied to, and possibly derived from, the partitive after a negative: Il n'y a pas de mariage. It would be more natural today to say un mariage ... une union. The use of the form de mariage is easily explained by the ellipsis of the concluding words, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... ridiculously below the amounts reported to us: in some instances they have been multiplied by 20, probably in all by 15; the rumour and the terror of these arrays have operated both ways; for us more permanently than against us. Lastly, it is not true that the Government has proceeded only by negative steps; the army has been increased in Ireland, the garrisons have been better arranged; military stations have been strengthened, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... kill 'em all, according to this experiment,—said the Master.—-Good as far as it goes. One more negative result. Do you know what would have happened if that liquid had been clouded, and we had found life in the sealed flask? Sir, if that liquid had held life in it the Vatican would have trembled to hear it, and there would have been anxious questionings and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... as to say that "the whole position of the later monophysites, thought out to all its conceivable conclusions, is already to be found in Apollinaris." Apollinarianism was condemned at the second general council, and there the Church made her first declaration, a negative one, on the subject of the hypostatic union. In conflict with the heresies which arose in the next two generations, she evolved a positive statement ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have written." We must set this statement down to one of those fits of dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods that often came upon him. What he meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and grandfather, but coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... at him with amazement as she sensed the marvelous coincidence of their meeting, he told it as he had not told it to McDowell or even to Miriam Kirkstone. A third time the facts were the same. But it was John Keith now who was telling John Keith's story through the lips of an unreal and negative Conniston. He forgot his own breakfast, and a look of gloom settled on Wallie's face when he peered in through the door and saw that their coffee and toast were growing cold. Mary Josephine leaned a little over the table. Not once did she interrupt ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... Plato argues that evil is not a principle of strength, but of discord and dissolution, just touching the question which has been often treated in modern times by theologians and philosophers, of the negative nature of evil. In the last argument we trace the germ of the Aristotelian doctrine of an end and a virtue directed towards the end, which again is suggested by the arts. The final reconcilement of justice and happiness and the identity of the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Nabob of Arcot's debts, so faint was the impression it produced upon the House, that Mr. Pitt and Lord Grenville, as I have heard, not only consulted with each other as to whether it was necessary they should take the trouble of answering it, but decided in the negative. Yet doubtless, at the present moment, if Lord Grenville—master as he is of all the knowledge that belongs to a statesman and a scholar—were asked to point out from the stores of his reading the few models of oratorical composition, to the perusal of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... recognized to be the essence of the matter and what they contrived with masterly skill to determine as its proper aim, after an examination of the huge apparatus of tradition. But was not that the ideal of Greek sages and philosophers? This question can by no means be flatly answered in the negative, and still less decidedly in the affirmative, for a new significance was here given to the ideal by representing it as assured beyond all doubt, already realised in the person of Christ and incompatible ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Republic, it soon comes to pass that parties gather round the negative and positive poles of some opinion or notion, and that the intolerant spirit of a triumphant majority will allow no deviation from the standard of orthodoxy which it has set up for itself. Freedom of opinion will be professed and pretended ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the confusion and acquainted the commander with the frightful plight of the American. After firing with renewed ardor for several minutes Captain Pearson again called to know whether Jones had surrendered. He shouted back a defiant negative, and, pistol in hand, ordered his men to the guns, threatening to kill the first one who refused. All knew his temper too well to hesitate, and the battle was renewed with greater fury than before. Captain Pearson could not believe the condition ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... arrange to have these developed and printed, quickly, but in some way so neither negative nor positive will be out of your sight at ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... irritability, so that they bend towards any object which they touch; but this is denied by Palm. Even before reading Mohl's interesting treatise, this view seemed to me so probable that I tested it in every way that I could, but always with a negative result. I rubbed many shoots much harder than is necessary to excite movement in any tendril or in the foot-stalk of any leaf climber, but without any effect. I then tied a light forked twig to a shoot of a Hop, a Ceropegia, ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... commixture of comic and tragic elements; that they were unwilling or unable to comply with the rules and with right reason (in the meaning of certain critics these terms are equivalent), may be considered as an evidence of merely negative properties. The ground of the resemblance lies far deeper, in the inmost substance of the fictions and in the essential relations through which every deviation of form becomes a true requisite, which, together with its validity, has also its significance. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and to see that nothing unholy was put into his food, or a bustling stirring brother's wife like Donna Olympia. He then with a he! he! he! asked me if I had ever read the book called the "Nipotismo di Roma"; and on my replying in the negative, he told me that it was a very curious and entertaining book, which he occasionally looked at in an idle hour, and proceeded to relate to me anecdotes out of the "Nipotismo di Roma" about the successor ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... and superstitious enough, are of various dates and sources; and, so far from being attributed to a supernatural origin, they are distinctly said to "have been proved to be the best and most suitable for the human body through the research and diligent study of Rhiwallon" and his three sons. The negative evidence of the "Meddygon Myddfai," therefore, tends to show that the connection of the Van Pool story with the Physicians is ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... that Holland was henceforth a portion of the Empire. "What was I to do?" the Emperor exclaimed at St. Helena. "Leave Holland to the enemy? Nominate a new king?" It is difficult from his standpoint to answer these questions except in the negative. Louis had viewed his royal task as if he had been a dynastic king, which of course he never was, though much beloved by many of his subjects. He had moved the capital from The Hague to Amsterdam, had reformed the Dutch jurisprudence by the introduction ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... which our Constitution secures may be enjoyed alike by minorities and majorities, the Executive has been wisely invested with a qualified veto upon the acts of the Legislature. It is a negative power, and is conservative in its character. It arrests for the time hasty, inconsiderate, or unconstitutional legislation, invites reconsideration, and transfers questions at issue between the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... read: "This is the first lecture. Concentrate on this sentence: 'I am a positive spirit and not negative to any condition.' Then follow with concentration on positive love. After that peace and harmony will vibrate through and around your body. Your soul—The other writing breaks right in. This is the way it goes: ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... like the term "Socialism," is used in varying senses, and is not, therefore, satisfactory to everyone. Thus E.F.B. Fell (The Foundations of Liberty, 1908), regarding "Individualism," as a merely negative term, prefers the term "Personalism," to denote a more positive ideal. There is, however, by no means as any necessity to consider "Individualism," a more ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... never (as Shelley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simply bids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided, without an end, without an aim. But he has more than these merely negative merits. I have seen long accounts of Spenser in which the fact of his invention of the Spenserian stanza is passed over almost without a word of comment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetry must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... natural fresh water resources in some areas; the policies of former Communist regimes promoted rapid urbanization and industrial growth that had negative effects on the environment; the burning of soft coal in power plants and the lack of enforcement of environmental laws severely polluted the air in Ulaanbaatar; deforestation, overgrazing, and the converting of virgin land to agricultural ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... be a question at once and equally toute francaise, et toute europeenne: an explanation the exact meaning of which I acknowledge I do not precisely understand; but which, if it does not distinctly admit the definition of a, question francaise, seems at least to negative M. de Montmorency's definition of ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm, embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity but to talk of something else and go—above all, to talk of something else before going, lest the would-be benefactor should be ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not assimilate with if they were placed at our disposal. In this way a weary, well-read novel-reader, worn out in all lines of light letters, enters a circulating library, and queruously asks: "Have you any new books?" She expects a negative answer, and in that case would suffer a keen disappointment. The man says "Yes," and brings out several new books. Every one of these is new in every sense. It may be the most trivial set of pages yet printed in this era of scribblers, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... close cooperation between embryologists of different persuasions. It is perhaps easy to underestimate the impact and general importance of Harvey's work in view of these qualifications, and so it should be remarked that both positive and negative features of De Generatione influenced profoundly ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... joys of heaven we can form no conception; but its negative delights form a sufficiently attractive picture,—no pain; no thirst; no hunger; no horror of the past; no fear of the future; no failure of mental capacity; no intellectual deficiency; no morbid imaginations; no follies; no ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... vastly improved upon the Newbery publication in every word changed and every line omitted. In reality, they deprived the nursery of much that might well have remained as it was, although certain expressions were very properly altered. In a negative manner they did one surprising and fortunate thing: in leaving out the amusing notes they did not attempt to replace them, and consequently the nursery had one book free from that advice and precept, which in other verse for children resulted in persistent nagging. The illustrations were entirely ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... content myself, in this section, with an easy task, and shall pretend only to give a negative answer to the question here proposed. I say then, that, even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive—what she is I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Sandwich's business is not like to come on to-day, which I am heartily glad of. This law against Conventicles is very severe; but Creed, whom I met here, do tell me that, it being moved that Papists' meetings might be included, the House was divided upon it, and it was carried in the negative; which will give great disgust to the people, I doubt. Thence with Creed to Hercules Pillars by the Temple again, and there dined he and I all alone, and thence to the King's house, and there did see "Love ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of the sky? Is it not blue? Is not blue a cold color; is it not the negative to the warmth, the balance to the scales, the one thing needed on which to rear the glorious fabric that Naychure reveals to the undimmed vision of man? I know your answer, and I refute it. I have studied Art from its roots, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a child who was christened in Paris under the name of Ivan, as a girl, and who afterwards turned out to be a boy, and on the other hand, the excessive tension of the clytoris in newly-born female infants may have occasioned similar mistakes. Thus far Pliny in the negative, and notwithstanding what he has said, there are others, such as Galen, who assert the affirmative. "A man," he says, "is different from a woman, only by having his genitals outside his body, whereas a woman has them inside her." And this is certain, that if Nature having ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... your negative preference," returned Cornelia, rather amused at her companion's straightforward manner. Then, with a sudden contraction of her ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... of the story is that the thirty persons to whom the parcels were addressed had been asked by the officers if there was anything dutiable in them, and all had replied in the negative. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 40, August 12, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... stain upon so honorable a family. The citizens thought it a modest and moderate request. Cato, however, without any retraction or reserve, at once came forward, and standing up with his colleague interrogated Titus, as to whether he knew the story of the supper. Titus answering in the negative, Cato related it, and challenged Lucius to a formal denial of it. Lucius made no reply, whereupon the people adjudged the disgrace just and suitable, and waited upon Cato home from the tribunal in great ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... meditations. One little phrase, charged with a lyric poignancy, sings itself again and again, enlightening her more sober prose: "For nails would not have held God-and-Man fast to the Cross, had love not held Him there." Her conceptions are positive, not negative, and joyous adoration is ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Sunday's for all the week. There is, as it were, a syncope in all things; nothing is doing; art, science, and business, are alike at a stand-still. The stage, the press, the easel, the loom, the rudder of the merchantman, and the helm of the state, all are alike in a most extraordinary negative condition. The world is in a catalepsy. It hears and sees, but it can ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... have portended the cessation of further Southern effort in England. That a renewal of activity soon occurred was due largely to a sudden shift in the military situation in America and to the realization that the heretofore largely negative support given to the Southern cause must be replaced by organized and persistent effort. Grant's victorious progress in the West had been checked by the disaster to Rosencrans at Chicamauga, September 18, and Grant's army forced to retrace its steps to recover Chattanooga. It was not until November ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... evolution, of heat. Other methods are to place the metal and mercury together in dilute acid, to add mercury to the solution of a metallic salt, to place a metal in a solution of mercuric nitrate, or to electrolyse a metallic salt using mercury as the negative electrode. Some amalgams are liquids, especially when containing a large proportion of mercury; others assume a crystalline form. In some cases definite compounds have been isolated from amalgams which may be regarded as mixtures of one or more of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... murmured an answer in the negative, as each man looked round and appealed to his fellow; when a noise was heard without, and a man was heard to say that he wanted Hugh—that he must ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... "Photography," the two classes into which it was divided represented: (Equipment, processes, and products); materials, instruments, and apparatus of photography; equipment of photographic studios; negative and positive photography on glass, paper, wood, cloth, films, enamel, etc.; photogravure in intaglio and in relief; photocollography; stereoscopic prints; enlarged and micrographic photographs; color photography; direct, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... thing," went on Treherne in a low voice. "It is more negative than positive, and yet it is infinite. Hundreds of men will avoid walking under a ladder; they don't know where the door of the ladder will lead. They don't really think God would throw a thunderbolt at them for such a thing. They don't know what would happen, that is just ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... The positive and negative plates are giving me considerable trouble, though. But I guess we can solve the problem. Did you ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no use for. Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence, she did not need ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were made for each other. In fact, I ain't going to take 'no' for an answer, my dear. I've never asked a female to marry me until this hour; and I have not waited into greyness and ripeness to hear a negative. I'm sure of myself, naturally, and I well know that you'd only be a thought less fortunate than ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... to be asked whether the graces of the Quakers were frequent, I should reply in the negative. I never heard any delivered, but when a minister was present. The ordinary grace therefore of private families consists in a solemn, silent, pause, between the time of sitting down to the table and the note of carving the victuals, during which an opportunity is given for the excitement of religious ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... ladies sat down together like watchers, in that silence and vacuity of mind which come after an exhaustive struggle ending in the recognition of the inevitable; a torpor of thought, a stupefaction of feeling, a purely negative state of joylessness sequent to the positive state of anguish. They were now both hungry, but in want of some present friend acquainted with the motions of mental distress who could guess this fact and press ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... screwdriver I had brought with me. It never occurred to me, I swear, that the quest was no business of mine, and that even now I could withdraw from it, and no one be the wiser. But I was afraid—I was afraid. And there was not even the negative comfort of knowing that the neighbouring cell was tenanted. It gaped like a ghostly garret next door ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... statement, for Barker, in his evidence, made no mention of the letter which the dead man had sent me. I sat and heard the doctors—both of whom expressed themselves puzzled. The coroner put it to them whether they suspected foul play, but the reply they gave was a distinctly negative one." ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... that we do not in fact come so much into contact with the parents themselves as with those delegates, who are so utterly unfit for the office they undertake. Infant Schools, however, have completely succeeded, not only in the negative plan they had in view, of keeping the children out of vice and mischief, but even to the extent of engrafting in their minds at an early age those principles of virtue, which capacitated them for receiving a further stage of instruction ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... seen, in your fancy, at least, an ideal of man, for which you spurned (for Mellot has told me all) the merely negative angelic—the merely receptive and indulgent feminine-ideals of humanity, and longed to be a man, like that ideal and ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... teaching to me was almost exclusively doctrinal. He did not observe the value of negative education, that is to say, of leaving Nature alone to fill up the gaps which it is her design to deal with at a later and riper date. He did not, even, satisfy himself with those moral injunctions which should ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... very like imbecility. His income allowed him to do no good to the parish, whether in work, trade, or charity; and thus he had no moral weight with the parishioners beyond the example of his sinless life, and such negative effect as might be produced by ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... him that she did not love him was impossible to her. But how was she to refuse him without telling him either a lie, or the truth? Some answer she must give him; and as to that matter of marrying him, the answer must be a negative. Her education had been of that nature which teaches girls to believe that it is a crime to marry a man without an assured income. Assured morality in a husband is a great thing. Assured good temper is very excellent. Assured ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... business relations to do as much for the propagation of Christian truth as the Church itself. If your ventures are intrusted to the direction of men of character; if your agents are men who recognize in practice the morals of the religion they profess, you will not only not negative as now, alas! but too often the efforts of the Church's envoys, by the frequent violations of Christian law, on the part of those who propose to be governed by it; but through the illustrations you can send out of Christian consistency—by the living representatives of our higher ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... seemed to attach great importance." This incident reminded them that, in the boat that took him to Pontoise, Raoul Gaillard, then dying, had anxiously asked if a razor-case had been found among his things. On receiving a negative reply, "he had appeared to be very much put out, and was heard to murmur that the fortune of the man who would ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... attentions was the cause of the Spirit's visit, and again he received the answer, "No." Then Hughes named individually all the inmates of the house in succession, and inquired if they were the cause of the Spirit's visits, and again he was answered in the negative. Then he asked why, since no one in the house had disturbed the Spirit, he came there to disturb the inmates. To this pertinent question the Spirit answered as follows:—"There are treasures hidden on the south side of Ffynnon Wen, which belong to, and are to be given to, the nine months old child ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... while the offending papers were consumed. That done—the blazing eyes in that grim circle of patriots watching the blazing writs—"they called a vote whether they should huzza; but, it being Sunday evening, it passed in the negative!" ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... learned divine, "to make out from the Bible your charge that piracy is a crime. I know not a word from the first of Genesis to the end of Revelation where piracy is once condemned. But I pass this, and, waiving my clear logical rights, undertake to prove the negative, and to show that the Bible does, most explicitly, both by precept and example, bear me out in my assertion, that piracy is not necessarily, and always, and amidst all circumstances, a sin. WHAT GOD SANCTIONED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT, AND PERMITTED ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... path of memory, and her brain took them up as if they were parts of a dream. For many minutes she was perfectly quiet, dumbly contemplating the stranger who sat guard over her in that wretched place. In her mind there was quickly developed, as one brings the picture from the film of a negative the truth of the situation. She had escaped from one set of captors only to give herself into the clutches of others a thousand times ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... attempted to guard against excessive centralism by the tribunitial veto, or by the organization of a negative or obstructive power. Mr. Calhoun thought this admirable, and wished to effect the same end here, where it is secured by other, more effective, and less objectionable means, by a State veto on the acts of Congress, by a dual executive, and by substituting concurrent ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... without protest from whatever city, from whatever community, if there were any other which claimed to own the genuine tombs of SS. Peter and Paul? These arguments gain more value from the fact that the evidence on the opposite side is purely negative. It is one thing to write of these controversies at a distance from the scene of the events, in the seclusion of one's own library; but quite another to study them on the spot, and to follow the events where they took place. If my readers had the opportunity of witnessing the discoveries ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... invited, but he refused without ceremony. Mrs. Laval turned to Matilda; and Mrs. Lloyd asked graciously if she would like to go? Now Matilda would have liked very much to go, on one side of the question; yet her answer was a grateful negative. ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... a discussion of the condition of British possessions in the East Indies, that "rich source of their commerce and credit, severed from them, perhaps forever;" of "the predatory conquest of Eustatia;" and of the "relief of Gibraltar, which was merely a negative advantage;"—all to show that "it seems scarcely possible for them much longer to shut their ears against the voice of peace." There is not a word in all this that is not quite true, pertinent, reflective, and becoming a statesman; but neither ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... atoms are composed of small heavy protons that are always positive in charge, and larger lighter electrons that are always negative. In Arret the protons were negative, and the electrons positive. The result was two worlds occupying the same space at the same time, yet with matter so essentially and completely different that each world was intangible to the other. They had named the unseen world ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... and nothing more. But she accompanied the simple negative with a clear and honest sincerity of the eyes that set his mind completely at rest. He felt that this girl had never in her ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always prevent us from obtaining direct evidence for the belief in the soul's survival. But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of proof in cases where, in the nature of things, proof is inaccessible.[17] With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem with ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... looked anxiously at the white spot. It was as obvious as ever, but did not seem to him increased since he left home. A very slight matter will sometimes give hope to a despairing man. Under the influence of this negative comfort, Bladud took up his weapons and sallied forth, closely followed ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... the following quotation from Mr. Eliot as illuminative of his method of work: "The contemplation of the horrid or sordid by the artist is the necessary and negative aspect ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... to swamp good?" he asked. Bill studied the toes of his moccasins and, without looking up, replied with a negative ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... satisfactory conclusions from them—such as the nearness or distance of surrounding trees of the same species, and the possible chances of their seeds taking lodgment in the soil from which they grew. But, fortunately, there are facts, and those abundantly substantiated, which entirely negative the presence of seeds in the soils where these "spontaneous growths" are said to have appeared. In some instances, they cover large tracts of land, at distances of thirty, forty, fifty, and even hundreds of miles, from any native forest from which ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Johnestoun, which he purchasses to him by donatioun of the Governour, with a charge to the said Toune to obey him as thare lauchfull Provest. Whareat, not only the said Lord Ruthven, but also the toune, being offended, gave ane negative ansuer, alledging, That such intrusioun of men in office was hurtfull to thare priviledge and fredom; which granted unto thame free electioun of thare Provest from year to year, at a certane tyme appointed, quhilk thei could not nor wold nott prevent. Heirat the said Johnne offended said, "That ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... mentioned as a peculiarity, that the Slavi consider only the first four ordinal numbers as adjectives, and all the following ones as substantives. For this reason, the governed word must stand in the genitive instead of the accusative: osm sot (nom. sto), eight hundred. In all negative phrases they employ likewise the genitive instead of the accusative. A double negation occurs in Slavic frequently, without indicating an affirmation; for even if another negation has already taken place, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... head with a negative movement which Effie was quick enough to realize meant yielding. She wanted him to yield. It would simplify all her purpose. She desired that he ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... generate mechanical motion; or to take a simple arithmetical instance: if 10/2 5, then 10/5 2; and therefore if we once recognize the power of thought to produce any results at all, we shall see that the law by which negative thought produces negative results is the same by which positive thought produces positive results. Therefore all our distrust of the law of growth, whether shown in the anxious endeavour to bring pressure to bear from without, or in allowing ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... matter commenced its existence? And the second is: How has it been perpetuated? On the second question I shall have more to say hereafter. But on the first one, what I now have to say will be for the most part of a negative character. ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... show that the opposite gestures of affirmation and negation, namely, vertically nodding and laterally shaking the head, have both probably had a natural beginning. The waving of the hand from right to left, which is used as a negative by some savages, may have been invented in imitation of shaking the head; but whether the opposite movement of waving the hand in a straight line from the face, which is used in affirmation, has arisen through antithesis or in some ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... which frequently, in deep painting, impresses the positive with an unsightly spotted character, somewhat similar to that of a bad lithograph taken from a worn-out stone. I should wish my wax-paper negative to be similar in appearance to that of a good calotype one, or to show by transmitted light, as my vexatious specimen does when viewed on its right side by reflected light. As the most lucid description ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... your correspondents be good enough to say what they consider the best method of securing a calotype paper negative for a few days or a week, in cases where it may be difficult, from lack of conveniences during that time, to use hyposulph., with its consequent washings, &c.? Some, I believe, recommend bromide of potassium; some, the iodide; others, common salt: but I should like ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... now search for a law that would negative this provision in its effect upon social equality, he would fail to find it. But he would find it in the unwritten law of the natural aversion of the races. He would find it in public opinion, which is the vital force in every law in a free government. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... She could not let him go: that negative was a clutch. She seemed to herself to be, after all, only drifted toward the tremendous decision—but drifting depends on something besides the currents when the sails ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... and feelings of consanguinity. His uncle abroad, for instance, had frequently urged him to pay a visit to his relatives, and, of course, to supply him liberally with the necessary funds for the journey. To every such suggestion, however, he gave a decided negative. "If they wish to see me," he would reply, "let them come and see me: as for me, I have no wish to see them, and I ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... humbly propose to answer in the negative, and so to answer them in conformity with what I understand to be the principles of our history and law. My endeavour will be to show that the powers of the State so determined, in regard to the legislative office of the Church (setting aside for the moment ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... feeling or my own. Happiness is more active, a more conscious enjoyment. We had been content. That expresses our condition perfectly; and now that I can analyze my own feeling, and understand what the word implies, I am satisfied of its accuracy. "Content" has both a positive and negative meaning or antecedent condition. It implies an absence of disturbing conditions as well as of wants; also it implies something positive which has been won or achieved, or which has accrued. In our state ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... obey the writ, and took his seat among the Commons.[1] That a new house was to be called according to the articles of the "petition and advice," no one denied; but who, it was asked, made its members lords? who gave them the privileges of the ancient peerage? who empowered them to negative the acts of that house to which they owed their existence? Was it to be borne that the children should assume the superiority over their parents; that the nominees of the protector should control the representatives of the people, ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... consist in the discharge of some mechanical duty. He was in the right. Nevertheless, for the worth and blessedness of life we must look to the discharge of duties which are not mechanical. Of mechanical teaching the highest result proposed is the multiplication of photographs from the teacher's negative, or, in the words of Richter, "to fill our streets with perpetual stiff, feeble copies of the same pedagogue type." But the parent's office demands courage,—courage not so much to originate as to accept the wisdom of thinking men, some of whom have spoken more than a hundred years ago. The folly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... of the power of popular enthusiasm worthy of mention. A miserly old gentleman, who had never been known, it was said, to do a generous act, and who had thrown off all appeals for aid to ordinary benevolent causes with an imperative negative, was so overcome by the popular breeze in favor of the soldiers, that he came into the hospital with a roll of bank-bills in his hand, and passing from cot to cot gave each wounded man a five-dollar bill, repeating, with a spasmodic ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... That I allowed him to think of me as a fellow-student, I confess, but in my failure to undeceive him I was only adding to the comfort which he took in my company. It would have been a cruelty to have confessed my ignorance. It was after all only a negative deception, one which did ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... hair; and his successors, for some generations, wore it very short. A professor of Utrecht, in 1650, wrote expressly on the question, Whether it be lawful for men to wear long hair? and concluded for the negative. Another divine, named Reeves, who had written for the affirmative, replied to him. In New England a declaration was inscribed in the register of the colony against the practice of wearing long hair, which was principally levelled at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... us; we grew old. I abandoned my waist-line to Nature's will and my face settled into the expression of a good negative that has been blurred by too long exposure to a strong light. Toward the end William looked like the skin-and-bones remnant of a saint. His face was sunken and hollowed out till the very Wesley in him showed through. His beard was long and had whitened until it gave his Moses head the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... his early life, laid the basis of his political significance; the Cooper Union speech, summing up his conflict with Douglas, applied his thinking to the new issue precipitated by John Brown; but in both these he was still predominantly a negative thinker, still the voice of an opposition. With the first message, he became creative; he drew together what was latent in his earlier thought; he discarded the negative; he laid the foundation of all his subsequent policy. The ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... obviously rests entirely on negative evidence. This is, of course, the only evidence that ever can be available to prove the commencement of any series of phenomena; but, at the same time, it must be recollected that the value of negative evidence depends entirely on the amount of positive corroboration it receives. ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... act declaring "the war to exist by the act of the Republic of Mexico," and making provision for its prosecution "to a speedy and successful termination," was passed with great unanimity by Congress, there being but two negative votes in the Senate and but fourteen ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... fortunes, and at the end of his life was "sending round the hat." Lamartine boldly proclaimed that he hated arithmetic, "that negative of every noble thought." He was accordingly driven to very shabby shifts to live. The Cours de Litterature alone brought him in 200,000 francs a year, yet 'the money ran through his hands like quicksilver. His debts are said to have amounted to ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... newspaper men and other friends had come North to welcome the explorer home. Battle was quite a gay place; but it was living up to its name, for Peary not only claimed that he had found the Pole, but also that Cook had not; and he was realizing what a hard thing it is to prove a negative. We had a very delightful time with the party, and greatly enjoyed meeting all the members of the expedition. Among them was the ill-fated Borup, destined shortly to be drowned on a simple canoe trip, and the indomitable and athletic ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... affairs changed? I answer unequivocally, yea, a thousand times, yea. A negative answer would be the quintessence of ignorance. From a recent careful survey of every Southern state through nearly one hundred trusty observers, I have the testimony that the young women are pure in large numbers, and are rapidly increasing in an intense desire and determination ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... had not been idle. Although their operations against the reinforced German Army had a negative result, against the Austrians in Galicia their success continued. Przemysl had not been taken, but, hemming it in securely, the Russians passed on and took the fortified town of Jaroslau, near the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... examples of duality taken from nature. The current of electricity is polarised into a positive and a negative current. It is the same with the magnet; though you break a bar into a hundred pieces, you bring into being a hundred small magnets, each possessing its positive and negative side; you will not have destroyed the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... and as the dialectical interest was uppermost at Oxford, he now endeavoured to engage them in discussions on philosophical and religious topics. We have seen that his favourite authors were Locke, Hume, and the French materialists. With the impulsiveness peculiar to his nature, he adopted the negative conclusions of a shallow nominalistic philosophy. It was a fundamental point with him to regard all questions, however sifted and settled by the wise of former ages, as still open; and in his inordinate thirst for liberty, he rejoiced to be the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... therefore, ascribed to both parties in the negotiation, and that of Seward is treated as conceived at the moment when a policy of seeking European friendship was dominant at Washington, but with the hope of securing at least negative European support. Seward's persistence after European recognition of Southern belligerency is regarded as a characteristic obstinacy without a clear view of possible ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... cadets the night before had tramped around the school building so much that the footprints were hopelessly mixed. Then the boys were questioned as to whether or not they had seen any one dropping from the fire-escape to the ground, and all answered in the negative. ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... point, so far as available authorities for the young people to study and consider are concerned, these are all against coitus except for begetting of off-spring. All the "purity" writers and Purity Societies are ranged together on the negative side. Likewise are all the books of "advice to young wives and husbands," especially ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... in the fragment an example bearing out his theory of the development of the epic. "The qualities which difference it from Beowulf," he says, "are mainly negative; it lacks sentiment, moralizing, the leisure of the writer; it did not attempt probably to cover more than a single event; and one will not err in finding it a fair type of the epic songs which roving singers were ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... delay, Bremen inquired of Omrah if he was hurt, and received an answer in the negative. When the rope came, and was lowered down to him, Omrah seized it, and was hauled up by the Hottentots. He appeared to have suffered a little, as his hair was torn out in large handfuls, and his shirt was in ribbons; but with the exception ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... can work in that solarium to-night without interruption," replied Dr. Bird. "I have some tests which I wish to carry out while it is still dark. If my results are negative, forget what I have told you. If they yield any information, I will be glad to share it with you at the proper time. Now get the President out of that solarium and tell me when the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... time, of space, and of matter, which so closely adhere to all the perceptions of our experimental knowledge. But as soon as we presume to reason of infinite substance, of spiritual generation; as often as we deduce any positive conclusions from a negative idea, we are involved in darkness, perplexity, and inevitable contradiction. As these difficulties arise from the nature of the subject, they oppress, with the same insuperable weight, the philosophic and the theological disputant; but we may ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... too, our livers waxed torpid, and our blood boiled in vain. The potato was gone; the benefits conferred on posterity by Sir Walter Raleigh were at length realised in a negative way. Miniature "Murphies" fetched four pence halfpenny each, while an adult member of the genus at ninepence was worth two of the little ones. Mr. Rhodes may have luxuriated on potatoes (cum grano salis!) but few others were so very Irish. The De Beers Company owned a large ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... honour of being invited to an evening party at the Tuileries in the winter of 1816, and was in conversation with the Countess de l'Espinasse, when the Duchess did me the honour to ask me if I intended going to St. Germain to hunt. I replied in the negative, not having received an invitation; upon which the Duchess graciously observed that if I would attend mass the following morning in the Royal Chapel, she would manage it. Accordingly I presented myself there dressed in a black coat and trousers and white neckcloth; but at the entrance, a huge Swiss ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... impassable forest" at an unindicated distance from Point-de-Galle, or that this hut does not possess a vast subterranean chamber. When we cannot check our witness we must regard what he tells us in the light of those instances which it is possible to fix firmly. Among negative results I may mention an inquiry into the alleged death of a person named George Shekleton in a Masonic lodge at Calcutta. Sir John Lambert, K.C.S.I.E., the commissioner of police at that place, very courteously made ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... said Aunt Clara, with a plaintive and very positive emphasis on the negative particle,—"no, she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... at the colored paper for a half-minute, it will be found that if the colored paper is removed one sees its complementary color. If the head is not moved, this complementary color has the same size and shape as the original colored piece of paper. The negative after-image can be projected on a background at different distances, its size depending on the distance of the background. The after-image will be found to mix with an objective color in accordance with the principles of color-mixture ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... The strong cockney negative was also an exclamation. It came from Mrs. Courage, the cook-housekeeper, who stood near the kitchen range making the coffee for breakfast. She was a woman who looked her name, born not merely to do battle, but to enjoy being in the midst ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... solution; discussed it until it was time for Matilda to go downstairs to perform her share of the preparation of the communal dinner. Left alone, her fury now sunk to sober ashes, Mrs. De Peyster continued the exploration of possibilities, with the same negative result. ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... to the Egyptian was to secure the favour of the god. There is but little trace of negative prayer to avert evils or deprecate evil influences, but rather of positive prayer for concrete favours. On the part of kings this is usually of the Jacob type, offering to provide temples and services to the god in return for material prosperity. The Egyptian was essentially self-satisfied, ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... duration. His speech was very moderate, although it might have appeared that he was guided by some acrimonious feeling in selecting Lord Glenelg for attack. Mr. Leader seconded the motion; and Lord Palmerston undertook the defence of the colonial secretary. He would meet the motion by a simple negative. Lord Sandon said that he had expected that the affairs of Canada would have formed the basis of the present motion. Lord Palmerston was right in saying that it should not have been directed against Lord Glenelg alone, but against the entire administration. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... negative law—is the emptiest of all the impositions from on top. In its long record of failure, in the comparative success of Tammany, those who are aiming at social changes can see a profound lesson; the impulses, cravings and wants of men must be employed. You can employ them well or ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the man gave an instant and decided negative, and seemed half offended by my offer. He threw the coat, which was in his hands again, upon a chair, and stooping down took his basket on his arm. I was deceived by his manner, and began to think that I had proposed rather a hard ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... what I found in the Congo Free State, I think what one fails to find there is of the greatest significance. To tell what the place is like, you must tell what it lacks. One must write of the Congo always in the negative. It is as though you asked: "What sort of a house is this one Jones has built?" and were answered: "Well, it hasn't any roof, and it hasn't any cellar, and it has no windows, floors, or chimneys. It's ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... never a word did we hear of either Joe or Nancy the whole season through. True, in the number of other claims on our attention, it was not often that their fortunes came to one's mind. But now and again we asked about the schooner, and always got the same negative reply, "Reckon she 've got a load and gone south." This was a view which we were only too glad to adopt, as it meant the best possible luck ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... fingers of his right hand wandering into his crispy, red beard, and again over his scarred face. "Mayor's election comes off two weeks from Friday-couldn't do without me-can knock down any quantity of men-you throw a plumper, I take it?" The young Missionary answers in the negative by shaking his head, while the kind old sailor continues to fuss over and prepare Tom for his departure. "Tom is about to leave us," says the old sailor, by way of diverting the vote-cribber's attention. That dignitary, so much esteemed by ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent treasure ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the pilot of his own galley to be frightened and confused, took his cloak and placed it before his eyes, asking him at the same time if he found any thing alarming, or of evil presage, in what he then did? and upon his answering in the negative: "Where then is the difference," said Pericles, "between this covering and the other, except that something of greater extent than my cloak deprives us of the light of the sun?" Nor can it be doubted that Alexander when, on a like occasion, previous to the battle of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... not mention what reduces John Mill's school to something worse than negative error, the certainty that their doctrine will not be obeyed by any but those whom we would desire to have the peopling of the earth, viz. the people of most intellect. If the highly intelligent and conscientious ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... it; found it difficult to accomplish, and not altogether effective. The bullets still scattered more or less like a shotgun charge. Mr. Kincaid's score more than doubled his. Mr. Kincaid always shot the best he could; and entered a grave negative to Bobby's tentative ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White |
