"Primal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to her and dependent upon him. He was ready to guard it with every instinct of caution and every ounce of courage there was in him. And to protect it meant to fight. That was the first law of his breed, the primal warning which came to him through the red blood of many generations of wilderness forefathers. So he listened, and he watched, and his blood pounded hot in his veins as he followed the footprints in the trail. A bit of brush, swinging suddenly free from where it had been prisoned ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the State itself has contributed towards the existing order by creating proletarians and delivering them up to exploiters. They forget to prove us that it is possible to put an end to exploitation while the primal causes—private capital and poverty, two-thirds of which are artificially created by the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... of a lawyer are ordinarily devoted to questions of property between man and man. He is to be congratulated if, though but for once, in any signal cause he can devote them to the vindication of any of the great primal rights affecting the highest interests of man.'' He was a member of the noted Free Soil Convention at Buffalo of 1848, and presided at the first meeting of the Republican ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... adherents endeavoured to solve the problem of the origin of evil, [431:2] and to trace the connexion between the finite and the infinite, was not without ingenuity. They maintained that a series of Aeons, or divine beings, emanated from the Primal Essence; but, as sound issuing from a given point gradually becomes fainter until it is finally lost in silence, each generation of Aeons, as it receded from the great Fountain of Spiritual Existence, lost somewhat ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... known to hungry man. And on these clear and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... down his spine. It was the primal instinct to torture and slay the enemy and the Sioux lived up to it. It was keen torture already to hear that his fate would surely come, but not to know how or where or when was worse. But it appeared that it was not to come at once, and with that thought ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... Son with all the love Which each of them eternally breathes forth, The primal and unutterable Power Whate'er before the mind or eye revolves With so much order made, there can be none Who this beholds without ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the mysteries of their religious rites; he taught them picture writing and the interpretation of dreams; nay, far more than that, he was the original ancestor, not only of their nation, but of the whole race of man, and, in fact, was none other than the primal Creator himself, who fashioned the earth and gave life to all ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... important contribution to English letters during the last twenty years—"with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, and it is only evil when divorced from the worship of the Primal Beauty." In this confession we are brought back to the point where we began. The gods of Greece were ideals of earthly beauty, and by them, while their worship remained spiritual, men were exalted far above ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... invited him to Concord and cared for him like a brother. Mr. Alcott deserved this, for though he was not more a philosopher than Thoreau was a naturalist, and equally with Thoreau he was a character. The primal tenet in his creed was like the ancient mariner's, to harm neither man nor bird nor beast; and he exemplified this doctrine with incredible consistency for full fifty years. He lived a blameless life. Many laughed at him for his unpractical theories; but the example of one such man, even in a reactionary ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... the best Proverbs of Solomon. In general, we should say that to his mind filial piety and fraternal submission were the foundation of all virtuous practices, and absolute obedience to rulers the primal principle of government. He was eminently a peace man, discouraging wars and violence. He was liberal and tolerant in his views. He said that the "superior man is catholic and no partisan." Duke Gae asked, "What should be done to secure the submission of the people?" The sage replied, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... instance it was a contagious, mad excitement easily possible among hot-blooded people and wandering pleasure-seekers, the primal laws of whose being are impulse and passion. That the joyous exhilaration which filled Mr. Burleigh's parlor was akin to the wild, half pagan frenzy that the great master of fiction imagined as seizing upon the loiterers near the Villa Borghese ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... and guarded the earth, although its children had departed from their early obedience. In evidence of His care, He sent, from time to time, gifted spirits among men to aid them in developing and elevating the souls so fallen from their primal innocence. These spirits He clad in sensuous bodies, that they might be prepared to enter the far country of Human Life. Earth was rapidly falling under the merciless rule of a hopeless and crushing materialism, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of body, it is possible for the Mind to be unsound or sick; even as through some primal defect at birth, as with those who are born fools, or through alteration in the brain, as with the madmen. And of this mental infirmity the Law speaks when it says: "In him who makes a Will or Testament, at the time when he makes the Will or Testament, ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... young attorney sensed a poorly concealed effort to evade this primal responsibility toward him and the society of which he was an inseparable part. Men who walked with their heads in the clouds were certain to step on one's feet. Dreamers were scoundrels or lunatics who sought to justify their unfitness ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... movements of conquest have been due to drought in Arabia, causing the nomads of that country to migrate into regions already inhabited. The last of these four movements was the rise of Islam. In these four cases, the primal need of food and drink was enough to set events in motion; but as this need could only be satisfied by conquest, the four secondary passions must have very soon come into play. In the conquests ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... Dr. Ingleby says, succinctly and decidedly, "The primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone";[S] but he expressly bases this dictum upon the decisions of the professed palaeographers of the British Museum and the Record Office. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... trap—he could call it nothing else—for Lew, he and H lne had put forces into conflict that were not amenable to any light control. Lewis had passed his word. Leighton knew he would never go back on it. On the other hand, for the first time in all her life Folly's primal instinct was being balked by a denial she could comprehend only as having its source in Leighton ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... true. Indeed they are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... without, and a world within,' which may be called complementary worlds. But nature is ever liberal, and her chords are generally harmonies, or exquisite modifications of concord. The chord of the tonic, in music, is the primal type of this harmony in sound; it is perfectly satisfactory to the tympanum; and the ear, knowing no further elements (for the tonic chord combines them all), can ask for ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... spans the stream; the storm so long threatened begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered mortals. Here De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye,—to you his last good-bye; and as here you leave him, so is he forever enshrined in your thoughts, together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm, of human tragedies and of the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... directly and without the intervention of any other from Christ the Source, draws also from his fellow-Christian some form of the common life that to himself is unfamiliar, and needs human intervention in order to its reception. Such dependence upon one's brethren is not inconsistent with a primal dependence on Christ alone, and is a safeguard against the cultivating of one's own idiosyncrasies till they become diseased and disproportionate. The most slenderly endowed Christian soul has the double charge of giving to, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... as Olive Keltridge. Aware of it, however, he was fully conscious that the fact caused him no regrets at all. Catie, as he still called her on occasion, should, of course, have been the one to comprehend him; but, like the cicada, he merely iterated "Catie didn't." And comprehension is the primal need of every man. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... a disease except to those who are intuitively on the side of the man instead of the microbe, of the people instead of the pyramid. Such instances, however, are of value in bringing those who listen to them to a clear self-consciousness of their own primal preference—and that is a distinct gain, even when the preference is for ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... primal sympathies which are very good substitutes for intelligence. We do not worry because nature does not get on faster with her work. When we go out on the hills on a spring morning, as our forbears did ten thousand years ago, it does ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of India. I am a Hindoo by birth. My people were the first to walk in the fields of knowledge, first to divide them, first to make them beautiful. Whatever may hereafter befall, the four Vedas must live, for they are the primal fountains of religion and useful intelligence. From them were derived the Upa-Vedas, which, delivered by Brahma, treat of medicine, archery, architecture, music, and the four-and-sixty mechanical ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the depot. He tried to force his way and was called a brute by a crowded woman. He ran down the platform to the gates he had entered with the truck. They were automatic and had locked. Then he became a primal creature being cheated of a lawful mate and climbed the high iron fence and ran for the ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... The primal purpose in publishing this work is to show that the social problems in the South are, in the main, the same as those which afflict every civilized country on the globe; and that the future conflict in that section will not be racial or political ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... of years this land of hard trails, this far out place where man met man without veneer, where nature's breasts lay stripped of covering and naked, where life was the old life of things elemental, where primal laws were good laws, where there was room enough for the strong and scant room for the weak, David Drennen had found a spacious walled home. Half of the year his house had the lofty, snow-capped mountains for its only walls, the sweeping blue arch for its roof, ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... but in the cities the pursuit of knowledge still continues. There is, however, on Mars a much lessened intellectual activity than on the earth. It is a sphere of simplified needs and primal feelings exalted by acutely developed love of Music. Mars is the music planet. There are not on Mars newspapers, journals, magazines, books. The tireless production of these things on the earth has but one analogy ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour 180 Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be, In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering, In the faith that looks through death, In years that ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... expression of the author's nature; and the other a happy effort of imaginative humor, one of those strokes of genius that re-create the world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was an old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea. A great artist can paint a great ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... force behind all things; it is the moving principle of the universe and the innermost centre of all Life. Hence, to take the negation of desire for our primal principle is to endeavour to stamp out Life itself; but what we have to do is to acquire the requisite knowledge by which to guide our desires to their true objects of satisfaction. To do this is the whole end of knowledge; and any knowledge applied otherwise ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... that ever man Looked into since the world began Is Woman! As I turn those pages, As fresh as in the primal ages, As day by day I scan, perplext, The ever subtly changing text, I feel that I am slowly growing To think no other work worth knowing. And in my copy—there is none So perfect as the one I own— I find no thing set down but such As teaches me to ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... strategy, the only strategy—and for a time it went well. Within the hour Kurho's forces were scattered, as attack and counter-attack surged and slashed in wild eruption of the long-shafts. Just as eruptive were the neuro-emotives, as each in his primal way must have known that this was the long awaitment, this was the grim finality in Kurho's boast ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... Now the form at d, Fig. IV., is the great root and primal type of all cornices whatsoever. In order to see what forms may be developed from it, let us take its profile a little larger—a, Fig. V., with X and Y duly marked. Now this form, being the root of all cornices, may either have to finish the wall and so keep off rain; or, as so often stated, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Apostolic writings, and in the teachings of the Church. But, for all their best endeavours, I could not feel called to the perpetual calm of the Cloister. We are a line of fighters and hunters, men to whom pride of race and love of hearth and home, are primal instincts. ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... unifying thought of this volume is that the necessary ideas and laws of the reason, and the native instincts of the human heart, originally implanted by God, are the primal and germinal forces of history; and that these have been developed under conditions which were first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the providence of God. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the Guide and Educator of our race. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, In the primal sympathy Which, having been, ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... necessary for the reader to remember that Spinoza commenced his philosophical studies at the same point with Descartes. Both recognized existence as the primal fact, self-evident and indisputable. ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Korea, he had been wakened by the yammering of a tigress. His terror for a moment had been primal, literally a simian's helpless quaking. Earlier still, he had heard a hoot-owl, and encountered through it, his first realization of phantom horrors; he knew then there was an Unseen, and nether acoustics; here was a key to ghostly doors. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... not without the gifts of wit, prophecy, and eloquence. He is an adroit magician, able to assume almost any form at will, and impervious to any amount of ridicule and insult. Here we have, it appears, the elements of the story in Genesis; the primal Eden, the tempter in animal form, and the bringing of sorrow and death upon earth through the elemental sins of envy ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... her rewards, if far-seeing in bestowal of them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her almost daily in a room—her holy of holies—where the gods of ancient India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already again devising plans to set the ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... follows: success should be cosmic, a new creation, not any trick or feat. To be man is the only success. For this we lie back grandly with total application to the cause. Why run after knowledge? A large mind circles all the primal facts from its own stand-point, and needs never tread the curious round of science, history, and art. Where it is, is Nature: therefore it is calm and free. The wise men of my knowledge were farmers, drovers, traders, learned beyond the book. You cannot feed but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... knowledge is subject to change; fresh 'mirrors' or 'portraits' are provided at the end of each recurring cosmic cycle or aeon. But the substance is unchanged and unchangeable. As Prof. Browne remarks, 'the prophet of a cycle is naught but a reflexion of the Primal Will,—the same sun with a new horizon.' ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning, in aim and in destiny. The differences of nations in relation to the sun's rays and in character of country, environment, race, colour and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... something quite different in the case of plants like the tomato, which are propagated by seed, from what they do with plants like the apple and strawberry, which are propagated by division. In the latter case all the plants of the variety are but parts of the primal origination, and so are alike. A description is simply a more or less complete and accurate definition of what a certain immutable thing really is, but in the case of plants propagated by seed the variety is made up of all the plants which accord with a certain ideal. Bailey ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... connects these with scientific observations and social practice. Bruno having resuscitated these doctrines, stamps them with a wider scope, giving them a more positive direction; and he may with propriety be called the second Pythagoras. The primal idea of Pythagoras, which Bruno worked out to a more distinct development is this: numbers are the beginning of things; in other words numbers are the cause of the existence of material things; they are not final, but are always changing ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... feels the old Antaean strength In you, the great dynamic beat Of primal passions, and she sees In you the last besieged retreat Of love relentless, lusty, ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... that man originated his first ideas of the supernatural from the external phenomena of nature which were perceptible to one or more of his five senses; his first theogony was a natural one and one taken directly from nature. In ideation the primal bases of thought must have been founded, ab initio, upon sensual perceptions; hence, must have been materialistic and natural. Spencer, on the contrary, maintains that in man, "the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... peg into the ground with my axe or mallet, is the life in my arm any more strictly the source (the secondary source) of the energy expended than is the nut in this case? Of course, the sun is the primal source of the energy in both cases, and in all cases, but does not life exert the force, use it, bring it to bear, which it receives from the universal ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... passed bleak Pindus, Acherusia's lake, And left the primal city of the land, And onwards did his further journey take To greet Albania's chief, whose dread command Is lawless law; for with a bloody hand He sways a nation, turbulent and bold: Yet here and there some daring mountain-band Disdain his power, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... types of relationship may involve social isolation; the justice of the statesman is blind to such things. It may be urged that according to Atkinson's illuminating analysis [Footnote: See Lang and Atkinson's Social Origins and Primal Law.] the control of love-making was the very origin of the human community. In Utopia, nevertheless, love-making is no concern of the State's beyond the province that the protection of children covers. [Footnote: It ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... of the freedom, the mildness, the reasonableness of the temper it begets; of its aim at completeness and perfection,—it is nevertheless true, that if it be sought apart from faith in God and devotion to man, its tendency is to produce an artificial and unsympathetic character. The primal impulse of our nature is to action; and unless we can make our thought a kind of deed, it seems to be vain and unreal; and unless the harmonious development of all the endowments which make the beauty and dignity of human ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... changefulness of the curve. You may put leaves on the other line for yourself, but you will find you cannot make a right tree spray of it. For all tree boughs, large or small, as well as all noble natural lines whatsoever, agree in this character; and it is a point of primal necessity that your eye should always seize and your hand trace it. Here are two more portions of good curves, with leaves put on them at the extremities instead of the flanks, Fig. 38; and two showing ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... and millions of years ago. They are, in fact, the only part of the visible Earth which was present when Life itself was born. So here are the three great elemental characters, all together—the primal sea and sky and land—to act the azoic prologue. And here, too, for all mankind to glory in, is the whole pageant of animal life: from the weakest invertebrate forms, which link us with the illimitable past, to the mightiest developments of birds and mammals at the ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"—this, to the unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of the primal gods was now substituted the hideous strophes and antistrophes of the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one performer after another took up the strain, to and fro and from upper to lower tiers of cells, one awaited some seismic cataclysm to put an end to it and them; and ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... him build near the ground. The dangers of the nesting-time fall mostly to his share, for his dull brown mate is easily overlooked as an insignificant sparrow. Nature always gives a plain coat to the wives of these gayly dressed cavaliers, for her primal thought is the safety of the home and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Rugged type of primal man, Grim utilitarian, Loving woods for hunt and prowl, Lake and hill for fish and fowl, As the brown bear blind and dull ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen. That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... second act is full of the dreams of Asia. With Panthea, one of the ocean nymphs that watch over Prometheus, she makes her way to the cave of Demogorgon, "that terrific gloom," who seems meant to typify the Primal Power of the World. Hence they are snatched away by the Spirit of the Hour at which Jove will fall, and the coming of change pulsates through the excitement of those matchless songs ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... newcomer to discovering that the gown of lavender satin had been turned and made over, none too expertly, from one originally built some years before the war. Later she found what our ladies agreed was its primal design, after much turning of the leaves ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the tricks which were constantly being employed in politics to effect one end or another, were greatly cheered by this so-called "public uprising." They little knew the pawns they were in the game, or how little sincerity constituted the primal impulse. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... detached unaccompanied infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence, the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... legendary chant, the primal command of their God after creation. Vevau and Hawaii were placed in their former abode toward India (Hawaii being undoubtedly Java; and Vevau being Vavao, in Malagasy); but they had brought the names with them, and when they reached the present American territory, of which Honolulu is the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Idea, Primal Cause, the Causing Cause, why crave for more? Why strive its depth and breadth to mete, to trace its work, its ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... seems now—we two white men, gentlemen of quality, completely oblivious to blood, birth, tradition, breeding—our primal allegiance, our very individualities sunk in the mystical freemasonry of a savage tie which bound us to the two nations we assumed to speak for, Oneida and Delaware—two nations of the great Confederacy of the Iroquois that had adopted us, investing us ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... government, while they had one, being merely a loose and mutable expression of the desires and caprices of the majority—that is to say, of the ignorant, restless and reckless—gave the freest rein and play to all the primal instincts and elemental passions of the race. In so far and for so long as it had any restraining force, it was only the restraint of the present over the power of the past—that of a new habit over an old and insistent tendency ever seeking expression in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... literature, and too much of content. But all our taking thought will have been vain, if it is not now patent that the first beauty of literature is, and must be, its identity with the central flame of life,—the primal conditions of our being. Thus it is that the critic is justified in asking first of all, How does this man look on life? Has he revealed a new—or better—the eternal old meaning? The Weltanschauung is the critic's first ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... author of The Metamorphosis of Metals was seeking for an argument in favour of his view, that water is the source and primal element of all things, he found what he sought in the Biblical text: "In the beginning the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Similarly, the author of The Sodic Hydrolith clenches his argument in favour of the existence of the Philosopher's ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... remonstrate and remorse to torment, they think the exemption permanent. They do not know that at any moment, in some unforeseen emergency—this abused faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life. This elemental power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated from the soul than heat from fire! It may smoulder unobserved, but a breath will fan it into flame! Without it, the soul would cease to be a soul; its permanent eradication ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... primal duties shine aloft, like stars; The charities that soothe and heal and bless Are scattered at the feet of man ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... more and more impressed of late years. That is, that continents and oceans have always had the same relative position as now; that is to say, the continents have followed a definite plan in their development. The very first part of North America to appear above the waters of the primal sea clearly outlined the shape of the future continent. Mr. Dana assures us that our continent developed with almost the regularity of a flower. Prof. Hitchcock also points out that the surface area of the very first period outlined the shape of the continent. "The work of ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... ground floor. The principal door was in the middle of the front, and there was one small window on each side of it. Apparently there was a low extension in the rear. This manner of house immediately succeeded the primal log cabins of the Western States, and such houses have sufficed for the happy shelter of large families of strong boys and blooming girls, as sound in body and soul, if not so refined and variously accomplished, ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... asked myself vainly what it could mean. There was no direct accusation against any one, yet the implication was plain. A woman had been moved by one of the primal passions to betray—some one. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as well as the people, by virtue of their intelligence. It ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... what man sees, but what God sees,—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand,—it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity, he has to do; and he digs where he stands,—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... confident that, notwithstanding the fact that the nerve-cell is not differentiated in these primal forms, nerve-elements are, nevertheless, present in them, and serve to direct and ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... mellow murmuring of bees, and saw the butterflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... whatsoever work chance puts into their hands, however lowly and base it may be, they give it value and nobility. Wherefore no one should turn up his nose when he encounters people who have not, in their aspect, that primal grace or beauty which nature should give, on his coming into the world, to a man who works at any art, seeing that there is no doubt that beneath the clods of the earth are hidden veins of gold. And very often, in those who are most insignificant in form, there are born so great generosity ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... of many primal influences forgotten or denied by races of higher type and deeper culture. Very little is known concerning the Malayan people who mingled with almost every Oriental stock. Amphibious tastes suggest picturesque traditions of prolonged voyaging in search of fresh ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... its results. The entireness and simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitive element, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which was much worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies of love, faith, imagination; and happily it is not given to every one to live, in the pecuniary sense, by the artistic utilisation and sale of these. You cannot make ideas; they must come unsought if they come ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the sharpest pang of sorrow. Then there was the weight of anxiety about the revelation of the fact on both sides, and the arrangements it would be desirable to make beforehand. I suppose we should all have felt as Deronda did, without sinking into snobbishness or the notion that the primal duties of life demand a morning and an evening suit, that it was an admissible desire to free Mirah's first meeting with her brother from all jarring outward conditions. His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded relationship of the other Cohens, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... acts. The powers which have been employed in its culture are thus set free for the acquisition of yet other virtues, and the formation of other good habits. Herein lies the secret of progressive goodness, of an ever nearer approach to a perfect standard of character. The primal virtues are first made habits of the unceasing consciousness and of the daily life, and the moral power no longer needed for these is then employed in the cultivation of the finer traits of superior excellence,—the ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Tewana of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman, round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's brink, wringing her tresses after the morning bath, it were justifiable to mistake ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... On the one side devotion, simple-minded loyalty and a fighting heart in a body of such mechanical perfection as Mars had never seen before or since. On the other side a primal beast, just as ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... water was the primal element from which all had been derived; Anaximenes guessed air; Heraclitus fire; Pythagoras held that number was the essence of all things; Empedocles thought that fire and heat, accompanied by "indestructible forces," formed the basis; Xenophanes had guessed air, fire, water, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All | | deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central | | essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings | | and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all | | things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the | | feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the | | soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music.... | | See deep enough, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... some one asked, "What is there to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"—and the question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal ardour. Soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "If there were nothing to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself, it would be a bad mark against him." For to suggest—to open magic ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... another path runs traverse before thine eyes, such that by thyself thou wouldst not issue forth therefrom ere thou wert weary. I have put it in thy mind for certain, that a soul in bliss cannot lie, since it is always near to the Primal Truth; and then thou hast heard from Piccarda that Constance retained affection for the veil; so that she seems in this to contradict me. Often ere now, brother, has it happened that, in order to escape peril, that which it was ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... trail every man was a fighter. It was fight or fall, for the trail would brook no weaklings. Good or bad, a man must be a man in the primal sense, dominant, savage and enduring. The trail was implacable. From the start it cried for strong men; it weeded out its weaklings. I had seen these fellows on the ship feed their vanity with foolish fancies; kindled to ardours of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... forward against the other side is force; "that which moves or tends to move matter." In all ages, it has been directed primarily against the physical bodies of individual men, threatening each individual man with suffering and death. It appeals to the primal instinct of men, self-preservation, and is the ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings—and not only of kings, but of all other ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... that ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes?" She replied: "No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when mis'ry is at hand! That kens Thy learn'd instructor. Yet so eagerly If thou art bent to know the primal root, From whence our love gat being, I will do, As one, who weeps and tells his tale. One day For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. Ofttimes by that ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the fierce spirit of the Ego come out of the primal infinite, but detached, isolated, an aristocrat. He is not an Italian, dark-blooded. He is fair, keen as steel, with the blood of the mountaineer in him. He is like my old spinning woman. It is curious how, with his wife and child, he makes ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Blair emphatically. "You're back in the youth of the race—back in the beguilement of the young world. Everything is in this hour—the beauty of classic myths, the primal charm of the silent and the open, the lure of mystery. Why, it's a time and place when and where everything might come true—when the men in green might creep out to join hands and dance around the fire, or dryads steal from their trees to warm their white limbs, grown chilly in October ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Being primal in his instincts, as every great man is, Mr. Bayard, at this hostile declaration, could not avoid a quick side-glance at Richard's door-wide shoulders, Pict arms, and panther ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... here seems to be pointing to an intellect not human but divine. And yet, if in the moral sphere we are supposed to lift ourselves up to a higher region through faith in God, Virtue and Immortality, so drawing nearer to the Primal Being, why should it not be likewise in the intellectual? By contemplation (Anschauen) of an ever-creative nature, may we not make ourselves worthy to be spiritual sharers in her productions? I at first, led by an inner urge that would not rest, had quite unconsciously been seeking for the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... works of the Fathers. Those which appear to me of any great value are valuable chiefly for those articles of Christian Faith which are, as it were, 'ante Christum' JESUM, namely, the Trinity, and the primal Incarnation spoken of by John i, 10. But in the main I should perhaps go even farther than Luther; for I cannot conceive any thing more likely than that a young man of strong and active intellect, who has ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Hindu deities, the imagery, which is derived chiefly from Eastern sources, is novel and attractive. That addressed to Narayena is in a strain of singular magnificence. The description, in the fourth stanza, of the creative power or intelligence, issuing from the primal germ of being, and questioning itself as to its own faculties, has something in it that fills ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the economic causes of migration are primal and most important, and since like causes played such a large part in giving rise to this recent movement, it might be well to pause here to enumerate some of these causes, and to note briefly the nature of the same. In the first place, a migration ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... fallow in a year. It is not until the altars of Pan are overthrown that the worship of Mammon is triumphant, and the mischief is that when the great god Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome Earth-hunger—old as the primal Eden, where man's life began—is stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for the use of soldiers who ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... WEAKNESSES, n.pl. Certain primal powers of Tyrant Woman wherewith she holds dominion over the male of her species, binding him to the service of her will and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... modern localities. San Francisco has in all probability its cathedrals, but it may well be that its cathedrals are less old and less traditional than many of our hotels. If its inhabitants built a temple to the most primal and forgotten god of whose worship we can find a trace, that temple would still be a modern thing compared with many taverns in Suffolk round which there lingers a faint tradition of Mr. Pickwick. And everything in that new gold country was new, even to the individual inhabitants. Good, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... that this transfer of reference of the expression of this fighting instinct soon became so important to the race that reversion to its primal individualistic reference had to be inhibited. Aggressive attack by an individual upon another of his own clan or nation necessarily tended to weaken the social unit and to reduce its strength in its protective and aggressive wars; ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... necessary to draw a distinction, so subtle that in dealing with facts it is continually impossible to mark it with precision, yet so vital, that not only your understanding of the power of art, but the working of your minds in matters of primal moment to you, depends on the effort you make to affirm this distinction strongly. The art which realises a creature of the imagination is only mischievous when that realisation is conceived to imply, or does practically induce a belief in, ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the stability of the human race was, more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families—a father, an uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of children—wandered ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... not. Was he aware that, when all was said and done, in spite of her misdoings, in spite of his passion of anxiety during her illness, in spite of the pity and affection of his daily attitude, Kitty occupied, in truth, much less of his mind than she had ever yet occupied?—that a certain magic—primal, incommunicable—had ceased to clothe ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Energy. He is the highest Penance. He is the highest Brahma. He is the highest refuge. He is the most holy of all holies, the most auspicious of all auspicious objects. He is the god of all the gods and He is the immutable father of all creatures. On the advent of the primal Yuga, all creatures spring from Him. On the expiration, again of a Yuga, all things disappear in Him.[590] Hear, O king, the thousand names, possessed of great efficacy in destroying sins, of that foremost one in all the worlds ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... throughout at the highest pitch. Furthermore, they contain much finely sympathetic description of Scottish scenery, impressionistic, but poured out with enthusiasm. Scott's numerous lyrics are similarly stirring or moving expressions of the primal emotions, and some of them ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... primitive materials are themselves in turn only different combinations of a varying number of atoms of one single original element. But in all this we have not as yet obtained any further light as to the real nature of these original atoms or their primal energies. ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... mean, not that a minister must grow discouraged, but that he must set his teeth, and with pluck and endurance rise strong and masterful and say, This shall not be! Let him not listen to the barking and baying: let him hearken to the great primal voices of man and nature. Love lies deeper than discord. The constructive forces of humanity are stronger than the disintegrative. The ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... into shapeless colour-masses by the wind-blown rains. Sometimes, up above, where the fiery points of redbud trees shot skyward, a thrush sang or a blue jay scolded—and the bird-notes were laden, like the air, with the primal ripeness of spring. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't, A brother's murder. Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will: My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. What if this cursed hand Were thicker ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... men move automatically: no man thinks because he intends to think; he thinks, as he hungers and thirsts, under a great primal necessity; his thoughts come out from the inner depths of his being as the flower is developed by forces rising through ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... its starting-point in construction and verification. Thus philosophical research can only be a conscious and deliberate return to the facts of primal intuition. But common-sense, being prepossessed in a practical direction, has doubtless subjected these facts to a process of interested alteration, which is artificial in proportion to the labour bestowed. Such is Mr Bergson's ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... reason can accept the fact, though science can not even imagine the process? If not, there is nothing for us but the eternity of matter, for evolution itself has to face the very same difficulty when asked to account for its primal germ. It is surely more conceivable that God created the first matter out of nothing, than that nothing evolved something out of itself, by an imminent law of its nature. This point, however, our scientific men ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... These bare cliffs of primal personality have not yet undergone the abrasion of the glacial drift nor of the frost and the heat, the wind and the rain of long years. They are angular, bold, defiant, and unsuited to the pastoral and agricultural scenes of middle life. The grind of life with its ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... arranged these primal truths in the order of their importance, in the hope that some patient investigator may amplify and codify them into a coherent body of doctrine, and so establish a new religion. I would do it myself were it not that a very corpulent and ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... claimed that this ancient city owed its primal existence to a fragment of the Aztecs, driven from their native quarters in Old Mexico. By others 'twas attributed unto one of the fabulous 'Lost Tribes of Israel,' but even the most enthusiastic never ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... make for pensions. A large and unestimated sum may also be added to the account from loss of military conscription, again not counting the losses to society through those forms of poverty which have their primal cause in war. For in the words of Bastiat, "War is an ogre that devours as much when he sleeps as when he is awake." It was Gambetta who foretold that the final end of armament rivalry must be "a beggar crouching by ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... a word meaning prayer and devotion, becomes in the laws of Manu the primal God, first-born of the creation, from the self-existent being, in the form of a golden egg. He became the creator of all things by the power of prayer. In the struggle for ascendancy, which took place between the priests and the warriors, Brahma naturally ...
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