"Insoluble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... solve the insoluble problems of life, but having presented them as powerfully, perhaps, as is possible for human intelligence, he turned in his last period, of only two or three years, to the expression of the serene philosophy ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... while publicly professing an impossible virtue; for the woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. There are probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases of bitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases, practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward that in the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among the middling class of people, at any rate, has sufficed, there comes the great development of associations and tendernesses that arises out of intimate ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the small number of possible proportions, of any acid whatever with any base. We have also the curious law, discovered by Berthollet, that two soluble salts mutually decompose one another whenever the new combinations which result produce an insoluble compound, or one less soluble than the two former. Another uniformity is that called the law of isomorphism; the identity of the crystalline forms of substances which possess in common certain peculiarities of chemical composition.(133) ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... hour after hour, Wilhelmina waits there in vain. The truth is, one of the smallest accidents has happened: the Generals "lost a wheel at Gera yesterday;" were left behind there with their smiths, have not yet appeared; and the insoluble question among Friedrich and the Margraves is, "We dare not go on without them, then? We dare;—dare we?" Question like to drive Friedrich mad, while the hours, at any rate, are slipping on! Here are three Letters of Friedrich, legible at last; which, with Wilhelmina's account from the other side, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... places or on small questions. They don't. They often include questions of the largest order. But when the English introduce a really large question as the basis of their politics they like to select one that is insoluble. This guarantees that it will last. Take for example the rights of the Crown as against the people. That lasted for one hundred years,—all the seventeenth century. In Oklahoma or in Alberta they would have called ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... say no more but leave the problem as insoluble, only fearing that it will become a formidable weapon in the hands of the ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... clean surface of a Daguerreotype plate is exposed to the action of this menstruum, particularly if warm, the white parts, or lights are not altered, but the dark parts are attacked, and chloride of silver is formed, of which an insoluble coating is soon deposited, and the action of the acid soon ceases. This coat of chloride of silver is removed by a solution of ammonia, and then the acid applied again, and so on, until the depth ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... lot of the common man in these times helps us to understand one thing which otherwise would be an insoluble problem: which was, why did Christian soldiers so often become renegadoes and fight for the corsairs under the banner of those who were the fiercest and most irreconcilable foes of themselves and their kindred? The life of the common soldier or sailor did not offer many advantages; ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... a few hours the greater part of the strychnine salt as an insoluble bromide in transparent crystals. A lady in England lost her life by taking a similar mixture: the precipitated strychnine collected at the bottom, and in taking the last dose she ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... The reason for this was that the French fleet was a mixed one, the sailing division having been reinforced by a squadron of galleys from the Mediterranean. The elaborate attempts to combine the two types tactically—a problem which the Italian admirals had hitherto found insoluble—points to an advanced study of the naval art that is ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... from the mass by a magnet, leaving a pure nitrogen jelly. These facts are curious enough, and full of suggestion, but like all other questions having to do with magnetism, they hold for the present generation the double fascination of insoluble mystery. To be sure, one may readily enough suggest that if magnetism be really a whirl in the ether, this whirl is apparently interfered with by the waves of radiant heat; or, again, that magnetism is presumably due to molecular motions which are apparently interfered with by another ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... Beauty which is the same, yesterday, to-day and for ever. In such ideas or ideals, "eternal" as participating in the essential character of the facts they represent to us, we come in contact, as he supposes, with the insoluble, immovable granite beneath and amid the wasting torrent of mere phenomena. And in thus ruling the deliberate aim of his philosophy to be a survey of things sub specie eternitatis, the reception of a kind of absolute and independent knowledge [28] (independent, that is, of time and position, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... There have been produced "unexpected revelations in plant life, foreshadowing the wonders of the highest animal life." And there "have opened out very extended regions of inquiry in Physics, in Physiology, in Medicine, in Agriculture and even in Psychology. Problems, hitherto regarded as insoluble, have now been brought within ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... successful. For a long time the body is repeatedly shaken, but in vain; the tibiae or tarsi, unduly hard, refuse to yield to the patient saw. Sparrows and Mice grow dry and shrivelled, unused, upon the gibbet. Sooner in one case, later in another, my Necrophori abandon the insoluble problem in mechanics: to push, ever so little, the movable support and so to unhook ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again: "What am I ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... silicate of potash, silicate of soda, etc., which are soluble in water, and therefore available to plants. If we roughen a corn stalk with sand-paper we may sharpen a knife upon it. This is owing to the hard particles of silica which it contains. Window glass is silicate of potash, rendered insoluble by additions of ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... spaniel barked his respectable disapproval. In his long life of eighteen months he had seen many people, postmen and butcher boys and casual diggers in kitchen gardens, whose apparent permit to exist in Drane's Court had been an insoluble puzzle; but never had he seen so outrageous a trespasser. With unparalleled moral courage he told him exactly what he thought of him. But the trespasser did not hear. He kept on advancing. Miss Winwood rose, disgusted, and drew herself up. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... The problem was insoluble; the only way was to set one's self courageously at one's own little corner of the gigantic scheme, to attack it as faithfully as one could, by humble aspirations, quiet ministries, and tender-hearted sympathy; to take as simply as possible whatever ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mass. In this the virus is suspended, and with this it lies or may be precipitated upon the living fibre beneath. Then there is danger of re-inoculation; and it would seem that this fatal process is often accomplished. The eschar formed by the lunar caustic is dry, hard, and insoluble. If the whole of the wound has been fairly exposed to its action, an insoluble compound of animal fibre and the metallic salt is produced, in which the virus is wrapped up, and from which it cannot be separated. In a short time the dead matter sloughs away, and the virus ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... one insoluble problem is——, given a good and perfect God, where does sorrow come from, and why is there any pain? Men have fumbled at that knot for all the years that there have been men in the world, and they have not untied it yet. They have tried to cut it and it has resisted all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of good and evil is insoluble by universal suffrage. It is not given to a ballot to make the false true, or injustice just. Human conscience is not to be put to ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... the fundamental question for any philosophy of ethics; but it receives no answer at all from the prevailing school of metaphysical thought. This school offers no solution of the problem which was found insoluble by the type of philosophy whose aim is to co-ordinate the results of science. A comparison of the purposes and results of the two ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... although he would not admit that he constantly admired her, he did admit that there were moments when he admired her passionately and deemed her unique and above all women. Whence the change in himself? How to justify it? The problem was insoluble, for he was intellectually too honest to say lightly that originally he ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... I have condensed here are as alive to-day as are thousands of other Ginx's Babies in all our big cities. While philanthropists and politicians, priests and preachers, men and women theorize about the questions, the questions grow "more insoluble." What is to be done? is the first question. How is it to be done is a question which is secondary and its discussion is useless until the first is settled. Too much State drove Ginx's Baby into the Thames. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it came about that, within three months of his extraordinary accident, Mr. Fenwick was comfortably settled in an apartment within a few minutes' walk of Krakatoa Villa; and all the incidents of his original appearance were getting merged in the insoluble, and would soon, no doubt, under the influence of a steady ever-present new routine of life, be completely absorbed in the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... we might otherwise pass by almost unobserved, but to which we are put on the alert by the abstract query whether a man be indeed a freeman or a slave, as we watch from aside his devious course, his struggles, his final tragedy or triumph. So much value at least there may be in problems insoluble in themselves, such as that great controversy of Pascal's day [71] between Jesuit and Jansenist. And here again who would forego, in the spectacle of the religious history of the human soul, the aspects, the details which the doctrines of universal ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... occurs in the diamond, which is believed to be produced by the decomposition of vegetable matters, and it is there crystallized and remarkably transparent; but when produced by artificial processes, carbon is always black, more or less porous, and soils the fingers. It is insoluble in water, burns readily, and is converted into carbonic acid. Carbon is the largest constituent of plants, and forms, in round numbers, about 50 per cent of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... by persons who have lived in China—among the people, but not of them—and the more superficial the acquaintance, the more emphatically is the statement made, that the ordinary Chinaman, be he prince or peasant, offers to the Western observer an insoluble puzzle in every department of his life. He is, in fact, a standing enigma; a human being, it may be granted, but one who can no more be classed than his unique monosyllabic language, which still stands ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante which, referring all human action to the easy formula of purgatory, heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... or by the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble, Caesar ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... officially put these learned Associates upon ascertaining for him "Why Champagne foamed?" They, with a hidden vein of pleasantry, required "material to experiment upon." Friedrich Wilhelm sent them a dozen, or certain dozens; and the matter proved insoluble to this day. No King, scarcely any man, had less of reverence for the Sciences so called; for Academic culture, and the art of the Talking-Schoolmaster in general! A King obtuse to the fine Arts, especially to the vocal Arts, in a high ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... eggs that come soonest to maturity. Thus, in the natural state, the space of eleven months is necessary for the male eggs to acquire that degree of increment they must have attained when laid. This consequence, which to me seems immediate, renders the problem insoluble. How can the eggs, which should grow slowly for eleven months, suddenly acquire their full expansion in forty-eight hours, when fecundation has been retarded twenty-one days, and by the effect of this ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... hundred thousand dollars in capital, removing to the boundless prairies of which he had heard so much—Chicago, Fargo, Duluth, Sioux City, places then heralded in Philadelphia and the East as coming centers of great life—and taking Aileen with him. Although the problem of marriage with her was insoluble unless Mrs. Cowperwood should formally agree to give him up—a possibility which was not manifest at this time, neither he nor Aileen were deterred by that thought. They were going to build a future together—or so they thought, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more"—such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But such ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... already shown, that phosphorus is changed by combustion into an extremely light, white, flakey matter; and its properties are entirely altered by this transformation: From being insoluble in water, it becomes not only soluble, but so greedy of moisture, as to attract the humidity of the air with astonishing rapidity; by this means it is converted into a liquid, considerably more dense, and of more specific gravity than water. In the state of phosphorus before combustion, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... injustices of this, not yet being felt, the doctrine would have been of but little service. But in later Hebrew literature, many magnificent passages revealed the despair felt by prophet and thinker over the insoluble problem presented by the evil fate of the good and the triumphant success of the wicked; and a solution was sought in the doctrine of a Messianic kingdom, until Christianity with its proclamation of a future life set the question entirely aside. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the insoluble mystery of a dog that fled from nothing but the wind, and lapsed into profound musings on human character. "Come on!" he whispered to himself. "Why should it be given to one man to say 'Come on!' with that stupendous violence of effect? Always, all his life, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... at sea as you are," Hellen said, feeling them each in turn to make sure it was really they. "It's an insoluble mystery to me." ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Independence was that from that day each colony assumed the name of State; and the union changed its name of "The United Colonies" to the proud title of "The United States of America." Were the new States essentially different from the colonies? This is one of the insoluble questions connected with the formation of the Union. Calhoun later declared that the Declaration of Independence changed the colonies from provinces subject to Great Britain to States subject to ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... book, Marquise Tullia Fabriana, reputed to have assimilated the Chaldean science of the women of Edgar Allen Poe, and the diplomatic sagacities of Stendhal, had the enigmatic countenance of Bradamante abused by an antique Circe. These insoluble mixtures developed a fuliginous vapor across which philosophic and literary influences jostled, without being able to be regulated in the author's brain when he wrote the prolegomenae of this work which could not have embraced less ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the unneighbourly alien labour laws, to provide that Canadian sealers should give up their rights in Bering Sea for a money payment, and to arrange for a measure of reciprocity in natural products and in a limited list of manufactures. But the question of the Alaskan boundary proved insoluble, and the Commission broke ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... of the insoluble mystery, which appeared so plainly before him, enveloped him completely, even as the water in high-flood covers the willow twigs on the shore,—a desire came upon him to pray. He felt like kneeling, but he ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... it will be seen that the problem is an exceedingly complex one, not to be decided off-hand, or by any simple method. It has in fact been usually considered as (strictly speaking) insoluble, and only to be estimated by a more or less rough approximation, or by the method of general analogy from certain known facts. It will be seen, from what has been said in previous chapters, that Mr. Lowell, in his book, has used the latter method, and, by taking the presence of water and ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and 'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two lines from The Woods of Westermain, published in 1883 in the Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, sum up in themselves ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... moment Bobbie Holland's eyes were dreamy and her tongue unguarded. "I don't know what I'm going to do with him," said she with a gesture as of one who despairingly gives over an insoluble problem. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seen purposely removed from its contiguous parts, so as to render more visible its form and insertions. Under this tissue is found with the Nos. 7, 8, and 9, the endosperm or perisperm, containing the gluten and the starch; soluble and insoluble albuminoids, that is ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... prima facie objection to those agents which consist of assimilable elements, such as are found making a part of healthy tissues. These are divisible into three classes,—foods, poisons, and inert, mostly because insoluble, substances. The food of one animal or of one human being is sometimes poison to another, and vice versa; inert substances may act mechanically, so as to produce the effect of poisons; but this division holds exactly ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mattress if she had been told that there was a match underneath it. Why did the voice that urged her to perform the necessary action not add the one word that was capable of ensuring that action? The problem moreover is equally perturbing and perhaps equally insoluble whether it concerns our own subconscious faculties, or spirits, or strange intelligences. Those who give these warnings must know that they will be useless, because they manifestly foresee the event as a whole; but they must ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... plain, and passed through several shady forests of casuarina. A curious provision of nature for the distribution of the seeds of a parasitical plant was observed here, each seed being enclosed within a sort of pulp, like bird-lime, insoluble in water; the whole resembling a very thin-skinned berry. On this being broken, probably by birds, the bird-lime is apt to attach the seed to trees or branches, and so the parasitical growth commences. On the plains, the blue flowers of a large variety of MORGANIA GLABRA ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... that influence had upon her as contrasted with her neighbours which made the difference. When we ask why this influence affected her differently we find no satisfactory answer, and are in the presence of a mystery—the world-old insoluble mystery of the superiority of one tribe or one individual over others apparently of the same class. Political history is wont to tell this chapter of Rome's story under the title of the "Rise of the Plebeians," but the ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... is obtained; the ordinary methods of reduction yield leucoellagic acid, C'14H'10O'8, which crystallises in small sharp needles, melting with decomposition at 294-295 C. Leucoellagic acid is soluble in ethyl and methyl alcohols, and in glacial acetic acid, insoluble in chloroform, benzene, toluene, carbon tetrachloride, and petrol ether; it gives a bluish-green colour with ferric chloride which quickly turns black. Leucoellagic acid is soluble in alkalies, the ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... Utopia the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all trading finally involves individual preferences which are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really defined standards, every economic dissertation and discussion reminds one more strongly than the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... that all the captains of industry in England had a soul in them such as yours. The look of England is to me at this moment abundantly ominous, the question of capital and labour growing ever more anarchic, insoluble altogether by the notions hitherto applied to it—pretty sure to issue in petroleum one day, unless some other gospel than that of the 'Dismal Science' come to illuminate it. Two things are pretty sure to me. The first is that capital and labour never ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... written it shows on its face that it is more an effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty years ago on the impressionable mind of youth, than the original production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of life and judgment to come. Mark how the stock words of the pulpiteer, "transgressor," "worldly lusts," "dreadful," "awful," "perdition" stalk fiercely through the sermon of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... can be ascertained, M'Munn's Elixir is simply an aqueous infusion of opium—procured by the ordinary maceration—and preserved from decomposing by the subsequent addition of a small portion of alcohol. Narcotin being absolutely insoluble in water is eliminated as the circular says. This fact alone would not account for the difference between its action and that of laudanum. This is explained by the fact that all the other alkaloids possess ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... certain than another to be at the mercy of the universal quarrel of Guelf and Ghibelline, that city was Ravenna. In its larger sense that quarrel was her inheritance. It was the one thought which filled her mind. But here, as elsewhere, the great quarrel was insoluble or at any rate not to be solved. It merely bred faction and divided the city against itself. Guelf and Ghibelline tore Ravenna as they tore Florence ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Notwithstanding this, there was still a very active operation going on in the deposit, but it was confined to that spot. Indeed, the swarming vibrios were bound to remain there, the tartrate of lime being still more insoluble in water saturated with carbonate of lime than it is in pure water. A supply of carbonaceous food, at all events, was absolutely wanting in the bulk of the liquid. Every day we continued to collect and analyze the total amount of gas disengaged. To the very ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... which debases democracies was as unknown as the discontents which undermine the thrones of monarchies. Equality here was not a name; it was a reality. Riches were not persecuted, because they were not envied. Here those problems connected with the labours of a working class, hitherto insoluble above ground, and above ground conducing to such bitterness between classes, were solved by a process the simplest,—a distinct and separate working class was dispensed with altogether. Mechanical inventions, constructed on the principles ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... mystery. He was insoluble. Dressed in a pair of baggy Turkish pants, with a red sash round his middle, knotted loosely over a woollen jersey that had wide horizontal black and yellow strips, with a grey woollen shawl over the lot, and a new tarboosh a size or two ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the country on the ground that they were obstructing the prosecution of the war. But he also announced that the Cabinet intended to make one more attempt to arrive at a settlement of the apparently insoluble ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... separating what is general, because human, from that which is common, because diffused, always a complicated task, will be found more difficult than in literary matter, and without the aid of extensive collection insoluble. It is possible to fall back on the consideration that, after all, such resolution matters not very much, since in any case the survival of the belief indicates its humanity, and for the purpose of the study of human nature borrowed superstitions may be cited as confidently as if original ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... denounced by Winwood in his letters to his sovereign as tyrannical, over-bearing, malignant, and treacherous. He did his best to counsel moderation and mutual toleration, for he felt that these needless theological disputes about an abstract and insoluble problem of casuistry were digging an abyss in which the Republic might be swallowed up for ever. If ever man worked steadily with the best lights of experience and inborn sagacity for the good of his country and in defence of a constitutional ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... foundation, and concludes falsely, while the form is correct and unexceptionable. In this manner the paralogism has its foundation in the nature of human reason, and is the parent of an unavoidable, though not insoluble, mental illusion. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... with peculiarities that make them 'disposed to act' somewhat differently under similar pressure. "History is only able to grasp the conditions of their existence." And what M. Seignobos calls the final problem—Is evolution produced merely by changed conditions?—must according to him remain insoluble by the legitimate processes of history. The student may accept or reject this view as his notions of evidence prompt him to do. M. Seignobos has at all events laid down a basis for discussion ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... spiritual side of life, and that they occur here because they have occurred there. Maeterlinck says further (in this paper entitled "The Foretelling of the Future"): "But I do not intend, in the wake of so many others, to lose myself in the most insoluble of enigmas. Let us say no more about it, except this alone,—that Time is a mystery which we have arbitrarily divided into a past and a future, in order to try to understand something of it. In itself, it is almost certain that it is but an immense, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... there is 70 per cent. of suberine, which is soluble in alcohol and ether, and is plastic, ductile, and malleable under the action of humid heat. Mixed with suberine, cerine and resin give cork its insolubility and inalterability. These substances are soluble in alcohol and ether, but insoluble in water. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... late decision, or indecision, of the censor were heard. The play had not been prohibited, but it had been adapted to more polite ears. But how? That was the question. I confess that to me the question seemed insoluble. Here is the situation as it exists in the play; nothing could be simpler, more direct, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... force in the germ manifests itself, in the plant, in the conversion of the insoluble starch of the seed into sugar, and in an additional change of a part of that sugar so as to set at liberty a large amount of carbon, which, uniting with the oxygen of the air, forms carbonic acid, and this process is attended with a liberation of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... correspond to the black marks on the finger-print, and these correspond to the ridges on the finger. Hence it follows that the gelatine plate is acted upon by light only on the parts corresponding to the ridges; and in these parts the gelatine is rendered insoluble, while all the rest of the gelatine is soluble. The gelatine plate, which is cemented to a thin plate of metal for support, is now carefully washed with hot water, by which the soluble part of the gelatine is dissolved away leaving the insoluble ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... hitherto received conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too religious and too sanguine to merit ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... solution of tan upon a solution of glue, observed that they were hardly mixed together before a white felamentous precipitate took place, owing to a combination of the glue with the tanning principle contained in the solution of tan. This precipitate is insoluble in water, either hot or cold, and acquires colour by being exposed to the light. The foregoing experiment furnishes a true explanation of the process of tanning; for it will easily be conceived that the solution of tan ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... very air had a sense of waiting in it. The priest sat and looked at his lifelong friend, his furrowed face the incarnation of cynical hopelessness. 'What is, is worst,' he seemed to say. His yellow, wise old eyes watched the quick face with the air of one who, having posed an insoluble problem, awaits with a sarcastic humour ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... have wished to imagine that our satellite is shaped like an egg, the more pointed end being directed away from us. We are here, of course, faced with a riddle, which is all the more tantalising from its appearing for ever insoluble to men, chained as they are to the earth. However, it seems going too far to suppose that any abnormal conditions necessarily exist at the other side of the moon. As a matter of fact, indeed, small portions of that side are brought into our view from ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... quantity of mineral salts, coloring substances, and other unknown extractive matters. Some of these substances can be removed from it tolerably easily. The effective substance is insoluble in absolute alcohol. It can be precipitated by it, though not, indeed, in a pure condition, but still combined with the other extractive matter. It is likewise insoluble in alcohol. The coloring matter may also be removed, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... the problems that the Japanese builders of the past had to face in the erection of a few of the great temples which still adorn the country have proved insoluble to many European engineers and architects. The erection and support of the magnificent pagoda at Nikko is an example in point. Dr. Dresser has referred to this and pointed out what he deemed a great waste of material in connection ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... majority of cases, can solve the mystery easily—and in most cases there is very little mystery. But, by His Imperial Majesty's law, the Chief Man-at-Arms must call in a Duke's Investigator if the crime is insoluble or if it involves a member of the aristocracy. For that reason, you were perfectly correct to call His Highness the Duke as soon as murder had been discovered." He leaned back in his chair. "And it has been clear from the first that my lord the ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... affected by general disbelief in the personality of Satan, and universal disbelief in that of Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. A far more vulnerable point is the failure of the purpose so ostentatiously proclaimed, "To justify the ways of God to men." This problem was absolutely insoluble on Milton's data, except by denying the divine foreknowledge, a course not open to him. The conduct of the Deity who allows his adversary to ruin his innocent creature from the purely ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... same grey, inscrutable eyes that I had seen before—immediately above my own. I tried to fathom them, to discover some trace of expression. I could not—they were insoluble. I instinctively felt there was a subtle brain behind them, a brain that was stealthily analysing me, and I tried to assure myself its intentions were not hostile. Above, and on either side of the eyes, I saw the shadow of something ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the English. Large measures respecting charities, education, secondary punishments, and the transfer of land are in preparation, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is at work on the difficult—I suspect the insoluble—problem of an equitable income tax. I foresee, however, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... attitude of the Greeks may appear to be, especially by contrast with the Christian view, it would be a mistake to suppose that it was the only one with which they were acquainted, or that they had put aside altogether, as indifferent or insoluble, the whole problem of a future world. As we have seen, they did believe in the survival of the spirit, and in a world of shades ruled by Pluto and Persephone. They had legends of a place of bliss for the good and a place of torment for the wicked; and if this conception ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... were dim and grey and very mysterious, the moored, ice-blocked barges silent and deserted, and here and there a lit window shone warm. The sun sank right out of sight into a bank of blue, and the Surrey side dissolved in mist save for a few insoluble, spots of yellow light, that presently became many. And after our lovers had come under Charing Cross Bridge the Houses of Parliament rose before them at the end of a great crescent of golden lamps, blue and faint, halfway between the earth and sky. ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... Europe? By whom was it inspired? If, as Jewish writers assure us, neither Marlines Pasqually, Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, nor any of the visible occultists or magicians were Jews, the problem only becomes the more insoluble. We cannot believe that Sanhedrims, Hebrew hieroglyphics, the contemplation of the Tetragrammaton, and other Cabalistic rites originated in the brains of French and German aristocrats, philosophers, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... back of that iridescent and enigmatic girl with the dead fowl. And the dog that barks as Jan Van Koort ruffles his drum, what a spectre dog! No, the mystery of The Night Watch is insoluble, because it is the dream of a poet. Its light is morning light, yet it is the mystic light of Rembrandt, never seen on sea or land. In The Syndics, that group of six linen-drapers, Rembrandt shows with what supreme ease he can beat Hals at the game of make-believe actuality. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the problem that has troubled and baffled so many honest hearts, but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed insoluble. ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... musings. Partly, if Mr. Wyse was back, it was well just to run over his record; partly she wanted to divert her mind from the two houses just below, that of Major Benjy on the one side and that of Captain Puffin on the other, which contained the key to the great, insoluble mystery, from conjecture as to which she wanted to obtain relief. Mr. Wyse, anyhow, would serve as a mild opiate, for she had never lost an angry interest in him. Though he was for eight months of the year, or thereabouts, in Tilling, he ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Hindoo, and fancy we diminish the difficulty by explaining that it revolves around the sun, and the sun around some far-off star. Just so the general mind of humanity finds some satisfaction in supposing a world or a series of worlds anterior to the present, thus escaping the insoluble enigma of creation by removing ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... minerals are not all equally soluble in water; some are so little soluble that it is years before any change becomes apparent, and the substances are said to be insoluble, yet in reality they are slowly dissolving. Other rocks, like limestone, are so readily soluble in water that from the small pores and cavities eaten out by the water, there may develop in long centuries, caves and caverns (Fig. 30). Most rock, like granite, contains several substances, ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... anomalous to me as my own desultory and self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience with the necessarily insoluble problem. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... some severe and sour-complexioned theologians who would call this devotion to objects so far outside of his parish an illicit passion. But to me it seems a blessing conferred by heavenly wisdom upon a good man, and I doubt not he escapes from many an insoluble theological puzzle, and perhaps from many an unprofitable religious wrangle, to find refreshment and invigoration in the society of his ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... when we endeavour to harmonise the antinomy of man's moral freedom and the doctrine of grace. However insoluble the mystery, it is not lessened by denying one side in the interest of unity. Scripture boldly affirms both truths. No writer insists more strenuously than the Apostle Paul on the sovereign election of God, yet ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Jan Mayen. Only a week had elapsed since he had actually ascertained the impracticability of reaching a higher latitude,—what likelihood could there be of a channel having been opened up to the northward during so short an interval? Such was the series of insoluble problems by which I posed myself, as we stood vainly smacking our lips at the island, which lay so ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... carried in the blood to the lungs, where it passes off in the breath. The solid part of our body waste, or the "ashes," is of two kinds—that which can be melted in water, or is, as we say, soluble; and that which cannot be melted in water, or is insoluble. The insoluble part of our solid body waste goes into the feces and is ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... albumen is in readily assimilable form. The casein, being insoluble, is not directly available, until it is acted upon by proteid-dissolving enzyms like trypsin which may be secreted by bacteria. The fat is relatively resistant to change, although a few forms are capable of decomposing it. Milk sugar, however, ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... Esophagus, Trachea, Bronchia, Vagina and Urethra. They consist of a group of secreting sacs, terminating at one extremity in a closed tube, while the other opens into a common duct. The mucus varies in composition in different parts of the body; but in all, it contains a small portion of insoluble animal matter. Its functions are threefold. It lubricates the membranes, prevents their injury, and facilitates the passage of ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... water soluble, and can be extracted readily with hot water. When coffee is properly made, as by the drip method, either by percolation or filtration, the ground coffee comes in contact with the hot water for only a few minutes; so the major portion of the protein, which is not only practically insoluble, but coagulates on heating, remains in the unused part of the coffee, the grounds. The coffee bean contains a large percent of protein—fourteen percent. By comparing this figure with twenty-one percent ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Trinity, the problem of the relation of human will and predestination, and so on—problems which have been investigated for thousands of years without result—ask them to set those problems aside as insoluble. In the meantime, just as a man who is studying mathematics may be asked to set aside the problem of squaring the circle, let him go on with what can be done, and what has been done, and leave out of ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... man on to scheme and to build for a future that extends beyond his grave,—all start up before you at the very moment your reason is overtasked, your imagination fevered, in seeking the solution of problems which, to a philosophy based upon your system, must always remain insoluble. The young man's conversation not only thus excites your fancies,—it disturbs your affections. He speaks not only of drugs that renew youth, but of charms that secure love. You tremble for your Lilian while you hear him! And the brain thus tasked, the imagination thus inflamed, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Lockwin to climb up the steps to the hurricane deck. Indeed it is a clever riddance of that uncomfortable man. Ouf! that brutal sneeze, that jargon, that tobacco, that quaking of head and hesitancy of expression! It distracts one's thoughts from an insoluble problem; How to shuffle off this coil—not of life, but of ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... was hopelessly compromised by the position of her armies on their far-flung line in France and Belgium. Nemesis for the invasion of Belgium had at last overtaken the invader. The problem of withdrawing in safety was rendered insoluble by the battles of the first week in November and the consequent convergence of the Allies on Germany's remaining lines of communication. The decisive blows were delivered right and left by the American and British ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... Automatically their eyes rolled towards my bonnet; the Vicar smiled, and bent his head in a courtly little bow, which said much without the banality of words. The Squire had no expression! Whether he approved, disapproved, or furiously disliked, he remained insoluble as the Sphinx. Oh, some day—somehow—some one—I hope, will wake him into life, and whoever she is, may she shake him well up, and ride rough-shod over him for a long, long time before she gives in! He ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the processes are inefficient through neglect of the actual state of combination of the S, viz. as an organic sulphonate. The process of V.B. Drewson (D.R.P. 67,889) consists in heating with lime under pressure, yielding calcium monosulphite (with sulphate and the lignone complex in insoluble form). The sulphite is redissolved as bisulphite by treatment with sulphurous acid. This process is relatively costly, and yields necessarily an impure lye. It has been proposed to employ the product as a foodstuff ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross |
