"Primordial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... famous assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... as incoherent as they are outwardly wayward and fitful. If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges of that primordial irrationality, from which all our ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... may freely admit that Primula veris, vulgaris, and elatior, as well as all the other species of the genus, are descended from a common primordial form, yet from the facts above given, we must conclude that these three forms are now as fixed in character as are many others which are universally ranked as true species. Consequently they have as good a right to receive distinct specific names as have, for instance, ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... something formidable and noble in the way he drove all light and casual loves, the usual recreations of men of literary talent, away from his threshold. Like some primordial Prometheus, making men out of mud and fire, he kept the perilous worshippers of Aphrodite far-distant from the smoke of his smithy, and refused to interrupt his cosmic labour ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... those which it has received from its ancestors plus its individuality. The fact that the sexual cells are formed from the early formed cells of the new organism which represent all of the qualities of the fertilized ovum or primordial cell, renders it unlikely that the new offspring will contain qualities which the parents have acquired. The question of the inheritance of characteristics which the parents have acquired as the ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... commencement of the process of aggregation, more especially in dark red leaves, the contents of the cells often present a different appearance, as if the layer of protoplasm (primordial utricle) which lines the cells had separated itself and shrunk from the walls; an irregularly shaped purple bag being thus formed. Other fluids, besides a solution of the carbonate, for instance an infusion of raw meat, produce this same effect. But the appearance of the primordial utricle shrinking ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... black hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... would crush him, annihilate him, how horribly quick, and with such horrible indifference! I suppose it's civilisation in the making, the thing that isn't meant to be seen, as though it were too elemental, too—primordial; like the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... the scene. There was nothing but the great reach of the ocean floor, the unbroken plane of blue sky, and the bare green slope of land—three immensities, gigantic, vast, primordial. It was no place for trivial ideas and thoughts of little things. The mind harked back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race. The huge spaces of earth and air and water carried with them a feeling ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... of the history of science should be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God's first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one. Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and those with ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... orbit and in the surrounding spaces. It was already floating along in a nebulous superheated form capable of condensation by the loss of heat, but in particular capable of growth and development by the fall of surrounding matter upon the forming globe. We must remember that in the primordial state the elements of a planet, as for instance our earth, were mixed together and held in a state of tenuity ranging all the way from solid to highly vaporized forms, and that these elements subsequently and by slow ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... everlasting silence broods, with lips Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors. Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores, Laborious water carves; whence echo ships Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.— Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth, I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,— Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits, 'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,— An ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... be eventually contested and defeated? We know that in many of the states there are Bills of Rights, which are considered to have equal authority with their constitutions. Some, indeed, regard them as settling the principles of primordial law, which the constitution itself cannot countervail. These, then, may also be appealed to for the purpose of proving the unconstitutionality of a state law; and in the inferences which ingenuity, or even stupidity, may draw ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... teaches—both in the general theory of evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent—that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the innate tendencies which also vary more or less widely. In view of all this, how can the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire of war. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... rejoined. "You have the native American passion,—the passion for the picturesque. With us, I think it is primordial,—antecedent to experience. Experience comes and only shows us something we ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... arabes, and then, if the game goes against them, they invoke their rights of French citizenship in the grand manner. The Frenchman knows it all; he regrets that such creatures should be his own compatriots—regrets, maybe, that he is not possessed of the same primordial pushfulness and insensibility; and shrugs ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... and emotion seized him. For all his journey the South had seemed to welcome him, but here at last was the country he knew. He went out upon the platform and threw back his head, sniffing the soft breeze, heavy with the mysterious thrill of unplowed acres, the wondrous existence of primordial jungle, where life has rioted unceasingly above unceasing decay. It was dry with the fine dust of waste places, and wet with the warm mists of slumbering swamps; it seemed to Gideon to tremble with the songs of birds, the dry ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... world, very unequally, upon the origin of the existing diversity of the plants and animals which surround us. One assumes that the actual kinds are primordial; the other, that they are derivative. One, that all kinds originated supernaturally and directly as such, and have continued unchanged in the order of Nature; the other, that the present kinds appeared in some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... reading in perfect good faith, we rose from our perusal with the impression that Mr. Darwin was advocating the descent of all existing forms of life from a single, or from, at any rate, a very few primordial types; that no one else had done this hitherto, or that, if they had, they had got the whole subject into a mess, which mess, whatever it was—for we were never told this—was now being removed once for ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to bring about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though they ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... are necessary here regarding the homogeneousness of matter, or the idea that the various elements are composed of primordial units which are themselves alike, mere duplicates of each other. If this should prove to be really the case, as seems to be quite likely in the light of the facts given above, would it not be a veritable triumph for materialism? By no means. On the contrary, I think I can show in a very few words ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... for reform were laid in a report by Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (November 1853), prepared for Mr. Gladstone at his request, recommending two propositions, so familiarised to us to-day as to seem like primordial elements of the British constitution. One was, that access to the public service should be through the door of a competitive examination; the other, that for conducting these examinations a central board should be constituted. The effect of such a change has been enormous not only on the efficiency ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... up, to drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial impulse of ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... footprints were monstrous. The great hoofs had crushed down through the snow, and had even bitten into the earth. Will had a curious idea that it might not be a mountain buffalo, large as they grew, but some primordial beast, a survivor of a prehistoric time, a mammoth or mastodon, the pictures of which he recalled in his youthful geography. If America itself had so long passed unknown to the white man, why could not these vast ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... agreed, and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness; that they neither feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution of the primordial living substance should have taken place only along the plant line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of vegetable life, as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though certainly widely different from the present flora, in the evolution of which animals have played so great ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit" (p. 317); and in another place he claims that "we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups of a conjurer" ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... that he was master—that missionaries were somewhat feeble-minded and had to do with weak people. I was not very well acquainted with the bunk-house at the time, but I outlined a plan of campaign the major part of which was the capture of this primordial man. Could I reach him? Could I influence and move him to a better life? If not, what was the use of trying my theological programme on others? So I abandoned myself to the task. I knew my friends and the officers of the missionary society ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... all men have experienced this primordial tristia post coitus; but this great moral pain, very serious in its significance and depth, passes very rapidly, remaining, however, with the majority for a long time—sometimes for all life—in the form of wearisomeness and awkwardness after ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... making noble efforts to spread this understanding among the people. Their efforts are gravely hindered by two obstacles; one the professional tradition known as "the medical secret," the other the universal prevalence of that primordial ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... sequence of events, to seemingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world with invisible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception, like himself in their thought and action, differing only ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... was made Of nicely tempered mud, That man no lengthened part had played Anterior to the Flood. 'Twas all in vain; he heeded not, Referring plant and worm, Fish, reptile, ape, and Hottentot, To one primordial germ. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... traversed is vast and varied, and the facts he has gathered are numerous and from many and diversified sources—all bearing more or less conclusively on the one vital point he seeks to establish, viz: That the primordial germs (meaning germinal principles of life) of all living things, man alone excepted, are in themselves upon the earth, and that they severally make their appearance, each after its kind, whenever and wherever ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... psychical contact with almost any man she chose. Their power was an evil, selfish shadow of original, universal love. By them she could produce at once, in the man on whom she turned their play, a sense as it were of some primordial, fatal affinity between her and him—of an aboriginal understanding, the rare possession of but a few of the pairs made male and female. Into those eyes she would call up her soul, and there make it sit, flashing light, in gleams and sparkles, shoots and coruscations—not ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... discordancies, linguistic scholars have recently decided that both the 'bow-wow' and the 'ding-dong' theories are unsatisfactory; that the search for imitative, onomatopoeic, and directly expressive sounds to explain the origin of human speech has been too exclusive, and that many primordial roots of language have been founded in the involuntary sounds accompanying certain actions. As, however, the action was the essential, and the consequent or concomitant sound the accident, it would be expected that a representation or feigned reproduction of ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... the khan emptied itself behind us in a long string, jingling and clanging with horse and camel bells. But they turned northward to pass through the famed Circassian Gates, whereas we followed the plain that paralleled the mountain range—our mules' feet hidden by eight inches of primordial ooze. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Sextons,—an association than which there is none more mouldy in the whole world. Certainly, this was glory enough for any Western genealogist,—yet Fortune had a higher gratification to bestow. For, in His Worship, the Most Primordial, the High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch of all Sextons, Colonel Prowley soon discovered a relative of his own. Sir Joseph Barley, a rubicund old knight, and the Most Primordial in question, after an elaborate investigation and counter-investigation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences, and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... difference sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive, By their ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... father and mother, When I became, My creator created me; But of nine-formed faculties, Of the Fruit of fruits, Of the fruit of primordial God; Of primroses and mountain flowers, Of the blooms of trees and shrubs, Of Earth, of an earthly course, When I became,— Of the blooms of the nettle, Of the foam of the Ninth Wave. I was enchanted by Math Before I became immortal. I was enchanted ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... wills; so that all the problems of mechanics are present to us in the simple stone which may be used as a hammer, or in the stick that may be used as a lever, as much as in the most complicated machine. These are the primordial cells of mechanics. And an organ is only another ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion that this oversight, this neglect of ideas ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... well as by the number and position of those vertebrae, from nine to ten. Of all the recent vertebrata, the cartilaginous fishes, or Selachians, have most nearly preserved the form and structure of this primordial skull. These Selachians, the Rays and Sharks, are on the whole the creatures which throw the clearest light on the history of the lineage of the vertebrata and on the organisation of our primeval fish-natured ancestors. It is ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. She vanished round the corner. His effort was Titanic. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... coming of winter the Blue Mesa reclaimed its primordial solitude. Mount Baldy's smooth, glittering roundness topped a world that swept down in long waves of dark blue frosted with silver; the serried minarets of spruce and pine bulked close and sprinkled with snow. Blanketed in white, the upland ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... the part of one and the same individual. How this can be we shall perceive in subsequent chapters. In the meantime, we may say that all knowledge and volition would seem to be merely parts of the knowledge and volition of the primordial cell (whatever this may be), which slumbers but never dies—which has grown, and multiplied, and differentiated itself into the compound life of the womb, and which never becomes conscious of knowing what it has once learnt effectually, till it is for some reason on the point of, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... body and each phenomenon capable of exciting the feeble thought of infant humanity. Whatever essential transformations this primitive philosophy may afterwards undergo, a judicious sociological analysis will always expose to view this primordial base, never entirely concealed, even in a religious state the most remote from the original point of departure. Not only, for example, the Egyptian theocracy has presented, at the time of its greatest splendour, the established and prolonged coexistence, in the several castes of the hierarchy, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... the primordial depths of her, Lilly snatched up the pillow, rushing with it and its burden to the door, kicking it open in a gale of terror, her voice tearing ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... system itself, that determined his choice. Epicurus had allied his theory of pleasure [61] with the atomic theory of Democritus. Stoicism had espoused the doctrine of Heraclitus, that fire is the primordial element. Epicurus had denied the indestructibility of the soul and the divine government of the world; his gods were unconnected with mankind, and lived at ease in the vacant spaces between the worlds. Stoicism on the contrary, had incorporated the popular theology, bringing it into conformity ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... fact, they are rights which are practically valid for you only in the will of the sovereign. Whether they are in their nature primordial or prescriptive rights, makes no difference as to this point. The will of the sovereign is the only effectual guarantee of the natural rights of individuals, and the only source of their political rights. The sovereign recognizes the former, confers the latter, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Premier Antonio Salandra in his memorable speech from the Capitol, expressed the living and the fighting spirit of Italy, a spirit of strength and humanity, when he said: "I cannot answer in kind the insult that the German chancellor heaps upon us: the return to the primordial barbaric stage is so much harder for us, who are twenty centuries ahead of them in the history of civilization." To support his, came the quiet utterances of Sonnino (whose every word is a statement of Italian ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... example, it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type." So with use and disuse and transmission of acquired characteristics generally—once show that a single structure or instinct is due to habit in preceding generations, and we can impose no limit on ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... characteristics of the dog tribe are irrecognisable. By various influences, such as, for example, differences in food and climate, and domestication, a species may be split into varieties, or breeds, all of which, however, retain the more important characteristics of the primordial type. There appears to be no limit to the varieties of dogs, yet one can perceive by a glance that there is no specific difference between the huge Mont St. Bernard dog and the diminutive poodle, or between the sparse ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... for Bernard Saisset they were exactly the primordial question; he was obstinate in disentangling that knot of snakes; or rather, like a little Fury, he brandished the snakes above his head. A frail boy, distinguished looking, impassioned, too many nerves, burning with a too lively sensitiveness ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... sketched form is primordial, original, the simplest of all; it is a nascent moment or first attempt. It appears first of all in dreaming—an embryonic, unstable and uncoordinated manifestation of the creative imagination—a transition-stage between passive reproduction and organized construction. A step higher is revery, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... founders of every Church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... of an infinite harmony? To fancy that the law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without me. I should not exist without ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... spark of repentance and of tendency to improvement are extinguished in them—will evaporate for ever. Then their divine spirit, the undying part of them, separates from the soul and returns to its primitive source; the soul is reduced to its primordial atoms, and the monad plunges into the darkness of eternal unconsciousness. This is the only case of ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... down upon me and bore me back into the drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged myself to the door of a neighboring farmhouse, the voice ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... we can tell which is superior. The primordial cell in differentiating out of homogeneity into heterogeneity developed different qualities in different beings, and of the organs integrated from the heterogeneous elements each has its use and many are essential to life. In man the brain is more powerful than in the ox, but in the ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... helpless creature be lifted by the middle on a stick, its liquid contents are instantly separated, forming distended, high-pressure blobs at each end of the empty, flabby shrunken skin. Though it suffers this experiment placidly, being incapable of the feeblest resistance, it has the primordial gift of care of itself. Twists purposely made to test its degree of intelligence are artfullystraightened out, and the eagerness and hurry with which water is forced throughout empty parts show that life is both sweet and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... add the psychologists, these fundamental types, by which all our judgments and ideas are inevitably shaped, and which our sensations serve only to illuminate, are known in the schools as CATEGORIES. Their primordial existence in the mind is to-day demonstrated; they need only to be systematized and catalogued. Aristotle recognized ten; Kant increased the number to fifteen; M. Cousin has reduced it to three, to two, to one; and the indisputable glory of this professor ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the volcanic source ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... Nature here is as clear as Science can make it. In the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary from that primordial truth which, as we have seen, underlies all other truths, that whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without,"[82] We are dealing here ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... of primordial slime subtly intruded upon the sensory nerves of the visitor. The place breathed out decay; the decay of humanity, of cleanliness, of the honest decencies of life turned foul. Something lethal exhaled from that dim doorway. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... better in the whole brutal exuberance of the character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an elemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces, blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside the wisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chance to get their own again ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... of characeae, mosses and liverworts, and vascular cryptogams, where in special structures produced by cell-divisions there arise single primordial cells, which divide into two portions, of which the upper portion dissolves or becomes mucilaginous, while the lower contracts and rearranges itself to form ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal—that all are equally "lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... we see that the crossing of the several equine species tends in a marked manner to cause stripes to appear on various parts of the body, especially on the legs. As we do not know whether the primordial parent of the genus was striped, the appearance of the stripes can only hypothetically be attributed to reversion. But most persons, after considering the many undoubted cases of variously coloured marks reappearing by reversion in crossed pigeons, fowls, ducks, &c., will come to the same conclusion ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... him pass with his honoured fair beside him. Worthy middle-class creatures, they seemed, leading dull lives but appreciative of better things when they saw them—and George's bosom was fleetingly touched with a pitying kindness. And since the primordial day when caste or heritage first set one person, in his own esteem, above his fellow-beings, it is to be doubted if anybody ever felt more illustrious, or more negligently grand, than George Amberson Minafer felt at ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... operative after the necessity of knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of the truth itself, science ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... fire. This northern land was never the home of weak or half-felt emotions. The fine shades and subtle gradations of feelings were unknown to the northern people, but they had full knowledge of the primordial passions. They could hate as the she-wolf hates the foe that menaces her cubs, and they could love to the moment of death. He knew that whatever fate life had in store for him it could not change his attitude toward her. She would leave ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... summon us before that final bar To give account of deeds done in the flesh. The spirit cannot thus be summoned, Since entity it hath not sound can strike. Let sceptics rave! I see no difficulty That He, who from primordial atoms formed A human frame, can from the dust awake it Once again, marshal the scattered molecules And make immortal, as was Adam. This body lives! Or else no deep delight Of quiring angels harping golden strings; No voice of Him who calls His children home; ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... endeavour to bring over to our vision as many other visions as we can succeed in influencing. For since we have the power of communicating our thought to one another and since it is of the very nature of the complex vision to be exquisitely sensitive to influences from outside, it is a matter of primordial necessity to us all that we should exercise this will to influence and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... function of the guild in vague words; but this function did not disappear till a very much later time. The question, "Who will be my judge?" has no meaning now, since the State has appropriated for its bureaucracy the organization of justice; but it was of primordial importance in medieval times, the more so as self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. It must also be remarked that the translation of the Saxon and Danish "guild-bretheren," or "brodre," by the Latin convivii must also have ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... the accumulative power of natural selection, which I look at as by far the most important element in the production of new forms. The laws governing the incipient or primordial variation (unimportant except as the groundwork for selection to act on, in which respect it is all important), I shall discuss under several heads, but I can come, as you may well believe, only to very partial and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... assumes also the existence of life in the form of one or more primordial germs. He does not adopt the theory of spontaneous generation. What life is he does not attempt to explain, further than to quote (p. 326), with approbation, the definition of Herbert Spencer, who says, "Life depends ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... from the dug-out or the cave where in primordial condition he won his food by his own hands from the uncut forests and the unfarmed waters. As family policeman he had no incentive to accumulations of food, clothing, or luxuries. These involved added police responsibilities and enlarged the temptations ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... had just discussed had been uncommon in all respects; Maitland's scheme of courses and his specification as to details had roused the admiration of the Primordial's chef and put him on his mettle. He had outdone himself in his efforts to do justice to Mr. Maitland's genius; and the Primordial in its deadly conservatism remains to this day one of the very few places in New York where good, sound cooking is ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... important. In Scandinavia occurs a well-developed series of Cambrian deposits, representing both the lower and upper parts of the formation. In Bohemia, the Upper Cambrian, in particular, is largely developed, and constitutes the so-called "Primordial zone" of Barrande. Lastly, in North America, whilst the Lower Cambrian is only imperfectly developed, or is represented by the Huronian, the Upper Cambrian formation has a wide extension, containing fossils similar in character to the analogous strata in Europe, and known as ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... within her as she caught that phrase. That knot also would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the primordial Essence. But how shall we know this as a fact? How shall we prove it as an incontrovertible ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... have found certain definite facts,—that all known matter is formed out of one primordial Universal Substance,—that the ether spreading throughout limitless space is a Universal Medium, through which it is possible to convey force by means of vibrations,—and that vibrations can be started by the power of Sound. These ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... nations, parties or individuals, get licked in the same way. They outrage some one's self-respect, and then the old primordial cyclone ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... sincerely liked her old protectress, and found Charles Street agree with her. There was a primordial air about it, which made habits seem like laws of Nature; an absence of fuss which soothed her nerves, and did much better than slay her monsters for her, when it exposed them for no monsters at all, but ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... them again the action of Rome upon England is fortified. Even those among them who are most bent upon maintaining the local laws and traditions, have constantly to refer to the ancient law-makers and commentators; Roman law is for them a sort of primordial and common treasure, open to all, and wherewith to fill the gaps of the native legislation. The first lessons had been given after the Conquest by foreigners: the Italian Vacarius, brought by Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, had professed law at Oxford in 1149.[302] ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... shall infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... ever shall, One cadence of that infinite plain-song Which is itself all music. Stronger notes Than any that have ever touched the world Must ring to tell it — ring like hammer-blows, Right-echoed of a chime primordial, On anvils, in the gleaming of ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... in the wilderness—in the forest primeval. We pillowed our heads upon nature's heart, and lay at night watching the cold stars shivering in their firmament." That was good! Mr. Sprudell wondered if it was original or had he read it somewhere? "By day, like primordial man, we crept around beetling crags and scaled inaccessible peaks in pursuit ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... qualities her reason demanded in a husband; but in the other was grace and charm, something wildly admirable. He allured as the warrior, intrepid and graceful, allured the maiden, as the forest calls the householder. Something primordial and splendid and very sweet was in her feeling toward him. There could be no peaceful wedlock there, no security of home, no comfort, only the exquisite thrill of perilous union, the madness of a few short weeks—perhaps ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him. He came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces. The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed, wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so mildly to her hand. Likewise she was stirred by the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... to have been regarded by the Koreans as an amulet. But the ornament may also have taken its comma-like shape from the Yo and the Yin, the positive and the negative principles which by Chinese cosmographists were accounted the great primordial factors, and which occupy a prominent place in Japanese decorative art as the tomoye.* The cylindrical jewels evidently owed their shape to facility for stringing into necklaces or chaplets. The Chronicles and the Records alike show that these jewels, especially ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... this work, to consider in what manner the advancement of Europe in civilization has taken place, to ascertain how far its progress has been fortuitous, and how far determined by primordial law. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... proximity to consuming markets, it may present the concentration of intensive culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and perhaps controlled by a simple forestry. The law that holds this community together is largely traditional and customary and almost always as its primordial bond there is some sort of temple and some sort of priest. Typically, the temple is devoted to a local god or a localised saint, and its position indicates the central point of the locality, its assembly place and its market. Associated with the agriculture there are usually a ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... that which I hold to be the correct explanation, viz. that He has given to a certain fundamental and primordial medium, certain qualities and properties, by, and through which are originated and perpetuated, all the motions of the heavenly bodies already existent in the universe, or that are ever likely to ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... 'Having bowed down to the primordial being Isana, to whom multitudes make offerings, and who is adored by the multitude; who is the true incorruptible one, Brahma, perceptible, imperceptible, eternal; who is both a non-existing and an existing-non-existing being; who is the universe and also distinct ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... appearance of an amatory cast; all blown together as if by merest chance, henceforth bewilder the sane Historian. To combine any picture of these University, and the subsequent, years; much more, to decipher therein any illustrative primordial elements of the Clothes-Philosophy, becomes such a problem as the reader ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... significance, did it not carry with it the implication that the book was also the origin of English novel writing. The importance, therefore, of Euphues is not so much that it was primary, as that it was primordial; and, to be such, it must have laid its spell in some way or other upon succeeding writers. Our first task is therefore to enquire what this spell was, and to discover whether the attraction of Euphues must ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... man?—a creature without inspiration, Gross of form and feature, dull of inclination? Or was his primordial self a something higher? Fresh from test and ordeal ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the love of my whelpage. I was twenty, and she a mad, wanton creature, wonderful and unmoral and filled with life to the brim. My blood pounds hot even now as I conjure her up. The ungarmented beast, my dear Dane, the great primordial ungarmented beast, mighty to procreate, indomitable in battle, invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered the globe with his sword and pillowed his ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... cosmogony of Chutsz was dualistic. All nature owed its existence to the Ri and Ki, the determining principle and the vital force of primordial aura that produces and modifies motion. Wang held that these two were inseparable. His teaching was ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the term,—the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought empty,—was his final test of any man. Unless there was something fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... course of time. The wheel! The eternal recommencement of things! And all the creatures of the human flock though changing the sheep-fold, never change shepherds; the shepherds are ever the same, the dead, the first to think, whose primordial thought was like the handful of snow which rolls and rolls down the hill-slopes, growing larger, bearing along everything which clings ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... be a River, and became cosmic and personal; ceasing to be a mere watery chaos of Lakes and Deluges hereabouts. For the Sandstone was of various degrees of hardness; tenacious as marble some parts of it, soft almost as sand other parts. And the primordial diluviums and world-old torrents, great and small, rushing down from the Bohemian Highlands, from the Saxon Metal Mountains, with such storming, gurgling and swashing, have swept away the soft parts, and left the hard standing ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... Development," {26} or "Evolution." We retain this name, although well aware of the fact that the authors do not agree in their use of the term "evolution." Professor Wigand, who adopts only the theory of a descent from one primordial cell to another, and who positively rejects the idea of a progress from one fully developed species to another, claims among other things that one value of his own theory is that he secures for the idea of evolution its full meaning. The expression still has a meaning for those ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... to the existence of things, and, consequently, primitive and anterior to every other law: so that all those which man has received, are only imitations of it, and their perfection is ascertained by the resemblance they bear to this primordial model. ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Karma, form the two main columns of the Hindu temple; for the Brahman as well as for the Buddhist—who is only a member of a powerful offshoot of Hinduism—these two laws rule throughout the whole Universe, from the primordial kingdoms up to the gods, including man; and the principal, nay, the only goal of human life is Moksha—salvation, in Christian terminology—liberation from the chain ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... to shine with the luster of evidence; nothing can prevail against it. We can prove that it is as fecund as it is respectable; but if the science of wealth should endeavor to demonstrate the contrary, the primordial bases of society, liberty, property and the family would not be less sacred nor less necessary, for they are the right of humanity. They could not be put aside, even under pretext of any mechanism which would claim to produce more.(45) These sovereign principles of economy flow from the moral ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... He noted the man's little twinkling animal eyes, his high cheek bones, his flat nose, his thick and slobbery lips, his straggling, fierce mustache and eyebrows, his grotesque long-tailed cutaway coat. So to him, too, this primitive man reaching dully from primordial chaos, the great ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... sides a magnificent view spread out before us in the raw light. The chain of rocks, clearly visible in their barren desolation which stretched to the very summit, lay stretched out like some great heap of gigantic, unformed things left by some primordial race of Titans to ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... about him. Her "day" was a dread of mine; I could seldom remember which day it was, and when I did she had a way of shifting it so that I was fatally sure to run into it—to my misery, for, beginning with those primordial indignities suffered in youth, when I was scrubbed with a handkerchief outside the parlour door as a preliminary to polite usages, my childhood's, manhood's prayer has been: From all such days, Good ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... vanquished drove on in the dark, close to the great flank of hills. From where King's Mountain, strewn with dead and dying, reared its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a primordial age when titans strove together, perhaps to the ears of the marching men came faintly through the night's stillness the howl of a wolf and the answering chorus of the pack. For the wolves came down to King's Mountain from all the surrounding hills, following the scent of blood, and made their ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... the death of love," shouted Neshevna. But Lenyard heard her not; nor did he hear the noise of the people beneath—the veritable booming of primordial gorilla-men. And now a corrosive shaft of tone rived the building as though its walls had been of gauze and went hissing towards Paris, in shape a menacing sword. Like the clattering of tumbrils in narrow, stony ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... carried on at all by a human individual, unless the mind that produced them in him were also able to produce more practically useful products. The latter are thus the more essential, or at least the more primordial results. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... so many "movements," seen the tides of taste and technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion. This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the market. He got up and stood before the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "The conversation," they added, "refers to the primordial scheme and cannot be divulged before the proper season; but, when the time comes, mind do not forget us two, and you will readily be able to escape ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that—questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the primordial cell, or perhaps even on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this—namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... botanist, and the contractile substance and sarcode of the zoologist, must be, if not identical, yet in a high degree analogous substances. Hence, from this point of view, the difference between animals and plants consists in this; that, in the latter, the contractile substance, as a primordial utricle, is enclosed within an inert cellulose membrane, which permits it only to exhibit an internal motion, expressed by the phenomena of rotation and circulation, while, in the former, it is not so enclosed. The ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... construction of the myth of the Creation. Man devised it so that he might be able to say, "in the beginning." But a new difficulty met him at the threshold—as change must be in existence, "we cannot think of a change from non-existence to existence." His only refuge was to select some apparently primordial, simple, homogeneous substance from which, by the exertion of volition, things came into being. The one which most naturally suggested itself was water.[167-1] This does in fact cover and hide the land, and the act of creation was often described as ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... and without their close connection with each other law and religion were impossible—makes hereditary authority sacred to great masses of mankind in the old world. The obligation is the more stringent, therefore, on men thus set apart as it were by primordial selection for ruling and instructing their fellow-creatures, to keep their edicts and their practice in harmony with divine justice. For these rules cannot be violated with impunity during along succession of years, and it is usually left for ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... instant Chloe's glance rested upon her companions; Big Lena sat scowling murderously at Vermilion's broad back. Harriet Penny had fainted and lay with the back of her head awash in the shallow bilge water. A strange alter ego—elemental—primordial—had taken possession of Chloe. Her eyes glowed, and her heart thrilled at the sight of the tense, vigilant figure of Vermilion, and the sweating, straining scowmen. For the helpless form of Harriet Penny she felt only contempt—the savage, intolerant contempt of the strong ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... just trouble you to explain this—wait a bit. (Opens volume again.) Ah, here we are—"And these illusive and primordial cognitions, or pseud-ideas, are homogeneous entities which may be differentiated objectively or subjectively, according as they are presented as Noumenon or Phenomenon. Or, in other words, they are only cognoscible as a colligation of incongruous coalescences." Now then—are you going ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... falls away in which the hidden centre is wrapped. In that which fills the consciousness-soul, this hidden centre emerges unveiled into the temple of the soul. Yet it shows itself just here to be but a drop from the ocean of the all-pervading Primordial Essence; and it is here that man first has to grasp it,—this Primordial Essence. He must recognize it in himself before he is able to find it in ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... been dead, I should gladly have pitted my strength and wit against the savage and primordial world in which I found myself. I could have lived in seclusion within some rocky cave until I had found the means to outfit myself with the crude weapons of the Stone Age, and then set out in search of her whose image had now become the constant companion of my waking hours, and the central ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... courses over the earth drew up the metallic substance of the earth and distilled and gave it to the sun; and he in his great speed cast them out upon the earth, again in minute atoms, and as they came in contact with their own primordial atoms which lie upon the earth, and more densely in the lower parts of the earth, they explode, causing atmospherical heat; each atom giving forth a yellow flame of light as it explodes, so minute that one ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... Mlle. Giraud rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest removed, in nature's great family become conscious of the tie. Among those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses of men are precipitated as one chemical throws down a sediment from another. They moved reverently, as in a temple. Their souls were uplifted in unison with the stately ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... chaps, the Boy Scouts I saw there, who are trying to study God's big out-of-doors and must content themselves with stingy little parks. It's the love of Nature that takes them to the parks, and compared with this they have a poor substitute. This is the world as God made it, with all its primordial beauty. We're fortunate that circumstances placed us here, Thomas, and we ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... and distinct masses which these particles have brought into existence by their condensation. But we have thereby achieved only a single step. The primitive movement of rotation of the nebula is not connected with the simple attraction of the particles. This movement seems to imply the action of a primordial ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... intelligence and incapacity, the basal excellence and the basal fault, it is possible to define that whole affair of which morality is the constructive phase: the attempt of life to establish itself in the midst of primordial lifelessness, to avert dissolution and death, and to extend and ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... of Creation: a Popular View of some of the Grand Conclusions of the Sciences in reference to the History of Matter and of Life. Together with a Statement of the Intimations of Science respecting the Primordial Condition and the Ultimate Destiny of the Earth and the Solar System. By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D., Chancellor of the Syracuse University. ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration, not a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology, retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear and write, as it were, a genealogy of reason based on circumstantial ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... whether it was a correct report. Indeed, he had not been able even to satisfy himself as to whether they had no fingers, although that also was commonly said to be the fact. One of the miners, indeed, who had had more schooling than the rest, was wont to argue that such must have been the primordial condition of humanity, and that education and handicraft had developed both toes and fingers—with which proposition Curdie had once heard his father sarcastically agree, alleging in support of it the probability that babies' gloves were a traditional ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... in the Prado, and that other, which, by some freak of Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds which carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with its livid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make other planets than ours—dead planets, without either sun or star? Are these the sheer precipices of Chaos, against ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... place, though," he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape and listening for a moment to the woman's mournful notes. "Her man was clawed by a bear, and she's taking ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... from the dead primordial being the sacrificed bull, Mithra, sprouts life and vegetation, so in the dream of Omicron, a tree grows out of the belly of the dead bear. In mythology many trees grow out of graves, that in some way reincarnate the creative or life principle ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... field was sown in wheat, which went to seed unharvested each year, and in the cool depths of which the poppy seeds were hidden from the keen-eyed songsters. And further, climbing after the sun through the wheat stalks, the poppies grew taller and taller and more royal even than the primordial ones of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... silence, because there are decencies to be observed by animals no less than men, he walked forward with his trunk outstretched into the primordial jungle ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... ascent to the rugged profile of this land of the Western Hemisphere. All this is of historic record in stony cypher of geology indelibly engraved by time on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as traceable from the primordial archaean to our present era, the ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... live independently on their incomes—a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens to come among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken residence, and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the primordial houses, a family from some neighboring district may be adopted, but in the eyes of the aboriginal race they ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... had been traversed from west to east and they had crossed the fierce bosom of Unaga's plateau. The reality of it was no better and only little worse than had been anticipated. It had been a journey of hills, everlasting hills, and interminable primordial forests, with dreary breaks of open plains. Each season had brought its own troubles, with always lying ahead the deadly anticipation of the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... realize, civilized as we are, than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation, as regards what we call par excellence 'morality.' It is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. Acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and to the accomplishment of which, consequently, we can not help attaching a certain shame, do not in ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... puckered his brow in puzzled study of the wonderful problem. For an instant he seemed to grasp the whole of a true explanation, and then, just as success was within his grasp, the picture faded into a jungle scene where a naked, white youth danced in company with a band of hairy, primordial ape-things. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... found impossible to reduce them into others, wherefore they are presumed to be the primary bases of all matters. It has, indeed, been surmised that these so-called elements are only modifications of a primordial form of matter, brought about under certain conditions; but if this should prove to be the case, it would little affect the view which we are taking of cosmical arrangements. Analogy would lead us to conclude that the combinations of the primordial ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... primordial life began, and in it even in these latter days the far beginning of superior things may be discovered actively pursuing their craft and purpose in the order of the universe. Worms are abundant, and among them certain genera which might be taken as apt illustrations of the more ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... "L'histoire entiere de l'Irlande est une enigme si on n'a pas sans cesse a l'esprit ce fait primordial que le climat humide de l'ile est tout a fait contraire a la culture des cereales, mais en revanche eminemment favorable a l'elevage du betail, surtout de la race bovine, car le climat est encore trop humide pour l'espece ovine." F. Lot, in La ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... Chicago and St. Paul—Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words—in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... the nurses and babies; they imparted to the scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. "Yes," he said at last, "I suppose I am." And then, in answer to his companion's inquiries, he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It was an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which it will ...
— The American • Henry James
... primitive or primordial ovum[3] is imbedded in a little vesicle or follicle, which is generally known as Graafian follicle, and there are as many Graafian follicles as there are ova. (The Graafian follicles were first described about 250 years ago—in 1672—by a Delft physician named De Graaf, hence the name.) ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... is drunken he sees strange varieties of serpents. That's what ailed Adam and Eve. They kept intoxicated with their own primordial sweetness until they got the jimmies and saw a talking snake prancing around the evergreen aisles of Eden with legs like unto a prima donna. At least I suppose the Edenic serpent was built that way, for the Lord cursed it and compelled it to go on its belly all the days of its ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... fanciful to assume that the Liverpool Cabinet, in their ameliorating career, was directed by any desire to recur to the primordial tenets of the Tory party. That was not an epoch when statesmen cared to prosecute the investigation of principles. It was a period of happy and enlightened practice. A profounder policy is the offspring of a time like the present, when the original postulates of institutions are called ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... review of a well-known work: 'To be a Greek was to seek to know, to know the primordial substance of matter, to know the meaning of number, to know the world as a rational whole. In no spirit of paradox one may say that Euclid is the most typical Greek: he would know to the bottom, and know as a rational system, the laws of the measurement of the earth. Plato, too, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... economy of time that the real advance of modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist. With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising, self-admiring,' where should we be if certain—for the most part, uncertain and forgotten—men of genius had not invented the primordial processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. To talk of the 'invention' of the steam-engine, for example, is an absurdity. The 'invention' was ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... beginnings of mundane life) is a theory which the evolutionist must accept, and which can frighten none aware of the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous—nay, infinite—spiritual significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... 'Indeed, I shall explain all, after having bowed down to that Self-existent, Primordial Being, who is eternal and undeteriorating and inconceivable, and who is at once vested with and divested of attributes. O tiger among men, this Janardana attired in yellow robes is the grand Mover and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... by ancient Teutons—for the most part—was to blame for this. Certainly when Walhall had succumbed to the flames and the primordial Ash-Tree sunk in the lapping waters of the treacherous Rhine, I felt that the end of the universe was at hand and it was with a sob I saw outside in the soft, summer-sky, riding gallantly in the blue, the full ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... never be thy victim; may I never suffer collapse before thee. May the venom never enter my limbs, which are as those of the god Tmu. O let not the pains of death, which have reached thee; come upon me. I am the god Tmu, living in the foremost part of Tur [the sky]. I am the only one in the primordial water. I have many mysterious names, and provide myself a dwelling to endure millions of years. I was born of Tmu, and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... often beyond the region of demonstrated facts into that of speculative thought. An ever-recurring topic was that of the origin of the human race. It was Agassiz's declared belief that man had sprung not from a common stock, but from various centres, and that the original circumscription of these primordial groups of the human family corresponded in a large and general way with the distribution of animals and their combination into faunae. * (* See "Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and their Relation to the Different Types of Man" included in ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... comparisons upon which she could draw were few and confusingly new, mixed with reality and the loose artistic conceptions of heroes in fiction. The young male, as she had actually seen him, had been of the sailor type, hard-bitten, primordial, ruthless. For the face under her gaze she could find but one expression—fine. The shape of the head, the height and breadth of the brow, the angle of the nose, the cut of the chin and jaws, all were fine, of a type she had never before ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath |
