"Reducible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some sort of tremendous creature—all her ideas are reducible to that. What makes the muddle is that she isn't clear about the creature she wants most. A great actress or a great lady—sometimes she inclines for one and sometimes for the other, but on the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... bodies of many of the lower Algae, may equally claim to have first a characteristically animal, and then an unequivocally vegetable existence. Nor is the gradation restricted to these simple organisms. It appears in general functions, as in that of reproduction, which is reducible to the same formula in both kingdoms, while it exhibits close approximations in the lower forms; also in a common or similar ground of sensibility in the lowest forms of both, a common faculty of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... gathered into a conceived or conceivable group of 'Nuciferae,' in which the almond, hazel, walnut, cocoa-nut, and such others would be considered as having relationship, at least in their power of secreting a crisp and sweet substance which is not wood, nor bark, nor pulp, nor seed-pabulum reducible to softness by boiling;—but quite separate substance, for which I do not know that there at present exists any botanical name,—of which, hitherto, I find no general account, and can only myself give ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... between the Ancients and Moderns is reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day? If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in modern times; if they were not, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... there may be a good as well as an evil application of this Principle. And the ingenious Invention of that Excellent person, Doctor Wren of injecting liquors into the veins of an Animal, seems to be reducible to this head: I cannot stay, nor is this a fit place, to mention the several Experiments made of this kind by the most incomparable Mr. Boyle, the multitudes made by the lately mention'd Physician Doctor Clark, the ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... would not be a triumph of Unionist policy, it would rather be the destruction of Unionism. The one course of safety is to take care that at the next general election the country has laid before it for determination a clear and unmistakable issue. The question for every elector to answer must be reducible to the form Aye or No; will you, or will you not, repeal the Union and establish an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament in Dublin? If the question be so raised Unionists have no reason to fear ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... who says that it will not depart altogether? Mankind makes continual progress toward truth, and light ever triumphs over darkness. Our disease is not, then, absolutely incurable, and the theory of the theologians is worse than inadequate; it is ridiculous, since it is reducible to this tautology: "Man errs, because he errs." While the true statement is this: "Man errs, because ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... driving power, then the main character, which becomes a law working out its own destiny; and the subject in my own work has always been translatable into a phrase. Nearly every one of my books has always been reducible to its title. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... judgments are based upon two things: first, upon the original preferences of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us, in divers manners, from without. For the most part these divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning from the same source at second-hand and by the report of him who can. Thus the sum of the ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not easily reducible by C or H, it was originally obtained by electrolysis, but more recently from its chloride, by the reducing action of strongly heated K or Na. Al2Cl6 6 Na 6 ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... deny to Jeremiah. The text of the first, verses 17-18, is uncertain. If with the help of the Greek we render it as follows it implies not an actual, but an inevitable and possibly imminent, siege of Jerusalem. The couplet in 17 may alone be original and 18, the text of which is reducible neither to metre nor wholly to sense, a ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... by people of more gravity than understanding, that genius and taste are strictly reducible to rules, and that there is a rule for everything. So far is it from being true that the finest breath of fancy is a definable thing, that the plainest common sense is only what Mr. Locke would have called a mixed ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... is founded on official documents and coins, is without doubt more dependable than that of Plutarch, which is reducible to an imaginative metaphor; and the discovery of Letronne, concluding that concatenation of facts that I have set forth, finally persuades me to affirm that not a passion of love, suddenly re-awakened, led Antony in the second half of 37 B.C. ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... those persons who may have found means of introducing themselves to the delegates have in the smallest degree been able to influence the proceedings of the mutineers, whose conduct from the beginning seems to have been of a wild and extravagant nature not reducible to any sort of form or order and therefore capable of no other mischief than was to be apprehended from a want of the fleet to serve against the enemy. In this state however they were unfortunately suffered to go on without interruption until they began to think themselves justifiable ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... should appear, that the most comprehensive formula to which life is reducible, would be that of the internal copula of bodies, or (if we may venture to borrow a phrase from the Platonic school) the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many. But that there is a physiognomy in words, which, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... substance, non-poisonous—picrotin, which is insoluble in benzine and is reduced by Fehling's solution and nitrate of silver. Lastly, anamirtin is found in the mother water of picrotoxin; it is not bitter, not poisonous, and not reducible by the ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... your worldliness, your greed for progress, your thirst for gain, a pleasant fancy, a glorious dream, as if everything in the heavens, on the earth, or in the waters, were to be measured by the dollar and cent standard, and unless reducible to a representative of moneyed value, to be thrown, as utterly worthless, away. Let us row ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... animals—are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand, this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and instability of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent expense. The commercial value of canine monstrosities, such as the prevailing styles of pet dogs both for men's and women's use, rests on their high cost of production, and their value to their owners ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... has been said upon the overpowering "lusciousness" of his poetry, and the magical "melody" of his verse: most of this is futile. There is in the former as much of fadeur as of lusciousness; and a certain tripping or trotting exactitude, not less fully reducible to the test of scansion than of a well-attuned ear, is but a rudimentary form of melody—while of harmony or rhythmic volume of sound Moore is as decisively destitute as any correct versifier can well ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... weakness and cruel selfishness of holding that because such a happiness or such a virtue had not come into his little path, or worked well for him, therefore it was not in the great scheme, but was reducible, when found in appearance, to the basest elements." A touching utterance if it expressed the real feeling of a writer sorely disappointed and in great trouble; but an utterance moving rather to contempt if it came from a writer who ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... of galvanometers, and he graduated his tangent galvanometer to correspond with the system of electric measurement he had adopted. The electric currents used in his experiments were thenceforth measured on the new system; and the numbers given in Joule's papers from 1840 downward are easily reducible to the modern absolute system of electric measurements, in the construction and general introduction of which he himself took so prominent a part. It was in 1840, also, that after experimenting on improvements in voltaic apparatus, he turned his attention to "the heat evolved by metallic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... with the head in an opposite direction! This difference in the two hemispheres merits particular notice; it is part of a series of apparent anomalies in the compass which have hitherto remained unaccounted for; but which seem reducible to one general cause, as I have attempted to show in the Appendix No. II. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... the caricaturist, for he belonged to the type that was easy to "do;" it being well known that these gentlemen appreciate public characters in direct proportion to their saliency of feature. When faces are reducible to a few telling strokes their wearers are overwhelmed with the honors of publicity; with which, on the other hand, nothing is more likely to interfere than the possession of a countenance neatly classical. Daumier ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... remember the glass through which we have read the dark problems of the sky. But in this mysterious organ we see not even the signs of its mystery. We see, in truth, nothing; for what is there has neither form, nor symbol, nor any thing reducible to a sensuous distinctness; and yet who can look into it, and not be conscious of a real though invisible presence? In the eye of a brute, we see only a part of the animal; it gives us little beyond the palpable outward; ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... nurse-biting and original sin in general are all strictly reducible from Darwinian principles; but don't by misadventure run against ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... as you may, this globe of ours remains quite a bulky affair. The world in little is not reducible to a microscopic point. The nations collected to show their riches, crude and wrought, bring with them also their wants. For the display, for its comfort and good order, not only space, but a carefully-planned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter of fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as the camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New Zealand Berardius easily beats ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... simple fracture of the vault occurring in early childhood have been followed by the development beneath the scalp of a localised fluid swelling, which varies in size from time to time and is partly reducible by pressure. The swelling results from laceration of the membranes, and sometimes of the brain substance, so that the cerebro-spinal fluid of the sub-arachnoid space, or even of the lateral ventricle, escapes through the opening in the skull ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... their literature to tell us how they thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of the chalk cliffs ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... carried in this world." All other passions are subordinate unto these four, or six, as some will: love, joy, desire, hatred, sorrow, fear; the rest, as anger, envy, emulation, pride, jealousy, anxiety, mercy, shame, discontent, despair, ambition, avarice, &c., are reducible unto the first; and if they be immoderate, they [1632]consume the spirits, and melancholy is especially caused by them. Some few discreet men there are, that can govern themselves, and curb in these inordinate affections, by religion, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... can be pressed back into the abdomen by the ordinary manipulation of the fingers, it is a Reducible Rupture. This is the first condition, but without a proper truss it ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... same, issuing from the common source of the human desire for expression, yet the region of fancy corresponding to each medium of utterance is molded by intercourse with that medium, and acquires an individuality which is not directly reducible to terms of any other region of aesthetic fancy. Feeling, in short, is modified in becoming communicable; and the feeling which has become communicable in music is not capable of re-translation into the feeling which has become communicable ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... EUPHEMIUS, that you, who are feelingly alive to each fine Sensation that Beauty or Harmony gives the Soul, should so often assert, contrary to what you daily experience, that TASTE is governed by Caprice, and that BEAUTY is reducible to no Criterion? I am afraid your Generosity in this Instance is greater than your Sincerity, and that you are willing to compliment the circle of your Friends, in giving up by this Concession that envied Superiority you might claim over them, should it be acknowledged that those uncommon ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... to raise us above the condition of the brutes. But the same discontent which has been the source of all improvement, has been the parent of no small progeny of follies and absurdities; to trace these latter is the object of the present volume. Vast as the subject appears, it is easily reducible within such limits as will make it comprehensive without being wearisome, and render its study ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... every evil will is reducible to some species of malice. But the will that is at variance with erring reason is not reducible to some species of malice. For instance, if a man's reason err in telling him to commit fornication, his will in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... to speak of the eye, which has so great a share in the beauty of the animal creation, as it did not fall so easily under the foregoing heads, though in fact it is reducible to the same principles. I think, then, that the beauty of the eye consists, first, in its clearness; what colored eye shall please most, depends a good deal on particular fancies; but none are pleased with an eye whose water (to use that term) is dull and muddy.[26] We are pleased ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of thought are all reducible to the three following axioms, which are known as The Three Fundamental Laws ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is any) in fourteen minutes, and you immediately perceive in your head an infinite number of abstracts, summaries, compendiums, extracts, collections, medullas, excerpta quaedams, florilegias and the like, all disposed into great order and reducible upon paper. ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... similar hierarchy in the region of universals. Many universals, like many particulars, are only known to us by description. But here, as in the case of particulars, knowledge concerning what is known by description is ultimately reducible to knowledge concerning ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... back to another, which has also been pointed out before, that all efforts, the sole object of which is to please from moment to moment the man who directs and pays for them, are, whether embodied in the form of commodities or no, really reducible to some kind of personal service, if a toy-maker, in return for food, makes a dancing-doll for another man, he might just as well have pirouetted for so many hours himself; and if the purchaser would be more amused by a man's ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... a general way, are some of the subjects contained in the book, while there is a number of others not reducible to the classification given, and among these the Editor has included certain subjects of which he was able to give only a brief definition, just as there are doubtless others which in so wide an ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... implies a complaint that no discoveries have ever been made by these four methods. But, as the analogous argument against the syllogism was invalidated by applying equally as against all reasoning, which must be reducible to syllogism, so this also falls by its own generality, since, if true against these methods, it must be true against all observation and experiment, since these must ever proceed by one of the four. And, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... from the French: as, tenable, capable, preferable, convertible; and these we write as they are written in French. But the difficulty lies chiefly in those which are of English growth. For some of them are formed according to the model of the Latin verbals in ibilis; as forcible, coercible, reducible, discernible; and others are made by simply adding the suffix able; as traceable, pronounceable, manageable, advisable, returnable. The last are purely English; and yet they correspond in form with such as come ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... greater subtlety and tenuity of the former, which will require far greater degrees of compression and consequently of pain to make them visible; whereas the latter are feculent and gross, and so nearer allied to palpable existences, and more easily reducible ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... of evolution in the lower worlds man often introduces into his vehicles qualities which are undesirable and entirely inappropriate for his life as an ego—such, for example, as pride, irritability, sensuality. These, like the rest, are reducible to vibrations, but they are in all cases vibrations of the lower subdivisions of their respective worlds, and therefore they cannot reproduce themselves in the causal body, which is built exclusively of the matter of the three higher subdivisions of its world. For each section of the astral ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... man, are obliged to weave your image of the outer world upon the hard warp of your own mentality; which perpetually imposes its own convention, and checks the free representation of life. As a tapestry picture, however various and full of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little squares; so the world of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series of static elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtle curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinery cannot represent. It leaves them ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... vitalists, agree that in all life-manifestations there must be some preA"xisting vital force or principle, without which no living thing, whether plant or animal, can come into existence.[11] M. Pouchet says: "I have always thought that organized beings were animated by forces which are in no way reducible to physical or chemical forces." The AbbA(C) Needham is satisfied to formulate a "force vA(C)getative," so far as plant-life is concerned; Buffon invariably falls back on vital force or energy; and Burdach on a "force plastique," which is essentially inseparable from nature in her vital ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... security from foreign attack, the authoritative and just adjustment of domestic differences and grievances, and a certain opportunity for individual development; and these several objects are really reducible to two, because internal order cannot be preserved among a vigorous people, in case no sufficient opportunity is provided for individual development or for the adjustment of differences and grievances. In order that a state may be relatively ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... "ether" covers four substates as distinct from each other as are the solids, liquids and gases, and that all chemical elements have their four etheric substates, the highest being common to all, and consisting of the ultimate physical atoms to which all elements are finally reducible. The chemical atom is regarded as the ultimate particle of any element, and is supposed to be indivisible and unable to exist in a free state. Mr. Crookes' researches have led the more advanced chemists to regard the atoms as compound, ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... simultaneous ideas here glides in, and we concede unawares all that is necessary to the abbe's favourite system, "that sensation becomes successively attention, memory, comparison, judgment, and reflection;[117] and that the art of reasoning is reducible to a series of identic propositions." Without, at present, attempting to examine this system, we may observe, that in education it is more necessary to preserve the mind from prejudice, than to prepare it for the adoption of any ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... word Sociology to Comte, a man of exceptionally methodical quality. I hold he developed the word logically from an arbitrary assumption that the whole universe of being was reducible to measurable and commeasurable and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... found that there was no End of Wrangling this Way, they invented a kind of Argument, which is not reducible to any Mood or Figure in Aristotle. It was called the Argumentum Basilinum (others write it Bacilinum or Baculinum) which is pretty well express'd in our English Word Club-Law. When they were not able to confute their Antagonist, they knock'd him down. It was their ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... horticulturist of Paris, has likened the law of similarity to the centripetal force, and the law of variation to the centrifugal force; and in truth their operations seem analogous, and possibly they may be the same in kind, though certainly unlike in this, that they are not reducible to arithmetical calculation and cannot be subjected to definite measurement. His thought is at least a highly suggestive one and may ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... not the greatest part of the mischief: for the main bog, although, perhaps, not reducible to natural soil, yet, by continuing large, deep, straight canals through the middle, cleaned at proper times as low as the channel or gravel, would become a secure summer-pasture; the margins might, with ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... the ultimate facts of nature and one of the universal principles of art; and thus versification, which is the study of the rhythms of verse, is both a science and an art. But it differs from the other sciences in that its phenomena are not 'regular' and reducible to law, but varying and subject to the dictates, even the whims, of genius; inasmuch as every poem involves a fresh fiat of creation. Of course, no poet when he is composing, either in the traditional "fine frenzy" or in the more sober process of revision, thinks of prosody ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... are,—some think five, and some seven,—but certainly not more than the latter number—and perhaps it is simpler to assume five—distinct plans or constructions in the whole of the animal world; and that the hundreds of thousands of species of creatures on the surface of the earth, are all reducible to those five, or, at ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... discussion; but the moment it is decided in the affirmative, it will follow, that that government ought to be clothed with all the powers requisite to complete execution of its trust. And unless it can be shown that the circumstances which may affect the public safety are reducible within certain determinate limits; unless the contrary of this position can be fairly and rationally disputed, it must be admitted, as a necessary consequence, that there can be no limitation of that authority which is to provide for the defense and protection of the ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... at least seeming to us, the result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any principle which we can appeal to as habitually at work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a majority will still remain which are reducible to some law or other, and with these we will occupy ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... against the vanity of riches, the uncertainty of life, the sin of worldliness—against the gambling spirit of human nature; I ask what impression will be produced by those forty thousand harangues? In every congregation it is reducible to a certainty that, before a year has passed, some will be numbered with the dead. Every man knows this, but he thinks the chances are that it will not be himself; he feels it a solemn thing for Humanity generally—but for himself ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... directly opposite to our poet's and his speaker's meaning. As I have stopped it, the sense quadrates with the context: and surely it is one unalterable property of philosophy to make seeming strange and preternatural phenomena familiar and reducible ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... curve was formed of it on one side of the galvanometer, and the two single curves or halves were swung in opposite directions at the same time; their action then combined to affect the galvanometer: but all the results were reducible to those above described. ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... all these passions have a practical relation to good and evil and are consequently called "graces" both in Scripture and Tradition. Love (amor) is the fundamental affection of the will, to which all others are reducible, and hence the principal function of grace, in so far as it affects the will, must consist in producing acts of love.(64) The Council of Carthage (A. D. 418) declares that "both to know what we must do, and to love to do it, ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... are reducible to three classes: intolerable sensuality; diversified murder; and most scandalous mendacity: comprehending flagrant, and obdurate, and unceasing violations of the ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... And if sensation be a measure of physiological effect we can understand this correspondence of the physiological and sensation curves. We now see further that the physiological effects themselves are ultimately reducible to ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... at times with the fancy that Homer, Sappho, and Aristophanes are the inviolable Trinity of poetry, even to the extent of being reducible to One. For the fiery and lucid directness of Sappho, if her note of personal lyricism is abstracted, is seen to be an element of Homer, as is the profoundly balanced humour of Aristophanes, at once tenderly ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... to calm the terror of my patients, excited still more by the elemental uproar without; vainly did I harangue them, in the plainest terms to which science is reducible, on atmospheric vibrations, acoustics, reverberations, and volcanic agencies; they insisted on some supernatural power having produced the recent fearful sounds. Neither common nor uncommon sense could prevail with them; and when they discovered, by the appearance of the extra nurse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... neither restored Father nor diswhipped Taskmaster that walks there; but an anomalous complex of both these, and of innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not to this newly devised one: King Louis Restorer of French Liberty? Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living energy, he shall force ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... as well as from other evidence which it is not necessary to detail in this place, it may be seen that the causes assigned by physiologists, and the plans proposed by cultivators for the production of double flowers, are reducible to three heads, which may be classed under Plethora, Starvation, and Sterility. These three seem inconsistent one with the other, but are not so much so as they at first sight ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... between the two methods may now be presented in a few sentences. Plato held that all our cognitions are reducible to two elements—one derived from sense, the other from pure reason; one element particular, contingent, and relative, the other universal, necessary, and absolute. By an act of immediate abstraction Plato will eliminate the particular, contingent, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... economic method as contrasted with the legal and personal methods above and later described, because it is impersonal and reducible to a rule of value. Distribution under competition is made, not with reference to abstract ethical principles or to personal affection, but to the value of the product. Each worker strives to do what will bring him the ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... we remember that its basis is the interval—music does not know "notes" as such, but only intervals—that the number of possible intervals is very small and their relations quite simple, and that everything which is not reducible to a very simple vulgar fraction is heard, not as a harmony, but as a passing note, an inflection of a note of a chord. In fact the advance made in chord combinations since the introduction of the tempered system is not very great. All, or nearly all, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... with resounding galleries, and dismal state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and encounter any number of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little originality, and "walk" in a beaten track. Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks in the floor from which the blood ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... the motions of the conical pendulum or governor reducible to the same laws which ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... is obstruction of so large a number of the ducts converging to the root of the extremity or part that but little relief through collateral trunks is possible. The affected part becomes swollen and hardened, and sometimes attains an enormous size. It is neither reducible by position nor pressure. There is a corresponding dilatation and multiplication of the blood-vessels with the connective-tissue hypertrophy. The muscles waste, the skin becomes coarse and hypertrophied. The swollen limb presents immense lobulated masses, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... chapter, to the 8th Song Without Words of Mendelssohn. If the student, in analyzing the melody of that composition, will endeavor to penetrate some of the clever disguises employed by the composer (for the sake of Variety), he will find the whole piece reducible to a very few melodic figures, announced at or near the beginning. See also No. 45 (C major), No. 36, No. 26. Also Schumann, op. 68, No. 7, No. 8, No. 18, No. 23. Also Beethoven, pianoforte sonata, op. 10, No. 2, last movement; op. 26, ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... Bodies, I must subjoyn some cases wherein I (who am somewhat backwards to admit Observations for Universal) had the Curiosity to discover, that the Experiments would not Uniformly succeed, and of these Exceptions, the chief that I now remember, are reducible to the ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... Association has nothing to do with this. It knows its function to be the investigation of facts, and of facts only; and, as was said, no sect was ever yet framed on undoubted facts. Now what are the facts of Spiritualism up to this date? They are reducible to two:—1st. The continued life and individuality of the spirit body of man after it has quitted its body of flesh; and, 2nd. Its communion with spirits still in the flesh, under certain conditions, by ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... wisely decided to say nothing about the escapade of Hawksley and Kitty Conover, since it had terminated fortunately. Bernini had telegraphed the gist of the adventure. He could readily understand Hawksley's part; but Kitty's wasn't reducible to ordinary terms of expression. The young chap had run wild because his head still wobbled on his shoulders and because his isolation was beginning to scratch his nerves. But for Kitty to run wild with him offered a blank wall to speculation. (As if he could ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rain suggested—and from which broader conceptions proceeded and grander ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... pulverulent texture, and with an earthy fracture. It varies in its purity, being sometimes almost wholly composed of carbonate of lime, and at other times more or less intermixed with foreign matter. Though usually soft and readily reducible to powder, chalk is occasionally, as in the north of Ireland, tolerably hard and compact; but it never assumes the crystalline aspect and stony density of limestone, except it be in immediate contact with some mass of igneous rock. By means ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... are reducible to one of two kinds: either they are acts of creation, effecting a new result, or they are acts of repetition. Acts of repetition tend rapidly to become habits; and they may be performed without ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... secondly, that it shows every appearance of having remembered; thirdly, that no other hypothesis except memory can be brought forward, so as to account for the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, which is not easily reducible to an absurdity. Beyond this we do not care to go, and must allow those to differ from us who require ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... Roger de Coverley's conciliatory view, that there is much to be said on both sides. But this logical rule supposes that, in point of fact, the two principles apply to the same case, and are mutually exclusive. I also think that the habit of taking for granted that social problems are reducible to such an alternative, is the source of innumerable fallacies. I hold that, as a rule, any absolute solution of such problems is impossible; and that a man who boasts of being logical, is generally announcing his deliberate intention to be one-sided. He is confusing the undeniable canon ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... culmination, without wasteful prodigality or confusing want of symmetry, constitute Composition, which is to the structure of a treatise what Style—in the narrower sense—is to the structure of sentences. How far Style is reducible to law will be examined in the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... language but with the earlier forms of his own mother tongue. The study will prove profitable and stimulating in proportion as close and constant comparison is made of the old with the new. The guiding principles in such a comparison are reducible chiefly to two. These are (1)the regular operation of phonetic laws, resulting especially in certain Vowel Shiftings, and (2)the alterations in form and syntax that are produced ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... they attach to errors which possess all the means of distraction, that scarcely ever fail to put the mind of man into a state of combustion. In short, nothing is more easy than to convince ourselves that imaginary systems, not reducible to comprehension, which are always painted under terrific aspects, must act upon the imagination in a very lively manner, must sooner or later produce disputes—engender enthusiasm—give birth to fanaticism—end ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... be thought to be always an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of pains-taking; this good quality being involved in all "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history especially, and in all those complex subjects ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... representation, which is a purely psychological phenomenon, and a cerebral state which is a material one, and reducible to movement, is insisted upon; and it is declared that these two orders of phenomena are ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... gardening are reducible to three heads: the contrasts, the management of surprises and the concealment of the bounds. "Pray, what is it you mean by the contrasts?" "The disposition of the lights and shades."—"'Tis the colouring then?"—"Just that."—"Should not variety be one of the rules?"—"Certainly, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... of my sort cannot help but tend towards simplification, towards making all life turn upon some one dominant idea, complex perhaps in its reality but reducible at last to one consistent simple statement, a dominant idea which is essential as nothing else is essential, which makes and sustains and justifies. This is perhaps the innate disposition of the human mind, at least of the European mind—for I have some doubts about the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... that," said Madame de Villefort; "but I have a passion for the occult sciences, which speak to the imagination like poetry, and are reducible to figures, like an algebraic equation; but go on, I beg of you; what you say interests ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... what we understand by the fine arts, as painting, and poetry, relative perfection is only the result of repeated efforts in successive periods, and that what has been once well done, constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical, or definite, but depends on feeling, taste, and genius, very soon becomes stationary, or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... has been proposed, and we shall not shrink from considering it. The scheme of Sir Robert Peel is reducible to a few points, which we shall now proceed to review seriatim. First—let us regard it with a view to its nature; secondly, as to its necessity under ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... calling it a spiritual substance, he was probably simply protesting that there was something living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all his thoughts and actions. It was he that had them and did them; and this self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered very little what the substance ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the different State courts in the United States, while recognizing "foreign judgments in personam" which were reducible to money terms as affording a basis for actions in debt, originally accorded them generally only the status of prima facie evidence in support thereof, so that the merits of the original controversy could always be opened. When offered in ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... composition of dances, it is impossible for a professor of this art, to make any figure without a competent stock of original ideas, reducible into practice. A dance should be a kind of regular dramatic poem to be executed by dancing, in a manner so clear, as to give to the understanding of the spectator no trouble in making out the meaning of the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... the long run, are always reducible to one form. Otherwise trustworthy witnesses affirm that such and such events took place. These events are inexplicable, except the agency of "spirits" is admitted. Therefore "spirits" were ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the universe to his body, finishes the comparison by presuming the existence in the universe of a soul similar to that which he supposes to be the principle of his own life and thought; that thus all the arguments in support of the existence of God are reducible to an analogy all the more false because the term of ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... such empirical collections are not reducible to a science. They are composed of notions, taken from various sciences and teachings, and their philosophical and scientific principles are to be found in them. To undertake the construction of a scientific theory of the different arts, would be to wish to reduce to the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... by inch, the slow decline of the art. The essence of it—the despotic central idea—was that of organic unity both in the thought and the building. From that time, the universe has steadily become more complex and less reducible to a central control. With as much obstinacy as though it were human, it has insisted on expanding its parts; with as much elusiveness as though it were feminine, it has evaded the attempt to impose on it a single ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... human, or non-human, separable souls, or discarnate spirits which have never inhabited a body; a sharp distinction is often drawn between these two classes, notably by the Melanesians, the West Africans and others; the Arab jinn, for example, are not reducible to modified human souls; at the same time these classes are frequently conceived as producing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... are among all nations applied with so great latitude, that they are not easily reducible under any regular scheme of explication: this difficulty is not less, nor perhaps greater, in English, than in other languages. I have labored them with diligence, I hope with success; such at least as can be expected in a task, which no man, however learned or sagacious, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... objective.—Association: its role reduced to a single question, the formation of new combinations.—The principal intellectual factor is thinking by analogy. Why it is an almost inexhaustible source of creation. Its mechanism. Its processes reducible to ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... an expression In her brow's undisturbed self-possession Amid the Court's scoffing and merriment, As if from no pleasing experiment She rose, yet of pain not much heedful So long as the process was needful,— 110 As if she had tried in a crucible, To what "speeches like gold" were reducible, And, finding the finest prove copper, Felt the smoke in her face was but proper; To know what she had not to trust to, Was worth all the ashes and dust too. She went out 'mid hooting and laughter; Clement Marot stayed; I followed after, And asked, as a grace, ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... re-appearance of Elvira in the habit of a nun, form, I believe, the only important points in which the play of Mr. Sheridan deviates from the structure of the original drama. With respect to the dialogue, his share in its composition is reducible to a compass not much more considerable. A few speeches, and a few short scenes, re-written, constitute almost the whole of the contribution he has furnished to it. The manuscript- translation, or rather imitation, of the "Spaniards in Pern," which he used as the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... had foiled my intelligence in the unravelled Sibyl Book of Nature were mysteries strange to every man's normal practice of thought, even if reducible to the fraudulent impressions of outward sense; for illusions in a brain otherwise healthy suggest problems in our human organization which the colleges that record them rather guess at than solve. But the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it was added, M. Madeleine could make his appearance at Laffitte's any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, "these two or three millions" were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Cathedrals appear to have been constructed in their original plans upon similar rules." White's Classical Essay on Architecture compares the Norman with the Gothic, where he says: "In what is usually called the Norman period, the general proportions and outlines of the Churches are reducible to certain rules of setting out by the plain Square. As Architecture progressed the Square gradually disappeared, and the proportion of general outline, as well as of detail, fell in more and more with applications of the Equilateral Triangle, till the art, having ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... hidden secrets of nature, but explained them with ease, teaches that the power and nature of the Gods is not to be discerned by the senses, but by the mind; nor are they to be considered as bodies of any solidity, or reducible to number, like those things which, because of their firmness, he calls [Greek: Steremnia];[88] but as images, perceived by similitude and transition. As infinite kinds of those images result from innumerable individuals, and centre in the Gods, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... in respect to which is held by himself, and by others, to raise him to the level of Descartes or Leibnitz. Of course the first step was to approach the phenomena of human character and social existence with the expectation of finding them as reducible to general laws as the other phenomena of the universe, and with the hope of exploring these laws by the same instruments of observation and verification as had done such triumphant work in the case of the latter. Comte separates the collective facts of society and history from the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... conceivable, but most will be reducible to one or other of these. We may perhaps add that, when the revelation is given for the sake of others, this purpose might be frustrated, were not a substantial fidelity of expression and utterance also secured. This would involve, at least, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... is, Phaedrus; such a principle exists in the doctrine of Value—truly explained. The question from which all Political Economy will be found to move—the question to which all its difficulties will be found reducible—is this: What is the ground of exchangeable value? My hat, for example, bears the same value as your umbrella; double the value of my shoes; four times the value of my gloves; one twentieth of the value of this watch. Of these several relations of value, what is the sufficient cause? ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... such. Again, certain attachments equally old, and, to all appearance, equally venerable, never seem to win any recognized official status; while a chance-sprung acquaintance now two months born, steps into the place which by right belongs to the senior. There is no law reducible to print ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... made himself remarkable chiefly by his triumphs over vice, falsehood, hatred and the servile spirit of his age. He endeavored to explain the reason for Christianity in the world. He longed for a positive religion. His philosophy is reducible to a philosophy of nature, which has quite a different meaning from that of Schelling, for, with Hegel, it is only the expression of the passage to another being; and to the philosophy of the mind, which considers ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on the one hand originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand remains proof against all attempts ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... curious circumstance if all indusiate ferns were to be found reducible to a marginal production of the reproductive apparatus. I will bear this in mind, as certain forms of Pteris or its affinities lead me to suspect that in these tribes the indusium may be a long way from ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... excitation. Perpetual motion, as well as eternal rest, may bring about the engulfment of the self in the object. The most diverse types of religious emotions, IN SO FAR AS THEY PRESENT VARIATIONS IN THE DEGREE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, are thus seen to be reducible to the same psychological basis. The circle, no less than the point, is the symbol of the One, and the "devouring unity" that lays hold on consciousness from the loss of the feeling of transition comes in the unrest of enthusiasm no less than in the blissful ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... of its physical properties as it is that freezing is a physical property of water. If such an hypothesis should prove to be the true one, then the problem of explaining life would be a chemical one, for all vital properties would be reducible to the properties of a chemical compound. It would then only be necessary to show how such a compound came into existence and we should have explained life. Nor would this be a hopeless task. We are well acquainted with forces adequate to the formation of chemical compounds. If the force ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... be proper not to reduce all the phenomena of paramnesia to the same conditions. Only a limited number of them seem to be so reducible. Impressions often occur which one is inclined to attribute to illusory memory, merely to discover later that they were real but unconscious memory; the things had been actually experienced and the events ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden |
