"Mathematically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to overhear their confessions, like that whispering place of Gloucester [2706]with us, or like the duke's place at Mantua in Italy, where the sound is reverberated by a concave wall; a reason of which Blancanus in his Echometria gives, and mathematically demonstrates. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... curiously at variance with our own. As an instance, we may state that the earth, as seen from a highflying balloon, used to be almost always described as appearing concave, or like a huge basin, and ingenious attempts were made to prove mathematically that this must be so. The laws of refraction are brought in to prove the fact; or, again, the case is stated thus: Supposing the extreme horizon to be seen when the balloon is little more than a mile high, the range of view on all sides will then be, roughly, ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... in that province of thought which concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not fettered by the laws of harmony, but only by those of discord. The truly virtuous man, remarks Aristotle, never has occasion to practise self-denial. Hence, mathematically, "the theory of the intellectual action involves the recognition of a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn."[105-1] True freedom, real being, is only possible when law as such is inexistent. Only the lawless makes the law. When ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... morning I might have doubted, but now, thanks to that vain idiot who goes by the name of Wilkie, I am sure, perfectly, mathematically sure of success. Maumejan, who is entirely devoted to me, and who is the greediest, most avaricious scoundrel alive, will draw up such a complaint that Marguerite will sleep in prison. Moreover, other witnesses will be summoned. By what ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... most disturbed district, I certainly felt, and not for the first time, that as one approaches a spot in which law and order are supposed to be suspended the sense of alarm and insecurity diminishes, to put it mathematically, "as the square of the distances." Even after a rapid survey of this part of the West I cannot help contrasting the state of public opinion here with that prevailing in Dublin. In the capital—outside of "the Castle," ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... for men is a black suit, black gloves and tie of grosgrain or taffeta silk, and a black band upon his hat. The tailor adjusts this hat band with scrupulous nicety to the depth of his affliction. It is deepest for a wife; it diminishes mathematically through the gamut of parents, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... down suddenly behind a neighbouring bush, from which retreat we gazed round to see where our friends were. Another cry from behind attracted our attention; and far away on the horizon we saw a large flock of geese flying in a mathematically correct triangle. Now, although far out of shot, and almost out of sight, we did not despair of getting one of these birds; for, by imitating their cry, there was a possibility of attracting them towards us. Geese often answer to a call in this way, if well imitated; particularly ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... is one who maintains that, 'mathematically,' a bird cannot fly, and another who demonstrates that a fish is not ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... true, do they present clear reasoning to show conclusively that the alleged cause—such as sitting thirteen at table—actually produced the effect of a death? Do they establish a close causal relationship, or do they merely assert that after a group of thirteen had sat at table some one did die? Mathematically, would the law of chance or probability not indicate that such a thing would happen a little less surely if the number had been twelve, a little ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Cathedral of Saint-Etienne is a combination of styles and a violation of every sort of architectural unity, and realises a confusion which the most perverse imagination could scarcely have conceived. According to every convention of building, the Cathedral is not only artistically poor, but mathematically insupportable. The proportions are execrable; and the interior, the finest part of the church, reminds one irresistibly of a good puzzle badly put together. The weak tower is a sufficient excuse for ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... of Ohio, with their "altar mounds," "sacred enclosures," and "mathematically accurate" but mysterious circles and squares, are still pointed to as impregnable to the attacks of this Indian theory. That the rays of light falling upon their origin are few and dim, is admitted; still, we are not left wholly ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... observed rotation is exceedingly small and difficult to observe; and it is only by a very remarkable patience and care and ingenuity that Dr. Kerr has obtained his result. Mr. Fitzgerald, of Dublin, has examined the question mathematically, and has shown that Maxwell's theory would have enabled Dr. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... prophets of evil are refuted, Ireland must go without Home Rule for ever. "If the sky fall, we shall catch larks." But he would be a foolish bird-catcher who waited for that contingency. And not less foolish is the statesman who sits still till every conceivable objection to his policy has been mathematically refuted in advance, and every wild prediction falsified by the event; for that would ensure his never moving at all. Sedet aeternumque sedebit. A proper enough attitude, perhaps, on the part of an eristic philosopher speculating on politics in the silent shade of academic groves, but hardly ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... oppression were in our minds, it is not in our power. The overlordship of the Imperial Parliament remains in any scheme of Home Rule unimpaired, and any man damnified because of his religion can appeal in last resort to the Imperial Army and Navy. Shankhill Road is mathematically safe. After all there are in England some forty millions of Protestants who, whatever their religious temperature may be, will certainly decline to see Protestantism penalised. The Protestants in Ireland have a million and ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... the earth, was marked in the nebula of our system before the system existed—that is, that our orbit had its place in the beginning just as it has now; that the orbit was not determined by solar revolution and centrifugal action, but that it was mathematically existent in the nebular sheet out of which the solar system ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... is simply monstrous in invention, Swift in invention submits himself loyally to law. Give Swift his world of Liliput and Brobdingnag respectively, and all, after that, is quite natural and probable. The reduction or the exaggeration is made upon a mathematically calculated scale. For such verisimilitude Rabelais cares not a straw. His various inventions are recklessly independent one of another. A characteristic of Swift thus is scrupulous conformity to whimsical law. Rabelais is remarkable ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... pigments are not used in accordance with the laws governing their chemical composition, they will not stand. If the laws of proportion are not observed in composition, the picture will not balance. The laws of color harmony are as mathematically fixed as the law of gravity. So, too, the relations of size, which give the impression of nearness or distance to objects, rest on the laws of optics. You have infinite scope for individual expression inside of those laws, but you cannot ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... booklet inferred, that he was announcing the end of the world. [36] Was it not reported, too, that the Virgin of Luta in the town of Lipa had one cheek swollen larger than the other and that there was mud on the borders of her gown? Does not this prove mathematically that the holy images also walk about without holding up their skirts and that they even suffer from the toothache, perhaps for our sake? Had he not seen with his own eyes, during the regular Good-Friday sermon, all the images of Christ move and bow their heads thrice ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... panelled compartments, and the partial change of form in the arches, especially of doorways and windows, which in the latter part of the fifteenth century were often obtusely pointed and mathematically described from four centres, instead of two, as in the more simple pointed arch, and which from the period when this arch began to be prevalent was called the TUDOR arch, together with a great profusion of minute ornament, ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... these germinal processes cannot be proved mathematically, since we cannot actually see the play of forces of the passive fluctuations and their causes. We cannot say how great these fluctuations are, and how quickly or slowly, how regularly or irregularly they change. Nor do we ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... we all know the 'Muffin Man;' therefore it follows, mathematically, I believe, that we must all know each other. I think we'll try a sitting-down game next. I'll give you all something. Desire, you can tell them what to do with it, and Miss Ashburne shall predict ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single organism. Each part of the immense composition, down to the smallest detail, is necessary to the total effect. We are in the presence of a most complicated yet mathematically ordered scheme, which owes life and animation to one master-thought. In spite of its complexity and scientific precision, the vault of the Sistine does not strike the mind as being artificial or worked out by calculation, but as being ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... that is narrowed by the one man's senses, the weal of the whole,—in order that the wisdom of the State, which puts at the mercy of the arbitrary will and passions of the one, the weal of the many, might be mathematically exhibited,—might be set down in figures and diagrams. For this is that Poet who represents this method of inquiry and investigation, as it were, to the eye. This is that same Poet, too, who surprises elsewhere a queen in her swooning passion of grief, and bids her murmur to ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... was mathematically inclined, wanted to know why they wouldn't look at it through their twelve horrid little eyes, and Judy laughed and came down from the table, after expressing a wicked wish that the little Digby-Smiths might all tumble over the dress-circle rail before the curtain rose. Meg shut ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... even here, he shows himself to be the child of his age. For example, he almost always paints the interiors of his Gothic cathedrals on broad canvases of insignificant height, which causes the pointed arches and vaulted structures of the foreground to be cut off at the top. In spite of the mathematically correct drawing the general plan of the picture therefore reveals that the age of Peter Neefs no longer had a correct eye for the principle, for the spirit, of the Gothic, otherwise the master would not ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... more than a three-line paragraph even when they burn down. It was smelly. The kitchen joined the dining-room, and the dining-room the office, which was half a bar-room, with a few boxes of sawdust mathematically arranged along the walls. There were many like it up and down the coast. There were pictures on the walls of terrible wrecks at sea, naval battles, and a race ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... stand at the churchyard gate, better worth sitting in, so far as appearance goes, than the other three. Alfold, too, has a great old yew-tree, one of a row of three in the Fold churchyards. Has it ever been noticed that the Alfold, Dunsfold, and Hambledon yews stand almost in a mathematically straight line? From Alfold to Hambledon is five miles as the crow flies, and Dunsfold is almost exactly half way between ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... chair, a safety belt across his middle, was Space Commander Keven O'Brine, an Irishman out of Dublin. He was short, as compact as a deto-rocket, and obviously unfriendly. He had a mathematically square jaw, a lopsided nose, green eyes, and sandy hair. He spoke with ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... then, no escape from the admission that neither physical geology, nor paleontology, possesses any method by which the absolute synchronism of two strata can be demonstrated. All that geology can prove is local order of succession. It is mathematically certain that, in any given vertical linear section of an undisturbed series of sedimentary deposits, the bed which lies lowest is the oldest. In many other vertical linear sections of the same series, of course, corresponding ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... her works. Elementary matter, different in its essence, must necessarily form different beings, various in their combinations, in their properties, in their modes of action, in their manner of existence. There is not, neither can there be, two beings, two combinations, which are mathematically and rigorously the same; because the place, the circumstances, the relations; the proportions, the modifications, never being exactly alike, the beings that result can never bear a perfect resemblance to each other: ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... use of the substance of intellectual revelations, but must be guided by observed facts and by the conclusions logically and mathematically uniting them"—a passage which is quoted with approval by Professor Reichel, and would seem to be endorsed by the silence concerning the religious side of the question which is observed by most of our great scientific supporters. It is a point of view which can well be ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wood of the previous year's growth coming from a dormant bud. Here is manifested one of Nature's energy-saving devices, shoot, leaves, flowers and fruit spring in a short season from a single bud. In the light of this fact, pruning should be looked on as a simple problem to be solved mathematically and not as a puzzle to be untangled, as so many regard it. For an example, a problem in pruning is here stated ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... a thing to live in memory. From the nature of the land, gently rolling to the horizon without an obstruction the height of a man's hand, there was no possibility of escape for the quarry. The outcome was as mathematically certain as a problem in arithmetic; the only uncertain element was that of time. At first the jack seemed to be gaining, but gradually the greater endurance of the hounds began to count, and foot by foot the gap between pursuers and pursued lessened. In the beginning the rabbit ran ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... mathematically demonstrated that the continued exertion of a force in raising superimposed strata would tend to produce two classes of fractures in those strata; those of the first order at right angles to the direction of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... I required and gave me his hand. On the next day, I gave him my directions, the first article of which demanded that he should at once get himself weighed, so that the result might be made mathematically. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... legions, and by a horde of Bourguignons, and lastly by a horde of Sicamores, under one Clodovic, had previously subjugated the whole world, and given their names and laws to Asia, seems to me to be very strange: the thing is not mathematically impossible, and if it be demonstrated, I give way; it would be very uncivil to refuse to the Velches what ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... between the seashore and the Shimba Hills, in which we had been hunting. A road ten feet wide and innocent of wheels ran with obstinate directness up and down the slight contours and through the bushes and cocoanut groves that lay in its path. So mathematically straight was it that only when perspective closed it in, or when it dropped over the summit of a little rise, did the eye lose the effect of its interminability. The country through which this road led ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. "They can be treated mathematically," one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. "Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... very much to the Purpose, in describing spherically and mathematically that exquisite Quality call'd a devilish Spirit, in which it would naturally occur to give you a whole Chapter upon the glorious Articles of Malice and Envy, and especially upon that luscious, delightful, triumphant Passion call'd REVENGE; how natural to Man, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... not know that I have ever seen an entirely satisfactory statement of what constitutes a call to the ministry. Probably it is one of those things of the Spirit which cannot be mathematically defined. The variety of the calls in Scripture warns us against laying down any scheme to which the experience of every one must conform. It is the same as with the commencement of the spiritual life, where also ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... with all their calculations and expenditures in experiments, had determined the proper distribution of the strains, and the size and strength required for the side-plates of tubular bridges, but only for those at the top and bottom. General Haupt solved the problem mathematically, and sent a communication on the subject to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which has been extensively copied into the scientific journals of Europe, and has added largely to the reputation of its author. In the Victoria Bridge at Montreal, the distribution ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... "How mathematically exact you are!" she gibed. "To-morrow it will be a year, three months, and twelve days; and the day after to-morrow—mercy me! I should go mad if I had to think back and count up that way every day. But I asked you ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... greatly the knowledge of what may be termed the actuarial side of heredity has advanced in recent years. The average closeness of kinship in each degree now admits of exact definition and of being treated mathematically, like birth- and death-rates, and the other topics with ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... confiding to the two ladies his design for the work with which he had been haunted; they smiled and promised him their assistance. The youngest, with an air of gaiety suggested one of the first chapters of the undertaking, by saying that she would take upon herself to prove mathematically that women who are entirely ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... M, the third in U, there was in it an ineffable mystery, to wit, those three letters declaring to us that he was the beginning, middle, and end (summum, medium, et ultimum) of all. Nay, the mystery was yet more abstruse; for he so mathematically split the word Jesus into two equal parts that he left the middle letter by itself, and then told us that that letter in Hebrew was schin or sin, and that sin in the Scotch tongue, as he remembered, signified as much as sin; from whence he gathered that it was ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... drive me silly! Mathematically speaking the thing is possible; but humanly speaking it is ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... say, one of his works or a single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then, is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet written any ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... that a clear line can be drawn between them; criticism does not hope to be mathematically exact. But everybody sees the diversity between the talkative, confidential manner of Thackeray and the severe, discreet, anonymous manner—of whom shall I say?—of Maupassant, for a good example, in many of his ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... and who had full belief in magic and had a cryptic meaning in everything, we should place ourselves in her position before deciding. It is now manifest that the sunset has an important place in the arrangements. As those suns, cut so mathematically by the edge of the sarcophagus, were arranged of full design, we must take our cue from this. Again, we find all along that the number seven has had an important bearing on every phase of the Queen's ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... About a hundred and fifty people were trying to sit down in a hundred seats. The stewards looked harassed as they explained that there was another meal-time half an hour after the first. Knollys was trying, with impassive dignity, to prove mathematically to an old lady that by waiting until six o'clock for her tea to-day and automatically shifting all her meal-times on half an hour she was losing nothing; and, after all, it would all be the same whether she had her tea at five or ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... line, are Pointes called. A Point, is a thing Mathematicall, indiuisible, which may haue a certayne determined situation." If a Poynt moue from a determined situation, the way wherein it moued, is also a Line: mathematically produced, whereupon, of ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... such a wheel is shaped like an open clam shell, the central line which cuts the stream of water into halves being ground to a sharp edge. The curves which absorb the momentum of the water are figured mathematically and in practice become polished like mirrors. So great is the eroding action of water, under great heads—especially when it contains sand or silt—that it is occasionally necessary to replace these buckets. For ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... of drawing the human figure mathematically by means of squares, which was not unsuitable in working a statue sixty feet high, checked all flights of genius; and it afterwards destroyed Greek art, when the Greek painters were idle enough to use it. We hear but little of the statues and sculptures made for Philadelphus; but we cannot ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... worked out his discovery. Again, Neptune, the outermost known planet of our system was discovered by the astronomer Galle in consequence of calculations made by Leverrier. Certain variations in the movements of the planets were mathematically unaccountable except on the hypothesis that some more remote planet existed. Astronomers had faith in mathematics and the hypothetical planet was found to be a reality. Instances of this kind might be multiplied, but as the French say "a quoi bon?" I think these will be sufficient ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... many of her letters, a precision, formality, and self-complacency, which suggest the female pedant. Byron says of her that "she was governed by what she called fixed rules and principles, squared mathematically" (Medwin, p. 60); at one time he used to speak of her as his "Princess of Parallelograms," and at a later period he called her ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... long exercised an honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one's thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of 'self-expression,' individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of God and ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... hooks-and-eyes with such fingers, so I called Rosine and bribed her to help me. Rosine liked a bribe, so she did her best, smoothed and plaited my hair as well as a coiffeur would have done, placed the lace collar mathematically straight, tied the neck-ribbon accurately— in short, did her work like the neat-handed Phillis she could be when she those. Having given me my handkerchief and gloves, she took the candle and lighted me down-stairs. After all, I had forgotten ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... to note that when a space has been divided into the ratio of 2 to 3, the relationship of the smaller to the larger is practically the same as the relationship of the larger to the original whole. Or, mathematically, if the original, having an area of 5, is divided into parts of 2 and 3, then 2 is to 3 as 3 is to 5,—a ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... or reward. If this fundamental principle could be investigated by responsible scientists, unhampered by theological influences, and with no prejudice as to the idea's being regarded as a mere culte, its exactness could perhaps be mathematically proved beyond a cavilling doubt. Possibly then the doctrine might be allowed to be taught in the public schools, to the everlasting benefit of the ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... to the human mind, so long as it can do so without surrendering its relevance to practice. Thus natural science is at its best when it is most thoroughly mathematical, since what can be expressed mathematically can speak a human language. In such science only the ultimate material elements remain surds; all their further movement and complication can be represented in that kind of thought which is most intimately ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... geologists and biologists had demanded hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of millions of years to allow for the developments with which they were concerned. The physicists, led by Lord Kelvin, refused to admit the demand, claiming that it could be proved mathematically that it was impossible that the sun could have been giving out heat at its present rate for more than a hundred million years, at the very outside. The appearance of radium robbed this argument of its cogency. It is true that an examination of the sun's spectrum ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... the Gens, O Gens of Earth, hark ye to the words of Dalis and of Sarka! The time has come to try the experiment of which Sarka told you, and which I, Dalis, of the Gens of Dalis, have found good, and hereby certify! See that all your Beryls are mathematically tuned to catch every sound, every vibration, every picture, from this Beryl of Sarka, henceforth to be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... John, who looked as burly as a drifting ale pipe in a head sea, and whispered something about Young America being an unpleasant companion to sail the air with. Feeling how much better it was to be good-natured, I took the matter mathematically, trusting to the best. To be always right end up is a principle never to be lost sight of. There was land below us, firm and frowning; which, before we knew where we were, we had slipped into, like preserved meat, up to our arm-pits. Poor John made an awful ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... bank at Monte Carlo will always beat the individual if he stays long enough. I presume that the bank there is managed honestly, although I neither know nor care whether it is. But this at least is certain—the cagnotte gains 3 per cent. on every spin. Mathematically, a man is bound to lose the capital he invests in every thirty throws when his luck is neither good nor bad. In the long run his luck will leave him with a balanced book—minus the cagnotte. My advice to any man would be, "Never play ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... to prevent what is deemed an evil and stop short of those cases in which the harm to the few concerned is thought less important than the harm to the public that would ensue if the rules laid down were made mathematically exact.[1041] Exceptions of specified classes will not render the law unconstitutional unless there is no fair reason for the law that would not equally require its extension to the excepted classes.[1042] Incidental individual inequality does not violate ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... ahead, just skimming the surface of the water, and coming straight at us, like a mathematically arranged triangle of cannon balls, taking definite form and magnitude oh, so swiftly, unbelievably swift; coming—yes—directly overhead, as before, the pulsing, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... and partly on this other ground, that one who has become a traveller has loosened himself from his old customary moorings, and so gives himself, as it were, a new starting-point in life, from which he may, if the spirit of delusion is still happily strong within him, draw a mathematically straight line in the given direction A B, to be the faithful index of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... an infinitely short time. You may mix in a little practical mechanics, if you choose. Invent some method of taking the tardy Courier over his road at the rate of sixty miles a minute. Demonstrate me this discovery (when you have made it!) mathematically, and approximate it practically, and Abscissa is yours. Until you can, I will thank you to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... Shakespeare's contains so many speeches which a student of the play, if they were quoted to him, would be puzzled to assign to the speakers. Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically possible. Can he find, again, any signs of character by which to distinguish the speeches of Ross and Angus in Act I. scenes ii. and iii., or to determine that Malcolm must have spoken I. iv. 2-11? Most of this writing, we may almost say, is simply Shakespeare's writing, not that of Shakespeare ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... walls, brown tiles, or thatched roof having an old-fashioned, rustic effect. One might suppose earthquakes were common from this habit of living on the ground floor. The dryness of the climate doubtless obviates risk of damp. Much more graceful are the little orchards of these homesteads than the mathematically planted cider apples seen here in all stages of growth. Even the blossoms of such trees later on cannot compare with the glory of an orchard, in the old acceptance of the word, having reached maturity in the natural way. Certain portions of rural France are ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... questionable, yet they were certainly available for garrisons and for many duties which would otherwise have absorbed great numbers of white soldiers. Thus, as the President said, the question became calculable mathematically, like horse-power in a mechanical problem. The force of able-bodied Southern negroes soon reached 200,000, of whom most were in the regular military service, and the rest were laborers with the armies. "We have the men," said Mr. Lincoln, "and we could not ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... had been flung downward and given a spinning motion, which, acting on the softer sandstone beneath, had begun hollowing it out, as if by the chisel of an engraver. This strange operation had gone on for years, until a bowl a dozen feet across and half as deep had been formed. It was almost mathematically round, very smooth and with a tapering shape to the bottom that made the resemblance to an ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... section, mathematically exact, is of course, square in shape. In our illustration the lower part of two lunettes ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... resting place of the Indians, and a retreat which it was dangerous to enter. About 2,000 people live here, and during the season there are often 3,000 or 4,000 health-seekers in addition. There is a grand avenue through the village eighty feet wide and well kept. Instead of being laid out in a mathematically straight line, it follows the meanderings of the River Fontaine-qui-Bouille. This feature gives it a novel as well as a delightful appearance. There is also a little park, which possesses features not to be found in ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... cannon going and there was a slaughter in the German lines. Then when the German infantry crossed to our front line trenches (now entirely vacant) they were smashed up because the French guns were firing directly upon these positions, which they knew mathematically. And those of the Boche who went down in the dugouts for safety were killed by the gas which the Frenchmen had ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... that cloven hoof which I never had and those ass's ears which, alas! I did flourish so portentously. Why, Jessica, according to your own words you will have a strange double lover to greet, and I think it would be mathematically correct if you gave two kisses in return for every one. It will be a new ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... with me for not saying a word about going to see you? Arabel and I won't affirm it mathematically—but we are, metaphysically, talking of paying our visit to you next Tuesday. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... to her mistress. In her absence I had leisure to form some idea of Miss Judson's character on the mute evidence of Miss Judson's surroundings. From the fact that there were books of a sentimental and poetical tenor amongst the religious works ranged at mathematically correct distances upon the dark green table-cover—from the presence of three twittering canaries in a large brass cage—from the evidence of a stuffed Blenheim spaniel, with intensely brown eyes, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... knives were shortly used in the same way, neither my companion nor I cared to have butter, and contented ourselves with cheese, which luckily was cut at a side-table, and presented to us in large blocks, in the shape of dice, mathematically correct ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... or less after every performance. They didn't get the curtain down on the first one until five minutes after twelve—for even an experienced director like Galbraith can make a mistake in timing—and the mathematically demonstrated necessity for cutting, or speeding, a whole hour out of the piece, tamed even the wild-eyed Mr. Mills. The principals, after having for weeks been routined in the reading of their lines and the execution ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... and the daughters of Lot couldn't disturb his confidence in them or in himself. And—in my opinion—he paints that way, too." And he went away laughing and swinging his athletic shoulders and twirling his cane, his hat not mathematically straight on his handsome, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... 'tubing'] 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing *again*!!" 2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles, either physically or mathematically. 3. An indescribable form of self-torture (see ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... have the flower and outcome of Newton's induction; and how to verify it, or to disprove it, was the next question. The first step of the philosopher in this direction was to prove, mathematically, that if this law of attraction be the true one; if the earth be constituted of particles which obey this law; then the action of a sphere equal to the earth in size on a body outside of it, is the same as that ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... he analyzed the wave action mathematically, then worked out a typical hookup for one of his jetmarines in a set ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... number of times, are unconsciously but unavoidable cemented into closer and closer union; the limbs require little more than to be put in motion for them to follow a regular track with ease and certainty; so that the mere intention of the will acts mathematically like touching the spring of a machine, and you come with Locksley in Ivanhoe, in shooting at a mark, 'to allow for ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... was mathematically thought out. In a few months at the outside France would be lying trampled down and bleeding; Russia would be overrun; already she would be mistress of Europe, and prepared to attack the only country that stood between her and world-wide dominion, whose allies ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... to say enough of 'Robinson Crusoe' to justify its traditional superiority to De Foe's other writings. The charm, as some critics say, is difficult to analyse; and I do not profess to demonstrate mathematically that it must necessarily be, what it is, the most fascinating boy's book ever written, and one which older critics may study with delight. The most obvious advantage over the secondary novels lies in the unique situation. Lamb, in the passage from which I have ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... yet, if we will consider, we shall find that it is only of our own ideas. The mathematician considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are in idea in his own mind. For it is possible he never found either of them existing mathematically, i.e. precisely true, in his life. But yet the knowledge he has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or any other mathematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain, even of real things existing: because ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... and the fifth remaining diminishes week by week. Our mobility and efficiency increase. There is not the slightest ground for Mr. Methuen's lament about the condition of the Army. It is far fitter than when it began. It is mathematically certain that a very few months must see the last commando hunted down. Meanwhile civil life is gaining strength once more. Already the Orange River Colony pays its own way, and the Transvaal is within measurable distance of doing the same. Industries are waking up, ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... glass a millimetre thick[6], yet sometimes broken by the sea-eagles, which dash themselves like great moths against these gigantic lanterns. The building which encloses and sustains this mechanism, and in which it is set, is also mathematically constructed. Everything about it is plain, exact, bare, precise, correct. A lighthouse is ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... real things. The formula for it was "Universalia ante rem." By it the general name preceded that of the species. Universal concepts represent the real; all else is merely illustrative of the real. The only real sphere is the one held in the mind, mathematically correct in every way. Balls and globes and other actual things are but the illustrations of the genus. Perhaps Anselm was the strongest advocate ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the peripheral vessels however is a sign of only relative value, for the amount of blood in the internal organs may be very different. The problem, how to estimate exactly, if possible mathematically, the quantity of blood in the body has always been recognised as important, and its solution would constitute a real advance. The methods which have so far been proposed for clinical purposes originate from ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... criticism made against proportional systems of voting is that they do not secure the exact representation of all the electors in a country. Thus the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems, whilst admitting that the new method would generally produce more accurate results, mathematically at least, than the existing method, qualified their statement by saying that their success "in producing in Parliament the 'scale map of the country,' which they held up as the ideal, can be only partial"; and in another paragraph the Report contains ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... political storm just going to a life-peerage limit, and then stopping suddenly. But in politics we must not trouble ourselves with exceedingly exceptional accidents; it is quite difficult enough to count on and provide for the regular and plain probabilities. To speak mathematically, we may easily miss the permanent course of the political curve if we engross our minds with its cusps ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... especially, for men are so different. You say 'evidence'. Well, there may be evidence. But evidence, you know, can generally be taken two ways. I am an examining lawyer and a weak man, I confess it. I should like to make a proof, so to say, mathematically clear. I should like to make a chain of evidence such as twice two are four, it ought to be a direct, irrefutable proof! And if I shut him up too soon—even though I might be convinced he was the man, I should very likely be depriving myself of the means of getting further evidence against ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... exclaim: 'Total failure, except in case 7!' And, about that case, he will have his private doubts. But, arguing mathematically, M. Richet proves that the table was right, beyond the limits of mere chance, by fourteen to two. He concludes, on the whole of his experiments, that, probably, intellectual force in one brain may be echoed ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the sky, where he announced that the body ought just then to be, allowed France to snatch the honour of discovery, and the new planet was found by the observer Galle at Berlin, very near the place in the heavens which Le Verrier had mathematically predicted for it. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... of time. The representative system is the invention of the modern world; and, that no doubt may arise as to my own opinion, I declare it before hand, which is, that there is not a problem in Euclid more mathematically true, than that hereditary government has not a right to exist. When therefore we take from any man the exercise of hereditary power, we take away that which he never had the right to possess, and which no law or custom could, or ever can, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... indefinitely, it would sink deep and cut into the very roots of existence. As it is, man does not really believe in evil, just as he cannot believe that violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite torture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the violin there are thousands who cannot. The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions. No doubt there have been people ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... perfect whiteness a black line is traced. The length of each of these lines is mathematically the same, for they have been determined with as much accuracy as the base of the first triangle in a trigonometrical survey. That done, the two boards were erected on the same day in the center of the conference room, and the two candidates, ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and bamboo clusters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and the roads. Some mathematically minded writer once computed that, if Christ in the days of His flesh had started on a tour among the villages of India, visiting one each day, to-day in the advancing years of the twentieth century many would yet be waiting, unenlightened and unvisited. Few have been visited by any modern ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... said. "Nevertheless, it isn't mathematically exact proof, because the equinox needn't ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... scholar, fresh from a big school, he ought to have been more mathematically correct, and known that in describing the arc of a circle his left hand would go lower; but he did not stop to think. The consequence was that as his fingers glided over the rough stone, they passed a few inches beneath the tough stem he sought to grasp, and once in motion, ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... the Canadian youth at Rockport, who gave the crew of the Catwhisker, by wireless, directions whereby the latter were able to locate "mathematically" the whereabouts of the "Canadian Crusoe's Friday Island" listened in much of the time thereafter, in the hope of being able to keep in touch with developments to the end of this ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... authority on this subject, and one, too, whose statements are mathematically accurate, is Vitruvius, who also distinctly points out the great difference between the Greek and Roman theatres. But these and similar passages of the ancient writers have been most incorrectly ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... be taken only of like things. It is possible to average the figures 3, 4, and 8 by adding them together and dividing by 3. The average is 5. Such a process is mathematically correct, because all of the units comprising the 3, 4, and 8 are exactly alike. One of the premises of mathematics is that all units are alike, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... had been, from time immemorial, pouring its flowing treasures into buckets full of holes. At the existing rate of supply and leakage they would never be filled; nothing would ever be settled in medicine. But cases thoroughly recorded and mathematically analyzed would always be available for future use, and when accumulated in sufficient number would lead to results which would be ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... enormous velocity with which, as has been mathematically proved, meteoric stones reach the earth from the extremest confines of the atmosphere, and the lengthened course traversed by fire-balls through the denser strata of the air, it seems more than improbable ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... And who should be so indulgent to the vagaries of the imagination as the philosophers who taught your youth to doubt everything in the Maker's plan of creation which could not be mathematically proved? 'The human mind,' said Luther, 'is like a drunkard on horseback; prop it on one side, and it falls on the other.' So the man who is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant's religion, is always sure to set up some insane ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... took quite a different direction, and thereby attained an incomparably happier result. The fall of a stone, the motion of a sling, resolved into their elements and the forces that are manifested in them, and treated mathematically, produced at last that clear and henceforward unchangeable insight into the system of the world which, as observation is continued, may hope always to extend itself, but need never fear to be ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Gar's side. She stepped lightly down into the cockpit with a naive expression of surprise at the yacht's immaculate order. The sails lay precisely housed, the stays, freshly tarred, glistened in the sun, the brasswork and newly varnished mahogany shone, the mathematically coiled ropes rested on a deck as spotless ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... manuscript that came down from Paris. Our simpler stemma indicates the presence of one rather than more than one such manuscript in the vicinity of Paris in the ninth or the tenth century and again in the fifteenth. This line of argument, which presents not a mathematically absolute demonstration but at least a highly probable concatenation of facts and deductions, warrants the assumption, to be used at any rate as a working hypothesis, that {Pi} is a fragment of the lost Parisinus which contained all the books ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... machines were ingenious, what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that impress cannot be stamped out—that he will have to account for his part, however small it be, in the magnificent pageant of life and work, for he has not been sent into it 'on chance.' Inasmuch as if there is chance in one thing there must be chance in another, and the solar system is too mathematically designed to be a haphazard arrangement. With all our cleverness, our logic, our geometrical skill, we can do nothing so exact! As part of the solar system, you and I have our trifling business to enact, Monsignor,—and to ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... and to this end the general propositions in the first and second book are directed. In the third book we give an example of this in the explication of the system of the World; for by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the first book, we there derive from the celestial phenomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets. Then, from these forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... vague) to assure us that even ordinary words are mutually understood. For instance, the question is asked: "Do you consider it probable that such or such a thing would happen?" Now what does the questioner mean by "probable," and what does the officer think he means? Mathematically, the meaning of "probable" is that there is more than 50 per cent of chance that the thing would happen; but who in ordinary conversation uses that word in that way? That this is not an academic point is shown by the fact that if the answer is "no" the usual inference ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... well-known theory of Adhemar and Crohl, which is founded on changes in the ellipticity of the earth's orbit. This is expounded and amplified by Sir Robert Ball in his "Cause of an Ice Age." The weak point of this theory, which is mathematically unassailable, is that it proves too much, and postulates a constant succession of glacial periods throughout earth-history, and for this there is no evidence. The geographical explanations are chiefly founded on supposed changes ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... combines the properties of a lump of ice and a red-hot coal," he observed. "Catherine has made it thoroughly clear, and you have told me so till I am sick of it. You needn't tell me again; I am perfectly satisfied. He will never give us a penny; I regard that as mathematically proved." ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... then, as the life-work of Copernicus, that he placed the sun in its true place as the centre of the solar system, instead of the earth; that he greatly simplified the theory of planetary motion by this step, and also by the simpler epicyclic chain which now sufficed, and which he worked out mathematically; that he exhibited the precession of the equinoxes (discovered by Hipparchus) as due to a conical motion of the earth's axis; and that, by means of his simpler theory and more exact planetary tables, he reduced to some sort of order the confused chaos of the Ptolemaic system, whose accumulation ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... reason on the other.* While, moreover, the dialectical arguments for unconditioned totality in mere phenomena fall to the ground, both propositions of reason may be shown to be true in their proper signification. This could not happen in the case of the cosmological ideas which demanded a mathematically unconditioned unity; for no condition could be placed at the head of the series of phenomena, except one which was itself a phenomenon and consequently ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... argues that you may just as well keep the temperature at seventy-two, and wait a fortnight for your chickens. I am certain there's a fallacy in the system somewhere, because we never seem to get as far as the chickens. But Ukridge says his theory is mathematically sound and he sticks ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... thoroughly sensible—which I think they might be with very little serious attention—that even the blessings of this world are not to be purchased with riches; a doctrine, in my opinion, not only metaphysically, but, if I may so say, mathematically demonstrable; and which I have been always so perfectly convinced of that I have a contempt for nothing so much as for gold." Adams now began a long discourse: but as most which he said occurs among many authors who have treated ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... after a radiation dosage like that." He looked down at Pendray. "His problem was easy, mathematically. But not psychologically. That ...
— The Measure of a Man • Randall Garrett
... 348) is "equal in all directions," which we might conceive to mean, mathematically "circular," as the words do mean that. A shield is said to have "circles," and a spear which grazes a shield—a shield which was [Greek: panton eesae], "every way equal"—rends both circles, the outer circle ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... AN EXCESS has no meaning in their theory, and is not susceptible of demonstration. If supply and demand alone determine value, how can we tell what is an excess and what is a SUFFICIENCY? If neither cost, nor market price, nor wages can be mathematically determined, how is it possible to conceive of a surplus, a profit? Commercial routine has given us the idea of profit as well as the word; and, since we are equal politically, we infer that every citizen has an equal right to realize profits in his personal industry. But commercial operations ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... physiologists speak of this phenomenon under the heading of the Weber-Fechner law, after the two physiologists who gave it prominence. James pokes a good deal of fun at the "law," which is expressed mathematically. Perhaps the mathematics should have been eliminated as too "scientific" for our present attainment, but it does remain true that it is not the ACTUAL stimulus increase that is important in sensation or ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the same aspirations toward a better future, there is nothing in common between these two socialisms, neither in their logical structure nor in their deductions, unless it be the clear vision, which in modern socialism becomes a mathematically exact prediction (thanks to the theories of evolution) of the final social organization—based on the collective ownership of the land and the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... discussion may perhaps be traced to a rather careless use of terms. At one time "instinct" or "impulsion," the moral force driving man toward perfection, is a potentiality developed by cultivation, and at another a force that is created by cultivation. Although the sublime is the apex of her mathematically-definite program and is a moral quality attained by the few, every human being has his point of sublimity in the idea of a Supreme Being. On the one hand, beauty is a preconceived idea in the human ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds |
