"Indeterminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grey cap and the red shawl, resembled hundreds of thousands of little human rabbits similarly parented. Only the trained eye could have identified them among a score or two of their congeners. For the most part, they were dingily fair, with snub noses, coarse mouths, and eyes of an indeterminate blue. Of that type, once blowsily good-looking, was Mrs. Button herself. But Paul wandered a changeling about the Bludston streets. In the rows of urchins in the crowded Board School classroom he sat as conspicuous as ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... spoil, such as was never seen before, consisting of objects one likes to possess, gathered in vast lots, which lots are distributed by hundreds of thousands over the twenty-six thousand square miles of territory. There are no owners for this property but the nation, an indeterminate, invisible personage; no barrier other than so many seals exists between the spoils and the despoilers, that is to say, so many strips of paper held fast by two ill-applied and indistinct stamps. Bear in mind, too, that the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... indeterminate sentence, allowing of parole when earned by continuous good conduct, and final release when reformation is ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... of foods is the vitamin, a nitrogenous substance of indeterminate nature. Without it we would starve, though eating plenty of proteins, carbo-hydrates, fats, salts and water. Nothing will sustain life if the vitamins are absent from the diet. Goat's milk contains these important substances in greater abundance ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... illuminating power and the calorific value of air-gas, unless the manufacture is very precisely controlled, are apt to be variable, and the amount of light, emitted, either in self-luminous or in incandescent burners, is somewhat indeterminate. The generating plant must be so constructed that the air cannot at any time be mixed with as much hydrocarbon vapour as constitutes an explosive mixture with it, otherwise the pipes and apparatus will contain ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... what I said, but if I may take the evidence of Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively. I told them, for one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri. Little Angelo was of that indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a drunken father without regard to the child-labour laws of the State of New Jersey. His people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of miles from the glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from his work along the railroad-track. It is ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... 1913, seems, like them, to have been thinly occupied in Roman times; at any rate the structures actually unearthed consisted only of a roughly built foundation (25 feet diam.) of uncertain use, which there is no reason to call a temple, some other even more indeterminate foundations, and two bits of road. More interest may attach to three ditches (one for sewage) and the clay base of a rampart, which belong in some way to the northern defences of the place in various times. The full meaning of these will, however, not be discernible ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... rolling his eyes and hugging his kaross around him because of the cold, and something in his anxious, indeterminate expression told me at once that he knew himself to be a man in terrible danger. Just behind him, dark and brooding, his arms folded on his breast, his eyes fixed upon the ground, looking, to my moved imagination, like an evil genius, ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... however, wasn't enough to account for the profound effect on him; that was buried in the secret of instinctive recognitions. "Well, the thing for me to do is to go to bed," he said aloud, but it was no more than an unconvinced mutter, addressed to the indeterminate region of his feet. Savina Grove was standing by the door, in the place, the position, in which she had said good-bye to the Davencotts. Her flamboyant tulle skirt, contrasted with the tightly-fitting upper part of her dress, gave her, now, in the sombre crowded furnishings, the rich draped brocades, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that these have been developed under conditions which were first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the providence of God. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the Guide and Educator of our race. As "the offspring of God," humanity is not a bare, indeterminate potentiality, but a living energy, an active reason, having definite qualities, and inheriting fundamental principles and necessary ideas which constitute it "the image and likeness of God." And though it has suffered a moral lapse, and, in the exercise of its freedom, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... en route for China, India, and the seas circumflowing; and foreign trade, therefore, as much concerned in the guilt of its expense as colonial traffic. The amount of charge, therefore, although remaining to be deducted from the colonial head, may be left as a neutral indeterminate item. But the military expenses for Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, about L.80,000, cannot be for colonial account at all, because stations merely for carrying on foreign trade, against which chargeable, with the civil establishments as well, whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... room. He is a young fellow wearing a blue pill-box hat, uniform trousers, a jacket too small for him, and bicycle-clips: the stub of a cigarette dangles between his lips. He speaks with a rough accent, indeterminate, but more Welsh ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... universe, consciousness—if we can give that name to a very uncertain and confused notion of the ego—is reduced to a few elementary actions. They are much less separated than ourselves from the whole of the circumambient life and they still possess a number of those more general and indeterminate senses whereof we have been deprived by the gradual encroachment of a narrow and intolerant special faculty, our intelligence. Among these senses which up to the present we have described as instincts, for want—and it is becoming a pressing want—of ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... after an indeterminate minute while he watched her, laid his hand lightly on her shoulder. "I'll see that dad takes it. And I'll give you a bill of sale that ought to shut the Black Rim mouths. I'm a Lorrigan and I'm not going to apologize for the ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... INDIVISIBLE (p. 58). What logic! Weight is only force, that is, a thing hidden from the senses, whose phenomena alone are perceptible,—a thing, consequently, to which the idea of division and indivision is inapplicable; and from the presence of this force, from the hypothesis of an indeterminate and immaterial entity, is inferred an indivisible ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... to supply the right artificial environment for their weakness and treat them as incurable moral and mental invalids. We must cease to deal with such as with responsible human beings, who might do better if only they would. The "indeterminate sentence" is a step toward such treatment, but it is often rendered wholly futile by being mixed with "reward of shortening term for good behavior in prison." Good behavior inside prison walls gives no proof of ability to ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... or permanent load is one of constant and indeterminate duration, as books on a shelf. In the case of a bridge the weight of the structure itself is the dead load. All large beams support a uniform dead load ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... her own particular fragrance enveloping my body, penetrating my very heart with an inconceivable intimacy, bringing me closer to her than the closest embrace, and yet so subtle that I sensed her existence in me only as a great, glowing, indeterminate tenderness, something like the evening light disclosing after the white passion of the day infinite depths in the colours of the sky and an unsuspected soul of peace in the protean forms of life. I had not known such quietness for months; ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... that in Rubus there are two sorts of chloranthy, according as the anomaly affects the ordinary flowering branches, or the leafy shoots of the year, the summits of which, instead of developing in the customary manner, terminate each in one vast and long inflorescence, very loose and indeterminate, and with axillary flowers.[293] ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... interesting; strictly speaking, they do not write for the public at all, but only for their professional colleagues. The harmful men are the foolish rhapsodists who take advantage of the fact that the language of music is indeterminate and evanescent to talk about the art in such a way as to present themselves as persons of exquisite sensibilities rather than to direct attention to the real nature and beauty of music itself. To them I shall recur ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the door moved resolutely to the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown she looked almost girlish in spite ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... descendant of the Jason's-crew, who landed from the Argo-Mayflower, usually bearing a name thus significant, and manifesting, even at her age, traits of character justifying the compellation. What that age precisely was, could not always be known; indeed, a lady's age is generally among indeterminate things; and it has, very properly, come to be considered ungallant, if not impertinent, to be curious upon so delicate a subject. A man has no more right to know how many years a woman has, than how many ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... descend with such gentle slopes, that the valleys between them are extensive and flat. Several contain an indeterminate depth of rich soil, capable of supporting the most exhausting vegetation, and are tolerably well watered by chains of small ponds, or occasional drains, which empty themselves into the river by ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... time ago he wrote a series of articles for the Reno Gazette, dealing with psychology. I was particularly impressed with a fact which he made to stand out clearly above all others and which would vitally affect society as a whole if it were to be universally carried out. It is the substitution of an indeterminate sentence for the definite one which now prevails. "No judge can determine in advance when a prisoner is fit to return to the community," he says; and in the same way we release the inmates of an insane hospital as soon as we ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... reception; for the servant merely bowed and departed, without relieving him of hat and coat. Indeterminate, he stood, vaguely conscious of misgiving and questioning the stillness of the great house. But almost immediately a young man entered whose face expressed the utmost concern. He was clean-shaven, except for those frustrated ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... captain was in the forecross-trees, glass in hand, his eyes in every quarter, spying for an entrance, spying for signs of tenancy. But the isle continued to unfold itself in joints, and to run out in indeterminate capes, and still there was neither house nor man, nor the smoke of fire. Here a multitude of sea-birds soared and twinkled, and fished in the blue waters; and there, and for miles together, the fringe of cocoa-palm and pandanus ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... aloof and taciturn a client as Rammer Spacelines ever had picked up. A lean, blond character of indeterminate age, with pale eyes, hard mouth. Why he had selected a bulky semifreighter like the Queen for a mineralogical survey jaunt to a lifeless little sun system far beyond the outposts of civilization was a point he didn't discuss. ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... intelligence, which looks for some basis that cannot be argued about, there is still something to be said for Intuition. And when Mill, still in search of some precise formula, undertook to interpret persistent sequences by his theory of Real Kinds possessing an indeterminate number of coherent properties—so that our belief in the invariable blackness of crows is justified as a collocation of these visible properties—he merely throws the problem of Causation farther backward. We have to be content with direct observation of phenomena that can be classified ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... back of his head, a bag in one hand. His face was weak and good-tempered, his eyes had once been fine but now they were dim and blurred; there were dimples in his fat cheeks; he wore on his upper lip a ragged and untidy moustache and he had two indeterminate chins. His expression was mild, kindly, now a little ashamed, now greatly indignant. It was a pity, as he often said, that he had not more control over his feelings. Maggie saw at once that he was, as usual, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... his evasion, has been retaken. The Company says again, in the personal interests of the prisoners, that any evasion give place to serious punition (minima) fortnight of rigourous imprisonment after that they go in the "Strafbaracke" for an indeterminate time. ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... travelers came at length to a wide space of absolutely level ground which presented a most curious appearance. It was as level as a windless lake, and almost without vegetation. The naked surface was of a sort of indeterminate dust-color, but dotted here and there with tiny patches of vegetation so stunted that it was little more than moss. Grom, with his inquiring mind, would have liked to stop to investigate this curious surface, unlike anything he had ever seen before. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... we're better off than before, girl. We're at liberty to carry arms, and to go and come, provided we stay this side of the galley hatch. They are to let us alone and stay forward of the hatch. By the way," he added. "In view of the rather indeterminate outlook, let's carry our ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... above, "mei," literally means "command" or "decree"; but while the English terms definitely imply a real being who decides, decrees, and commands, the term "mei" is indeterminate on this point. It is frequently joined to the word "Ten," or Heaven; "Ten-mei," Heaven's decree, seeming to imply a personality in the background of the thought. Yet, as I have already pointed out, it is only implied; in actual usage it means the fate decreed by Heaven; that is, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... drear months of a dead world, changed as rapidly as had the smiling Place. From a shapeless gray-gold fuzzy baby, she grew lank and leggy. The indeterminate fuzz was buried under a shimmering gold-and-white coat of much beauty. The muskrat face lengthened and grew delicately graceful, with its ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... white shawl and seated herself on the old, high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... in the earth. Especially in metal mines we cannot know, when our works are initiated, what the size, mineralization, or surroundings of the ore-bodies will be. We must plunge into them and learn,—and repent. Not only is the useful life of our mining works indeterminate, but the very character of them is uncertain in advance. All our works must be in a way doubly tentative, for they are subject to constant ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... is always indefinite, and is very easily turned in a wrong direction," and he apparently accounted for inversion by this fact, and by the precocity of neurotics. Obici and Marchesini (Le 'Amicizie' di collegio, p. 126) refer to the indeterminate character of the sexual feelings when they first begin to develop. A correspondent believes that sexual feelings are undifferentiated in the early years about puberty, but at the same time considers that school ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... under that heavy trouble, of which such information as I have had has been quite untrustworthy, leaving me in entire incredulity in regard to it except on this point, that you and yours must be suffering deeply. Naturally I thought most of you in the matter (its public aspects being indeterminate), and many times before our friend's letter came I had said to Mr. Lewes: "What must Mrs. Stowe be feeling!" I remember Mrs. Fields once told me of the wonderful courage and cheerfulness which belonged to you, enabling you to bear up under exceptional trials, and I imagined you helping ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... when thou and Grief were first acquainted Thou wrotest, "Come, for I have lookt on death." Piteous I held my indeterminate breath And sought thee out, and saw how he had painted Thine eyes with rings of black; yet never fainted Thy radiant immortality underneath Such stress of dark; but then, as one that saith, "I know Love liveth," sat ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... the form of an oil which solidifies rapidly and may be crystallized from hot water after the addition of a little hydrochloric acid. This clouds in cooling, and after a certain time it separates in small crystals of indeterminate form which unite in warty concretions. After drying the salt forms a dull powder, melting between 275 F. and 280 F. It also melts in boiling water, and its aqueous solution exposed to the light is partially reduced, 100 grammes of water acidulated with 10 cubic centimeters ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... proclaimed by President Wilson and recognized by the Allies. Nor would it suffice even to have the faculty of reoccupation, because "this faculty" could never be a valid substitute for occupation. As regards the suggestion that a long occupation or one for an indeterminate period would cause bad feeling, M. Poincare was convinced that this was an exaggeration. A short occupation causes more irritation on account of its arbitrary limit; everyone understands an occupation without ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... already distinguished by common-sense. He thought the unity of nature to consist in its periodic evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (to apeiron), which, much in the manner of the "nebula" of modern science, is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar commonplace of science, begins to be recognizable. It has here reached the point of signifying a common substance for all tangible ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... by the wandering breeze from the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of age and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon, a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless photographs of her family and her wide connection, most prominent among them two—that ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... reached to much refinement; while on the other hand, fierce passion was not abated by conventional restraints, slaughter and bondage were the usual results of war, the idea of property was but very partially defined, and though there were strong indeterminate sentiments of right there is no word in Homer signifying law. Upon the whole, though a very imperfect, it was a wonderful and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... propositions in awkward controversial questions; he knows how to give his draught a color of compromise without the least sacrifice of any Austrian interest, as soon as the correct interpretation comes to the aid of the apparently indeterminate expression. When his draughts become the basis of subsequent discussion, it is then usually discovered for the first time that the real purpose for which they were drawn is contained in what seemed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... an impropriety of speech, I confess; for I do no more thereby but take a certain for an uncertain number, and posit the determinate term for what is indeterminate. When I say, therefore, five hundred, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... really tiresome of Kitty! Rich young men with characters yet indeterminate were not to be lightly brought in contact with Madame d'Estrees. Kitty could not be ignorant of it—poor child! It had been one of her reckless strokes, and Ashe was conscious of a ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her and she was both shocked and displeased. There were droppings of food all down the front of his coat; the mouth under the ragged ill-grown beard drooped sullenly; the forehead was lined and contracted; and on the lean temples the hair was a dusty indeterminate colour that might or might not have been called gray. The utter misery and self- abandonment of the man appealed to her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the wicked feeling that he was humbled and brought low who ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... discussion later, and on the whole there appears to be no certain solution of the problem, though the Mayoo seem to have taken over and varied the western form. In the case of Purula-Burong there appear to be indeterminate cases; six seem to tell in favour of a southern origin; three suggest a western origin; and one word Chupil (f. Namilpa) seems to be from a ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... contrast is, from its very nature, vague, arbitrary, indeterminate. It rests, in truth, on an essentially subjective and fleeting conception, that of contrariety, which it is almost impossible to delimit scientifically; for, most often, contraries exist only by and for us. We know that this form of association is not primary and irreducible. It is brought ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... ladies and children. He recognised the Princess of Ferentino with Barbarella Viti, followed by the Countess of Lucoli driving a pair of ponies and accompanied by her great Danish hound. A perturbing breath of the old life passed over his spirit, awakening indeterminate ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... embryo human lives should be allowed for all the varying and indeterminate reasons suggested by different advocates would lead the ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... up suddenly, for without any further warning there had come a tiny indeterminate tapping against his panel. He held his breath and listened. It came again. Then fearlessly he drew back the bolts, slid the panel open and shut his eyes, dazzled by ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution—perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... struggle with herself. It showed plainly on the thin, anxious face. The lips compressed with determination, the eyes set, then wavered, and again the indeterminate lines of acquiescent subjection gained their accustomed ascendency. Back and forth assertion and complaisance fled and followed; only assertion ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... every one a superior affection to his own country, we never expect any regard to distant nations, where a competition arises. Not to mention, that, while every man consults the good of his own community, we are sensible, that the general interest of mankind is better promoted, than any loose indeterminate views to the good of a species, whence no beneficial action could ever result, for want of a duly limited object, on which ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... made Edgar start from his lounging posture on the turf, and gaze with amazement upon the fierce workings of a face he had never seen flushed by an angry emotion before. He feared his uncle had suddenly gone mad, and stood indeterminate what course to pursue, when the countenance before him changed, the eyes closed, and the hermit fell heavily on the green sward in front of his door. Edgar, in his alarm, lifted the prostrate form in his strong, young arms, and bore ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Colebrooke possessed. He had been preceded by the labors of Burrow and E.Strachey; but it is entirely due to him that mathematicians are now enabled to form a clear idea of the progress which the Indians had made in this branch of knowledge, especially as regards indeterminate analysis. It became henceforth firmly established that the "Arabian Algebra had real points of resemblance to that of the Indians, and not to that of the Greeks; that the Diophantine analysis was only slightly cultivated by the Arabs; and that, finally, the Indian was more scientific and ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... destroying the earth; he said, it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minerva said, she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would appear so; and there was no one person or action among them, which would not puzzle her owl,[455] much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet—if a hero ever has a valet—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... pursued in ranking other organic beings as species. But it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point, until some definition of the term "species" is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an indeterminate element such as an act of creation. We might as well attempt without any definition to decide whether a certain number of houses should be called a village, town, or city. We have a practical illustration ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Inquisition or English Court of High Commission longer casts its upas-shadow athwart the hearts of men, the great world is "growing nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot them through that Perdition which does not hover indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology, but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; is visual, tactual,—in which untold millions of mankind writhe and shriek from ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... indeterminate period in a blank fog for Orne, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a creche. Had to be. He could remember his sudden exposure on Heleb, the explosion—then nothing. Good old creche. It made him feel safe now, ...
— Operation Haystack • Frank Patrick Herbert
... one looks out; the red and green signal lamps hang high in the air; and one glides past a sleeping town, the lamps burning quietly in deserted streets; there are house-fronts below, in a long thoroughfare suddenly visible from end to end; above, there are indeterminate shadows, the glimmering faces of high towers; it is all ghost-like and mysterious; one only knows that men live and work there; and then the tides of slumber flow in upon the brain, and one dives thirstily ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... regular beat was slower, like that of a clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of God was no more and no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs were worn off ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... or when the root, thin as whipcord, of a certain fig-tree has crept across the face of the grey rock forming a ridge or barricade against which decayed vegetation accumulates, there the BAEA flourishes, displaying an indeterminate line of mauve flowers above oval, crimpled leaves. Mauve, green and grey—the mauve of the Victorian age, the green of the cowslip, the grey ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... there was a solid minority of law-abiding citizens who could be depended on in any crisis. There was a larger number who could be expected as a rule to stand with the angels, but who had friendly dealings with the outlaws and were open to suspicion. Then there was the indeterminate and increasing number of men whose sources of revenue were secret, who toiled not, but were known to make sudden journeys from which they returned with fat "rolls" in their pockets. It was to curb this sinister third group that Packard had attempted to organize the county. Failing ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... invented the mark system (the principle of the indeterminate system) and made the prisoners' liberation depend upon their conduct and character and not upon the original offence. Maconochie's experience led him to write in after years to a friend, "if you would try a social-moral one (prison system) you ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... pugnatur means, literally, it is fought; translate freely, the battle is fought, or the contest rages. The verb pugno in Latin is intransitive, and so does not have a personal subject in the passive. A verb with an indeterminate subject, designated in English by it, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... man raised his head as a car pulled into the curving driveway. The warm hum of the turboelectric engine stopped, and a man climbed out of the vehicle. He walked with easy strides across the grass to where the elderly gentleman sat. He was lithe, of indeterminate age, but with a look of great determination. There was something in his face that made the old man vaguely uneasy—not with fear but with ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... number of cases of repudiation of such agreements is almost negligible. To plead the Statute of Frauds in an action for non-delivery or non-acceptance of goods under such informal agreements might be a defence in the law courts, but would not save the defendant from the indeterminate but effective penalties due to the feeling of his fellows that he was acting dishonourably. It is instructive to notice that in dealing with the question of industrial disputes, which are in many ways analogous to international, at least where they arise between organised bodies ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... we shall succeed in getting it if we try pertinaciously enough. This world is good, we must say, since it is what we make it,—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? M has its character indeterminate, susceptible of forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the other. All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution x. Wherever the facts to be ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... I stood motionless and invisible in the deep shadows of the clump of bush, soft swishing sounds in the long grass grew increasingly frequent all round me, and in the misty starlight I caught frequent sudden glimpses of indeterminate forms gliding ghost-like toward the water, which was evidently the recognised drinking place for most of the game in the neighbourhood. And at length, when I had been standing there for about twenty minutes, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... oppressed and miserable, beneath the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for hours like the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide roadway that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across the veldt, forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a lady's arm, was completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust. But the hot wind was going down now, as it always does towards sunset. Indeed, all that remained ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... expresses all numbers by ten characters, giving them an absolute value, and a value by position, and furnishing simple rules for the easy performance of all kinds of calculations. Algebra, or universal arithmetic—the method of calculating indeterminate quantities, or investigating the relations that subsist among quantities of all kinds, whether arithmetical or geometrical—was developed from the germ that Diophantus had left. Mohammed Ben Musa furnished the solution of quadratic equations, Omar Ben Ibra him that of ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... would she borrow yet again from the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging and still be loyal? In either case Blount saw his own finish, and he was rather relieved when she left the sex argument indeterminate and began to talk of other things: of her father's decision to go home at the end of the following week, of the good times she had been having, and of the regret with which she would turn her back upon the wide horizons and the freedom of ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... speaking, but only the MENTAL part. You say, "I grieve," and again the Me is not all speaking, but only the MORAL part. You say the mind is wholly spiritual; then you say "I have a pain" and find that this time the Me is mental AND spiritual combined. We all use the "I" in this indeterminate fashion, there is no help for it. We imagine a Master and King over what you call The Whole Thing, and we speak of him as "I," but when we try to define him we find we cannot do it. The intellect and the feelings can act ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... crowd of half-a-dozen adults and about fifty children had collected, and hailed the approach of the newly wedded couple with a faint, indeterminate cheer. All the children were holding something in little bags, and his attention was caught by the expression of vindictive concentration upon the face of a small big-eared boy in the foreground. He didn't for the moment realise what these things might import. Then he received a stinging ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... again, one could hear the sound in the distance—the thunder of the captains of the storm and the shouting; but still so faint, so vague, so indeterminate and unearthly that it seemed like the sound in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... arises a question which cannot be solved without leaving the limited domain of history to enter the indeterminate regions ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... found herself changing places with the daughter whom she had regarded as wholly subject to her direction. Sidwell began to exercise an indeterminate control, the proofs of which were at length manifest in details of her mother's speech and demeanour. An exquisite social tact, an unfailing insensibly as the qualities of pure air: these were the points of sincerity of moral judgment, a gentle force which operated as ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... slight of build, of fresh and pleasing countenance, clean shaven, of indeterminate colouring. His crisp hair was so trim in spite of its dampness as to suggest the attentions of a barber within the last twelve hours. His hands were rough and bore traces of scars; the fingers, though slender for a man, might have belonged to a labourer's; ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... a space of time seeming quite indeterminate. Little by little, however, a change came over things, or my impression of them. Is it that one's body being well broken, one's mind becomes more susceptible of homogeneous impressions? I know not. But the higher light, the incense, fills the space above all those ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Sir Robert Aylward, for he halted to stare at it, then stretched out his hand and switched on another lamp, in the hard brilliance of which the thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared itself, leaping out of the darkness into light. It was a terrible object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so that it glared upwards. The workmanship of the thing was rude yet strangely powerful. Whatever there is cruel, ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... to get thin. Her face was growing sharp and peaked. The steady curve of her cheek had become a little indeterminate. Her chin had begun to sag and her eyes to look a little weary. But she had not observed these things, for we do not notice ourselves very much until some other person thinks we are worthy of observation and tells us ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... large, clean-shaven, dark-haired man of indeterminate age. By his profession at large he was little known, but in the Guardian office he was very well known indeed and excellently understood, and an appreciation of his character and qualities truthfully set down by the observant Jimmy or by Herbert, the map clerk, would ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... so-called. Those that are improperly called by that name are revealed as either empirical historical observations, or spiritual laws, that is to say judgments, into which are translated the conceptions of the spiritual activities; when they are not simply empty and indeterminate generalizations, like the so-called law of evolution. Sometimes, too, nothing more is understood by sociality than social rule, and so law; and thus sociology is confounded with the science or theory of law itself. Law, sociality, and ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... the Poet drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... accidental variations Mr. Darwin does not, of course, mean to imply variations really due to "chance," but to utterly indeterminate antecedents. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... dear creature, not only in her glances, indeterminate of colour, veiled or gay like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the draping of her dress, in everything about her, even to the long curl, falling over the neck erect and delicate as ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... that direction. There was an unoccupied muddy space for fifty yards, perhaps, between car and gate, and then the wheels and head of the pit rose black against the sky. I was one of a rude semicircle of people that hung as yet indeterminate in ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... thought there is a vague conception of life everywhere, but no true appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction of man's nature: in its consciousness of itself, humanity is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But there Greek thought finds its happy ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... defined. The House of Lords was but a small body. It comprised simply those lords, temporal and spiritual, who were entitled to receive from the king, when a parliament was to be held, a special writ, i.e., an individual summons. The number of these was indeterminate. The right of the archbishops, the bishops, and the abbots to be summoned was immemorial and indisputable, although the abbots in practice evaded their obligation of attendance, save in cases in which it could be shown that as military tenants of the crown they were obligated ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... of a constant going and coming of spectres about him. There were strange noises in his ears; extraordinary fancies disturbed his brain. He saw neither houses, nor pavements, nor chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects whose edges melted into each other. At the corner of the Rue de la Barillerie, there was a grocer's shop whose porch was garnished all about, according to immemorial custom, with hoops of tin from ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... chance isolation - as he changes the position of his sunshade - of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... talk was Charles Dudley Warner, the humorous writer. I am not partial to American humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley Warner I always appreciated. In our talk I saw his serious side, for he was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State, on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories. He told me that he never talked in train: but during the three hours' journey to New York neither of us opened the books with which we had provided ourselves, and we each talked ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... out from the one, to which therefore I give hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of them I should commence, there ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... accepted and current poetic forms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people, occupations, and aspirations of "these States," as yet undeveloped but vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tally the fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and a new world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope and flexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation and variety. Finding none ready to his hand, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... the world becomes and the more it rises above the indeterminate, so much the farther removed it is from God; that is to say, so much the more impious it is." M. Julien Benda[12] is not led to this startling utterance by any political or sentimental grudge. It is not the late war, nor the peace of Versailles, nor the parlous state ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... windan, wind) is to move in an indefinite or indeterminate way which may or may not be a departure from a prescribed way; to deviate (L. de, from, and via, a way) is to turn from a prescribed or right way, physically, mentally, or morally, usually in an unfavorable sense; to diverge (L. di, apart, and vergo, incline, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... experiment. He showed her what few mortals have seen, a naked soul with its scars, its stains, and its ravages from flame and convulsion. He need not have apprehended a disastrous result. She was compounded of his essences, and her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius. She listened intently, the expression of torment displaced by normal if profound sympathy. He had begun with the passions inspired ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... among the scanty grass tufts in which we were trying to get cover. It was very hard work indeed, but after a half hour of it we gained a thin bush not over thirty yards from a half dozen dark and indeterminate bodies dozing in the very centre of a brush patch. Cautiously I wiped the sweat from my eyes and raised my glasses. It was slow work and patient work, picking out and examining each individual beast from the mass. Finally the job was done. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... "the Island" for indeterminate periods. At stated intervals they were to be released, one by one, and restored to citizenship. The shortest term of exile, however, was one year. The releases were to be decided by lot, except in the case of three men: Crust, Fernandez and an Irish sailor named Clark. They were the ringleaders ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... call attention to the fact, that if nature and the sacred text are fixed elements, this is not the case with the interpretations of theologians, and the results of geology. It is difficult to pronounce upon the exact relation of two quantities more or less indeterminate. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... vaguely took it for granted that Dora was going somewhere. But she wasn't. They emerged from the part of the small town closely built about the university and came out upon a bit of parked land overlooking the river; and here Dora's steps slowed to an indeterminate halt near a bench beneath ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... torments"; and the spirits of the faithful pass to rest and joy. But between these two representatives in the narrative, the one of the evil, the other of the good, there are the multitudes who are neither very good nor very evil, so varied in the indeterminate tokens of good and evil which marked their lives on earth, that it would seem to be impossible for us to know on which side of "the great gulf" their position ought to be. But if the extremes enter the Intermediate ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... is directly due to woman suffrage may be summed up as follows: Equal guardianship of children; raising the "age of protection" for girls from 16 to 18 years; establishment of a State Home for Dependent Children; a State Industrial School for Girls; indeterminate sentence for criminals; a State Arbitration Board; open meetings of school boards; the removal of emblems from ballots; placing drinking fountains on the corners of most of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... her husband. "I mean you, and Mrs. Easterfield, and myself, and the rest. That young woman's indeterminate methods of fascination interfere ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... of individual natural bodies are either quite indeterminate, as in the case of planets, stones, trees, &c., or they vary within moderate limits, as in the case of seeds, eggs, &c.; but even in these cases small quantitative differences are met with which do not interfere with the essential properties ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... and lay in the darkness about me. Some were couched upon rough wooden shelves ranged around the walls, others sprawled upon the floor, in the center whereof, upon a small tea-chest, stood a smoky brass lamp. The room and its occupants alike were indeterminate, sketchy; its deadly atmosphere seemed to be suffocating me. A sort of choking sound came from one of the bunks; a vague, obscene murmuring filled the whole ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... to write, the closed door seemed to symbolize a refusal to share in his trial, a hardening of herself against his need of her. What if he should come down intending to speak, and should be turned from his purpose? Slighter obstacles have deflected the course of events in those indeterminate moments when the soul floats between two tides. She sprang up quickly, and as her hand touched the latch she heard ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... laid soft fingers on their checks. Overhead burned the stars, clear, unflickering, like candles. Dimly could be seen the horses, their flanks swinging steadily in the square trot. Ghostly bushes passed them; ghostly rock elevations. Far, in indeterminate distance, lay the outlines of the mountains. Always, they seemed to recede. The plain, all but invisible, the wagon trail quite so, the depths of space—these flung heavy on the soul their weight of mysticism. The woman, until now bolt ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... with a single-barrelled gun, whistling to the hares. He must have worked among machinery in early days, for before he stood still he always shouted to himself: "Stop the machine!" and before going on: "Full speed!" He had a huge black dog of indeterminate breed, called Arapka. When it ran too far ahead he used to shout to it: "Reverse action!" Sometimes he used to sing, and as he did so staggered violently, and often fell down (the wolf thought the wind blew him over), and ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... a group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely within the circle or illumination. And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light, now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by mysterious thousands into the mass of night. We passed them. They looked up, squinting their eyes against the dazzle of the fire. The night closed about ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... influence of Leicester and the caprices of the queen, remains to a large extent a matter of conjecture. His share in the settlement of 1559 was considerable, and it coincided fairly with his own somewhat indeterminate religious views. Like the mass of the nation, he grew more Protestant as time wore on; he was readier to persecute Papists than Puritans; he had no love for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and he warmly remonstrated with Whitgift over his persecuting Articles of 1583. The finest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... self-love. A man wishes to perpetuate and immortalize himself, as it were, in his great-grandchildren. Where the esprit de famille ceases to act individual selfishness comes into play. When the idea of family becomes vague, indeterminate, and uncertain, a man thinks of his present convenience; he provides for the establishment of his succeeding generation, and no more. Either a man gives up the idea of perpetuating his family, or at any rate he seeks to accomplish ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... need to become familiar with this indeterminate idea of the savage Supreme Being, which, logically, may be prior to the evolution of the notion of ghost ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to-morrow morning. He was one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, and at twelve or thirteen years of age look as much alike as goslings,—a lad with light-brown hair, cheeks of cream and roses, full lips, indeterminate nose and eyebrows,—a physiognomy in which it seems impossible to discern anything but the generic character to boyhood; as different as possible from poor Maggie's phiz, which Nature seemed to have ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... March evening six mouths later, one of those warm, still, sunshot-and-grey March evenings when elm-root are blue with violets and the air is full of the faint indeterminate scent of tree flowers, that Lawrence brought his bride home to Farringay. March weather is uncertain, and he preferred to go where he could be sure of comfort, while Isabel, having once consented to be married, left all arrangements ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... as memorials of her existence. The plantation was just upon that wavy line which separates the cotton region of the east from the tobacco belt that sweeps down the pleasant ranges of the Piedmont region, east of the Blue Appalachians. Or, to speak more correctly, the plantation was in that indeterminate belt which neither of the great staples could claim exclusively as its own—that delectable land where every conceivable product of the temperate zone grows, if not in its rankest luxuriance, at least in perfection and abundance. Tobacco ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... and incongruous is kept out, while all that is essential to the matter in hand is hurried on with swifter progress than in real life; over the whole, viz., the situations and characters, a certain clearness and distinctness of appearance is thrown, which the vague and indeterminate outlines of reality seldom possess. Thus the form constitutes the poetic element of Comedy, while its prosaic principle lies in the matter, in the required assimilation to something ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... first-gathered fruit. The flesh was red and juicy. There was a texture it was satisfying to chew on. The taste was indeterminate save for a very mild flavor of ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and flawless. Inside it could be made out various objects—a circular bench arrangement on a wooden flooring, batteries that filled the cup between the floor and the bottom arc of the sphere, tall metal cylinders, a small searchlight set next to a mechanism that was indeterminate. At three equidistant points on the sides there were glass handles, as thick as a man's thigh, cast integral with the walls. On the top there ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the work thoroughly, but she is a thought heavy in the hand; she is too literary, not to say professional; she is definite at all costs. She has "restored" Miss Coleridge as a German archaeologist might restore a Tanagra figure. Indeterminate lines have been ruthlessly rectified and asymmetry has grown symmetrical. Though we do not suggest that she misunderstood her friend, we are sure that the lady exhibited in the memoir is not the lady who ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of Kubin, Munch, and Gauguin should be read in the light of my artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets; it is an authentic one, and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... his kindness in coming. He looked considerably older than his age; his hair had grown thin and grey about his temples, and the sharp birdlike outline of his face and features seemed blurred and indeterminate. His creed too, and his whole manner of looking at things of faith, seemed to have undergone a similar process. The two had ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... streams of blood in the arteries of man are filled with the unknown. The habits of the Esquimaux, the customs of the dwarfs of Central Africa, the ways of the baboons of Sumatra are minutely set to book, but the wars of the phagocytes remain indeterminate, unexplained. With microscope to his eye the bacteriologist is now examining the constituent parts of the blood, isolating, breeding, and minutely studying the germs of fevers, the growths of tumors, and other elemental forms of human parasites, in order to discover their ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... ignorance of business—of the way in which serious affairs are actually managed—and the true nature of the agents and impulses that give movement and direction to the stronger currents of ordinary life. Perhaps they are also incapable of long moral or political investigations, where many complex and indeterminate elements are to be taken into account, and a variety of opposite probabilities to be weighed before coming to a conclusion. They are generally too impatient to get at the ultimate results, to go well through with such discussions; ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... he must become agent of a factory: out of this comes a variety of training which is very valuable, but a wise man must have strength to call in his resources before middle-life, prune off divergent activities, and concentrate himself on the main work, be it what it may. It is shameful to see the indeterminate lives of many of our gifted men, unable to resist the temptations of a busy land, and so losing themselves in an aimless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... The great saline stretch shone pale-blue, under the rising sun. The legs of our five mehara cast on it their moving shadows of a darker blue. For a moment the only inhabitant of these solitudes, a bird, a kind of indeterminate heron, rose and hung in the air, as if suspended from a thread, only to sink back to rest as soon as we ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... Maltravers received confirmed all his expectations,—the suit of Legard had replaced his own. It was then that Maltravers began to consider how far the fortune of Evelyn and her destined husband was such as to preclude all anxiety for their future lot. Fortune is so indeterminate in its gauge and measurement. Money, the most elastic of materials, falls short or exceeds, according to the extent of our wants and desires. With all Legard's good qualities he was constitutionally careless and extravagant; ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words. A word may have several meanings, but all of them fixed and recognized ones; as the word post, for example, or the word box, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... supposedly valueless region where cotton surely would not grow, that rich country now known as Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. This region, late gained by war from Mexico, soon to be increased by purchase from Mexico on the South, was still of indeterminate status, slavery not being prohibited but permitted, by federal action, although most of this territory had been free soil under the old laws of Mexico. Moreover, as though sardonically to complicate all these much-mingled matters, there thrust up to the northward, ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... Ransom it came like balm and a renewed life. Bounding across the room, he strove to seize her hand and draw her to himself. But Hazen would not have it. His anger, indeterminate before, was concentrated now, and not the white pleading of her face, nor the warning gesture of Ransom, could hold ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... this twofold trap, the theorists will reply that the Scoliae are descended from a precursor, an indeterminate creature, of changeable habits and changing form, modifying itself in accordance with its environment and with the regional and climatic conditions and branching out into races each of which has become a species with the attributes which distinguish it to-day. The precursor is the deus ex machina ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre |
