"Coherence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But Pythagoras, Empedocles, Epicharmus, and other physicists and philosophers have set forth that the primordial elements are four in number: air, fire, earth, and water; and that it is from their coherence to one another under the moulding power of nature that the qualities of things are produced according to ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... play, and a few years later split into their elements, and so given birth to romantic poetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I could take those separated elements, all that abstract love and melancholy, and give them a symbolical or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer's rough-tongued riders, but some procession of the Gods! a pilgrimage no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new 'Prometheus Unbound,' Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar things—"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so forth—this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind—a jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And what could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for that civilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place? When the boy left school his "education" had ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... the various points of which I have spoken and the details of the composition satisfactorily worked out the student should practice with a view to learning the piece as a whole. Nothing is so distressing to the musician as a piece which does not seem to have coherence and unity. It should be regarded aurally as the artist regards his work visually. The painter stands off at some distance to look at his work in order to see whether all parts of his painting harmonize. The pianist must do ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... war the sense of a common danger had lent the Congress a not easily defined but quite real coherence, which vanished when peace came, and the local ideals of the States took precedence. Take taxation. Congress could compute the quota of taxes which each State ought to pay, but it had no way of collecting or of enforcing payment. It took eighteen months to collect five per cent ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... of fresh and wet peat to frost, speedily destroys its coherence and reduces it to the proper state of pulverization. For this reason, fibrous peat should be exposed when ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... this of post-kantian absolutism I am unable to frame. I see the intellectualistic criticism destroying the immediately given coherence of the phenomenal world, but unable to make its own conceptual substitutes cohere, and I see the resort to the absolute for a coherence of a higher type. The situation has dramatic liveliness, but it is inwardly incoherent throughout, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... tale, and soon stated that she was single, explaining later that she had two husbands, and one was dead, while the other had disappeared from her ten years ago. Gradually her alarm subsided and she achieved coherence. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... something more than a mere device for securing office. Unless those who are elected under the same party designation are willing to assume sufficient responsibility and exhibit sufficient loyalty and coherence, so that they can cooperate with each other in the support of the broad general principles, of the party platform, the election is merely a mockery, no decision is made at the polls, and there is no representation of the popular will. Common honesty and good faith with the people who support ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... as in the chansons de geste proper; but the marvels are excellent, the poet relating them with an admirable mixture of gravity and complaisance, in spirited style and language, and though with extremely little attention to coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small power of what may be called ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... happens to lose any part of the dialogue, announcing the changes, the whole becomes unintelligible confusion. In this respect, and in discarding a number of uninteresting characters, the plan of Dryden's play must be unequivocally preferred to that of Shakespeare in point of coherence, unity, and simplicity. It is a natural consequence of this more artful arrangement of the story, that Dryden contents himself with the concluding scene of Antony's history instead of introducing the incidents of the war with Cneius Pompey, the negociation with Lepidus, death of his ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... antique art in the galleries about. After this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn, and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus's marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... he must explain, and shows him instantly just how far he has progressed with the proof of each statement. Furthermore, a brief renders the arguer invaluable assistance in preserving the fundamental principles of composition, especially those of Unity, Coherence, Proportion, and Emphasis. It greatly simplifies his task of assorting material and assigning each part its proper place and function. It exhibits so clearly every particle of evidence and every process of reasoning employed that it affords great convenience for testing both the quality ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... Length Paragraphing of Speech Indentation of the Paragraph Essential Qualities of the Paragraph Unity Coherence Emphasis ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... drama. Only a few years ago, Mme. Charlotte Wiehe acted in New York a one-act play, entitled La Main, which held the attention enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was spoken. The little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and coherence, and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn; and it secured this achievement by visual means alone, with no recourse whatever to the spoken word. Here was a work which by no stretch of terminology could ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... what a consideration of the superstitions of savages would lead me to expect. The belief in fairies, ghosts, and witches is a survival of those superstitions. It is, of course, not found in equal coherence, equal strength of all its parts, equal logic (if I may so express it) everywhere. We must not be surprised if, as it is gradually penetrated by the growing forces of civilization, it becomes fragmentary, and ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... an order and connexion of all the scenes, removing them from the place where they were inartificially set; and though it was impossible to keep them all unbroken, because the scene must be sometimes in the city and sometimes in the court, yet I have so ordered them, that there is a coherence of them with one another, and a dependence on the main design: no leaping from Troy to the Grecian tents, and thence back again, in the same act, but a due proportion of time allowed for every motion. I need not say that I have refined the language, which before was obsolete; but I am willing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... body where two or more bones meet is called an articulation, or joint. At the place of meeting the bones are firmly attached to each other, thereby securing the necessary coherence of the skeleton. The large number of bones, and consequently of articulations, are necessary for the different movements of the body and also on account of the manner in which the skeleton develops, or grows. Articulations ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... present educational structure are many, and in some cases obvious to all. In the first place, it is said, and with much truth, that there is no systematic coherence between the different parts of our educational machinery, and no thorough-going correlation between the various aims which the separate parts of the system are intended to realise. As Mr. De Montmorency has recently pointed out, we have always had a national group of educational ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... of the Kensington carpet-mill slaves by his grandfather—should be thus flouted and put upon by the daughter of Flint, that parvenu, absolutely floored him. For a moment he sat there speechless, unable even to reach for his drink; but presently some coherence returned. He was about to utter what he conceived to be a strong rejoinder, when the girl suddenly standing up, turned her back upon him and ignored him as completely as she might have ignored any of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... thick here; and the same consideration of the suffering he had had, perplexed and terrified him. He began to fear that all this intricacy in his brain would drive him mad; and that his thoughts already lost coherence as the footprints did, and were pieced on to one another, with the same trackless involutions, and varieties ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Dora, seeing the girl has some important news to impart, but is so nervous and unstrung as to be almost incapable of speaking with any coherence. But presently Florence grows calmer, and then, her voice becoming clear and full, she is able to unburden ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... tail actually exceeding in length the remainder of the spinal column. The next group of Ratites, although it contained only the Ostrich, Rhea, Emu, Cassowary, and Apteryx, he shewed to be equivalent in anatomical coherence to the third great group of Carinates, which includes the vast majority of living birds. In his arrangement of the latter group, he laid most stress on the characters of the bony structures which form the palate, and by this simple means was able to lay down clearly at least the main lines of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming odds. There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he seemed to strive for coherence. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... relatively to itself, magnetism, like every other power in Nature, is designated by its opposite poles, and must be represented as the magnetic axis, the northern pole of which signifies rest, attraction, fixity, coherence, or hardness; the element of EARTH in the nomenclature of observation and the CARBONIC principle in that of experiment; while the southern pole, as its antithesis, represents mobility, repulsion, incoherence, and fusibility; the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his speech and in getting it into finished form, the toaster will do well to remember those three essentials to all good composition with which he struggled in school and college days, Unity, Mass and Coherence. The first means that his talk must have a central thought, on which all his stories, anecdotes and jokes will have a bearing; the second that there will be a proper balance between the parts, that it will not be all introduction and conclusion; the third, that it will hang together, without ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... syncopated triplets of the strings. The lovers are raised entirely away from the external world; it is the sleep of approaching death into which they sink; rather dissolution into eternity. The words begin to lose coherence and meaning, and are often ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... of slight fever and inflammation, the Englishman recovered coherence and thanked the Chaplain and his wife, and Lispeth—especially Lispeth—for their kindness. He was a traveller in the East, he said—they never talked about "globe-trotters" in those days, when the P. & O. fleet was young and small—and had come from Dehra Dun to hunt for plants and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... most important factors in the development of man, the recognition—profound and complete recognition—of the law of universal unity and coherence. The separation which exists between individuals, between worlds, between the different poles of the universe and of life, the mental and physical fantasy called space, is a nightmare of the human imagination. That nightmares exist, and exist only to torment, every child knows; and what we ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... self-respect music must be recognized as a part of the great human uplift. To this end it has been knocking at the doors of the institutions of learning asking to be admitted and recognized as a part of public education. The reply has been that music teaching must first develop coherence, system and standards. This has caused music teachers to look about and realize as never before that the profession as a whole has no organization and no fixed educational standards. Every teacher fixes his own standard and is a law unto himself. The standard is individual, and if the individual ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... my classes presented, and how unlikely it was, in the face of all these drawbacks, that their acquirements should be above mediocrity. On the score of natural abilities, however—in quickness of perception, facility in generalization, readiness and coherence of expression, and clearness of head generally—it would not be at haphazard one could find an equal number of boys in any ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... he had just got below the surface of a great subject and was beginning to dig into the roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the guidance of men of his own day, of the nineteenth century historian, who refashions the past on the lines of his own mind, who gives it rationality, coherence, and, as it were, modernness, so that the main impression he produces on us, so long as we look at that past through him only, is on the whole an impression of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... same the lights of the second car swerved in toward the gateway, and consternation seized hold of Sofia's intelligence and wiped it clear of all coherence. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Greevy done it, an' I'm here." With no apparent coherence and relevancy Sinnet continued, but his voice was not so even as before. "Em'ly was a girl that wasn't twice alike. She was changeable. First it was one, then it was another, and she didn't seem to be able to fix her mind. But that didn't prevent her leadin' men ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... exercised and the means employed to another part of the work; for how came the sun and its atmosphere to have such materials, such motions, such a constitution, and these consequences followed from their primordial condition? How came the parent vapor thus to be capable of coherence, separation, contraction, solidification? How came the laws of its motion, attraction, repulsion, condensation, to be so fixed as to lead to a beautiful and harmonious system in the end? How came it to be neither too fluid nor too tenacious, to contract neither too quickly nor ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Chunti until he fell the victim of a court intrigue—being poisoned by a rival named Hamar. With Toto disappeared the last possible champion of the Mongols, and the only thing needed to insure their overthrow was the advent of a capable leader who could give coherence to the national cause, and such a leader was not ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... that Mr. Webster succeeded entirely. The real contest was for the possession of that debatable ground which lies between the defined limits of the executive and legislative departments. The struggle consolidated and gave coherence to the Whig party as representing the opposition to executive encroachments. At the time Jackson, by his imperious will and marvellous personal popularity, prevailed and obtained the acceptance ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... upon the ground appears so simple, delivered Italy hand-bound to strangers. Had they but succeeded in arresting Charles and destroying his forces at Fornovo, it is just possible that then—even then, at the eleventh hour—Italy might have gained the sense of national coherence, or at least have proved herself capable of holding by her leagues the foreigner at bay. As it was, the battle of Fornovo, in spite of Venetian bonfires and Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her conscious of incompetence and convicted her of cowardice. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... kindly girlish tact. Chocolates were one of Phemie's numerous school-girl weaknesses, and a weakness so rarely indulged in that she perceptibly brightened when her friend produced the gay-colored, much-gilded box. And thus stimulated, she poured forth her sorrows with more coherence and calmness. She was to go to Switzerland, that was settled, and the others were to be placed in various other highly select educational establishments. They were becoming too old now, Lady Augusta had decided, to remain ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rifacimento of 1623 has greater literary merits— the merits of mere smoothness, clearness, grammatical coherence, and intelligibility—than the autograph; and I can understand the preference of some students for the former, though I do not share it Michelangelo the younger added fluency and grace to his great-uncle's ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... are unaccountably gone, and we have agreed to discard the new version altogether. As you may be more fastidious in singing mere silliness, and a string of well-sounding images without sense or coherence—Drums of Tartars, who use none, and Tulip trees ten foot high, not to mention Spirits in Sunbeams &c,—than we are, so you are at liberty to sacrifice an enspiriting movement to a little sense, tho' I like LITTLE-SENSE ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... stood before her the next day in the hotel parlor, she reminded him in her exquisite beauty of a play seen from the back of the stage; the illusion so successful with the audience is there an exposed sham, without coherence, and without beauty. Her eyes had a scared look. She had to say to herself, if this is Horace then my time has come, if it is Arthur Dillon I have nothing to worry about, before her hate came to her aid and gave her courage. She murmured the usual formula of unexpected pleasure. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... English Composition. Perfect form cannot possess the four general qualities above mentioned unless its elements are controlled by these main principles. These are: (1) the principle of sincerity; (2) the principle of unity; (3) the principle of mass; and (4) the principle of coherence. Sincerity demands of perfect form that it be a just expression. Unity demands that every composition should group itself about a central idea. There must be one story, all incidents subordinated, one main ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... Bertram answered; "like your own worst customs. It didn't show either gentleness or rationality, you'll admit; but it showed what's the one thing essential to civilisation—great coherence, high organisation, much division of function. Some of the rites these civilised Mexicans performed would have made the blood of kindly savages run cold with horror. They sacrificed a man at the harvest festival by crushing him like the corn between two big ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... Powis. Lady Malpas arrived yesterday. I shall visit Miss Rich to-morrow. In the next apartment to [nine lodges *****. I have not seen him some years; and he is grown either mad or superannuated, and talks without cessation or coherence: you would think all the articles in a dictionary were prating together at once. The Bedfords are expected this week. There are forty thousand others that I neither know nor intend to know. In short, it is living in a fair, and I am heartily sick ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... my brain lost coherence, and I passed over the invisible boundary into dreamland. It was a beautiful evening in summer. I was at home among my friends and we were sitting in the open air. The doctor was there, taking his turn with me in telling the story of our adventures. This went on till our listeners were tired ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... were in special need of a clear, intelligible code. By 'boiling down' the English law, and straining off all the mere technical verbiage, it would be possible to extract a few common-sense principles and to give their applications to practice in logical subordination and coherence. That which seems to be a labyrinth in which it is hopeless to find the way until experience has generated familiarity with a thousand minute indications at the various turning points, may be transformed, when the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of life had been the same before, but then they were all connected, while now they had all tumbled to pieces. Only senseless things, lacking coherence, presented themselves one after another to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... theory of LAPLACE. The rotation of each nucleus or sun round its axis produces centrifugal force; that force, by refrigeration, increases beyond the centripetal force of gravity; in consequence rings are formed and detached from the surface, whose unequal coherence of parts mostly causes them to break into separate masses or planets, partaking of the motion of the bodies from which they have been separated, and these primaries in their turn becoming centres of gravitation and centrifugal force, throw ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... shown its immense resisting power and its tenacious union, in the persecution by Galerius; and Constantine was discerning enough to see the vast political importance of winning over such a body; which, though but a small fraction of the whole empire, was the only party which could give coherence to that empire, the only one which had enthusiastic adherents in every province, the only one on whose resolute devotion it was possible for a partizan to rely securely. The bravery and faithful attachment of Christian regiments was a lesson ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... conveys to us a strong sense of the tyranny of nature and [180] circumstance over human action. The most powerful expressions of this side of experience might be found here. The bloodless, impassible temperament does but wait for its opportunity, for the almost accidental coherence of time with place, and place with wishing, to annul its long and patient discipline, and become in a moment the very opposite of that which under ordinary conditions it seemed to be, even to itself. The mere resolute self-assertion ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... convicted of imitation, except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied. Thus it can scarcely be doubted, that in the first of the following passages Pope remembered Ovid, and that in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strong enough to say to such a weltering sea "Peace, be still"? I dared ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... denominations into which modern Western Christianity is divided are seriously examined, they are seen to fall into three main types or groups. Standing by herself is the Church of Rome, venerable, august, impressive in virtue of her unanimity, her coherence, her ordered discipline, and her international position, representing exclusively the ancient Catholic tradition, and making for herself exclusive claims. At the opposite end of the scale there are the multitudinous sects of Protestantism, differing ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... before in other words, this province is nothing more than a piece of patchwork, intersected with petty boundary lines, so that every nation is stitched in and quilted in spots, without any harmony, or coherence, or general design. The people of Louisburgh are a kind, hospitable, pleasant people, tolerably well informed for the inhabitants of so isolated a corner of the world; but a few miles further off we come upon a totally different race: ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... rendering given above is only intended to link the various speeches into coherence; it has no resemblance with the French. In the original, "Font ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... with a rising hope, just thought, "We must take one of them at a time." But his coherence lapsed. "IS there some woman? Of whom he's really afraid of course I mean—or who does ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... parties du reseau ferrugineux en font beaucoup moins que le fond meme du gres. De meme si l'on compare entr'eux les gres qui renferment des cailloux avec ceux qui n'en contiennent pas, on trouve dans ceux-ci plus de gluten calcaire, l'eau-forte diminue beaucoup plus leur coherence. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the orchestra to the stage, which frequently represented the slope of a hill. He is always endeavouring to move, and for the sake of emotion, he not only violates probability, but even sacrifices the coherence of the piece. He is strong in his pictures of misfortune; but he often claims our compassion not for inward agony of the soul, nor for pain which the sufferer endures with manly fortitude, but for mere bodily wretchedness. He is fond of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... you, good Master Robert Shallow. Bardolfe, looke to our Horsses. If I were saw'de into Quantities, I should make foure dozen of such bearded Hermites staues, as Master Shallow. It is a wonderfull thing to see the semblable Coherence of his mens spirits, and his: They, by obseruing of him, do beare themselues like foolish Iustices: Hee, by conuersing with them, is turn'd into a Iustice-like Seruingman. Their spirits are so married in Coniunction, with the participation of Society, that they flocke together in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... be? Are they huge phosphorised fishes? If so, what monsters! Or are they crystals? a kind of igneous snow-flakes? floating in a fluid of their own, or very nearly their own, specific gravity? Some kind of solidity or coherence they must have, or they would not retain their shape in the violent movements of the atmosphere which the change of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... of such capital in a pillow being the last intelligible confidential communication made to her by the departed, before succumbing to dropsical conditions of snuff and gin, incompatible equally with coherence and existence. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the members of St. John's College, Cambridge, at which the writer took his degree. This variety in the sources from which the materials are put together must be the apology for some defects in their connection and coherence. It is hoped also that the circumstances of bodily fatigue and actual difficulty under which they were often written, will ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... into the mouth of the insane Lear any such sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the insanity has declared itself, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... group, constituting the constructive period, comprises the men who were foremost in framing the Constitution, and in organizing and giving coherence and life to the new government and to the nationality thereby created. This is introduced by John Adams. He, like Washington, might properly find a place in both the first and the second groups, but the distinction of the presidential office brings him with sufficient propriety into ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... came through those heavily bearded lips, and the stranger flung out his hands in a sweeping gesture, sunken eyes glowing with an almost savage light as he spoke with more coherence: ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... hundred dollars for the whole damn moose pasture.... Well, it's good enough for me.... I tell you it's rotten, the whole damn cheese.... You've got to stand in with the police or you can't get...." and so on and on unendingly, without coherence. I went to sleep only when the sound of the wordy ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... atavism make it probable that the coherence of the petals has originally arisen by the same method, but by action in the opposite direction. The direct proof of this conclusion is afforded by a curious observation, made by Vilmorin upon the bright and large-flowered garden-poppy, Papaver ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... be acknowledged that Flaubert's arraignment of modern society possesses the characteristics commended by the late Barett Wendell: it is marked in a high degree by "unity, mass, and coherence." It must be admitted also that George Sand possessed in a high degree the Pauline virtue of being "not easily provoked," or she never could have endured so patiently, so sweetly, Flaubert's reiterated and increasingly ferocious assaults upon her own master passion, her ruling principle. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... had just finished a very excellent dinner, which Fandor paid for out of his own pocket. He was careful not to take any of the royal funds for his personal use. Wulf hovered on the borderland of drunkenness, but his ideas still showed some coherence. For the twentieth time he ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... to drive them into superior regions, yet they were wholly hindered from descending downwards, and were compelled to reside in those places capable to receive them; and these were the heavenly spaces, unto which a multitude of these small bodies were hurled, and these being thus shivered fell into coherence and mutual embraces, and by this means the heaven was produced. Then a various and great multitude of atoms enjoying the same nature, as it is before asserted, being hurried aloft, did form the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... which otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be well made without some such order of things as might, through a series of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing else can protect it against the levity of courts, and the greater levity of the multitude. That to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... demands on her attention. But not the less willingly did he return with her to the solitude of the ruinous factory. On every safe occasion, becoming more and more frequent as the days grew longer, he repaired thither, and every time returned more capable of drawing the coherence of melody from that matrix of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Philosophy, and still more a mind courageous and elevated by religion, are capable of completely weakening the influence of the animal sensations which assault the soul of one in pain, and able, as it were, to withdraw it from all coherence with the material. The thought of God, which is interwoven with death, as with all the universe, the harmony of past life, the anticipation of an ever-happy future, spread a bright light over all its ideas; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... immensity of a trackless forest, of other mountain ranges equally wild and lonely, cutting the monotony of plains and prairies, and valleys full of every delight. All that Hamilton had read or heard of the immense area beyond or surrounding the few cities and hamlets of the American colonies, flew to coherence, and he had a sudden appreciation of the stupendousness of this new untravelled world, understood that with its climate, fertility, and beauty, its large nucleus of civilization, its destiny must be as great ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... wonders of Wellington's Peninsular campaign, from Vimiera (1808) to Toulouse (1814), the magnificent unity of scheme preserved throughout is, perhaps, the most wonderful: the dramatic coherence, development, and final catastrophe of triumph. For this, however, readers must be referred to Napier's History; Enough here to add that one of the most decisive steps was the formation of the ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... account most naturally for the broken order and lax coherence of this letter, by the suggestion that, as St. Paul dictated it, there was present with him a sense of almost nervous hesitation. He has exactly a gentleman's reluctance to do an ungracious action: while he knows that it is his duty to warn the Colossians of a serious danger, he knows ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... inquired from him, what news there was in the learned world, and what new pieces were brought to light? The visiter replied, that there was little or nothing worthy notice; that there was, indeed, a thing called an Essay on Man, shocking poetry, insufferable philosophy, no coherence, no connexion. Pope could not repress his indignation, and instantly avowed himself the author. This was like a clap of thunder to the mistaken bard, who took up his hat and never ventured to show his unlucky face there again." ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... power of genius to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy, the trivial and the relevant, the true and the false. The thoughts of the gossip, so the psychologists tell us, have connection but not coherence; the thoughts of the genius have coherence and likewise connection and unity. Thus we discover that scandal-mongers are at fault in the mind more than in the heart; and that it behooves people who do not wish to have themselves voted mentally defective to draw a distinction between scandal and ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... this position, my first duty was to make a careful study of the publications of the parent society in England, with a view of learning their discoveries. The result was far from hopeful. I found that the phenomena brought out lacked that coherence and definiteness which is characteristic of scientific truths. Remarkable effects had been witnessed; but it was impossible to say, Do so and so, and you will get such an effect. The best that could be said was, perhaps you ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... close to the Italian Restaurant, where they sell the cocoa and the ginger beer. There was no one in the place besides themselves, and here, among the falling leaves, and in a solitude as profound as on the top of a Dartmoor tor, Arnold told the story of his love again, and with greater coherence, though ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... it—I'll make it—I'll make it," his iteration sounded like a mocking echo flung back into his ears. "I must not sink," he asserted to himself. "Not until I have saved Trusia," his thoughts were becoming incapable of coherence. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... must unburden his heart. He told Jean all his suspicions, his arguments, his struggles, his assurance, and the history of the portrait—which had again disappeared. He spoke in short broken sentences almost without coherence—the language of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... pages of the manuscript are missing. There is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story. It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with the record of Mr. Joyce-Armstrong's qualifications as an aeronaut, which can be gathered from other sources and are admitted to be unsurpassed among ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me, and folded his arms, and spread his great chin upon his deer-skin apron, and nodded briskly with his deep gray eyes, surveying me in triumph. To his mind, that mill was the wonder of the world, and any argument based upon it, with or without coherence, was, like its circular saws, irresistible. And yet he thought that women can not reason! However, I did not say another word just then, but gave way to him, as behooved a child. And not only that, but I always found him too good to be argued with—too kind, I mean, and ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Hebrew nation; i. e. the Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman, the last represented by "the iron legs," which did indeed bestride the world; these "iron legs" are represented as terminating in feet and toes part of iron and part of clay, which have no natural coherence; i. e. the Roman empire shall be divided into several kingdoms, partly strong and partly weak: a prophecy remarkably fulfilled in the history and condition of the kingdoms of Europe. The prophet goes on to say in ch. ii, that in the latter days of those kings or kingdoms, [which are yet ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... imitation of the same pattern, I will warrant you, that our young divines, by leaving out four or five words in a place and putting a false construction on the rest, can make any passage serviceable to their own purpose; though from the coherence of what went before, or follows after, the genuine meaning appears to be either wide enough, or perhaps quite contradictory to what they would thrust and impose upon it. In which knack the divines are grown now so expert that ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... centralized, and the popular interest. He is incapable of adapting his general political theories to his actual political programme; and, consequently, the utmost personal enthusiasm on his part and great power of effective political agitation cannot give essential coherence, substantial integrity, or ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... passion of two brothers for one placid and beautiful girl, a passion which leads to fratricide and madness. That it is a very melancholy and tragical story is obvious from this brief sketch of its contents, but it is remarkable for coherence and self-restraint no less than for vigour of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the wonder is that she is not more ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... scholar—that being in a famous assembly explaining the mystery of the Trinity, that he might both let them see his learning was not ordinary and withal satisfy some theological ears, he took a new way, to wit from the letters, syllables, and the word itself; then from the coherence of the nominative case and the verb, and the adjective and substantive: and while most of the audience wondered, and some of them muttered that of Horace, "What does all this trumpery drive at?" at last he brought the ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... formidable effect when they have earned a castigation. But I am sure I see signs in the above article that you are either unaccustomed to dictating or are out of practice. If you will re-read it you will notice, yourself, that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that it loses itself early and does not find itself any more. There are some other defects, as you will notice, but I think I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Cis told with more coherence now, but the tears in her eyes and colour deepening: "I was taking in Humfrey's kerchiefs from the bleaching on the grass, when Master Babington—he had brought me a plume of pheasant's feathers from the hunting, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... coherence. In his early occasional pieces, like the Phi Beta Kappa address, coherence is at a maximum. They were written for a purpose, and were perhaps struck off all at once. But he earned his living by lecturing, and ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... only, but morality itself would be in danger. As men's conceptions of God are purified and deepened, they tend to exhibit the varied contents of morality in their connection with a diviner order. It is, then, the thought of man's relation to God which gives coherence to the moral life, and brings all its diverse manifestations ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... as it is a dramatic threnody in memory of a loved friend. As compared with the masses of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and the other early mass-writers, it has not their conventional form, their regular sequence of setting, their coherence of spirit and sentiment. There are wide divergences in it from the old beaten track. But it may be said, on the other hand, that while the traditions are violated, Verdi does not so far lose sight of the devotional character of his work as to descend to the ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... expressing what he had to say. He begins sentences and omits to finish them; he goes off into digressions and forgets to pick up the line of thought he has dropped; he throws out his ideas in lumps instead of fusing them into mutual coherence. ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... mingled on his canvas cream and mulberry juice and sunbeams; the Robusti, the Caliari, the Bassani, and others whom it would be tedious to mention. One breath, one afflatus, inspired them all; and it is due to this coherence in their style and inspiration that the school of Venice, taken as a whole, can show more masterpieces by artists of the second class than any other in Italy. Superior or inferior as they may relatively be among themselves, each bears the indubitable stamp of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... "discerned things that differ." And when, as here, he saw around him men, however misguided, who were aiding in the "announcement" of the Name and salvation of Christ, he thought more of the evangelization than of the breach of coherence, which yet most surely he deplored. He speaks with perfect candour of the unsound spiritual state of the separatists, their envy, strife, and partizanship. But he has no anathema for their methods. He is apparently quite unconscious of the thought that because he is the one Apostle in Rome ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... leaders or central organization, and their only political unit was the pleme, or tribe. They were considerably influenced by contact with Roman civilization. It was reserved for a foreign race, altogether distinct in origin, religion and customs, to give unity and coherence to the scattered Slavonic groups, and to weld them into a compact and powerful state which for some centuries played an important part in the history of eastern Europe and threatened the existence ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... consciousness too long to endure. By self-hypnosis, which I began successfully to practise, I became able to put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious mind. But the latter was an undisciplined and lawless thing. It wandered through all nightmarish madness, without coherence, without continuity of scene, event, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... years which preceded the outbreak of the war were marked in this country by a revival of public interest in the art of poetry. To this movement coherence was given and organisation introduced by Mr. Edward Marsh's now-famous volume entitled Georgian Poetry. The effect of this collection—for it is hardly correct to call it an anthology—of the best poems written by the youngest ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... dream of another person instead of one of my own to analysis, the result is the same; the motives for convincing others is, however, changed. In the dream of a healthy person the only way for me to enable him to accept this repressed idea is the coherence of the dream thoughts. He is at liberty to reject this explanation. But if we are dealing with a person suffering from any neurosis—say from hysteria—the recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by reason of their connection with the symptoms of his illness and of the improvement ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... passing over them, though reluctantly, I will record the deeds of the emperors, with some brief introductory remarks to make clear to those who shall read my history by what steps the Romans passed from aristocracy (or democracy) to the rule of one man, and to impart, in addition, coherence to the narrative. ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... That's all one; things of consequence must have their respects; where, how, and to whom. — Yes, sir, he shewed himself a true Clog in the coherence of that affair, sir; for, if he had managed matters as they were corroborated to him, it had been better for him by a forty or fifty score of pounds, sir; and he himself might have lived, in despight of fates, to have fed on woodcocks, with the rest: but it was his heavy fortune to ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the popular fancy which created him. For though the names of his confessor, Friar Tuck; his mistress, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... The disaster of a single day made an end of the Prussian army as a force capable of meeting the enemy in the field. A great part of the troops was captured by the pursuing enemy during the next few days. The regiments which preserved their coherence were too weak to make any attempt to check Napoleon's advance, and could only hope to save themselves by escaping to the fortresses ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of "spirits" who, to the mere tactile sense, have been indistinguishable from flesh and blood; and, occasionally, have wrested with all the vigour of Jacob's opponent; yet, further, to the speech, in the language of raps, of spiritual beings, whose discourses, in point of coherence and value, are far inferior to that of Balaam's humble but sagacious steed. I have not the smallest doubt that, if these were persecuting times, there is many a worthy "spiritualist" who would cheerfully go to the stake in support of his pneumatological faith; and furnish evidence, after Paley's ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... others, Ludwig Boerne, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Karl Gutzkow, dominate the literary activity of Germany from the beginning of the fourth decade to about the middle of the nineteenth century. The common bond of coherence among the widely divergent types of mind here represented, is the spirit of protest against the official program of the reaction which had succeeded the rise of the people against Napoleon Bonaparte. This German ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... coherence.] Mixture — N. mixture, admixture, commixture, commixtion^; commixion^, intermixture, alloyage^, matrimony; junction &c 43; combination &c 48; miscegenation. impregnation; infusion, diffusion suffusion, transfusion; infiltration; seasoning, sprinkling, interlarding; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... first time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it very much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a lack of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily passed off, for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description; but when, a little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian verse describing how, turning from barbaric splendors such as the Persians affect, he binds his brows with simple ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... in preparing the pastes which are applied to the grids are powders, and in their dry condition could not be applied to the grids, as they would fall out. Mixing them with a liquid to make a paste gives them greater coherence and enables them to be applied to the grids. Sulphuric acid puts the oxides in the desired pasty condition, but has the disadvantage of causing a chemical action to take place which changes a considerable portion ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... mountains excavated in the form of a tunnel, lava, and ashes, which exhibited incontestable proof of the agency of fire. The Salt Sea, on the contrary, is a lake of great length, curved like a bow, placed between two ranges of mountains, which have no mutual coherence of form, no similarity of composition. They do not meet at the two extremities of the lake; but while the one continues to bound the valley of Jordan, and to run northward as far as Tiberias, the other stretches away to the south till it loses ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... evidences of coherence, as antecedent and consequent, though we are occasionally perplexed by inconsistencies of detail. To deal with these latter, is a portion of the duties of a critic; but he is not to treat the Iliad as if inconsistency prevailed every where throughout its parts; for coherence of parts—symmetrical antecedence and consequence—is discernible throughout the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... in want of a leader; never was it more plain, that, without a head, the people "bluster abroad as beasts," with plenty of the iron of purpose, but purpose without coherence, and with no cunning smith of circumstance to edge it with plan and helve it with direction. What the country was waiting for showed itself in the universal thrill of satisfaction when Major Anderson ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... rhythmically for my own use, as if I hadn't made it on the spur of an inspired moment! They also told me that I couldn't write a fugue; that my orchestration was overloaded, and my work deficient in symmetry, repose, development and, above all, in coherence. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... synopsis of a communication to show the kind of thing we got—though this was a very favourable specimen, both for length and for coherence. It shows that it is not just to say, as many critics say, that nothing but folly comes through. There was no folly here unless we call everything folly which does not agree with preconceived ideas. On the other hand, what proof was there ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he strove to mitigate his treason, with the poorest arguments imaginable, and, as if his good sense had declined with his fortune, his style was altered, and debased to that of a common man, or rather a schoolboy, filled with tautologies and stuff of no coherence; in which he neither shewed the majesty of a prince, nor sense of a gentleman; as I could make appear by exposing those copies, which I leave to history; all which must be imputed to the disorder his head and heart were in, for want of that natural ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... for coherence in our narrative, would be clearer did the reader review the part of the last conversation in the White Castle between the Prince of India and Mahommed, in which the latter is paternally advised to study the Greek capital, and keep himself informed of events within its ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... Parable, as I had read it, progressed onward with some coherence and concatenation, a coherence and concatenation growing perhaps more disjointed as it advanced. Now it began to be broken with interjectory sentences, and just here was one, the tenor of which I could not ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... maintain their demands by force, if necessary; but no declaration of war was issued. Great Britain, in accepting the challenge, equally abstained from acts which would constitute a state of war; but she armed at once to shatter the coalition, before it attained coherence in aught but words. From first to last, until the Armed Neutrality again dissolved, though there was hard fighting, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody? And what are we to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with no more colour or coherence than so many index-words out of a dictionary? I do not know that we can say anything, but that it is a prodigiously amusing exhibition for a line or so. The worst of it is, that Whitman must have known better. The man is a great critic, and, so far as I can make out, a good one; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that military history,—including therein naval,—simply and clearly presented in its leading outlines, divested of superfluous and merely technical details, would be found to possess an interest far exceeding that which is commonly imagined. The logical coherence of any series of events, as of any process of Nature, possesses an innate attraction for the inquisitive element of which few intelligent minds are devoid. Unfortunately, technical men are prone to delight in their technicalities, and to depreciate, with the adjective "popular," ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... vague head may be placed many sets of inquiries, each of them extensive—(a) The degree of generality of the ideas; (b) the degree of abstractness of the ideas; (c) the degree of definiteness of the ideas; (d) the degree of coherence of the ideas; (e) the extent to which there have been developed such notions as those of class, of cause, of uniformity, of law, of truth. Many conceptions which have become so familiar to us that we assume them to be the common property ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... easily thrown into any shape, it is also easily thrown out of shape. It has little coherence or stability, less than masonry and very considerably less than timber. If any unequal settlement in the foundation of a brick building occurs, those long zigzag cracks with which we in London are only too familiar set themselves up at once; and if any undue load, or any variation in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... on her a look of profound, intelligent attention, as she went on, stumbling, reaching out for words, discarding those she found, only her steady gaze giving coherence to her statement. "You know, living the way I have . . . I've told you . . . I've seen a great deal more than most girls have. And then, half brought up in France with people who are clever and have their eyes wide open, people who really count, I've seen how they don't believe in humans, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... different kinds of Polyp Corals on a Reef as compared with their structural rank and also with their succession in time, because we have here another of those correspondences of thought, those intellectual links in Creation, which give such coherence and consistency to the whole, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... see that when it is stated at the highest possible, nothing has really been taken either from Comte's claims as a powerful original thinker, or from his immeasurable pre-eminence over Saint Simon in intellectual grasp and vigour and coherence. As high a degree of originality may be shown in transformation as in invention, as Moliere and Shakespeare have proved in the region of dramatic art. In philosophy the conditions are not different. Il faut prendre son ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... home she endeavoured to collect her thoughts, and took up a pen in order to address those dear parents, whom, spite of her errors, she still loved with the utmost tenderness, but vain was every effort to write with the least coherence; her tears fell so fast they almost blinded her; and as she proceeded to describe her unhappy situation, she became so agitated that she was obliged to give over the attempt and retire to bed, where, overcome with the fatigue her mind had undergone, she fell into a slumber which greatly ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... exhausted by struggle after struggle with the populations which surrounded them. Moabites and Midianites, Ammonites and Bedawin, even the king of distant Mesopotamia, had sacked their villages, had overrun their fields, and exacted tribute from the Israelitish tribes. The tribes themselves had lost coherence; they had ranged themselves under different "judges" or "deliverers," had forgotten their common origin and common faith, and had even plunged into interfraternal war. Joshua was scarcely dead before the tribe of Benjamin was almost ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... leap at one bound without necessary connection or coherence from the discussion of executive to those of legislative powers? Why waste words over doubtful theories when there was pressing need to suggest practical amendments to the statute whose real or imaginary defects Mr. Buchanan had pointed out? Why indulge ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... one living poet and prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age. But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken to consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they are distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic intention gives unity, ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... themselves and subject to worlds invisible. He groaned at the recollection of having tried to establish fixed precepts. Counting up his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through ether, he had explained their coherence by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction. You bowed before that man of science—well! I tell you that he died in despair. By supposing that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he had invented to explain to himself the universe, were equal, he stopped the universe; ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... directing the course of positive scientific inquiry into wrong channels. There was indeed nothing to prevent investigating the mode of action of the supposed plastic or vital force by observation and experiment; but the phrases gave currency and coherence to a false abstraction and generalization, setting inquirers to look out for one cause of complex phaenomena ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... stone, upbuilt so high that even the leaping monster could not hope to reach its summit. Later the story of the wounded, but now conscious and refreshed runner, was told with more of detail and coherence. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... he could not think. His faculties were in a whirl—he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert, while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without coherence—scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration—a speech of hers, a look, an inflection—then the whole experience ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... such drastic scepticism is reduced to complete silence. You cannot build up anything except illusion from a basis that is itself illusion. If I were not self-conscious there would be no centre or substratum or coherence or unity in any thought I had. If I were not self-conscious I should ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys |
