"Gravitation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belief. They raced and chased to and fro, up, down and across, in circles, triangles, parabolas and rectangles, until it was fairly bewildering. Really, they seemed to move just as freely and certainly on the tree-trunk as if they were on the ground, with no such thing in sight as the law of gravitation. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... in which no outside advice can be of any avail because they will not take it even if it is offered. It is a life- and-death matter for their own wills to determine,—and no power, human or divine, can alter the course they elect to adopt. As well expect that God would revert His law of gravitation to save the silly suicide who leaps to destruction from tower or steeple, as that He would change the eternal working of His higher Spiritual Law to rescue the resolved Soul which, knowing the difference between good and evil, deliberately prefers evil. If an angel ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... the above remarks, I mean, with the editor's leave, to prove the necessity of keeping a friend in one's pocket, upon the principles of gravitation, according to Sir Isaac ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... of a chemical, origin. By the name mechanical are designated beds of mud, sand, or pebbles produced by the action of running water, also accumulations of stones and scoriae thrown out by a volcano, which have fallen into their present place by the force of gravitation. But the matter which forms a chemical deposit has not been mechanically suspended in water, but in a state of solution until separated by chemical action. In this manner carbonate of lime is occasionally precipitated upon the bottom of lakes in a solid form, as ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... examples of it will be found upon the grounds. The Mohammedan arch is suited better to materials, like wood and iron, which sustain themselves in part by cohesion, than to stone, which depends upon gravitation alone. Although it stands in stone in a long cordon of colonnades from the Ganges to the Guadalquivir, the eye never quite reconciles itself to the suggestion of untruth and feebleness in the recurved base of the arch. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of gravitation, or of inexplicable sounds, lights, and other occurrences in certain localities. These are just the things which Medicine Men, Mediums and classical Diviners have always pretended to provoke and produce by certain arts or rites. Secondly, whether ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... of finance, like the laws of military strategy, were never invented by anybody, any more than the law of gravitation or the law of electrical attraction and repulsion. They have all been learned by the experience and study of mankind since the dawn of civilization. All alike are parts of the great laws of nature. They should be carefully and diligently studied and taught in all the schools, ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... explanation. They provide external agents for what they call the centrifugal force. Some make the sun's rays keep the planets off, without a thought about what would become of our poor eyes if the push of the light which falls on the earth were a counterpoise to all its gravitation. The true explanation cannot be given here, for want ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Newton saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'Tis said (for I'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, call'd "gravitation"; And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... and distinctly assigned space to occupy in some forthcoming building, are these seemingly adult worlds. The astronomer has no means of recognizing their relative adolescence, except perhaps by making a distinction between the star clusters with the usual orbital motion and mutual gravitation, and those termed, we believe, irregular star-clusters of very capricious and changeful appearances. Thrown together as though at random, and seemingly in utter violation of the law of symmetry, they defy observation: such, for instance, are 5 M. Lyrae, 5 2 M. Cephei, Dumb-Bell, and some others. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... any ascetic feeling. It was more like a holiday spree as the result of discovering the schoolmaster Life with his cane to be a myth, and thereby being able to shake myself free from the petty rules of his school. If, on waking one fine morning we were to find gravitation reduced to only a fraction of itself, would we still demurely walk along the high road? Would we not rather skip over many-storied houses for a change, or on encountering the monument take a flying jump, rather than trouble to walk round it? That was why, with the weight of worldly ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... in large pores and rare bodies; and also that its density increases in receding from gross matter; so for instance as to be greater at the 1/100 of an inch from the surface of any body, than at its surface; and so on. To the action of this aether he ascribes the attractions of gravitation and cohoesion, the attraction and repulsion of electrical bodies, the mutual influences of bodies and light upon each other, the effects and communication of heat, and the performance of animal sensation and motion. David ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the American an entirely false idea of what he thinks the innate servility of the Englishman. He must remember that the aristocratic prestige is a growth of centuries, that it has come to form part of the atmosphere, that it is often accepted as unconsciously as the law of gravitation. This is a case where the same attitude in an American mind (and, alas, we occasionally see it in American residents in London) would betoken an infinitely lower moral and mental plane than it does in the Englishman. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Word in my pulpit. I have always held that the Bible is a self-evidencing book; God will take care of His Word if we ministers only take care to preach it. We are no more called upon to defend the Bible than we are to defend the law of gravitation. My beloved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester, has well said that if ministers, "instead of trying to prop the Cross of Christ, would simply point men to that Cross, more souls would be saved." The vast proportion of volumes of "Apologetics" are a waste of ink and paper. If they could ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... millions of tubular shapes, which chased each other more like sky-rockets than anything else to which I can compare them. The changes were as singularly beautiful as they were varied, in consequence of the difference in gravitation, and rapid evaporation, which was taking place before the waters reached the bottom. Dense clouds of vapour rose for a considerable height, mingling with the atmosphere, and presenting in their descent the most brilliant rainbows. From the rocky sides of the immense basin hung shrubs and ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... than in the case of the latter are the ominous forebodings of impending disaster which characterize Lenau's poems and correspondence. In a letter to his friend Karl Mayer he writes: "Mich regiert eine Art Gravitation nach dem Ungluecke. Schwab hat einmal von einem Wahnsinnigen sehr geistreich gesprochen.... Ein Analogon von solchem Daemon (des Wahnsinns) glaub' ich auch in mir zu beherbergen."[83] He is continually engaged in a gruesome self-diagnosis: ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... physical impulse, it is said, which is initiated anywhere on the earth, is felt to the extremities of our solar system—every motion of the smallest particle of matter communicating its effect, however inappreciable, to the most distant planet, and as far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character. Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human action, the results of which at any specific period ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... been reared on the farm, but be it known to all of us, our natural gravitation is ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... supposed necessary and universal truths, and assert that scientific observation is impossible unless such truths are already known or implied: which, to those who are not "pure metaphysicians," seems very much as if one should say that the fall of a stone cannot be observed, unless the law of gravitation is already in the mind of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... is precise and important, but you must not try to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.—This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Our Theory of Gravitation is as good as perfect: Lagrange, it is well known, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme, will endure forever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that it could not have been made on ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... said the malicious husband, who descried a most abominable bit of road ready for his purpose; and, suiting the action to the word, he put his spicy nags into a hand-canter. Bang went the springs together; and, despite of all the laws of gravitation, madame and I kept bobbing up and down, and into ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... political sense is meant a command imposed by a superior upon an inferior and sanctioned by a penalty for disobedience. But by the 'laws of nature' are meant merely certain uniformities among natural phenomena; for instance, the 'law of gravitation' means that every particle of matter does invariably attract every other particle of matter ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... experience which waits upon wilful wrong-doing, by the sense of sin. Such an emotion can never be inspired by an impersonal order with which we have come into conflict, but only by a personal Will against which we are conscious of having offended. The man who disregards the law of gravitation and falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin, experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation—the sensation, not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is God's holiness ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... danger." It is a magnificent animal, a model of tireless vigor in all its parts; a creature made to hurl itself head-foremost down appalling gulfs of space, and poise itself at the bottom as jauntily as if gravitation were but a bugbear of timid imaginations. I find myself unconsciously speaking about these plaster models as if they were the living animals which they represent; but the more one studies Mr. Kemeys's works, the more instinct with redundant and ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... way to do a kind and perfectly disinterested action and experience the glow of sheer happiness that it brings, in order to realize that you are dealing with a law of life that is as sure and unalterable as the law of gravitation. ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... all began to flap their hands, like young birds trying to fly; and Rollo said again, he wished, with all his heart, there was no gravitation; "for then," said he, "we should have strength enough ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... discoveries which have followed on the establishment of the modern scientific theory, which was arrived at in a different way, and has a different signification. Democritus also threw out in vague outline the idea of gravitation. But this was not science: it was guess-work; it afforded no ground on which the fabric of verified knowledge could be erected, and no sure method of obtaining ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... combination of intelligence with existence we may suppose to have existed from eternity. At the creation we may suppose that a portion of the Eon was separated from the intelligence, and it was ordained—it became a natural law—that it should have the properties of gravitation, etc.—that is, that it should give to man the ideas of those properties. The Eon in this state is matter in the abstract. Matter, then, is Eon in the simplest form in which it possesses qualities appreciable by the senses. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... story of the many led by the few. Always it had come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob. Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy. And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned. And there was autocracy again, and again ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... aspiration have sprung at any time, however remote, from the same stock as the orang and the chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of things,—a universal nebula, if you will,—in his secret soul he makes one exception—himself. That there is ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... of each special type or genus, be expanded into a general system for the origination or successive diversification of all species, and all special types or forms, from four or five remote primordial forms, or perhaps from one? We accept the theory of gravitation because it explains all the facts we know, and bears all the tests that we can put it to. We incline to accept the nebular hypothesis, for similar reasons; not because it is proved,—thus far it is wholly incapable of proof,—but because it is a natural theoretical ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... of "capture" of suns, planets, and satellites seems to me very beautifully worked out under the influence of gravitation and a resisting medium of cosmical dust—which explains the origin and motions of the moon as well as that of all the planets and satellites far better than Sir G. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... function. She prates about the laws of Nature in the presence of Him who, when He created the Universe, invented those very laws, and impressed them on His irrational creatures.—Does it never humble her to reflect that it was but yesterday she detected the fundamental Law of Gravitation? Does she never blush with shame to consider that for well nigh six thousand years men have been inquisitively walking this Earth's surface; and yet, that, one hundred years ago, the provident notions concerning fossil remains, and the Earth's structure, were such as now-a-days ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... visitors. In this dangerous business Andy himself took a part, and the girls gasped with dismay and later with admiration as the boy ran alongside a vicious looking animal for a few paces, then flung himself recklessly upon the beast's back and clung there, seemingly defying all the laws of gravitation. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... not more careful," she languidly made answer, "I am afraid that, owing to the laws of gravitation, a broken ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... conceive a durable state system in Europe under the new any more than the old dispensation without something that corresponds to equilibrium. An architect who should boastingly discard the law of gravitation in favor of a different theory would stand little chance of being intrusted with the construction of a palace of peace. Similarly, a statesman who, while proclaiming that the era of wars is not yet over, would deprive of strategic frontiers the pivotal states of Europe which are ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... The past is spread before us all and most of us spend our lives in learning those things which we do not need to know, but genius reaches out instinctively and takes only the vital detail, by some sort of spiritual gravitation goes directly to ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... philosopher, who visited the machine almost every day, and as often conversed with Redding about the new principle in mechanics which he had discovered and applied. The theory was specious, and yet opposed to it was the unalterable, ever-potent force of gravitation, which he saw must overcome all so called self-existant motion. The more he thought about it, and the oftener he looked at and examined Redding's machine, and talked with the inventor, the more confused did his mind become. At length, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... later conscience tells the truth to all; and the sooner the better, unless the soul arraigned is utterly weak, or else belongs essentially to the criminal classes, which require almost a miracle to reverse their evil gravitation. Marian Vosburgh was neither weak nor criminal at heart. Thus far she had yielded thoughtlessly, inconsiderately, rather than deliberately, to the circumstances and traditions of her life. Her mother had been a belle and something of a coquette, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... distribution tend to follow a social and political law of gravitation, in accordance with which members of the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will permit. This is characteristic ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... spending the evening, he never failed to go on afterwards to Odette. The interval of space separating her from him was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend, by an irresistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself. To be frank, as often as not, when he had stayed late at a party, he would have preferred to return home at once, without going so far out of his way, and to postpone their meeting until the morrow; but the very fact of his putting himself ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... other science, we must admit facts even when we cannot explain them. The facts of what we call gravitation are obvious, and any attempt to disregard them would result in disaster, yet no satisfactory explanation of gravitation has yet been discovered: many theories have been suggested, but no theory has yet been proved to be true. In the same way it may be necessary ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... forth the exact effect from every cause, and being, above all, questions of good or evil, reward or punishment, morality or immorality, etc., and acting as a great natural force above all such questions of human conduct. To those who still adhere to this conception, Karma is like the Law of Gravitation, which operates without regard to persons, morals or questions of good and evil, just as does any other great natural law. In this view the only "right" or "wrong" would be the effect of an action—that is, whether it was conducive to ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... skulls. The North has too generally allowed its strength to be divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun, which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the power which springs from concentration and the success which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... the whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse. The President is broken in body, and obstinate in spirit. Clemenceau is beaten for an office he did not want. Einstein has declared the law of gravitation outgrown and decadent. Drink, consoling friend of a Perturbed World, is shut off; and all goes merry ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... poured into our laps and seemed engaged in reconstructing the laws of gravitation. The table furniture was very uneasy, and it was no uncommon occurrence for a tea cup or a tumbler to jump from its proper place and turn a somersault before stopping. We had no severe storm on the voyage, though ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Planet, which had seemed to be beside him, appeared to swing about, so that it was beneath him. He knew that it was a change merely in his sensations. He was feeling the gravitation of the new world. It was pulling ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... attained perfection, we are not conscious of the share which reason has in its operation—it is so rapid that by no analysis can we detect the presence of reason in its action. Sir Isaac Newton seeing the apple fall, and thence 'guessing' at the law of gravitation, is a good instance ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... expressing the behaviour of gases under varying temperature and pressure assumes the form pv RT; so stated, this law is independent of chemical composition and may be regarded as a true physical law, just as much as the law of universal gravitation is a true law of physics. But this relation is not rigorously true; in fact, it does not accurately express the behaviour of any gas. A more accurate expression (see CONDENSATION OF GASES and MOLECULE) is (p a/v^2)(v ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... in private:—already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent;—else could I omit that strange creature Woollett, who existed in trying the question, and bought litigations?—and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen—with what deliberation would he wet ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Theories to Experience Origin of the Notion of the Attraction of Gravitation Notion of Polarity, how generated Atomic Polarity Structural Arrangements due to Polarity Architecture of Crystals considered as an Introduction to their Action upon Light Notion of Atomic Polarity applied to Crystalline Structure Experimental Illustrations ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... to go back in imagination to the days before men grasped the meaning of natural law! We take gravitation for granted but, when Newton first proclaimed its law, the artillery of orthodox pulpits was leveled against him in angry consternation. Said one preacher, Newton "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Stella fluttered away like the pretty butterfly that she was, leaving Constance to wonder at the natural gravitation of plungers in the money market toward plungers ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... says he, 'honest to Gosh'—Pete never used a cuss-word—'honest to Gosh,' says he; 'I dunno. The last I remember was thinkin' why this here law of gravitation couldn't be made to work as a man wanted it, when "bump" says somethin' behind me, and I went right along, as you see. I tried to figger it out, comin', but turning ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... story of Newton, who felt an apple fall upon him as he lay under a tree, and thought to himself: "Why did that apple fall?" Such was the simple origin of the theory of the gravity of bodies, and that of universal gravitation. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... out in that light. There is no darkness in which man can hide himself, when he leaves this world of shadows. A false theory, therefore, respecting God, can no more protect a man from the reality, the actual matter of fact, than a false theory of gravitation will preserve a man from falling from a precipice into a bottomless abyss. Do you come to us with the theory that every human creature will be happy in another life, and that the doctrine of future misery is false? We tell you, in reply, that ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... the Grand Junction Waterworks near at hand. Across Campden Hill Road is the reservoir of the West Middlesex Water Company, which, from its commanding elevation, supplies a large district by the power of gravitation. ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... preference to Newton's explanation; for, excepting the law of parsimony, there is certainly no other logical objection to the statement that the movements of the planets afford as good evidence of the influence of guiding angels as they do of the influence of gravitation. ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... with a mass of practical observations, which greatly helped the English mathematician when he dis-covered the existence of that interesting habit of falling objects which came to be known as the Law of Gravitation. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... thickness, the glass breaks. I also do not deny that the observation of such regularities, even when they are not without exceptions, is useful in the infancy of a science: the observation that unsupported bodies in air usually fall was a stage on the way to the law of gravitation. What I deny is that science assumes the existence of invariable uniformities of sequence of this kind, or that it aims at discovering them. All such uniformities, as we saw, depend upon a certain vagueness ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... from action to action, from progress to progress, with a rapidity dangerous while it dazzles; resembling in this the career of individuals impelled onward, first to obtain, and thence to preserve, power, and who cannot struggle against the fate which necessitates them to soar, until, by the moral gravitation of human things, the point which has no beyond is attained; and the next effort to rise is but the prelude of their fall. In such states Time indeed moves with gigantic strides; years concentrate what would be the epochs ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the first word of the kind that had ever passed between them. Yet neither showed surprise, nor did either change position. It was as though he had said that gravitation makes the apple fall, or that the earth was round, a thing they had both known for long, had become ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... of events is slow, like the working of the laws of gravitation generally. Certainly there has been but little change in the legal position of women since China was in its prime, until within the last half century. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of English and Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and wife ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... gradient, and all the exhilaration of the wide, wind-swept downland. But what had been to the unconscious merpussy nothing but a mutual accommodation imposed by a common lot—common subjection to the forces of gravitation and the extinction of friction by the reaction of short grass on leather—had been to her companion a phase of stimulus to the storm that was devastating the region of his soul; a new and prolonged peal of thunder swift on the heels of a blinding lightning-flash, and a deluge to follow such as a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... foot of the bed. I couldn't sleep an instant, my dear, if I thought that boy was in the upper berth; for I'd be sure of his tumbling out over you. Here, let me lay him down. [She lays the baby in the lower berth.] There! Now get in, Agnes—do, and leave me to my struggle with the attraction of gravitation. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... unholy smells were not in accord with the principles of hygiene. It dawned upon his mighty intellect that one flat stone would lie on top of another, and that a little mud, aided by Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravitation, would hold them together, and that walls could be built in the form of a quadrangle. Here was the birth of architecture. And thus, from the magical dreams of this unmausoleumed barbarian was evolved the home, the best and sweetest evolution of ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... mixture of elegant easy-chairs and drying oil-skin raiment, black tobacco pipes, books, musical instruments, fishing-tackle, mirth and evening firelight; all the gravitation of the premises was toward it—the Garrison guests yearned ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... apart Hugh and Ramsey were more consciously the prisoners, albeit the undaunted prisoners, of care and sorrow than of anything else. When their feeling for the river's lore drew them, by a spiritual gravitation, to a common centre—to learn, for instance, that Council Bend and Council Island were named for one of those historic "confabs" between the white man and the red which shouldered the red brother once and forever away from the sunrise and ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... desires may now learn something of these feeding laws in the same school that teaches her the law of gravitation or the rules for forming French plurals. Fortunately, also, the girls of to-day seem inclined to undertake such study. It is not too much to expect that the girl of the future will be able to set before her family meals scientifically planned or food wisely and economically ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... demonstration, to leap to comparisons that satisfy the heart while they leave the colder intellect only half convinced. When an elegant dilettante like Samuel Rogers is confronted with the principle of gravitation he gives ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... however, from his large blue eyes. After struggling violently to get over the rail of his crib, and falling heavily on the floor, he was wont to rise with a gasp, and gaze in bewilderment straight before him, as if he were rediscovering the law of gravitation. No phrenologist ever conceived half the number of bumps that were ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... which poets have celebrated in the "Pied Piper of Hamelin," whose music drew like the power of gravitation,—drew soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women and boys, rats and mice; or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pallbearers dance around the bier. This is a power of many degrees, and requiring in the orator a great range of faculty and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... extreme north of the actual workings, is supplied with water by a leat from the eastern Takwa rivulet. The twelve head of stamps, on Appleby's 'gravitation system,' are driven by a Belleville boiler and engine; this has the merit of being portable and the demerit of varying in effective power, owing to the smallness of the steam-chest. The battery behaves satisfactorily; ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... phenomena of the universe are bound by the universal law of cause and effect. The effect is visible or perceptible, while the cause is invisible or imperceptible. The falling of an apple from a tree is the effect of a certain invisible force called gravitation. Although the force cannot be perceived by the senses, its expression is visible. All perceptible phenomena are but the various expressions of different forces which act as invisible agents upon the subtle and imperceptible forms of matter. These invisible ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... buggy, because it will maintain its equilibrium without being held in position by shafts or other similar means. So far as contact with the road is concerned it is two-wheeled; and yet, in its relation to the force of gravitation upon which its statical stability depends, it is a four or six-wheeler according to the number of the small truck-wheels ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... one foot high, has now become two feet high, while it is unchanged in proportions and structure—what are the necessary concomitant changes that have taken place in it? It is eight times as heavy; that is to say, it has to resist eight times the strain which gravitation puts on its structure; and in producing, as well as in arresting, every one of its movements, it has to overcome eight times the inertia. Meanwhile, the muscles and bones have severally increased their ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... its advance? Judging by the past, and the change which is registered between that and the present, we know that it must be awake; judging by the immediate appearances, we should say that it was always asleep. Gravitation, again, that works without holiday for ever, and searches every corner of the universe, what intellect can follow it to its fountains? And yet, shyer than gravitation, less to be counted than the fluxions of sun-dials, stealthier ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... let it fall with a resounding thump that shook the ground. Abe stopped eating and watched every move in this remarkable performance. The ease with which the big Vermonter had so defied the law of gravitation with that unwieldly stick ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... Nature,—heat, light, electricity and gravitation,— are silent and invisible. We never see them; we only know that they exist by seeing the effects they produce. In all Nature the wonders of the "seen" are dwarfed into insignificance when compared with the majesty and ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... a ball of one hundred and twenty pounds, sufficient to crack the strongest embrasures, was on its way from some unknown region. An Armstrong gun capable of carrying ten miles had arrived or was about to arrive. No one inquired whether Governor Pickens had suspended the law of gravitation in South Carolina, in view of the fact that ordinarily an Armstrong gun will not carry five miles,—nor whether, in such case, the guns of Fort Sumter might not also be expected to double their range. Major Anderson was a Southerner, who would surrender rather than shed the blood of fellow-Southerners. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... cosmogonists say fossils were created, as we now see them, with a false resemblance to living beings{105}; what would the Astronomer say to the doctrine that the planets moved according to the law of gravitation, but from the Creator having willed each separate planet to move in its particular orbit? I believe such a proposition (if we remove all prejudices) would be as legitimate as to admit that certain groups of living and extinct organisms, in their ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... general statements, concerning the action of water in drained, and in undrained land, and of the effects of its removal, by gravitation, and by evaporation, are based on facts which have been developed by long practice, and on a rational application of well know principles of science. These facts and principles are worthy of examination, and they are set forth below, somewhat at length, especially ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... Boufflers. The descendants of those tiercelets are even now known in France under those names. Well, those who were in the secret of that domestic comedy laughed, as a matter of course, and it did not prevent the earth from moving according to the laws of gravitation. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... are reduced in somewhat the same proportion as the gravitation which binds them down,—I had almost said to earth,—which binds them down to brick, I mean. This decrease of responsibility must make them as light-hearted as the loss of gravitation makes ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... one-half, so that one hour under the old system will be equivalent to two; or if he is anticipating some joy, some diversion in the future, the same smart person will find a way to increase the speed of the earth so that the hours will be like minutes. Then he'll begin fooling with gravitation, and he will discover a new-fashioned lodestone, which can be carried in one's hat to counter-act the influence of the centre of gravity when one falls out of a window or off a precipice, the result of ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... to come; and when it does, he will have the heart and mind to fill it," said Jasper. "A soul that is true to what is best in life, becomes a power among men at last—it is spiritual gravitation. 'Tis current leads the river. You ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Factor. Resistance. How Resistance Affects Shape. Mass and Resistance. The Early Tendency to Eliminate Momentum. Light Machines Unstable. The Application of Power. The Supporting Surfaces. Area not the Essential Thing. The Law of Gravity. Gravity. Indestructibility of Gravitation. Distance Reduces Gravitational Pull. How Motion Antagonizes Gravity. A Tangent. Tangential Motion Represents Centrifugal Pull. Equalizing the Two Motions. Lift and Drift. Normal Pressure. Head Resistance. Measuring Lift and Drift. Pressure at Different Angles. Difference Between ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... for which the weakness and the need of the dependent creature call. Like the one force which scientists now are beginning to think underlies all the various manifestations of energy in nature, whether they be named light, heat, motion, electricity, chemical action, or gravitation, the one same vision of the throned God, manifest in Jesus Christ, is protean. Here it flames as light, there burns as heat, there flashes as electricity; here as gravitation holds the atoms together, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... needles toward magnets, (2) the circulation of water in plants, (3) AKASH or ether, inert and structureless, as a basis for transmitting subtle forces, (4) the solar fire as the cause of all other forms of heat, (5) heat as the cause of molecular change, (6) the law of gravitation as caused by the quality that inheres in earth-atoms to give them their attractive power or downward pull, (7) the kinetic nature of all energy; causation as always rooted in an expenditure of energy or a redistribution of motion, (8) universal ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... miscalculate their satellite's orbit. With the result that either it rushes on to certain destruction, or it passes beyond the limits of gravitation. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... which they mean a sort of divine conjuring-trick that is performed or brought about by violating or annihilating natural laws. That, of course, is absurd. Nothing happens but in virtue of natural laws, laws just as natural and inherent in the universal scheme of things as gravitation or the precession of the equinoxes, only outside our extremely limited knowledge of the universe. That, under certain conditions, such interpositions affecting physical organisms may be produced by invisible ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... necessity and "iron" law under which men groan? Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there be an "iron" law, it is that of gravitation; and if there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground. But what is all we really know, and can know, about the latter phenomenon? Simply, that, in all human experience, stones have fallen to the ground under ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... obstruct the Ether, or vice versa; there is no perceivable friction between them, unless, as I shall presently suggest, we may find something akin to obstruction by Matter, not to Ether itself, but to its pressure, in the phenomenon of Gravitation. ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... good instance of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it—a sentiment of combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which all things hang upon one thread. 'Thou ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... pippin falling upon the head of Sir ISAAC NEWTON (a clear case of hard cider on the brain) suggested the laws of gravitation. An elderly countryman passing my window this clear bright day, attended by his faithful umbrella, suggested ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... edge of Hooker's Bend, drawn in a rough semicircle around the Big Hill, lies Niggertown. In all the half-moon there are perhaps not two upright buildings. The grimy cabins lean at crazy angles, some propped with poles, while others hold out against gravitation ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... really, and well executed. The beast's skull bashed in easily, being merely thin bones for a thin atmosphere and light gravitation. A push sent it over ...
— Martians Never Die • Lucius Daniel
... wind that inconveniences and humiliates you by blowing off your hat in a street full of people. He had no quarrel with me. Neither would a boulder, falling on my head, have had. He fell upon me in accordance with the law by which he was moved—not of gravitation, like a detached stone, but of self-preservation. Of course this is giving it a rather wide interpretation. Strictly speaking, he had existed and could have existed without being married. Yet he told me that he had ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... intervened between the window I had chosen and the sward below. Even as I bounded forth into space I thought of this. But when one is in mid-air one does not turn back; a law of physics involving the relation of solid bodies to the attraction of gravitation prevents. Nor did I indeed desire to turn back. My one desire was to go. I dropped and dropped, as though for miles. I struck with terrific force upon a grass-covered but hard and unyielding surface. A pang of agony, poignant in its intensity, darted in an upward direction through my lower ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... yet, as I have said a good many times, they go on as though nothing had happened, although the foundation of their house has been removed. Only theories which stand in the air can thus defy the law of gravitation. ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... into the seemingly empty pot, and gave him a long stroke across his chest. With the passage of the brush the living flesh disappeared from beneath. I covered his right leg, and he was a one-legged man defying all laws of gravitation. And so, stroke by stroke, member by member, I painted Lloyd Inwood into nothingness. It was a creepy experience, and I was glad when naught remained in sight but his burning black eyes, poised apparently unsupported ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... perpetual brooding upon her! But I am her child, and my mind grows and grows to her like the off-shoots of the banyan-tree, that take root downward, and she sucks and draws it, as she draws my feet by gravitation, and I cannot take wing from her: for she is greater than I, and there is no escaping her; and at the last, I know, my soul will dash itself to ruin, like erring sea-fowl upon pharos-lights, against her wild and mighty bosom. Often ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... an attribute of matter. We have no knowledge of the origin of any force save of that which emanates from human volition. All our knowledge of force presents it as an effort of intelligent will. "We are driven," says Winchell, "by the necessary laws of thought, to pronounce those energies styled gravitation, heat, chemical affinity and their correlates, nothing less than intelligent will. But as it is not human will which energizes in whirlwind and the comet, it must be divine will." "In all cases, the creative power of God is an act of power, and the power does not perish ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... manner, the Copernican theory, the theory of gravitation, the nebular hypothesis, the theory of uniformity in geology, and every scientific advance has been opposed on the same grounds; that is, that these are against the teachings of the Christian Church. And how many Galileos, Brunos, and Darwins, and other would-be ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... early statesmen that the West Indies naturally gravitate to, and may be expected ultimately to be absorbed by, the continental States, including our own. I agree with them also that it is wise to leave the question of such absorption to this process of natural political gravitation. The islands of St. Thomas and St. John, which constitute a part of the group called the Virgin Islands, seemed to offer us advantages immediately desirable, while their acquisition could be secured in harmony with the principles to which I ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to the ground, and they sat idly and silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed and did not see. Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck. She did not lean toward him. She was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny. It was only an inch to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her part. Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly touches a flower, and just as lightly was the counter-pressure. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... curious battle against fate, and, not only a struggle against adverse circumstances, but against gravitation. For, now that there was no forward impulse in the airship, she could not overcome the law that Sir Isaac Newton discovered, which law is as immutable as death. Nothing can remain aloft unless it is either lighter than the air itself, or unless it keeps in motion with enough force to overcome ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... the course of New Testament criticism with that engaged upon the Old Testament. In the study of the origin of the Pentateuch the gravitation of opinion has been steadily downward, toward a later date, so that the great majority of scholars are now certain that the books must have been put into their present form long after the time of Moses. In the study of the origin of the Gospels the date ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... forgot the cold as he watched the preparations for the ship's departure. Neon and nitrogen gas were being pumped under pressure into the outer shell, where a minute charge of leucon, the newly discovered element that helped to counteract gravitation, combined with them to provide the power that would lift the vessel above ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... sustained, and transmitted; with this difference, that no one has designed these life-machines, but they are simply the result of life's innate tendency to struggle and spread. A great deal of the form and movement of the inorganic world is due simply to the stress of gravitation and not to design, and so we are asked to believe that the human and every other organism has been shaped and quickened by the action of as blind a power; that it is in some sense a ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... in a slanting direction, your highness, describing the hypotenuse between the base and perpendicular, created by the force of the wind, and the attraction of gravitation." ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... car, filled with noble beings in helmets, all playing on immense trumpets; the twenty-four prancing steeds with manes, tails, and feathered heads tossing in the breeze; the clowns, the tumblers, the strong men, and the riders flying about in the air as if the laws of gravitation no longer existed. But, best of all, was the grand conglomeration of animals where the giraffe appears to stand on the elephant's back, the zebra to be jumping over the seal, the hippopotamus to be lunching off a couple of crocodiles, and lions and tigers to be raining ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... breakers. The street was deep under water, and fears were entertained for the new bridge and the road to the beach. All night the gale continued, and all the next day till late in the afternoon; and when the river should have been at low tide, the island was still flooded. Gravitation was overmatched for the time being. And where were the rails, I asked myself. They could swim, no doubt, when put to it, but it seemed impossible that they could survive so fierce an inundation. Well, the wind ceased, the tide ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... father say, that they would be better off and happier with her out of the way, and she their dearest loved and most carefully cherished possession in the whole world? It is a cruel fall for an apple of the eye to the ground, for its law of gravitation is of the soul, and its fall shocks the infinite. Little Ellen felt herself sorely hurt by her fall from such fair heights; she was pierced by the sharp thorns of selfish interests which flourish below all ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze; and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend and in whom ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... time; an hour or two,— perhaps not so much, since the fatigues and struggles through which they had just passed had already made sad inroads upon their strength,—but an hour or two at most, and all would be over. Both must succumb to the laws of Nature,—the laws of gravitation,—or rather of specific gravity,—and sink below the surface,—down, down into the fathomless and unknown abysm of the ocean. Along with them, sharing their sad fate, Lilly Lalee,—that pretty, uncomplaining child, the innocent victim of an ill-starred destiny, must disappear forever ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... newly-affixed rockets on the Moonship's hull spurted their fumes. The big ship began to move. Not outward from Earth, of course. That was where it was going. But it had the Platform's 12,000 miles per hour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have been snapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carried the Moonship all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So the Moonship blasted to increase its orbital speed. It would swing out and out, and as ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... mastered the problem of how to produce, in a limited space, electricity of any desired potential and of any polarity, and that without danger to the experimenter or to the material experimented upon. It is gravitation, as everybody knows, that makes man a prisoner on the earth. If he could overcome, or neutralize, gravitation he could float away a free creature of interstellar space. Mr. Edison in his invention had pitted electricity against gravitation. Nature, in fact, had done the same thing long ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... schemes, it had humble beginnings," said Sypher, in comfortable postprandial mood, unconsciously flattered by the admiration of his subordinate. "Newton saw an apple drop to the ground: hence the theory of gravitation. The glory of Tyre and Sidon arose from the purple droppings of a little dog's mouth who had been eating shell fish. The great Cunarders came out of the lid of Stephenson's family kettle. A soldier happened to tell me that his ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... To found the problem or the actions of man on any one agent, and to cut him off from God, is peurile! The reason of man necessitated the discovery of gravitation, and it is to-day the best-established physical fact before our view. The reason of man also demands a Creator, to endow us with motives above our own development, and that reason, in the soul of every man, atheist and Christian ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... Gravitation he explained by a settling down of bodies toward the centre of each vortex; and cohesion by an absence of relative motion tending to separate particles of matter. He "can ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... length descend, rather than the rills which feed the swelling of their floods. The orchard at Woolsthorpe, and the cathedral at Pisa, were outlets of this kind, through which the pent-up tide of gathering knowledge burst. If they had never offered themselves, the laws of universal gravitation and isochronous vibration would ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... he not have made action and reaction equal and opposite, as they are in mechanics? For if affection could not operate at all, unless it was mutual, there would be no unhappy, because ill-assorted, marriages. What a difference it would have made! Had mutual gravitation been the law of the sexes, as it is of the spheres, this Earth would never have stood in need of a Heaven, since it would have existed already: for the only earthly heaven is a happy marriage. As it is, even when it ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy, any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw him in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control of momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of pure, unballasted levity both Pope and Horace mistook for a special privilege of philosophic strength. Others, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... simply striving to enter the harmony of the world, where everything is subjected to a law. Is not the falling of a stone the fulfilment of a vow, of the vow called the law of gravitation?" ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Bale Mardykes had arrived at the Hall, there were hurried consultations held in many households. And though he was tried and sentenced by drum-head over some austere hearths, as a rule the law of gravitation prevailed, and the greater house drew the lesser about it, and county people within the visiting radius paid their ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... it notice to quit, and pretend that it is gone when you have only put a new name upon the door. We must not call it 'attraction,' lest there should seem to be a power within; we are to speak of it only as 'gravitation,' because that is only 'weight,' which is nothing but a 'fact,' as if it were not a fact that holds a power, a true dynamic affair, which no imagination can chop into incoherent successions.[255] Nor is the evasion ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... road is open and visible. It is bordered by grass banks and ditches on either side. He rushes close to the left bank and, careering gracefully to the right like an Algerine felucca in a white squall, dares the laws of gravitation and centrifugal force to the utmost limitation, and describes a magnificent segment of a great circle. Almost before you can wink he is straight again, and pegging along ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... thousand shifts and wiles, look here! See one straightforward conscience put in pawn 30 To win a world; see the obedient sphere By bravery's simple gravitation drawn! ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... by calculations made in accordance with the law of gravitation, some planets were discovered exactly in the place where they should be. Such a law of gravitation there is also in the moral world. And when we find men's minds disturbed, as they were by the preaching of the Buddha, we can be sure, even without any corroborative ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... said, "in free trade that which shall act on the moral world as the law of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and creed and language and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace... I believe that the desire and motive for large ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... required may not always consist with pleasure, nor even with safety. Our most customary actions are rendered possible by forces and conditions that inflict weariness at times upon all, and cost the lives of many. Gravitation, forcing all men against the earth's surface with an energy measured by their weight avoirdupois, makes locomotion feasible; but by the same attraction it may draw one into the pit, over the precipice, to the bottom of the sea. What multitudes of lives does it yearly destroy! Why has it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... else I should have been. Pillar of fire that didst go before me to guide and to quicken,—pillar of darkness, when thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal to my dawning fears the secret shadow of death,—by what mysterious gravitation was it that my heart had been drawn to thine? Could a child, six years old, place any special value upon intellectual forwardness? Serene and capacious as my sister's mind appeared to me upon after review, was ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... ruled by physical laws. If those laws are obeyed, strength, health, sanity result; but if they are disobeyed, the consequences, which are inevitable and self-perpetuating, are weakness, disease, insanity. If one violates gravitation he is dashed in pieces; if he trifles with microbes their infinitesimal grasp will be like a shackle of steel. No one can get outside the physical universe and the ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... in a paper on the philosophy of the Asiatics, pointed out that "the old philosophers of Europe had some idea of centripetal force, and a principle of universal gravitation," and affirms that "much of the theology and philosophy of our immortal Newton may be found in ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... there is nothing either pushing or pulling it towards the earth, or the earth towards it; and yet it is quite certain that the stone tends to move towards the earth and the earth towards the stone, in the way defined by the law of gravitation. ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... several days. Nevertheless, the discovery that others had been before him did not depress him in the least. He gave the Sunday editor an insight into his views on one occasion when that gentleman was able to convince him that Isaac Newton and not Bart Harrington had discovered the law of gravitation while watching an apple fall from ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... code of moral distinctions, all modifying—many reversing—the old ones. What would have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to transfigure the celestial mechanics; if he had said, I will create a new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation; briefly, I will make new earth and new heavens? And yet a thousand times more awful it was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the spiritual conscience of man. Metanoeite (was the cry from the wilderness), ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... sciences, we prove a doctrine by referring it to some other doctrine or doctrines, until we come at last to some assumption that must be rested in as ultimate or final. We can prove the propositions of Euclid, the law of gravitation, the law of atomic proportions, the law of association; we cannot prove our present sensations, nor can we demonstrate that what has been, will be. The ultimate data must be accepted as self-evident; they have no higher ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... the morning wardrobe), you have something more actual to go on than the hallucinations of a peasant lad setting his foot manfully on the lowest rung of the social ladder. I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... in common Acceptation amongst us, doth not barely answer to this Sense. The Pondus Animae is to be taken into its Meaning, as well as the bare Inclination; as Gravitation in a Body (to which this bears great Resemblance) doth not barely imply a determination of its Motion towards a certain Center, but the Vis or Force with which it is carried forward; and so the English Word Genius, ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... that gravitation is due to the attraction that two bodies in different electrical condition have for each other, and that by changing the condition of one of these bodies so that they are both in the same electrical condition ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... have never been produced by causes different in kind from those to which they now owe their origin. And geology, which traces back the course of history beyond the limits of archaeology, could tell us nothing except for the assumption that, millions of years ago, water, heat, gravitation, friction, animal and vegetable life, caused effects of the same kind as they now cause. Nay, even physical astronomy, in so far as it takes us back to the uttermost point of time which palaetiological science can reach, is founded ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... greatest encouragement said repeatedly that I perfectly understood what I was writing' about - and only stopped me at two places: one was at a word too strong for what I had to describe, and the other at one too weak. The doctrine he allowed to be quite orthodox, concerning gravitation, refraction, reflection, optics, comets, magnitudes, distances, revolutions, etc., but made a discovery to me which, had I known sooner, would have overset me, and prevented my reading any part of my work: ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... things was pregnant with all the future, there would probably have been existent at any rate not more than one of the formulae which we now call natural laws. This one law, of course, would have been the law of gravitation. Here we may take our stand. It does not signify whether there ever was a time when gravitation was not,—i.e., if ever there was a time when matter, as we now know it, was not in existence;—for if there ever was such a time, there is no reason to doubt, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... how all these glorious views gave proofs of an Almighty Wisdom.' I asked him if he thought the system of LAPLACE to be quite certain, with regard to the total security of the planetary system from the effects of gravitation losing its present balance? He said, No; he thought by no means that the universe was secured from the chance ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... applying any of these it is advisable to empty the limb of blood. This is best done after the manner suggested by Lister: the limb is held vertical for three or four minutes; the veins are thus emptied by gravitation, and they collapse, and as a physiological result of this the arteries reflexly contract, so that the quantity of blood entering the limb is reduced to a minimum. With the limb still elevated the tourniquet is firmly applied, a part being selected where the vessel can be pressed ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... variable in time or place, we do not in everyday life speculate as to the cause of gravity, and therefore do not become conscious of its character as action at a distance. It was Newton's theory of gravitation that first assigned a cause for gravity by interpreting it as action at a distance, proceeding from masses. Newton's theory is probably the greatest stride ever made in the effort towards the causal nexus of natural ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... holding it in a stream of light, which was purposely admitted through a small opening, distinctly saw the aphides ejecting the fluid from their bodies with considerable force, and this accounts for its being frequently found in situations where it could not have arrived by the mere influence of gravitation. The drops that are thus spurted out, unless interrupted by the surrounding foliage, or some other interposing body, fall upon the ground; and the spots may often be observed, for some time, beneath and around the trees affected with honey-dew, till washed away by ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... preliminary approach toward the heart of the perplexity. And the first path is the realization that our world whatever it is, is certainly not the world as we see it! Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon "Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity," by the distinguished English physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of hearing him deliver before the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... for existence in the atmosphere of our globe, so is our moral organism devised for existence in justice. Every faculty craves for it, and is more intimately bound up with it than with the laws of gravitation, of light or heat; and to throw ourselves into injustice is to plunge headlong into the hostile and the unknown. All that is in us has been placed there with a view to justice; all things tend thither and urge us towards it: whereas, when we harbour injustice, we battle against ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... record of five years without having earned a penny. And yet they clung together, sharing each other's hatred and misery, being creatures of habit. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... Marshal Belleisle; perhaps, after Frederick and Voltaire, the most notable of that time. A man of large schemes, altogether accordant with French interests, but not, unfortunately, with facts and law of gravitation. For whom the first thing needful is that Grand Duke Franz, husband of Maria Theresa, shall not be elected kaiser; who shall be is another matter—why not Karl Albert of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... VIII.," with a grand spectacle of a coronation, had been presented at the theatres, the armour of one of the kings of England having been brought from the Tower for the due accoutrement of the champion. And here we may note a curious gravitation of royal finery towards the theatre. Downes, in his "Roscius Anglicanus," describes Sir William Davenant's play of "Love and Honour," produced in 1662, as "richly cloathed, the king giving Mr. Betterton his coronation suit, in which he acted the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... handy, he stepped boldly out upon the water and walked rapidly toward the direction in which He knew the boat must be. Scarcely conscious of the occult power of levitation that He was using to overcome the power of gravitation, He moved rapidly toward His followers. Soon He overtook them, and they, seeing a white figure moving swiftly over the water toward them, were affrighted, believing it to be a spirit or ghost. "It is I, be not afraid!" called out the Master to them. ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... in strong contrast. I do not think she is a safe wife for you. The purest, the most innocent creature imaginable, certainly that, but always in the seventh heaven; and you in the seventh heaven just at this moment, but with an irresistible gravitation to the solid earth, which will have its way again when the honeymoon is over—I do not believe you two would harmonize by intercourse. I do not believe Lilian would sympathize with you, and I am sure you could not ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... derived from the Latin; they are, each in its own language, genuine and independent forms. But it is curious to see what an attraction these distant cousins have for one another, let them only come within each other's sphere of gravitation. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... this reign, in other respects so inglorious. In 1666 Newton discovered the law of gravitation and created a new theory of the Universe. In 1667 Milton published "Paradise Lost," and in 1672 Bunyan gave to the world his allegory, "Pilgrim's Progress." There was no inspiration to genius in the cause of King and ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... "PROF. MOSSOTTI has recently shown, by a very able analysis, that there are strong grounds for believing that not only the molecular forces which unite the particles of material bodies depend on the electric fluid, but that even gravitation itself, which binds world to world, and sun to sun, can no longer be regarded as an ultimate principle, but the residual portion of a far more powerful force, generated by that energetic ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... some deriding us. In the midst of all this, I read scientists' comments on Einstein's new unified-field theory, which had been printed about the time True appeared on the stands. A discussion by Lincoln Barnett, author of The Universe and Dr. Einstein, explained the basic premise—that gravitation and electromagnetic force are inseparable. As I read it, I thought of what Redell had said. If gravitation were a manifestation of electromagnetic force, was it possible that an advanced race had found a way—as unique ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... a woman has, than how many skirts she wears; and, if he have any anxiety about the matter, in either case, his eyes must be the only questioners. The principle upon which the women themselves proceed, in growing old, seems to be parallel to the law of gravitation: when a stone, for example, is thrown into the air the higher it goes the slower it travels; and the momentum toward Heaven, given to a woman at her birth, appears to decrease in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... Kaiser Karl's in particular, is not to be called an intentionally unjust one; the contrary, I rather find; but it is, beyond others, ponderous; based broad on such multiplex formalities, old habitudes; and GRAVITATION has a great power over it. In brief, Official human nature, with the best of Kaisers atop, flagitated continually by Jesuit Confessors, does throw its weight on a certain side: the sad fact is, in a few years the brightness of that Altranstadt ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... larger thrust exerted by the screw in pressing forward the shaft and with it the vessel, but by the gravitation against the stern of the wave of water which the screw raises by its rapid rotation. This wave will only be raised very high when the progress of the vessel through the water is nearly arrested, at which time the centrifugal action of the screw is very great; and the ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... person who had lived and died, and yet he was changed. He appeared and disappeared at will. He entered rooms through closed and barred doors. At last his body ascended from the earth, and passed up to heaven, subject no longer to the laws of gravitation. We see in Jesus, therefore, during the forty days, one who has passed into what we call the other life. What he was then his people will be when they have emerged from death with their spiritual bodies, for he was the first-fruits ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... correctly. When, then, we speak of the evolution of thought, speech and action, we cannot mean that the laws of thought, for instance, were in the beginning different from what they are now, and only gradually came to be what they are at present. That would be just the same as saying that the law of gravitation did not operate in the way described by Newton until Newton formulated the law. The fact is that science has its evolution, just as thought, speech and action have. Man gradually and with much effort discovers laws of science, as he discovers the laws of thought, speech and action. ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... world again was fair. She felt as the freed Psyche must feel when she drops the clay, and lo! the whole chrysalid world, which had hitherto hung as a clog at her foot, fast by the inexorable chain our blindness calls gravitation, has dropped from her with the clay, and ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald |
