"Proximate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be looking too far ahead. If we had to choose some one piece of more proximate knowledge which we would more especially like to acquire, I suppose we should ask for the secret of interracial sterility. Nothing has yet been discovered to remove the grave difficulty, by which Huxley in particular was so much oppressed, that among the many varieties produced under domestication—which ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... time the bereaved Farfrae had learnt the, at least, proximate cause of Lucetta's illness and death, and his first impulse was naturally enough to wreak vengeance in the name of the law upon the perpetrators of the mischief. He resolved to wait till the funeral was over ere he moved in the matter. The time having come he reflected. Disastrous as the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... malevolent giant is not so bad a God as an insane child. And Browning means that pessimism is what we should naturally expect from so rudimentary an intellect as Caliban's, which judges the whole order of the universe from proximate and superficial evidences. ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... reserved for Mr. Malthus to show. As corollaries, it may be supposed that they imply a logical act of the understanding. In some small degree, no doubt; but no more than necessarily accompanies every exercise of reason. Though inferences, they are not remote inferences, but immediate and proximate; and not dependent upon each other, but collateral. Not logic but a judicious choice of his ground placed Mr. Malthus at once in a station from which he commanded the whole truth at a glance—with a lucky dispensation from all ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... dark, and out-of-the-way place, is the "home plantation" of Col. Edward Lloyd, on the Eastern Shore, Maryland. It is far away from all the great thoroughfares, and is proximate to no town or village. There is neither school-house, nor town-house in its neighborhood. The school-house is unnecessary, for there are no children to go to school. The children and grand-children of Col. Lloyd ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... aristocratic innocence on its waxen cheek, faintly flushed with paint, and I bore it home with pride. But when I came to examine it, I found it was but a sawdust abomination. Oh the modelling of the arm, oh the anatomy of the leg, oh the patella proximate to the ankle! I felt that if I gave that doll to the expectant infant, she might grow up to be an art critic. Thus, then, mused I sorrowfully, is the nation's taste made in Germany. We are corrupted from the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the latter part of this sentence—famine was not all a pretext, but it was certainly used by ministers as a cry to strengthen their Corn Law policy. "It was," said Sir Robert Peel, "that great and mysterious calamity, the potato failure, that was the immediate and proximate cause which led to the dissolution of the Government on the 6th of December, 1845." Two most important points, he said, they had now before them; (1) the measures to be immediately adopted in consequence of the potato blight; ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... those limitations are, and why, having been able to go so far, it should go no further. Every man and every race is capable of education up to a certain point, but not to the extent of being made from a sow's ear into a silk purse. The proximate cause of the limitation seems to lie in the absence of the wish to go further; the presence or absence of the wish will depend upon the nature and surroundings of the individual, which is simply a way of saying that one can get no further, but that as the song (with a ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... 480), where the question was who was liable for the damage eventually done by the burning squib which was passed about the market house by successive hands. The majority of the court held, however, against Blackstone and Cicero, and established the doctrine of proximate cause.] ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... wickedness was left unrebuked both in Clergy and laity. A great impulse was given to the sale of indulgences or pardons, an evil practice which brought in large sums of money to the papal exchequer, and at the same time led to such abuses as probably to become a principal proximate cause of ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... for any man to acquire even this proximate skill; and that requires long and patient practice. It is this: he should sight over his rifle at a wild animal, noting carefully the apparent relative size of the front sight-bead and the animal's body. He should then pace the distance between himself and that animal. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... about Norton Bury since the famine of last year. At least, so Jael said; and she was a wise doctoress, and had cured many. He would have no one else to attend him—seemed terrified at the mere mention of Dr. Jessop. I opposed him not at first, for well I knew, whatever the proximate cause of his sickness might be, its root was in that mental pang which no doctors could cure. So I trusted to the blessed quiet of a sick-room—often so healing to misery—to Jael's nursing, and his ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of an article in "Fraser," reviewing Berkeley's novel, in the course of which he spoke in utterly unjustifiable terms of Berkeley's mother. Mr. Berkeley was not satisfied with inflicting on the publisher so severe a beating that it was the proximate cause of his death, but called out the Doctor, who manfully avowed the authorship. Each, it is understood, fired five shots, without further effect than that one ball struck the whisker of Mr. Berkeley and another the boot of Maginn, and when Fraser, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... namely those things which necessarily follow from his absolute nature, through the means of these primary attributes, which, nevertheless, can neither exist nor be conceived without God, it follows: 1. That God is absolutely the proximate cause of those things immediately produced by him. I say absolutely, not after his kind, as is usually stated. For the effects of God cannot either exist or be conceived without a cause (Prop. xv. and Prop. xxiv. Cor.). 2. That God cannot properly ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... is ready to work, is fresh, is full of ideas." "The grounds of our judgment are often knowledge so remote from consciousness that we cannot bring them to view." "That the human mind includes an unconscious part; that unconscious events occurring in that part are proximate causes of consciousness; that the greater part of human intuitional action is an effect of an unconscious cause; the truth of these propositions is so deducible from ordinary mental events, and is so near the surface that the failure of deduction to forestall induction in the discerning ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... artificially prepared, must probably always be more expensive than that which is obtained from bark. But the fact is extremely curious, as it affords one of those very rare instances of chemistry being able to imitate the proximate ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... far and fast, and withal kept my head since I left the Red Tower a poor homeless wanderer, otherwise I had scarce found myself going out with High Councillor Leopold von Dessauer as my second to fight my late master's heir, the proximate Duke of the Wolfmark. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... conceded that a political party ought to have proximate aims, measures which it hopes to carry in the next session or the next parliament, as well as a more distant goal. Marxian socialism, as it existed in Germany, seemed to me to suffer in this way: although the party was numerically powerful, it was politically weak, because ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... fallen, and transferred our ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his bid, On the proximate occasion? ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... incidence in our own day is not otherwise than welcome. The Law of the Twelve Tables permitted the execution of Testaments in the only case in which it was thought possible that they could be executed, viz. on failure of children and proximate kindred. It did not forbid the disinherison of direct descendants, inasmuch as it did not legislate against a contingency which no Roman lawgiver of that era could have contemplated. No doubt, as the offices of family affection progressively lost the aspect of primary personal duties, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... The definition of a square just given amounts to the same thing as Euclid's definition, but it complies with a rule which has value as a matter of method, namely, that the definition should state the Proximate Genus of the ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... Individuals are physical beings subject to laws universal and invariable. The immediate cause acting in these laws may be obscure; the general results are subjects of certain calculation. But commonwealths are not physical but moral essences. They are artificial combinations, and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of the human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the laws which necessarily influence the stability of that kind of work made by that kind of agent. There is not in ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... and to produce its legitimate effect, it was necessary that the people should first be accustomed to this new order of life; that, for the present, their regards should not be too much drawn away from this their proximate and immediate vocation. Yet, even in the last four books there are not wanting allusions to Him who, as the end of the law, was, from the very beginning, to be set before the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... you what a wonderful piece of mechanism is that hand with which Nature has equipped you for seizing the oars of life's activities? Galen, the famous anatomist, after a prolonged study of the human hand, conceiving it to be the proximate instrument of the soul, was forced to renounce atheism, to acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being. Scientists regard the human hand as being the most remarkable organ, not vital, in ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... and cocked, and of a human being in such relation to it, as to be manifestly likely to be hit, that make the act a wrong. Hence, it is no sufficient foundation for liability, on any sound principle, that the proximate cause ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... can proximate ourselves inter th' vicinity of it lessen we delegate th' imperial functions of orinthological specimens t' some member of this here party," ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... civil war—indeed, before the return of the Guises to court. After stating that Charles IX. when he ascended the throne was ten years old (page 542), the author says that he is now eleven and a half. The proximate date would, therefore, seem to be January or February, 1562. Throkmorton wrote to the queen, Paris, Nov. 14, 1561, that "the Venetians had sent Marc Antonio Barbaro to reside there, in the place of Sig. Michaeli ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... standing-point, far different as were the foundations and the presumed sanctions of their teaching respectively, Seneca and St. Paul were both moral reformers; both, be it said with reverence, were fellow-workers in the cause of humanity, though the Christian could look beyond the proximate aims of morality and prepare men for a final development on which the Stoic could not venture to gaze. Hence there is so much in their principles, so much even in their language, which agrees together, ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... (economical). Many an argument, used by zealous and earnest men, has this economical character, being not the very ground on which they act (for they continue in the same course, though it be refuted), yet in a certain sense, a representation of it, a proximate description of their feelings, in the shape of argument, on which they can rest, to which they can recur when perplexed, and appeal when they are questioned." He calls these "startling words," p. 39. Yet here again he illustrates their truth; for in his own case, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... lower plants almost entirely consist—that the cell absorbs alimentary matters through the spongioles of the root, and that the fluid received thus undergoes the first steps of the organizing process—that the inorganic elements are changed into the simplest proximate principles by cells—so also are the further changes into the regular secretions of the plant, the result of cell-life—that gum and sugar are converted into the organizable portion of the nutritious sap by the cells of the leaves. ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... intervention of external energy, tends to the production of the body, or system of bodies, which disengage the greatest quantity of heat.[1] And, again, vast numbers of actions going on throughout nature are attended by dissipatory thermal effects, as those arising from the motions of proximate molecules (friction, viscosity), and from ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... consequently that gold is the cheapest article to send to the United States. The doctrine, then, is as true of gold, or the precious metals, as it is of other commodities.(264) It may be stated in the following language of Mr. Cairnes: "The proximate condition determining international exchange is the state of comparative prices in the exchanging countries as regards the commodities which form the subject of the trade. But comparative prices within the limits of each country ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... its origin, we may often stop on this side of that point, provided that which is deduced is higher than that for which it is deduced, as, "Rain water in its ultimate genus is that which descends from heaven and is increased by showers," but in reference to its more proximate sense, under which the right of keeping it off is comprised, the genus is, mischievous rain water. The subordinate species of that genus are waters which injure through a natural defect of the place, or those which are injurious on account of the works of man: for one of these kinds may be restrained ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... himself to be acting with the perfect disinterestedness which can only be accounted for by superficial reasoners on the assumption of some such abstract notion as religion, moral sense, or duty. Since the behaviour of mankind at large, therefore, is invariably guided by a remote or proximate consideration of utility; since conduct depends upon character, and character is shaped by external conditions and positive sanctions, it is possible to frame, on utilitarian principles, scientific rules of behaviour which can be powerfully, though indirectly, promoted ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Plants.—In ultimate analysis, plants consist mainly of C, H, O, N, P, K. In proximate analysis, as it is called, they are found to contain these elements combined to form substances like starch, sugar, etc. Water is the leading compound in both animals and plants. One of the most important differences between animals and plants is, that all plants, except ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... Borrow had bought a copy of this book he was willing to do what was asked, and to attempt also to translate into German Phillips' "Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe," or what the translator called "his tale of an apple and a pear." But Phillips changed his mind about the "Dairyman's Daughter" and commissioned a compilation of "Newgate Lives and Trials" instead. ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... have demonstrated the two proximate constituents of common air, because it was not necessary to know anything more about it for a clear knowledge of fire. I shall now go further, and see whether a still deeper decompounding of ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... two historical propositions are alike—one perennial truth holds good, namely, that every social hardship or injustice may be traced back to the linked sins of aggression and submission, remote or proximate in point of time. And I, for one, will never believe the trail of the serpent to be so indelible that barefaced incongruity must dog the footsteps ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... The proximate arrival of Caroline's father in the Colony was a circumstance ominous of trouble. The Baron was no trifler, and would as soon choke a prince as a beggar, to revenge an insult to his personal honor or the honor ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... community by facilitating the lives of all. Either unknowingly or in spite of themselves, Nature leads men by purely personal motives to fulfil her ends: Nature being one of our expressions for the Ultimate Cause of things, and the end, remote when not proximate, being the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... great number of ideas, perhaps for that reason associate those which they acquire with tenacity; they cannot reason concerning general causes; they expect that any event, which has once or twice followed another, will always follow in the same order; they do not distinguish between proximate and remote causes, between coincidences and the regular connection of cause and effect: hence children are subject to feel hopes and fears from things which to us appear matters of indifference. Suppose, for instance, that a child is very ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... of the original would this critic give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?" And again, "How far has this critic seen steadily and seen whole, the subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing, the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own department?" How far, in short, has he applied ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the calculation should be based on an ultimate analysis, which reduces the fuel to its elementary constituents of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, ash and moisture, to secure a reasonable degree of accuracy. A proximate analysis, which determines only the percentage of moisture, fixed carbon, volatile matter and ash, without determining the ultimate composition of the volatile matter, cannot be used for computing the heat of combustion ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... annual battues, not only for the supply of the government studs, but for export to India. Making due allowance for the false dimensions of the island assumed by Ptolemy, but taking his account of the relative positions of the headlands, rivers, harbours, and cities, the accompanying map affords a proximate idea of his views of Taprobane and its localities as propounded in ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... injunction of calmness of mind, not for the purpose of intimating Brahman itself.—True, we reply; but the fact nevertheless remains that, where the qualities of consisting of mind, &c. are spoken of, Brahman only is proximate (i.e. mentioned not far off so that it may be concluded to be the thing referred to), while the individual soul is neither proximate nor intimated by any word directly pointing to it. The cases of Brahman and the individual soul ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... provinco. Provincial provincano. Provision provizajxo, mangxajxo. Provisional provizora. Provocation incitego—ado. Provoke incitegi. Prow antauxa parto. Prowess valoreco, kuragxegeco. Prowl vagi. Proximate proksima, apuda. Proximity proksimeco, apudeco. Proxy anstatauxulo. Prudence singardemo. Prudent singardema, prudenta. Prune cxirkauxhaki. Prune seka pruno. Pruning shears brancxotondilo. Prussian, a Pruso. Prussic acid ciana acido. Pry sercxi, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... for the purpose of giving information to Congress in adopting modes for raising the money requisite to meet the expenditures." Hamilton had never sent in any other than a statement of expenditure for the past fiscal year, together with the estimate of the accountant of the Treasury for the proximate wants of the departments of government. Mr. Gallatin incorporated in his annual report a balance sheet in accordance with the ordinary forms of book-keeping familiar to every accountant and indispensable ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... accompanied with lively songs, gestures, and movements, such heroic adventures as were of a more cheerful hue, (many in the Odyssey for instance; for here, also, as in many other respects, the germ is to be found in Homer,) or, at least, could be made to wear such an appearance. The proximate cause of this species of drama was derived from the festivals of Bacchus, where satyr-masks was a common disguise. In mythological stories with which Bacchus had no concern, these constant attendants of his were, no doubt, in some sort arbitrarily introduced, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the various proximate causes to which so many human beings owed their deliverance from a combination of dangers as remarkable for their duration as they were appalling in their aspect, it is impossible, I think, not to discover ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... given by James the Fifth to the Rothes family. After the King's death, the forfeiture was reduced in Parliament on the 12th December 1543, under the direction of Cardinal Beaton; which so offended the Master of Rothes, that it is said to have been the proximate cause of the Cardinal's murder.—(Senators of the College of ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... authority for the preservation of my just rights within your waters. I take the following principles, applicable to the present case, to be well settled by the law of nations:—Firstly, that no act of hostility, proximate or remote, can be committed by any belligerent in neutral waters; secondly, that when a cruiser of one belligerent takes refuge within the waters of a neutral power, a cruiser of the opposite belligerent cannot follow her into those waters for purposes ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... set about making some more. In examining Miss Baker's teeth at the preliminary sitting he had found a cavity in one of the incisors. Miss Baker had decided to have it filled with gold. McTeague remembered now that it was what is called a "proximate case," where there is not sufficient room to fill with large pieces of gold. He told himself that he should have to use "mats" in the filling. He made some dozen of these "mats" from his tape of non-cohesive gold, cutting it transversely into small pieces that could ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the idea of the actually existent body (II. xi. and xiii.), which (II. xv.) is compounded of many other ideas, whereof some are adequate and some inadequate (II. xxix. Cor., II. xxxviii. Cor.). Whatsoever therefore follows from the nature of mind, and has mind for its proximate cause, through which it must be understood, must necessarily follow either from an adequate or from an inadequate idea. But in so far as the mind (III. i.) has inadequate ideas, it is necessarily passive: wherefore the activities of the mind follow solely from adequate ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... but amicably enough, though I take it he was not very well pleased with Wharncliffe's last letter, in which he distinctly told the Duke that his speech on the Address, and declaration against any Reform, was what overthrew his Government. This he never will admit, and, passing over the proximate cause, always refers his fall to (what was certainly the remote cause) the Catholic question—that is, to the breaking up of the Tory party which followed it, and the union of the old Tories with the Whigs and Radicals on purpose to turn him out. In this correspondence Wharncliffe ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... Foods may be conveniently divided into four great classes, to which the name food-stuffs or alimentary principles has been given. They correspond to the chief "proximate principles" of which the body consists. To one or the other of these classes all available foods belong[16]. The classification of food-stuffs usually given is ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... future—that awaiting them at Cadiz. But the ladies cannot overlook, or forget, some perils more proximate. The retrospect of the day throws a shadow over the morrow. That encounter with De Lara and Calderon cannot end without further action. Not likely; and both aunt and niece recall it, questioning their now affianced lovers—adjuring them ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... what I call the American idea," declared Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy—that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... promises. He is free from all human weakness. His mind is not limited, like that of man, to be more affected by partial suffering than by that universal disorder and ruin which must inevitably result from the unrequited violation of his law. The mind of man is unduly affected by the present and the proximate; but to God there is neither remote nor future. And when, in wisdom and in goodness, he first established and ordained the law unto life, he saw the end from the beginning; and he can never sacrifice the universal good by setting aside that law in order to avoid partial evil. His mercy to the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... Gulf and River of St. Lawrence; that part of Louisiana which is situate east of the Mississippi, and the tract between the Ohio and St. Lawrence, on which French forts had been erected, and which had been the proximate cause of the war. On her part Spain resigned East and West Florida, with all pretensions to fish on the coast of Newfoundland; and conceded the full right of cutting logwood in the Bay of Honduras. France and Spain promised full restitution to Portugal, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... undertaking. In the conception of Eve's grief as distinguished from Adam's, and as coloured by the circumstances of her situation—namely, by the consciousness that she had been the first to fall, and the proximate cause of Adam's transgression—there is certainly no sufficient foundation to sustain the weight of a dramatic poem. At the most, it might have furnished materials for a sonnet. It therefore detracts nothing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... phenomenon to some cause or other; but it shows also that experience had not, at that time, pointed out any regular order in the occurrence of those particular phenomena, nor proved them to be, as we now know that they are, dependent upon prior phenomena as their proximate causes. There have been sects of philosophers who have admitted what they termed Chance as one of the agents in the order of nature by which certain classes of events were entirely regulated; which could only mean that those events did not occur in any fixed order, or depend upon uniform ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... some terrible moral failure, not infrequently, is the proximate cause of the re-awakening of the soul. There is a deep psychological truth in the old phrase, "conviction of sin." Men are thus convicted. Some act of appalling wrong-doing reveals to them the depths of their hearts ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... mysteriousness of God's providence." "In the calamity, dear hearers, which has removed from our midst one of the best men of this, or any previous age of the world, and overwhelmed so many in deep sorrow, we are pointed to the cruel and murderous hand of the assassin, but this was only the proximate cause of his sudden and violent death. There is a high and remote cause to which we must look, if we would find the true source of this event, which has thrilled the heart of this whole community. That cause, dear hearers, is the ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... to the need of a more proximate explanation of phenomena, and, by such experiment as he is capable of, endeavours to ascertain, through their intrinsic properties or their outward manifestations, the cause or causes of their being. He leaves the skies and comes to earth, and seeks to ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... nearest bench, overcome with my dismay—quite as much at Miss Ambient's horrible insistence and distinctness as at the monstrous meaning of her words. Yet they came amazingly straight, and if they did have a sense I saw myself too woefully figure in it. Had I been then a proximate cause— ? "You're a very strange woman and you say incredible things," ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... domain where Conjecture, varying from the strongest presumption to mere plausibility, is the highest proof. Laws or Principles are yet undiscovered there, and in their place we find Generalizations—Suppositive or Proximate Laws—which are in process of proof, or already established by such evidence as the Inductive Method can array, and which carry the conviction of their correctness with varying degrees of force, to larger or ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... terror which even a slave dared not encounter. In the year when Tiberius Gracchus was tribune (and the coincidence is significant), it was found necessary to send a consul to put down the first slave revolt in Sicily. It is not known when it broke out. [Sidenote: Story of Damophilus.] Its proximate cause was the brutality of Damophilus, of Enna, and his wife Megallis. His slaves consulted a man named Eunous, a Syrian-Greek, who had long foretold that he would be a king, and whom his master's guests had been in the habit of jestingly asking to remember them when he came to the throne. [Sidenote: ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... catastrophe. Borrow could not translate Phillips's great masterpiece, Twelve Essays on the Proximate Causes, into German with any real effectiveness although the testimonial of the enthusiastic Taylor had led Phillips to assume that he could. Borrow, as we shall see, knew many languages, and knew them well colloquially, but he was ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... of to-day, "To save the souls of countless workmen entrusted to her by Christ, the Church must enter the field of Social reform, armed with extraordinary remedies. She must exert herself to the utmost to rescue the workmen from a situation which constitutes a real proximate occasion of sin for them, a situation which makes it morally impossible for them to fulfill their ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... well-established fact that the larva of a working-bee will develop into a queen-bee, if before it is too late, its food be changed to that on which the larvae of queen-bees are fed. All which instances suggest that the proximate cause of each advance in embryonic complication is the action of incident forces upon the complication previously existing. Indeed, we may find a priori reason to think that the evolution proceeds after this manner. For since no germ, animal or vegetal, contains the slightest ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... spark will kindle a flame where everything lies open to catch it. I have absolutely forgot the proximate cause of quarrel, but it was some trifle which occurred at the card-table which occasioned high words and a challenge. We met in the morning beyond the walls and esplanade of the fortress which I then ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to convey the expression of the wish that on the 25th of December and proximate days you, and those not distantly connected with you by family ties, may have enjoyed a season of Wholesome Hilarity, and that the new period of twelve months, upon which we are about to enter, may be Suffused ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... exceptional or great men—the men who, in vulgar language, are spoken of as "historical characters." Such an explanation, said Spencer, is no explanation at all. Great men, however great, are not isolated phenomena. Whatever they may do as the "proximate initiators" of change, they themselves "have their chief cause in the generations they have descended from," and depend for the influence which is commonly attributed to their actions, on "the multitudinous conditions" ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... discomfiture or emotion seen Caroline the object of Count Altenberg's attention, were struck with indignation the moment they suspected her of pleasing Colonel Spandrill. Envy seldom takes two steps at once: it is always excited by the fear of losing the proximate object of ambition; it never exists without some mixture of hope as well as of fear. These ladies having no hope of captivating Count Altenberg, Caroline did not then appear to be their rival; but now that they dreaded her competition ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... roughly, that a stimulus applied to the nervous system, like a spark to dynamite, is able to take advantage of the stored energy in unstable equilibrium, and thus to produce movements out of proportion to the proximate cause. Movements produced in this way are vital movements, while mechanical movements are those in which the stored energy of a living body is not involved. Similarly dynamite may be exploded, thereby displaying its characteristic properties, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... At one end, in the direction of Niowee, two tall poles were fixed firmly in the earth about three yards apart, and slanting outward. At the end toward Ioco a similar goal was prepared. Every time the ball should be thrown over either goal the play would count one for the proximate town, and the game was of twelve or twenty points according to compact, the catcher of the twentieth ball being entitled to especial honor. It was of course the object of each side to throw the ball over the goal toward their own town, and to prevent ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the footing of a general similitude, are all closely seen by each other; and where, as no signs of incontestable greatness or superiority are perceived in any one of them, they are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is then destroyed, but the taste for trusting the ipse dixit of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts himself up in his own breast, and affects from that point ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... are more or less accompanied by constipation and diarrhea. In all cases of chronic constipation I have found proctitis, and often colitis, and am forced to believe it is the most common and proximate cause of chronic constipation of the bowels. Constipation being a primary symptom, there must of necessity follow numerous secondary symptoms, of which diarrhea well marks the progress of septic infection. Some of the symptoms of infection are headache, megrim, vertigo, ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... indeed, an instinctive sympathy, between his disposition and her own. Certain it is, she caresses him without ceasing; and even harasses the family in the service of this cursed animal, which, indeed, has proved the proximate cause of her breach with Sir ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... dominant note, this propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes only in the form of its expression and in the proximate objects to which it directs the man's activity. Under the regime of individual ownership the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and accumulation ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... nation sees its life and prosperity threatened by an ambitious or a jealous neighbour, one cannot but admire its clergy for joining in the advocacy of an efficient and triumphant defence. But this is merely a superficial and proximate consideration. Not the actual war only, but the military system of which it is the occasional outcome, has a very pertinent relation to religion; the maintenance of this machinery for settling international quarrels in an age in which applied science makes it so ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... from all the foregoing is this. Whenever we believe a statement to be based on imagination, or to have been learned from some imaginative source, we must always connect it with its most proximate neighbors, and step by step seek out its elements and then compound them in the simplest possible form. We may, in this fashion, get perhaps at the proper content of the matter. Of course it need not yield another imaginary image. And its failure to do so would be an ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... ill-considered benevolence is that it looks only to proximate and immediate results without considering either alternatives or distant and indirect consequences. A large and highly respectable form of benevolence is that connected with the animal world, and in England it is carried in some respects to a point which is unknown on the Continent. But what ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... were the under half of the world. The sun was scorching and glowing on the other side, leaving us to night and frost. But the night and the frost wake the sunshine of a higher world in our hearts; and who cares for winter weather at Christmas?—I believe in the proximate correctness of the date of our Saviour's birth. I believe he always comes in winter. And then let Winter reign without: Love is king within; and Love is lord of ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... have been the proximate cause of his sickness, Alexander died, a black and swollen mass, hideous to contemplate, after a sharp struggle with the venom he had absorbed.[1] 'All Rome,' says Guicciardini, 'ran with indescribable gladness to view the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... own that it was Osborne about whom we were speaking, though I shall have something to say about that presently—and then, if I understand you rightly, you changed your behaviour to Roger, and made him more welcome to this house than you had ever done before, regarding him as proximate heir to the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... every carriage, cab, and "coach 'nhired" in their vicinity is in motion; venders of trotters and ham-sandwiches are in full cry; the bars of the proximate retail establishments are crowded with thirsty gods; ruddy chops and steaks are temptingly displayed in the windows of the supper-houses, and the turnips and carrots in the freshly-arrived market-carts appear ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... whose mental reservations he dreaded. He succeeded in some measure, or at least he disarmed any lingering suspicions by the irreproachable adjustment of his manners, by the reserve of his language, by his great show of lack of curiosity regarding all questions that might have a proximate or remote connection with his interests. How, then, had Mme. de Lorcy come to take it into her head that there was something of the appraiser about Samuel Brohl, and that his eyes took an inventory of her furniture? If he had forgotten himself at Maisons, he never forgot ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... to be noted respecting these forms, except that, in fig. 1, the two lower rolls, with the angular projections between, represent the fall of the mouldings of two proximate arches on the abacus of the bearing shaft; their two cornices meeting each other, and being gradually narrowed into the little angular intermediate piece, their sculptures being slurred into the contracted space, a curious proof of the earliness of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... your bench, my luds, or in this assembly, should entertain an opinion that the proximate parts of a mellifluous mind are for ever conjoined and unconnected, I submit to you, my luds, that it will of necessity follow, that such clandestine conduct being a mere nothing, - or, in the noble language of our ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... is the main subject of these latter confessions, to the history and journal of what took place in my dreams; for these were the immediate and proximate cause of my ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... achieved. Helped by one or two really ingenious romances on this theme, I had dreamed out my dream, realised every difficulty, ascertained every factor in the problem. I had satisfied myself that only one thing needful was as yet wholly beyond the reach and even the proximate hopes of science. Human invention could furnish as yet no motive power that could fulfil the main requirement of the problem—uniform or constantly increasing motion in vacuo—motion through a region affording no resisting medium. This must be a repulsive energy ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... honours conferred on them, and fled either to be the companions of the monks in the desert or elsewhere so as to be safe from the crushing load of Imperial distinction. Mr. Hodgkin and others have pointed out that the diversion of local funds to the Imperial Exchequer was one of the proximate causes which led to the downfall of the empire. Whilst the municipal system lasted, it produced admirable results. Dealing with Northern Africa, whose progress was eventually arrested by the withering hand of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... there is felt to be an unknown and apparently unknowable element, then, but not till then, does the idea God present itself to us. So at coroners' inquests juries never say the deceased died by the visitation of God if they know any of the more proximate causes. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... fire, in an insurance sense, as distinct from explosion, was accurately defined by Justice McIlvaine, of the Supreme Court of Ohio (1872), in the case of the Union Insurance Company vs. Forte, i.e., an explosion was a remote cause of loss and not the proximate cause, when the fire was a burning of a gas jet which did not destroy, though the explosion caused by the burning gas-jet did destroy. Earlier than this decision, however (in 1852), Justice Cushing, of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... combustible part of peat varies considerably in its proximate composition. It is in fact an indefinite mixture of several or perhaps of many compound bodies, whose precise nature is little known. These bodies have received the collective names Humus and Geine. We shall employ the term humus to designate this mixture, whether occurring in ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... As Father Kelleher puts it on a later page, 'There is a sense certainly in which, with a solitary exception in the case of wages, it may be said with perfect truth that the common estimation determines the just price. That is, the common estimation is the proximate practical criterion.'[2] ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... existed in the minds of both nations—a sentiment of mutual suspicion. The Englishman thought Germany was prepared to dispute with him the maritime supremacy of Great Britain, the German that England intended to attack Germany before Germany could carry her great design into execution. The proximate cause of the irritation—for it has not yet got beyond that—was the decision, as announced in her Navy Law of 1898, to build a fleet of battleships which Germany, but especially the Emperor, considered necessary to complete the defences, and appropriate for ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... always endeavoured, but could not always attain. Words are seldom exactly synonimous; a new term was not introduced, but because the former was thought inadequate: names, therefore, have often many ideas, but few ideas have many names. It was then necessary to use the proximate word, for the deficiency of single terms can very seldom be supplied by circumlocution; nor is the inconvenience great of such mutilated interpretations, because the sense may easily be collected ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... well say at once that this little record pretends in no degree to be a picture either of my introduction to Mr. Paraday or of certain proximate steps and stages. The scheme of my narrative allows no space for these things, and in any case a prohibitory sentiment would hang about my recollection of so rare an hour. These meagre notes are essentially private, so that if they see ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... was hemmed and crushed in on every hand. Evil men were the proximate cause of this; but He acknowledged behind them the will of God. He had to accept a career of shame instead of glory, of brief and limited activity instead of far-travelling beneficence, of premature and violent death instead of world-wide and everlasting empire. But He never ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... well known chemical experiment producing the arbor Dianae. The passage of the electric fluid leaves marks that are like the branches and foliage of a tree, and the same fluid exerts a direct influence on the germination of plants. Some of the proximate principles of vegetable and animal bodies, such as urea and alantoin, are said to have been produced artificially by the chemist; and in the combination of the simple elements, such as carbon and oxygen, into ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new accession of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological exhibitions of which only this ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... in this analysis will soon open a wide field of knowledge and inquiry; but it is sufficient for our present purpose, if, by a careful study of the composition and chemical disposition of the proximate compounds of the coal and the wood fuel, we arrive at the conclusion that both are the result of forces which, very slight in themselves at any moment, yet when acting through long periods of time become laid up in the form of coal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... and embraced Pelagianism. The bewildered seeker after theological knowledge resorts, not to these worthies themselves, with whom he professes to have no acquaintance, but to certain disciples of theirs. In this manner he gets a definition of “proximate power,” from which it is apparent that, while the Jesuits and Dominicans are only agreed in using the same expression—the meanings they put into it being entirely different—the Jansenists and Dominicans agree in substance, while only differing in the use of words. ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... Carlton, "we could come at any proximate estimate of the loss which falls upon society in consequence of the moderate use of intoxicating drinks, we would find that it exceeded a hundred—nay, a thousand—fold that of the losses sustained ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... geographical distribution of species upon the earths surface tends to suggest the same notion. For, as a general thing, all or most of the species of a peculiar genus or other type are grouped in the same country, or occupy continuous, proximate, or accessible areas. So well does this rule hold, so general is the implication that kindred species are or were associated geographically, that most trustworthy naturalists, quite free from hypotheses of transmutation, are constantly inferring former geographical continuity between ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... was Mr. Stanton appointed? By Mr. Lincoln. Whose presidential term was he holding tinder when the bullet of Booth became a proximate cause of this trial? Was not this appointment in full force at that hour. Had any act of the respondent up to the 12th day of August last vitiated or interfered with that appointment? Whose Presidential term is the respondent now serving out? His own, or Mr. Lincoln's. If his own, he is entitled ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... felt like a fish, in the dark—he opened the door into the street a very little, and crept out, and shut it, leaving me to grope my way back into the house: which cost me some trouble and a fall over his stool. This was the proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for what appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming, among other things, that he had launched Mr. Peggotty's house on a piratical expedition, with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... more numerous, and their villages larger. In 1753, when Gen. Washington visited the French posts on the Ohio, the spot which had been selected by the Ohio company, as the site for a fort, was occupied by Shingess, king of the Delawares; and other parts of the proximate country, were inhabited by Mingoes and Shawanees.[1] When the French were forced to abandon the position, which they had taken at the forks of Ohio, the greater part of the adjacent tribes removed farther west. So that when improvements were begun to be ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... to this conjecture. Some account of the argument it contains may well precede the suggestions presently to be set forth concerning the Unseen World; and we shall find it most convenient to begin, like our authors, with a brief statement of what the principle of continuity teaches as to the proximate beginning and end of the visible universe. I shall in the main set down only results, having elsewhere [2] given a simple exposition of the arguments upon which these results ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of the President by whom they were appointed, and for one month longer." He sought to anticipate his opponents' argument on this point. "By whom was Mr. Stanton appointed?" asked General Butler. "By Mr. Lincoln. Whose Presidential term was he holding under when the bullet of Booth became the proximate cause of this trial? Was not his appointment in full force at that hour? Had any act of President Johnson up to the twelfth day of August last vitiated or interfered with that appointment? Whose Presidential ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... melodramatic, "Death before Slavery!" may be applicable—when "Slavery" becomes a conceivable, proximate probability, or "Death" a possible alternative. Then let us have "Death before Slavery," by all means. At present, Punch would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... does not aim at culture nor at knowledge for its own sake, but at fitting the individual for social service. Our school system tends ever to forget this truth. It is in constant danger of losing sight of this ultimate aim of education by keeping its attention too narrowly fixed on some nearer and proximate aim. It tends often to lay too much stress on mere examinations and examination results. It forgets that the only true test of knowledge gained lies in the pupil's ability to use it intelligently in the furtherance of some purpose—and of some ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... to go out by the door to avoid it." His cousin, the Duke of Elbeuf, paid him a visit at night to urge him to withdraw himself from the plot hatched against him. "If it were necessary to lose my life in order to reap the proximate fruits of the states' good resolution," said Guise, "that is what I have quite made up my mind to. Though I had a hundred lives, I would devote them all to the service of God and His church, and to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... music for his ear: it is to him a note of evil augury—a knell of dread import. It is not often that he hears it: he dwells beyond the circle of its echoes. His nearest neighbour—a squatter like himself—lives at least a mile off; and the most proximate "settlement" is six times that distance from the spot he has chosen for his cabin. The smoke of his chimney mingles with that of no other: its tall column ascends to heaven solitary as ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of Asia, first over Europe, and thence, with swelling tide, pouring its multitudes into the New World, is the grandest phenomenon in history. What American can contemplate its results, as displayed before him, and as promised in the proximate future, without an emotion ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... Catholic of some note rode up from London. This was Thomas Pounde, of Belmont or Beaumont, near Bedhampton, a landed gentleman of means, an enthusiastic Catholic, and for the last five years or so a prisoner for religion. Mr. Pounde's message in effect was this. "You are going into the proximate danger of capture, and if captured you must expect not justice, but every refinement of misrepresentation. You will be asked crooked questions, and your answers to them will be published in some debased form. Be sure that whatever ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion |
