"Complexity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... simplicity he was unable to comprehend the complexity of feminine emotions engendered by the exigencies of the more artificial and suppressed conditions of life as forced ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... him from sloth and sensuality. The town was filled with a turbulent population of many different tribes, and the work of the European officials was exacting and difficult. But at the same time it gave unique opportunities for an able man to learn the complexity of the Indian problem; and the knowledge which John Lawrence acquired there proved of incalculable value to him when he ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... in touching the goal; but somehow these smart hits disturbed rather than amused her. Knight's complexity was a puzzle to her. She could not understand, despite his explanations, why these fireworks of dexterity were worth while. Knight was a brave figure of romance. She did not want her hero turned into an intriguer, no ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... recently that some dim perception of this complexity had begun to dawn upon her, athwart the sunshine of her life as bride and queen. When she had first landed on this fabled island she had been too much under the influence of the glamour with which her dreams had invested Cyprus during the years of her betrothal for any serious study of conditions, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Everything in that old world would appear to have been clean and obvious. A good man was a good man; a bad man was a bad man. For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel; for the novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant landscape unpleasant. Hence they had ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in silent and curious expectation, Alexander closely examined the knot, looking in vain for some beginning or end to its complexity. The thing perplexed him. Was he who had never yet failed in any undertaking to be baffled by this piece of rope, this twisted obstacle in the way of success? At length, with that angry impatience which was a leading element in his character, he drew his sword, and with one vigorous ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Physics; Biology embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Chemistry; and no biological generalization will enable us to predict the infinite specialities produced by the complexity of vital conditions. So Social Science, while it has departments which in their fundamental generality correspond to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the human race as a whole, and, as ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... not simple to me, Rita," he said, softly, "nor are your affairs. They concern me very much. You are so important to me. I have told you that. Don't you see how true it is? You are a strange complexity to me—wonderful. I'm mad over you. Ever since I saw you last I have been thinking, thinking. If you have troubles let me share them. You are so much to me—my only trouble. I can fix your life. Join it with mine. I need you, and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi is quite inadequate. Music is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which we receive from contemplating a mathematical process of great complexity is altogether different from that of music. Highly complex as are the mathematical relations of the vibrations which convey musical tones from the instrument to the ear the final result of those relations, the impression on the rods of Corti's organ ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... walking backward, a shot-loaded quirt raised admonishingly to the chin of Subrosa who walked stiff-legged and reluctant, his white-lashed, blue eyes rolling fearsomely, his nostrils belling in loud snorts of protest. A complexity of emotions stirred Subrosa. Afraid to lunge forward, hating to walk circumspectly, eager for the race yet dreading the discipline of rein and whip, Subrosa yielded perforce to the inevitable. As his heels flicked over the low doorsill he swung round and landed one final kick against the ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... magnates of the city bourgeoisie—was quite without any cultural direction at all. The chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity, and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so that devotion to a theory or a candidate ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... moral offenses. It must not be assumed that every person dying with considerable matter belonging to the lower astral level still within his emotional body will necessarily pass through such experiences. It should never be forgotten that we are dealing with a matter of the utmost complexity and that even the most exhaustive description in print would present only a fragment of the truth. The conditions of consciousness on any subplane vary as individuals vary. Some people on the lowest astral level are wholly unconscious of their surroundings. Another variation is that some people ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... from me to seek complexity in so simple a soul as was that of this young Hungarian peasant girl. Elsa Kapus had no thought of self-analysis; complicated sex and soul problems did not exist for her; she would never have dreamed of searching the deep-down emotions of her heart and of dragging them out for her mind to scrutinize. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... little shop he projected and the need of a horse and cart.... And that absurd state of affairs must have gone on for days and days. I see this little lady, hovering about him and trying to amuse him, too dainty to understand his complexity and too tender to let him go. And he, you know, hypnotised as it were by his earthly position, went his way with her hither and thither, blind to everything in Fairyland but this wonderful intimacy that had come to him. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... of hopeless vanity to attempt to describe the many varieties of coral and fish and crabs and strange grotesque creatures low in the scale of life which are unceasingly at work within "coo-ee." The complexity of the subject from a scientific aspect is sufficient justification for reluctance to set down anything beyond casual experiences and personal observation, and the record of ever-recurring pleasure obtained from the delights of the marine garden. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... symbolised in the cult of its patron deity. Religion to him, clearly, could hardly be a thing apart, dwelling in the internal region of the soul and leaving outside, untouched by the light of the ideal, the whole business and complexity of the material side of life; to him it was the vividly present and active soul of his corporate existence, representing in the symbolic forms of ritual the actual facts of his experience. What he re-enacted periodically, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... roof, and these were all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with fine copper and silver arabesques of amazing complexity. Every minutest architectural detail had been carved out of the solid gold dyke that had formed the city; nothing had been added to fill out any portion. The imagination was staggered at thought of the infinite skill and labor required for such a task. The creation of this city ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... splendours of autumn—from the warm bath, the luxurious bed, and breakfast, she had but lately enjoyed, to these artistic memories that ran through her brain, as she glanced from side to side, reminded now of Turner, now of DeWint, revelling in the complexity of her own being. Her conscience gave her no trouble; it had never been more friendly. Her husband and she had come to an understanding; they were in truth more than quits. There was to be no divorce—and ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... little bewildered by the complexity of cars, I apprehended the general principle of the machine. I made a diagram, and understood it much better. "You have merely improved on the idea of my moving faster than the train when I was going to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... would really be such fun to take Claude away from that silly Charmian creature in the very hour of a triumph. Yet she did not wish to see Charmian even the neglected wife of a great celebrity. Her feelings were rather complex. But she had always been at home with complexity. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn something of the mystery and complexity of life's purposes. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... he threw another and another, and they stood enchanted as the beautiful circles widened away from their centers and crossed each other in ever-increasing complexity of curve. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... life will become more largely mental. The increasing complexity of human relations and the more delicate adjustments that these relations require will bring a new and finer social order that will make ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... future thinking and speaking. The ideas become less simple and distinct. Just as fast as the mind advances in the knowledge of things, language keeps pace with the ideas, and even goes beyond them, so that in process of time a single term will not unfrequently represent a complexity of ideas, one of which will signify a ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... respect to these two practices, but only because of the large number of abstentions—merely 29 per cent. voted in Rome, 38 per cent. in Naples, and in Turin scarcely more. The people were tired of the excessive complexity and dissimulation of Italian politics. There was a good deal of violence—in Milan, Florence, Bologna and Sicily the riots were sometimes fatal—and with such an electorate, more extensive than heretofore, so that symbols had ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... translate touch into vision, as it developed into the lenses and humours of the eye.[2] Special organs of sense and the lower grades of perception and judgment were slowly developed through countless ages, in company with purely physical variations of shape of foot, or length of neck, or complexity of stomach, or thickness of hide. At length there came a wonderful moment—silent and unnoticed, as are the beginnings of all great revolutions. Silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh like a thief in ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... Coptic examples are, like all tapestry, built up by interweaving various threads upon warp-strings stretched in close parallel lines. By varying the colour of the threads that are thus manipulated upon the warp, patterns of any degree of complexity can be built up directly by hand, and without the assistance of any further mechanical contrivance. The peculiarity of this ancient weaving is that the patterns are frequently woven upon the warp-threads ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one would expect from an income of 3000 marks.[13] But the requirements of the population are not mediaevally simplified—they could not be, in view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial and professional vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as much ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work—a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a humming top that was required, but a ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... his study of the depositions, he sat awhile pondering over his own discoveries since he had been called into the case by the husband of the dead woman. These discoveries, due apparently to chance, invested the murder with a complexity which stimulated all the penetrative and analytical powers of his fine mind, because they brought with them the realization that he was face to face with one of those rare crimes where the solution has to be unravelled from a tangle of false circumstances, which, ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... necessary, for had there been any detail left out, a doubt might arise respecting it which would destroy the whole spiritual structure of Judaism. This is not a matter which philosophical reasoning can think out for itself. As in the natural generation of plant and animal the complexity of elements and conditions is so great that a slight tilting of the balance in the wrong direction produces disease and death, so in the spiritual creation of Israel the ceremonies and the laws are all absolutely essential to the whole, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... longer; I should have welcomed more complexity of feeling. The month which had passed since we parted had brought to her many reflections, no doubt, and as a presumable result of them a fixed attitude of mind. William Adolphus would have said (and very likely did say to Victoria) that she had got used ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... within its dykes, the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... be estimated by superficial understandings. An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is, however, sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces and put together, at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance, and complexity, composed of far other wheels and springs and balances and counteracting and cooeperating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... than we can conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... there are a great many. Poets and musicians use either, or a compound of both, and this compound is very attractive to youth and their teachers as well as to the vulgar. But our State in which one man plays one part only is not adapted for complexity. And when one of these polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and his poetry we will show him every observance of respect, but at the same time tell him that there is no room for his kind in our State; we prefer the rough, honest poet, ...
— The Republic • Plato
... iron laws" as the development of any other body. These laws always lead us back to the same simple principles, the elementary principles of physics and chemistry. The various phenomena of nature only differ in the degree of complexity in which the different forces work together. Each single process of adaptation and heredity in the stem-history of our ancestors is in itself a very complex physiological phenomenon. Far more intricate are the processes of human embryology; in these are condensed and comprised ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... upon the complications of an unknown scheme of life, it was I, the castaway, who was the savage, the simple innocent child of nature. Those people were obviously more civilized than I was. They had more rites, more ceremonies, more complexity in their sensations, more knowledge of evil, more varied meanings to the subtle phrases of their language. Naturally! I was still so young! And yet I assure you, that just then I lost all sense of inferiority. And why? Of course the carelessness ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... attention to the American section if I keep on giving pages to this section. But in spite of their great merit, the work of Kallstenius, Schultzberg, Carlberg, and Osslund will have to go with only meager reference. Osslund's pictures are somewhat startling at first, owing to a complexity of technical treatment. He does not seem to be working in the right medium, for I believe his Japanesque landscapes could be far more sympathetically presented in watercolour. Of the group comprising ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... has its own regulating centre, the size of the area representing any group depending upon the character and complexity of the movements performed by the muscles, rather than upon the amount of muscular tissue that is governed by the centre—for example, the centre for the mouth, tongue, and vocal cords is larger than that for the muscles ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... senses, or their power of resistance"; but not, however, going so far as to paralyze these two powers, or so far as to render us incapable of striving, either to know the object, or to resist the impression it makes on us. There is in the phenomena a complexity which we cannot retrace to unity without driving the intuitive ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... climates would be distributed with greater regularity, and the perturbations of climate would be comparatively small and regular; though even under such circumstances there would still exist a tendency to discontinuity and complexity of movements from that influence of rain, the peculiar character of which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... oversight, UNMIK continues to work with the European Union and Kosovo's local provisional government to accelerate economic growth, lower unemployment, and attract foreign investment to help Kosovo integrate into regional economic structures. The complexity of Serbia and Montenegro political relationships, slow progress in privatization, legal uncertainty over property rights, scarcity of foreign-investment and a substantial foreign trade deficit are holding back the economy. Arrangements with the IMF, especially ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... transition from heroic to democratic ages is to transfer both in war and in politics the decisive influence from the individual to the mass, from the protagonist to the private; and modern warfare, with its complexity and its science, has become mainly a matter of mechanics. Its hero is the mob, and its generals fight far away in the rear of the line of battle; even the telescope has given place to the telephone. Individual ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... put forth by Darwin, I venture to affirm that, so far as my knowledge goes, all the ingenuity and all the learning of hostile critics have not enabled them to adduce a solitary fact, of which it can be said, this is irreconcilable with the Darwinian theory. In the prodigious variety and complexity of organic nature, there are multitudes of phenomena which are not deducible from any generalisations we have yet reached. But the same may be said of every other class of natural objects. I believe that astronomers cannot yet get the moon's motions ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... into the apparatus a quantity of air strictly in accordance with the volume of acetylene made —a pair of meters geared together, one for the gas, the other for the air—and this would introduce extra complexity and extra expense. On the whole the idea cannot be recommended, and the action of the British Home Office in prohibiting the use of all such mixtures except those unavoidably produced in otherwise good generators, or in burners of the ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... feelings—are at once more lively and more demonstrative in youth, and thus it is that in youth the reform spirit is at its height and recedes as time goes on. What we call "experience" chills enthusiasm and passion, but though hope deferred and a realization of the complexity of human affairs has a moderating, inhibiting result, there is as much or more importance to be attached to bodily changes. If you could attach to the old man's experience and knowledge the body of youth, with its fresher arteries, more resilient muscles and joints, its ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the economist, of the subtle, complicated structure of the breathing, energetic, restless world of men; I say, let him take in and master the vastness of the view thus afforded him of Nature, its infinite complexity, its awful comprehensiveness, and its diversified yet harmonious colouring; and then, when he has for years drank in and fed upon this vision, let him turn round to peruse the inspired records, or listen to the authoritative teaching of Revelation, the book of Genesis, or the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... chief Barnacles being rather hurried (for they had it in hand just then to send a mail or two which was in danger of going straight to its destination, beating about the seas like the Flying Dutchman, and to arrange with complexity for the stoppage of a good deal of important business otherwise in peril of being done), went their several ways; with all affability conveying to Mr and Mrs Meagles that general assurance that what they had been doing there, they had been doing at a sacrifice for Mr and Mrs Meagles's good, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... hour the attractiveness of that lady which held the mirror to his features was paramount. But he had passionate snatches when the magnetism of the flyer drew him in her wake. Further to add to the complexity, he loved his liberty; he was princelier free; he had more subjects, more slaves; he ruled arrogantly in the world of women; he was more himself. His metropolitan experiences did not answer to his liking the particular question, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and in the very air that all breathe. This it is which kills, or withers, or corrupts. Socrates, indeed, might walk arm and arm with Hygeia, whilst pestilence, with a thousand furies running to and fro, and clashing against each other in a complexity and agglomeration of horrors, was shooting her darts of fire and venom all around him. Even such was Milton; yea, and such, in spite of all that has been babbled by his critics in pretended excuse for his damning, because for them too profound, excellencies,—such was Shakspeare. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... should march into a fashionable shop and see that he got what he wanted and the worth of his money! There had been no rashness in the hope that the unexplored treasure might be a rich one. The man's simplicity was an actual complexity. He had a boyish eye and a grin, but there was a business-like line about his mouth which was strong enough to have been hard if it had ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... tibia in a more important position than those of any other bone. Evidence of this implication was in my experience more frequent here than in any other situation. This may in part be attributable to the complexity of structure of this epiphysis, and perhaps more correctly to the influence of its irregular outline in favouring lateral forms of impact on the part of the bullet and consequent increase in the ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... into thirty-three groups. Many of these groups are analogous, so that on analysing them still further we find that all the known crystals may be classed in six separate systems according to their planes of symmetry, and all stones of the same class, no matter what their variety or complexity may be, show forms of the same group. Beginning with the highest, we have—(1) the cubic system, with nine planes of symmetry; (2) the hexagonal, with seven planes; (3) the tetragonal, with five planes; (4) the rhombic, with three planes; (5) the monoclinic, with one plane; (6) the triclinic, ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... leather, the lavish mahogany, glowed responsive to the fingering sunlight, and the painted simulacra of his predecessors looked down almost benignantly from their gilded frames. The little cell behind the wainscoting, into which the increasing complexity of affairs had forced the recent executives, claimed him during most of his working hours; but it was as rightful tenant of this vast chamber that he felt most the governor of New York. It epitomized for him not merely the commonwealth ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... very honest grey eyes, and a robust cheerfulness brought back some affection for the erring Lewis. The problem was beyond her reconciling efforts, so the poor girl, torn between common sense and feeling, and recognizing with painful clearness the complexity of life, found ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... to happen to or be done by one individual. This in practice is found to be sufficient for the law courts and the purposes of daily life, which, being full of hurry and the pressure of business, can only tolerate compromise, or conventional rendering of intricate phenomena. When facts of extreme complexity have to be daily and hourly dealt with by people whose time is money, they must be simplified, and treated much as a painter treats them, drawing them in squarely, seizing the more important features, and neglecting all that does not assert ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... recognition of this relationship must not be regarded as an attempt unduly to narrow down the causation of changes in the birth-rate. The great complexity of the causes influencing the birth-rate is now fairly well recognized, and has, for instance, been pointed out by Goldscheid, Hoeherentwicklung und Menschenoekonomie, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... less saw her at moments as even more agitated than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry New England brightness—he had "sampled" all the shades of the American complexity, if complexity it were—had its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough of it. He ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... those governments, which are formed without system, which exist by habit, and which are confused with the multitude, and with the complexity of their pursuits. What now stands as government in France is struck out at a heat. The design is wicked, immoral, impious, oppressive; but it is spirited and daring; it is systematic; it is simple in its principle; it has unity and consistency in perfection. In that country entirely ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military zone had been declared, because as yet there was no war! When would ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... may have been with Bosambo, but it is more likely that he had carefully thought out every detail of his scheme. Sanders at the moment was collecting hut tax along the Kisai river and there was also, as Bosambo well knew, a murder trial of great complexity waiting for his decision at Ikan. A headman was suspected of murdering his chief wife, and the only evidence against him was that of the under wives to whom she displayed much ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... done so much to create modern culture for Europe, should so quietly have accepted a retrogressive revolution. Yet, when we look closer, this is not surprising. The Italians were fatigued with creation, bewildered by the complexity of their discoveries, uncertain as to the immediate course before them. The Renaissance had been mainly the work of a select few. It had transformed society without permeating the masses of the people. Was ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... unfitted to function as the cerebrum of Empire. It must be relieved of burdens which in the complexity of modern politics it is no longer able to bear. How is this to be done? In one way and in one way only, by leaving local business to local bodies. But that is Home Rule, or, as the learned, envisaging the idea from another point ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is, on the whole, easier to run couplet into couplet than to run quatrain into quatrain; but the couplet seems hardly suitable for an English lyrical poem of any length, the very notion of lyrical poetry apparently involving a complexity which can only be represented by rhymes recurring at intervals. In the case of one of the three poems written by Horace in the measure called the greater Asclepiad, ("Tu ne quoesieris,") I have adopted the couplet; in another ("Nullam, Vare,") ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the— the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at last, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... on other occasions, I was struck by the complex and very various forms assumed by the ganoid scales of the Wealden. Throughout the Oolitic system generally, including the Lias, there obtains a singular complexity of type in these little glittering tiles of enamelled bone, which contrasts strongly with the greatly more simple style which obtained among the ganoids of the Palaeozoic period. In many of these ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... accomplished. Realist and psychologist, symbolist and mystic by turns, and first and always a poet, he has been compared successively to Bourget and Maupassant, Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, Theophile Gautier and Catulle Mendes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Baudelaire. Such complexity of style is the outcome of his cosmopolitan taste in literature, and his tendency to assimilate for future use whatever pleases him in each successive author. Shakespeare and Goethe, Keats and Heine, Plato and Zoroaster, figure among the names which throng his pages; while ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... together, wherein inherited qualities are crossbred, wherein special traits have accumulated in such a way as to produce the most original and the most sensitive of beings. As civilization increases, so does his complexity: with the result that man's originality strengthens and his sensitivity become keener; from which it follows that the more civilized he becomes, the greater his repugnance ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Stella is the picture which was stolen in 1911, but quickly recovered. It is part of the strange complexity of this world that it should equally contain artists such as Fra Angelico and thieves such as those who planned and carried out this robbery: nominally custodians of the museum. To repeat one of Vasari's sentences: "Some say that he never took up his brush without ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... admit annually, say, five per cent of those already naturalized, with their American children. The principle here seems to be that we can assimilate from any land in, and only in, proportion to the number already assimilated from that land. But the difficulty of applying such a test lies in the complexity of the assimilative process. No measure yet exists for assimilation. Anthropologists are convinced that various strains in the populations, for example of France, or Great Britain, which have been dwelling together for centuries, are not by any ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... exist among physical phenomena, that is, as fixed relations among variable forces. Human society has in it another element than mechanical causation or physical necessity, namely, the psychic factor, and this so increases the complexity of social phenomena that it is doubtful if we can formulate any such hard and fixed laws of social phenomena as of physical phenomena. This is not saying, however, that social phenomena cannot be understood and that there are ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... And though, on the one hand, he was suddenly exalted far beyond his hopes; yet on the other he was as suddenly cast down, and threatened to be for ever deprived of the bliss he had in view, the possession of which he coveted far more than wealth or grandeur. Additional complexity had been given to his position from the circumstance that, at De Gondomar's secret instance, of which, like all the rest, he was unaware, he had been appointed as officer in custody of Hugh Calveley, until the latter, who ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... principles laid down in the freedom manifesto, and boldly entered upon the policy of reaction and repression that it has ever since pursued. It now finds itself confronted by social and political problems of extraordinary difficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic cooeperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might, perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... may be required for the due execution of all the foregoing objects cannot be foreseen. It may exceed that for which your supplies are calculated, or, on the other hand, a less degree of the supposed complexity in the ground you will have traversed, along with the energy and diligence with which we rely on you for conducting these important services, may enable you to complete them within that period. In this latter ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... Musset says, what everybody who has read his brother's writings carefully will feel to be true, that neither in the hero nor any other single personage must we look for Alfred's entire individuality. In the complexity of his character and emotions, and the contradictions which they united, are to be found the eidolon of every young man in his collection, even "the two heroes of Les Caprices de Marianne, Octave and Coelio," says Paul, "although they are the antipodes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... were hideous and meaningless as well. The whole place was meaningless. It was the meaninglessness that seemed to leap out upon me wherever I turned my eyes. The fireplace astounded me. It was a mass of pillars and super-structures and carvings, increasing in complexity from within outwards, until it attained the appearance of an ornate temple in the centre of which burned a little coal. It was grotesque. On the topmost ledges of this monstrous absurdity stood two vases. They bulged like ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... assumption now, if never officially formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of Indians who claimed both a share in the administration ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... the German stage is ever to recuperate it must go back to the young Schiller, the young Goethe—the author of "Goetz"—and ever again to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing! There you will find set down principles of dramatic art which are adapted to the rich complexity of life in all its fullness, and which are potent to cope with ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... theatric air, in a manner that practically warns all other hands off the material for ever. At the same time I think I saw Miriam, and without a sacrifice of truth, that is of the particular glow of verisimilitude I wished her most to benefit by, in a complexity of relations finer than any that appear possible for the gentry ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... 'conscience' or 'moral sense,' not because I think it desirable to banish those words from popular terminology, but because I think that, in an attempt to present the principles of ethics in a scientific form, they introduce needless complexity and obscurity. ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... The complexity and volume of work which goes on at even a Divisional Headquarters, having dominion over about twenty thousand full-grown males, may be imagined; and that the bulk of such work is of a business nature, including much tiresome routine, is certain. Of the strictly ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... to progression. A monad, if no deviation in its structure profitable to it under its EXCESSIVELY SIMPLE conditions of life occurred, might remain unaltered from long before the Silurian Age to the present day. I grant there will generally be a tendency to advance in complexity of organisation, though in beings fitted for very simple conditions it would be slight and slow. How could a complex organisation profit a monad? if it did not profit it there would be no advance. The Secondary Infusoria differ but little from ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... becoming conventionalised. But Donatello would not permit his art to be divorced from appeals to reason and intellect; once started, his theory held its own. Donatello was bound by no laws; with all its cadence and complexity his art was unsuited to a canon as would be the art of music. He seems almost to have disregarded the ordinary physical limitations under which he worked. He had no "cant of material," and whether in stone, bronze, wood, or clay, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... the complexity of this bill and the delicate balances which it creates among competing economic interests, the committee will resist extensive amendment of this bill. On behalf of the committee I would urge all of my colleagues to vote ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... institutions. Readers of Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough are now in possession of facts which it would take a very long time to explain. They see that side by side with agricultural economics is agricultural religion, of great rudeness and barbarity, of considerable complexity, and bearing the stamp of immense antiquity. The same villagers who were the observers of those rules of economics which are thought to be due to Roman origin were also observers of ritual and usages ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... compare for complexity with any group of humans who have been collected into machine-like precision of operation. Take one time when an Ipplinger Cultural Contact Group was handed a Boswellister with V.I.P. connections and orders to put him to an ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... fishes, had arranged living vertebrates very much in the modern order. But the invertebrates were a vague and ill-assorted heap of animals. It was not recognised that among them there were many series of different grades of ascending complexity, and there was no well-known form to serve as a standard of comparison for all the others in the fashion that the body of man served as a standard of comparison for all vertebrates. Here and there, a few salient types such as insects and snails had been picked out, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... complexity of Duerer's ideas and their application was a natural result of their having been born of his experience. For excellence is extremely various, and widely scattered through the world. The simplicity of a true work of art results merely from some excellence having been singled out from all foreign ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... Commission of their number, if the Commons will meet them, Commission against Commission! Directly in the rear of which comes a deputation of Clergy, reiterating, in their insidious conciliatory way, the same proposal. Here, then, is a complexity: what will wise ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of surprises," Tallente declared. "I expected a miracle of complexity and I find you almost primitive." She laughed. "Then considering the sort of man you are, I ought to have gone up ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... consists of the buildings erected during or since the Renaissance (i.e. revival) period, and is marked by a return to the styles of past ages or distant countries for the architectural features and ornaments of buildings; and by that luxury, complexity, and ostentation which, with other qualities, are well comprehended under the epithet Modern. This group of buildings forms what is known as Renaissance architecture, and extends from the epoch of the revival of letters in the fifteenth ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... Cornal, "here's the makings of a hero." And he beamed almost with affection on Gilian, now in a stupor at the complexity his day's doings had brought ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... suggested by Mr. Wallace and by other critics that we have been too exclusively preoccupied with the idea of telepathy, that we have tried to force into that category phenomena which need a different or a further explanation. Considering the complexity of these phenomena there may well be some truth in this criticism, yet we should surely be unwise if we relaxed our insistence on the importance of telepathy, or the transference of thought or feeling from mind to mind without the agency of the recognized organs of sense as the very root ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... of Hawthorne's genius are also to be found in other points. He does not present the scene of life, the crowd of the world with its rich and varied fullness of interest, complexity of condition and movement, and its interwoven texture of character, event, and fate, such as the great novelists use; he has only a few individual figures, and these are simplified by being exhibited, not in their ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... that I can say. He remarks ('Oriental and Linguistic Studies,' 1873, p. 297), in speaking of Bleek's views: "Because on the grand scale language is the necessary auxiliary of thought, indispensable to the development of the power of thinking, to the distinctness and variety and complexity of cognitions to the full mastery of consciousness; therefore he would fain make thought absolutely impossible without speech, identifying the faculty with its instrument. He might just as reasonably assert that the human hand cannot act without a tool. With such a doctrine to start from, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... savages to adopt the strategy and discipline of modern armies. No accumulated laws, no well-tried methods existed for their aid. The elementary laws in each department were mostly undetected.' The guide of knowledge is verification. 'The complexity of phenomena is that of a labyrinth, the paths of which cross and recross each other; one wrong turn causes the wanderer infinite perplexity. Verification is the Ariadne-thread by which the real issues may be found. Unhappily, the process of verification is slow, tedious, ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... natives show substantial mental development, having a most complicated system of exogamy, and sometimes two personal names for each individual. Again, the Andamanese islanders, despite the extraordinary complexity of their agglutinative language, have no names for the numerals beyond two. [127] It is said that the Majhwar tribe can only count up to three, while among the Bhatras the qualification for being a village ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... into a single treatise, adopting the one last written as the groundwork, and incorporating with it as much of the two others as it had not completely superseded. I had also to unroll such of Bentham's involved and parenthetical sentences as seemed to overpass by their complexity the measure of what readers were likely to take the pains to understand. It was further Mr. Bentham's particular desire that I should, from myself, endeavour to supply any lacunae which he had left; ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... which, clinging not together in any sweet union of fellowship, blind and confuse us with their drifting masses, are all such essays in art; for an idea capable of quickening an artistic creation must be vitally One, and every great work, notwithstanding its variety and the manifold complexity of its parts, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that morality, like politics, is a matter in which, owing to the complexity of circumstances and motives, one can not establish any principles (p. 563), and in this he agrees with Bacon and Aristotle—there are no positive religious and moral laws which may create principles for correct moral ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... of thousands of observations made during long years by different men in far distant lands, the discussion of their probable errors, and their reduction to a common standard. The latter requires the use of the most refined methods of mathematical analysis; it is, as Newcomb says, "of a complexity beyond the powers of ordinary conception." In works on celestial mechanics a single formula ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... means of heating. These principles are embodied in the Franklin and Galton grates. A great many other grates have been suggested, and put on the market, but the principal objection to them is their complexity and expense, making their use a luxury not ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... "electricity" and "electrical force" to denote others; but it ceases to do so, if such a name implies the absurd assumption that either "electricity" or "vitality" is an entity, playing the part of a sufficient cause of electrical or vital phenomena. A mass of living protoplasm is simply a machine of great complexity, the total result of the work of which, or its vital phenomena, depend on the one hand upon its construction, and on the other upon the energy supplied to it; and to speak of "vitality" as anything but the names ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... shape, he began its elaboration. Pattern after pattern of graceful foliation emerged till the design assumed the intricate complexity ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... time, considering the complexity of the undertaking, the conversion of the power-plant was done and the repellers, already supposed the ultimate in protection, were reenforced by a ten-thousand-pound mass of activated copper, effective for untold millions of miles. Their monstrous pilot then set the bar ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... dog, laughing and swearing men as ensued beggars description. When there was some order restored, the pigs and dog tied up in the yard, the biggest of the darkeys, scraping his best bow, said, 'We jes' come, Mars' Cap'n, 'bout a little complexity 'long o' dat ar ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... demonstration of the earth's rotation. The principle of proof may be easily exhibited, though, like nearly all of the evidences of the earth's rotation, the complete theory of the matter can only be mastered by the aid of mathematical researches of considerable complexity. Suppose A B (Fig. 1) to be a straight rod in a horizontal position bearing the free pendulum C D suspended in some such manner as is indicated at C; and suppose the pendulum to be set swinging in the direction ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... electuary made up of varied savors and subtle colors, which can be more easily felt than measured or defined. Its very superiority consists in the complexity, the association of contraries, the skillful combination it implies. The man of to-day, fashioned by the historical and geographical influences of twenty countries and of thirty centuries, trained and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reason for every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types—and he never attempted steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... group, or a complete lattice round an individual body. Next, spikes or spines jut out from the lattice, partly for additional protection, partly to keep the little body afloat at the surface of the sea. In this way we get a bewildering variety and increasing complexity of forms, ascending in four divergent lines from the naked ancestral type to the extreme grace and intricacy of the Calocyclas monumentum or the Lychnaspis miranda. These, however, are rare specimens in the 4000 species of Radiolaria. ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... merely hovered. She had fancied that her resolve, once fairly taken, would not stumble over a simple matter of detail. But when she had tried a dozen times to begin the letter to Mr. Galbraith, the simplicities vanished and complexity stood in their room. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... nor of independence. He was contemporary with the first English publisher, Jacob Tonson. He was also contemporary with the notable reorganization of English prose which freed it from exaggeration, complexity, and obscurity; and he contributed not a little to the flexibility, charm, balance, and ease which have since characterized its best examples. He saw the rise of polite society in its modern sense; the development of the social resources ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... partially filled with oxide of iron and agate: the curvilinear lines show the course of the innumerable, concentric, concretionary zones of different shades of colour and of coarseness in the particles of tuff. The symmetry and complexity of the arrangement gave the surface an elegant appearance. It may be seen how obviously the fissures determine (or have been determined by) the shape, sometimes of the whole concretion, and sometimes only of its central parts. The fissures also determine the curvatures of the ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... stung her into passionate anger. She was no longer the reasonable and competent Gabriella, who had so successfully "managed her life"; she was primitive woman in the grip of primitive anger; and balance, moderation, restraint, had flown from her soul. The very mystery of her feeling, its complexity, its suddenness, its remorselessness—these emotions worked together to deepen the sense of insult, of injury, with ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow |
