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More "Abstraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In her abstraction Elza had almost forgotten herself and Tarrano; his voice reached her—his voice grim and with a gloating, sinister triumph in it. He was bending to the ground. Elza saw that they had come to an open space—an ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Round her image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by heavy sorrow—a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and Foster standing like a sentinel at the closed door. The captain, after examining a number of papers, glancing round from time to time as if to note whether or not the Judge had come out of his abstraction, remarked ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... upper lip and chin; and so far as an opinion could be formed, from his sitting posture, he was tall and well-made. The expression of his countenance was gentle, and there was an air of introspection and abstraction about it as if he were much in the habit of communing with his own thoughts. The upper part of his person, which only was visible, the rest being hid by the table and depending cloth, was clothed in a black coat or doublet, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... nor heard anything, and presently he went back to the house; but his abstraction was broken by the fancy, so that he did not sit down again to smoke and think. He had thought until his brain felt heavy and stupid; and the last cigarette he lighted; he threw away, for he had smoked until his tongue was sore. He went in ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... laconic intensity. Then Nutter slapped his pockets, like a man feeling if his keys and other portable chattels are all right before he leaves his home. But his countenance was that of one whose mind is absent and wandering. And he looked down on the ground, as it seemed in profound and troubled abstraction; and, after a while, he looked up again, and again glared on the cold pistols that hung before him—ready for anything. And he took down one with a snatch and weighed it in his hand, and fell to thinking again; and, as he did, kept ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... such a striking similarity to all Rosanne's "quarrel-cases," that the poor woman could not help adding them to the black list. Just as she could not help observing that, after the three events, Rosanne cheered up wonderfully and came out of the gloomy abstraction which always enveloped her when she was suffering from annoyance at the hands of others and left her when the offence had been mysteriously expiated by the offenders. Mrs. Ozanne was indeed deeply troubled. The disappearance of the Pom ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... were silent; Lyle, in her abstraction, loosened her hair, and it fell around her like a veil of fine-spun gold. An idea suddenly occurred to Miss Gladden, and rising from her chair, she gathered up the golden mass, and began to rearrange and fasten it, Lyle scarcely heeding her ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... transmitted to us from the Saxons or the barons of Runnymede. There are the metaphysical Radicals, who hold the principles of democracy, not as means to good government, but as corollaries from some unreal abstraction,—from 'natural liberty' or 'natural rights.' There are the radicals of occasion and circumstance, who are radicals because they disapprove the measures of the government for the time being. There are, lastly, the Radicals of position, who are Radicals, as somebody said, because they ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... abstraction. Its usual evidence is the possession of property, which may be money, land, goods or chattels, as the case may be. In final analysis this concrete evidence of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... the "abstraction" of the older psychologists, who well understood its importance for the subject with which we are now concerned. Nevertheless, the term "dissociation" seems to me preferable, because it is more comprehensive. It designates a genus of which the other ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... as usual, anxious to hear the news. The first letter Mr. Campbell opened, to the surprise of all, produced an immediate change in his countenance. He read it a second time, and laying it down on his knee, appeared to remain in a state of complete abstraction. ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... are taken up by their well kept farms, and one of the sections or districts into which the commune of Samana is divided, is officially named "Seccion de los Americanos." The people still preserve the English language and proudly proclaim that they are "of American abstraction." ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... and not perfectly at ease, in consequence of her silence and abstraction (for she had not even glanced at me,) I at length ventured ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... almost breathless, realizing so vividly the procession of bitter and apprehensive thoughts in the mind which for so long had possessed and controlled hers that she forgot her intention, even her desire to go to him. It was this moment of insight and abstraction from self that saved her. Her own mind seemed ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... have produced, a man of resource and quick decision, but a man, so I guessed, who dealt with things, and money only as the price of things, the reward of making them. He lacked, so I felt, something of the fine spirituality of Ascher, the scientific abstraction of the man who lives in a ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... gnawing at his heart; the noblest inspiration of his soul eluded his endeavor—viz: he could not make of the turnip a climbing vine. Months went by; the bloom forsook his cheek, the fire faded out of his eye; sighings and abstraction usurped the place of smiles and cheerful converse. But a watchful eye noted these things and in time a motherly sympathy unsealed the secret. Hence the letter to me. She pleaded for attention—she said her boy was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... encouraging her and defying the Universe. But the family I have been best acquainted with, since the removal from this trying sphere of a Chinese circle at Brentford, reside in the densest part of Bethnal Green. Their abstraction from the objects among which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... to the 'Bishop's Hotel' I had been attended by Jupiter, who had, no doubt, observed, for some weeks past, the abstraction of my demeanor, and took especial care not to leave me alone. But, on the next day, getting up very early, I contrived to give him the slip, and went into the hills in search of the tree. After much toil I found it. When I came home at night my ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... that a man who, by abstraction of all sensuous influences, and by child-like submission to the will of God, has made himself a partaker of the heavenly intelligence, becomes thereby possessed of the philosopher's stone. He is ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... perhaps accounted for the power that possessed the boy. A letter came to Bobby every other day. The spelling was not above reproach, but the sentiments must have been most satisfactory, for on receipt Bobby's eyes softened marvelously, and he was wont to fall into a tender abstraction for a while ere, shaking his cropped head, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... geologic survival from an earlier age; that she is a house-keeper cumbered and encompassed by minute cares largely of her own making. It is an easy guess that, for Eliza Marshall, London is in another world, that Tangier is but a remote and impracticable abstraction, and that all her strength and fortitude might be necessary merely to ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... mind to take much heed of the service now proceeding at the altar, where the priest droned and the incense rose in slow clouds towards the dome. We all stared at each other freely enough, and in truth the faces of many, not to mention bright uniforms and brilliant names, warranted the abstraction from holy thought and fervour. The old soldiers lining the aisle had fought, some at Inkerman, some at Solferino, some in Mexico, that land of ill-omen. The generals of all nations, mixing freely in the crowd, bowed grimly enough to each other. They ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... a feeling of painful emotion that I stood on the deck, gazing with an air of abstraction at the preparations for the long voyage which were actively going on around me. Once more I was alone among a crowd of people, with nothing to depend on but my trust in Providence. No friendly sympathetic being accompanied me on board. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... and respect his own value as an individual. These are big words to employ over the small problems of a child; yet in the child alone occur those silent developments, those noiseless changes which touch closest to true abstraction. Later in life our processes are stiffened by the material ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... the telegram he stood with it for a moment in his hand, looking the boy full in the face. His look had in it that peculiar far-away quality that the newspapers were calling "Napoleonic abstraction." In reality he was wondering whether to give the boy twenty-five ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... are so called as being arrived at by a process of Abstraction. What is meant by Abstraction will be clear from a single instance. The mind, in contemplating a number of substances, may draw off, or abstract, its attention from all their other characteristics, and fix ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... other, swung his foot thoughtfully to and fro, his ratty eyes lost in dreamy revery. Brandes tossed his half-consumed cigar out of the open window and set fire to another. Stull waited for Curfoot to make up his mind. After several minutes the latter looked up from his cunning abstraction: ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... influence of magic charms. He was haunted by a sprite, who stole his books and flung his MSS. about the room. A good genius, in the form of a handsome youth, appeared and conversed with him. He lost himself for hours together in abstraction, talking aloud, staring into vacancy, and expressing surprise that other people could not see the phantoms which surrounded him. He complained that his melancholy passed at moments into delirium (which he called frenesia), after ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... asleep, scudded swiftly across the fields, and, making short work of the lofty wall that formed the southernmost boundary of the Rownam estates, quickly made my way to the avenue. It was an ideal Sunday night in August, and it seemed as if all nature participated in the Sabbath abstraction from noise and work. Hardly a sound broke the exquisite silence of the woods. At times, overcome with the delightful sensation of freedom, I paused, and, raising my eyes to the starry heavens, drank in huge draughts of the pure country ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... deep Abstraction, sure concomitant of love. Now, could I see his busy fancy's painting, How should I blush to ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... entry, locked the door, put the key over it, as he had always been in the habit of doing; seated himself upon his bundle, with his back leaning against the wall; and immediately lapsed into a fit of deep abstraction, which he occasionally relieved by kicking his heels against the floor, shaking his head, in a sudden and emphatic manner, or inhaling his breath rapidly and violently, producing a sound blending the harmonious qualities of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... is a credit to none. We have to get rid of this state of affairs, and we have to provide (i) a substantial mental training which shall lead at last to a broad and comprehensive view of things, and which shall be a training in generalization, abstraction, and the examination of evidence, stimulating and disciplining the imagination and developing the habit of patient, sustained, enterprising and thorough work, and (ii) we have to add a general culture, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... human reality is capable of lyrism but not of abstraction. Nothing will serve for its understanding but the evidence of rational linking up of characters and facts. And beginning with Flora de Barral, in the light of my memories I was certain that she at least must have ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of a philosophy which confounds the organic with the inorganic, and, refusing to take note of a difference so profound, assumes to explain under one common abstraction, the movements due to gravitation and the movements due to ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... of misery anyway, that we ought to do the best we can to make it less," she said at last in a musing tone, as if her thoughts had unconsciously taken on speech. She had always appealed to him strongly, and never more so than in this softly uttered abstraction,—that it was an abstraction added to its ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... to do—pay for the whole party, or for Trina and himself, or merely buy his own ticket? And even in this latter case would a quarter be enough? He lost his wits, rolling his eyes helplessly. Then it occurred to him to feign a great abstraction, pretending not to know that the time was come to pay. He looked intently up and down the tracks; perhaps a train was coming. "Here we are," cried Trina, as they came up to the rest of the party, crowded ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Greek states shows that the social feeling assumes its most binding and powerful character where the community is large enough to allow free play to the various interests of human life, but is not so large that it becomes an abstraction to the imagination. Most of us feel no greater thrill in being one of a State with fifty million inhabitants than we do in recognising we are citizens of the solar system. The rural commune and the very small States exhibit the feeling ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... "Catarina Comaro," was brought out at Naples in 1844. This work also was a failure. It was evident that his capacity for work was over. He grew sad and melancholy, and during the last three years of his life was attacked by fits of abstraction which gradually intensified and ended in insanity and physical paralysis. He died ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences; in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual; should have overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... out for a leisurely stroll. He noted, too, the sidelong, brilliant glance of a pretty woman—with a delicate head, and covered in the hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet, like a frail and beautiful savage—which rested for a moment with a sort of mocking tenderness on the deep abstraction of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... trying to grind that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills? Did he catch sight of himself, therefore much despised by his late political associates? Did he see them, in the era of its being quite settled that the national dustmen have only to do with one another, and owe no duty to an abstraction called a People, 'taunting the honourable gentleman' with this and with that and with what not, five nights a-week, until the small hours of the morning? Probably he had that much foreknowledge, knowing ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... out of the windows on to the verandah, the lawn, and thence out of the front gate, where they found the dominie in a state of radiant abstraction, strutting up and down the road, and quoting pages of his favourite poet. He ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... not without misgiving, for I could not but be sensible that, in spite of all my allegations to the contrary, my audience was disposed to regard a prediction of this nature, proceeding from a Prime Minister, less as a speculative abstraction than as one of that class of prophecies which work their own fulfilment. I left the Council Chamber disheartened, with the feeling that Lord J. Russell's reference to the manhood of Colonies was more likely to be followed by practical consequences ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... Charlemagne or Caesar could be heard swearing at tyrants, cursing the conquerors, and claiming the hardest punishments for them. I thoroughly enjoyed this struggle between the man and the actor. Perhaps this perpetual abstraction from himself gives the comedian a more feminine nature. However that may be, it is certain that the actor is jealous of the actress. The courtesy of the well-educated man vanishes before the footlights, and the ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... enforce justice and fair dealing between them. All this made him a favorite in backwoods society, although in some things he appeared a little odd, to his friends. Far more than any of them, he was given not only to reading, but to fits of abstraction, to quiet musing with himself, and also to strange spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll humor. But on the whole he was one of the people among whom he lived; in appearance ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... of him his wild African imagination and sent him soaring. And then the affectionate note, the plaint in those sacred songs: Deus, Deus meus!—"O God! O my God!" The Divinity was no longer a cold abstraction, a phantom that withdrew into an unapproachable infinite; He became the actual possession of the loving soul. He leant over His poor scarred creature, took him in His arms, and comforted him like ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the conditions were the same as in (1), except that the subject abstracted as much as possible from the tactual nature of the stimulations and the position of the fingers. This was undertaken upon the suggestion of the subject that it would be possible to perform the abstraction, and was not repeated on ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... first symptom—the advance gyard as it were of Dave's gettin' queer—is when Dave's standin' in front of the post-office. Thar's a faraway look to Dave at the time, like he's tryin' to settle whether he's behind or ahead on some deal. While thus wropped in this fit of abstraction Dan Boggs comes hybernatin' along an' asks Dave to p'int into the Red Light for a smell of Valley Tan. Dave sort o' rouses up at this an' fastens on Dan with his eyes, half truculent an' half amazed, same as if he's shocked at Dan's familiarity. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... contending religious convictions. The wisest perhaps, like Michel de L'Hopital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent [17] and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival claims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the so-called "Political" party, professedly ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... could to receive some punishment which would allow them to squall to their hearts' content. But she never beat them, nor even lost her temper; she lived on very well, placidly, indolently, in a state of mental abstraction amidst all the uproar. At last, indeed, this uproar became indispensable to her, to fill the void in her brain. She smiled complacently when she heard anyone say, "Her children will beat her some ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... of mind they walked nearly the whole length of the departure platform, and at the western extremity became aware of a slender figure standing back against a pillar. The figure was plainly sunk into a deep abstraction; he was not aware of their approach, but gazed far abroad over the sunlit station. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... source of a series of aether-waves? Ask your imagination if it will accept a vibrating multiple proportion—a numerical ratio in a state of oscillation? I do not think it will. You cannot crown the edifice with this abstraction. The scientific imagination, which is here authoritative, demands, as the origin and cause of a series of aether-waves, a particle of vibrating matter quite as definite, though it may be excessively minute, as that which gives origin to a musical ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the infinite leisure which is a fine art when it is not born of genuine abstraction, and none could decide whether he was aware of the unfriendly proximity of Big Medicine. Weary was just on the point of saying something to relieve the tension, when Miguel blew the ash gently from his cigarette ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... Doctor made his way down town without interruption. As he went he tried to think out what it was that had come between him and the boy whom he had known so intimately for so many years. Stopping at the post office, he found a letter in his care addressed to "Rev. Daniel H. Matthews." In his abstraction he was about to hand the letter in at the window with the explanation that he knew no such person, when a voice at his elbow said: "Is Brother Matthews fully rested from ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... itself in a strange and ominous indulgence to crime. It was the old fashion, he says, upon hearing of any enormity, to level our indignation against the perpetrator; it is now the mode, to direct it against that culpable abstraction, society. Society is, indeed, the sole culprit. When the novelist has detailed some horrible assassination, or gross adultery, he exclaims, Behold what society has done! The criminal himself passes scathless; if, indeed, he may not put in a claim to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... down to his index. But he soon fell into a mood of abstraction. The races and the games did not interest him in the least. It was something else which attracted him. And, as he sat musing, the vision of the Hippodrome as he had last seen it rose clearly before him. He saw the seaweed-coloured ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... her aunt slyly exchanged smiles, which Darrell in his momentary abstraction failed to observe. They chatted pleasantly for a few moments, but underneath the light words and manner was a sadness that could not be disguised, and it was with a still heavier heart that Darrell returned to his work after Kate and her ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... spoke, they had approached close to the subject of their conversation; and Ellen had a moment's space for observation before he started from the abstraction in which he was plunged. The result of her scrutiny ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the dream would be upon her as a rule, and she would walk in a world of fancy, utterly oblivious of red pillar-boxes, green shutters, or anything else on earth, until she was brought up wondering by a lamp-post, tree, or some unoffending person with whom she had collided in her abstraction; then she would have to ask her way; but she was slow to find it by direction; and all the time she was wandering about, Aunt Victoria would be worrying herself with fears for her safety until ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... agreed upon; and while Bob produces his portfolio, drawing paper, pencils and so on, I turn to my note-book in a dazed way and begin counting my fingers in a depth of profound abstraction, from which I am barely aroused by the reappearance of the ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... Wagner, "that she is not the person whom the Lady Agnes has to complain against. My sister," he continued, "has never to her knowledge seen the Lady Agnes; much less has she ever penetrated into her chamber; and indignantly does she repel the accusation relative to the abstraction of the jewels. She also desires me to inform you that last night after reading of our father's last testament, she retired to her chamber, which she did not quit until this morning at the usual hour; and that therefore it was not ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... are, therefore, three steps in the process: first, to find out in a grave manner what we like best; secondly, to put as much of this as we can (which is little enough) into form; thirdly, to put this formed abstraction into a ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... gloomy abstraction, Mrs. Hopper continued. She related that Boxon had been at certain races where he had lost money and got drunk; driving away in a trap, he had run into something, and been thrown out, with serious ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... almost impossible to say anything which can really hurt a marker's feelings, and partly because the butt-officer always has the last word in any unpleasantness which may arise. That is to say, when defeated over the telephone, he can always lower his targets, and with his myrmidons feign abstraction or insensibility until an overheated subaltern arrives at the double from the five-hundred-yards firing-point, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... that was at all equivalent to the joy he took in watching his two sawmills working and the big down river log-rafts swinging into the bank in the big eddy just above Moosehide Mountain. Gold, even on the scales, was, after all, an abstraction. It represented things and the power to do. But the sawmills were the things themselves, concrete and tangible, and they were things that were a means to the doing of more things. They were dreams come true, hard and indubitable realizations of ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the convulsive respiration of Luke. The sexton stood by, apparently an indifferent spectator of the scene of horror. His eye wandered from the dead to the living, and gleamed with a peculiar and indefinable expression, half apathy, half abstraction. For one single instant, as he scrutinized the features of his daughter, his brow, contracted by anger, immediately afterwards was elevated in scorn. But otherwise you would have sought in vain to read the purport of that cold, insensible glance, which dwelt for a brief space on the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... faults!—Theophil ever loved to dwell. They saved Jenny from becoming an abstraction, a saint. Even those bitter little quarrels which all lovers must ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... Yogis can concentrate at will, and completely bury themselves in the subject before them, and extract from it every item of interest, and can then pass the mind from the thing at will, the same control being used in both cases. They do not allow fits of abstraction, or "absent-mindedness" to come upon them, nor are they day-dreamers. On the contrary they are very wide awake individuals; close observers; clear thinkers; correct reasoners. They are masters of their minds, not slaves to their ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... ... combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature ... Obedience to nature is the only virtue." Again, "It is not the wickedness of Don Juan ... which constitutes the character an abstraction, ... but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities as coexistent with entire wickedness in one ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... found him in old Adelbert's shack. He filled his pockets with charcoal from the pail beside the stove, and made cautious inquiries as to methods of cooking potatoes. But the pall of old Adelbert's gloom penetrated at last even through the boy's abstraction. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... external man is encompassed by hunger and thirst, heat and cold [antitheses of the Hindu philosophy], which are wont to entangle his external senses in such things as are external, in such a way that no one can live in such pure abstraction and seclusion, until he is relieved of and freed from all care for the external body. This is what I bewailed with tears, and expressly asked God whether it was not possible for the eternal mind and spirit to supply all necessaries for the bodily ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... while, the Etheling yielded and turned aside. "Let it be as you have said—though I cannot believe yet that it will happen." Coming back where a fallen tree made a mossy seat, he dropped down upon it and sat staring at the ground in frowning abstraction. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... Philip's hands. The people hitherto had acquiesced in their action, and certainly there had not yet been any call for a popular convention, or any other device to ascertain the popular will. It was also difficult to imagine what was the exact entity of this abstraction called the "people" by men who expressed such extreme contempt for "merchants, advocates, town-orators, churls, tinkers, and base mechanic men, born not to command but to obey." Who were the people when the educated classes and the working classes were thus carefully ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fibers also represent the outgoing paths and that they too lead down to lower central motor instruments which are again in numberless corelations. Any impression is thus a starting point for attitudes and reactions and it is an empty abstraction to consider it otherwise. An idea is never, psychophysically considered, the end of the process, it is always also a beginning. No external action may follow, but the mental impulse to such is nevertheless starting in ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... is no mere abstraction—as it was, perhaps, in the days of Brook Farm. It is a mode of action. Men whose view of life is perfectly balanced rarely soil themselves with the dust of battle. The heat necessary to produce social conflict (and social progress—who knows?) is generated by a supreme ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... right willingly. As for the diggers, I must say so much for them that, rough fellows as they were, they paid freely and gratefully all they could, and I did not hear of a single instance of robbery or outrage save one, and we were the victims of that. It was merely the abstraction, emptying, and replacing on our dray of a case of "Old Tom," all the spirits we possessed, and we did not discover the loss until too late for any chance of ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... his was the primary cause of his premature end. Emerging from some such fit of abstraction he became aware that it was after twelve. Convivial spirit that he was, he hurried to join his colleagues at their dinner, displaying remarkable agility as he descended the scaffold. But the effort caused him to perspire, and he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... hum of insects, the very song of summer, which we love, not for its beauty (though there is beauty in its sleepy busy monotony), but for all it recalls; for all the associations it brings to our minds. I was very tired; and I remained some time on the sofa in a state of abstraction bordering on sleep. I was roused from it in about half-an-hour by some snatches of an old song, which sounded almost like the chirpings of a bird, so sweet, and wild, and unconnected was their melody. I jumped up from the couch, ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... she laughed at the slightest excuse, she joined spiritedly in the repartee at dinner, a time when they nearly always had guests. But keen-eyed Mrs. Blythe saw several things in the course of the week. She noticed her lack of appetite, the long spells of abstraction that came sometimes after her merriest outbursts; the deep shadows under her eyes of a morning, as if she had passed ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... poor girl on the chair, and began to get ready the mid-day meal, hoping Phemy would help her, and gain some comfort from activity. Nor was she disappointed. With a childish air of abstraction, Phemy rose and began, as of old in the house, to busy herself, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... phial! Thee, with reverent awe, Down from thine old receptacle I draw! Science in thee I hail and human art. Essence of deadliest powers, refin'd and sure, Of soothing anodynes abstraction pure, Now in thy master's need thy grace impart! I gaze on thee, my pain is lull'd to rest; I grasp thee, calm'd the tumult in my breast; The flood-tide of my spirit ebbs away; Onward I'm summon'd o'er a boundless main, Calm at my feet expands the glassy plain, ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... it may be noticed that Dr. Slade winks three or four times rapidly; this may have been partly to veil from his visitors the fact that he had been looking intently downward, and partly through mental abstraction in devising an answer. He evidently breathes freer when ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... reflects the objective order of things and from that order evolves universal laws. This basic truth of our mental attitude is still more evident when considered in the moral order. For, when God becomes but a "pure abstraction," and the moral law solely dependent on the human will, one readily sees where such philosophy may lead. This "ego-centric philosophy" is responsible for the frame of mind which gifted the world with German "Kultur." Nietzche taught Germany ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... to garnish him with all those things he stands in need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found me in, and reason enough, what you have heard ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... which alienists were unable to decide between criminality and insanity, they advocated an intermediate institution, in which merciful treatment and social security were alike considered. They also emphasised the importance of certain measures which hitherto had been universally regarded as a pure abstraction or an unattainable desideratum—measures for the prevention of crime by tracing it to its source, divorce laws to diminish adultery, legislation of an anti-alcoholistic tendency to prevent crimes of violence, associations ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... full length along the seat farthest from the engine and the motor-cyclists. Next, he drew down the little corner-blinds of each window, leaving the door-blinds up; then sat down again resuming his attitude of abstraction. ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... "in the case of what you call Goods of sense, in their simplest and purest form, making abstraction from all aesthetic and other elements—as in the example you gave of a cold bath—the relation of the object to the sense is so simple and direct, that really, if we were to speak accurately, we should have, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... hungry. He hurriedly ate some sandwiches and drank some water, and again gave himself up entirely to mental labor. When, at last, the noise of machinery above him and the sound of voices aroused him from his abstraction, and the car emerged upon the surface of the earth, Clewe hastily slid back the door and stepped out. At that instant he felt himself encircled by a pair of arms. Bryce was near by, and there were other men by the engines, but the owner of those arms ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... came the ebb. Why had he chosen her? Was it merely as an abstraction—the embodiment of an ideal, a survival from a host of pleasant memories, and as a mother for his child, who needed care which no one else could give, and as a helpmate in carrying out his schemes of benevolence? Were these his only motives; and, if so, were they sufficient to ensure her happiness? ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... avail against the finger of the Lord, or the wrath of the Almighty!" said Josey Letherbarrow, suddenly coming out of his abstraction; "And if th' owld Squire were alive he wouldn't have had 'em touched—no, not he! He'd ha' starved sooner! And if the Five Sisters are laid low, the luck of the Manor will lay low with 'em! But it's not too late—not too late!"—and he turned his face, now alive in its every feature ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... tree, with its one broken branch which depended at an angle like the arm of a semaphore; nor did it relieve his mind to reflect that his mishap was partly due to his own foolish abstraction. He was returning to camp from a neighboring mining town, and while indulging in the usual day-dreams of a youthful prospector, had deviated from his path in attempting to make a short cut through the forest. He had lost the sun, his only guide, in the thickly interlaced boughs above ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... or to the other according to the state of controversy in any particular age. When the Arian or Tritheistic views were proclaimed and defended, the Orthodoxy of the Church swung over towards Sabellianism, making the Unity strong and solid; and the Trinity became a thin mode or an airy abstraction. When Sabellianism, thus encouraged, came openly forward, and defended its system and won adherents, then Church Orthodoxy would hasten to set up barriers on that side, and would fall back upon Tritheistic ground, making the Threefold Personality a profound and real distinction, penetrating ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... de Serre was gifted with eloquence singularly exalted and practical. He supported their general principles in the tone of a magistrate who applies, and not as a philosopher who explains them. His speech was profound without abstraction, highly coloured but not figurative; his reasoning resolved itself into action. He expounded, examined, discussed, attacked, or replied without literary or even oratorical preparation, carrying up the strength of his arguments to the full level of the questions, fertile without exuberance, ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... de Sully was subject to frequent fits of abstraction. One day, having dressed himself to go to church, he forgot nothing but his breeches. This was in the winter; when he entered the church, he said, "Mon Dieu, it is very cold to-day." The persons present said, "Not colder than ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... did personal morality of some sort emerge? Of course the words (in any language) and the explicit conceptions "morality," "duty," "right," "wrong," etc, are very late in appearance, presupposing as they do a power of reflection and abstraction which develops only in man and with a considerable civilization. Even in the Homeric poems, which reflect a degree of mental cultivation in some respects equal to our own, these concepts hardly appear. But ages earlier, far back in the course ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept as it is actually impossible. It is almost ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... biblioclasts, let us recollect one thing. It is not so much that they have rendered books imperfect by the abstraction of leaves or title-pages, as that they have actually preserved the sole testimony for the existence of hundreds of books, tracts, and broadsheets of which we should have otherwise known nothing, amid the wholesale destruction ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... in hand, looking around the little saloon, so oddly, yet so comfortably fitted out with rugs and skins. Presently the Lur reappeared through the reed portiere, which aroused the Brazilian from his abstraction. He filled the two glasses himself, waving his attendant out of the cabin, and handed one to Gaston. The other he raised in the air, bowing to his guest. "To the victor!" he said. "And sit down, won't you? There is more than ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... beside us. Two steaming cups stood invitingly on the tray, but before taking hers my step-mother suddenly remembered she had left her jewel case unlocked, and she hurried out of the room in a state of anxious excitement. I turned my back to the fire and in utter abstraction riveted my gaze upon the butterfly handles of the teacups. I was thinking. Such circumstances as these always brought back my simple yesterdays with a renewed force to my memory. I was thinking so profoundly that I neither heard nor saw my father, who had appeared in the doorway and was standing ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... pastor. The Rev. Elisha Edwards had come to them two years before, and he had given good satisfaction as to preaching and pastoral work. Only one thing had displeased his congregation in him, and that was his tendency to moments of meditative abstraction in the pulpit. However much fire he might have displayed before a brother minister arose to speak, and however much he might display in the exhortation after the brother was done with the labors of hurling phillipics against the devil, he ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... reference to the state. It was only as a member of family, gens, curia, phratry, or deme, and tribe, that the ancient city-state knew the men and women which composed it. The same was true of knowledge: every sensation, perception, and judgment fell into the category of some abstraction, and, instead of concrete things, men knew nothing but ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... was thought to deserve from the women; while others more rationally concluded that his encountering the dogs and their attacking him, was purely an accidental circumstance; and that having in the abstraction and absence of mind, attendant upon very profound meditation, encroached upon some part of the palace grounds, which the dogs were appointed to guard, he found his mistake too late to escape from ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... make out what had become of it, in such utter confusion were all the accounts, both personal and official. Mr. Johnson was hardly restrained by his compassion for the orphan from throwing up the executorship in disgust. Mr. Ness roused himself from his scholarlike abstraction to labour at the examination of books, parchments, and papers, for Ellinor's sake. Sir Frank Holster professed himself only a trustee ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... had most of the conversation to himself, his loquacity and good-humor having been very much improved by a few glasses of his rich old Madeira. His daughter, on the other hand, seemed frequently in a state of abstraction, and, on more than one occasion, found herself incapable of answering several questions which he put to her. Ever and anon the timid, blushing glance was directed at Reilly, by whom it was returned with a significance ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... which shut me up in a world of my own—a world in which the present had no part. I do not know for how long I sat thus tranced and oblivious of the silent, sympathizing group around me. It was by a deep involuntary sigh from my own lips that I was at last roused from my abstraction, and returned from the dream world of the past to a consciousness of my ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... each. I know that if you only regard Jesus Christ as human I am talking utter nonsense; but I know, too, that if we believe in the divinity of our Lord, there need be nothing to stumble us, but the contrary, in the thought that it was not an abstraction that He died for, that it was not a vague mass of unknown beings, clustered together, but so far away that He could not see any of their faces, for whom He gave His life on the Cross. That is the way in which, and in which alone, we can embrace the whole mass of humanity—by losing sight ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... not worth our while to discuss, like sophisters, whether in no case some evil for the sake of some benefit is to be tolerated. Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... she was back once more, this time with the tablecloth, which she proceeded to spread, though still lost in dreamy abstraction. ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... the sea. From its eminences there sweep unequalled views over the Gulf of Georgia and northwestward along towering mountain ranges upon whose lower slopes the firs and cedars marshal themselves in green battalions. From his hotel window he would gaze in contented abstraction over the tidal surges through the First Narrows and the tall masts of shipping in a spacious harbor, landlocked and secure, stretching away like a great blue lagoon with motor craft and ferries and squat tugs for waterfowl. Thompson loved the forest as a man loves pleasant, familiar things, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... he did! Why shouldn't he?" challenged Betty, coming out of her abstraction and smiling ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... introduced by the Eternal Painter, with his burden, waiting instructions in this moment of awkward diffidence. He looked at her and at the porch and at his bundle of mail in a quizzical appeal. Then she realized that, in a peculiar lapse of abstraction, she ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... half an hour, without change of posture; so that he might, in Pagan times, have represented the statue of a water-god bending over his urn, and attentive only to the supplies which it was pouring forth. At length, however, he seemed to recall himself from this state of deep abstraction, drew himself up, and took some coarse food from his pilgrim's scrip, as if suddenly reminded that life is not supported without means. But he had probably something at his heart which affected his throat or appetite. ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... pre-arranged episode, intended to dazzle me, though what earthly object he could have in taking me in was past my comprehension. When I looked at him he had finished reading the note, and his eyes had assumed the vacant, lack-lustre expression which showed mental abstraction. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to ruminate. He had remarked an extraordinary change in the countenance and deportment of Harry Woodward during the evening before and the earlier part of that day. The plausible serenity of his manner was replaced by unusual gloom, and that abstraction which is produced by deep and absorbing thought. He seemed so completely wrapped up in constant meditation upon some particular subject, that he absolutely forgot to guard himself against observation or remark, by his usual artifice of manner. He walked alone in the garden, a thing ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... he calls it, or, as we might call it, God as thought, God existing in and for Himself; and the Soul, the One and Many, occupying the sphere of appearance or imperfect reality—God as action. Soulless matter, which only exists as a logical abstraction, is arrived at by looking at things "in disconnexion, dull and spiritless." It is the sphere of the "merely many," and is zero, as "the One ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... which might have suggested some particular phonetic. They have preferred to adopt the other method, of which [Ch][Ch][Ch] (rise-descend-machine) for "lift," and [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] (discuss-govern-country-assembly) for "parliament" are examples. Even a metaphysical abstraction like The Absolute has been tentatively expressed by [Ch][Ch] (exclude-opposite); but in this case an equivalent was already existing in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Such lifeless objects as stones and mountains, trees and rivers, are worshipped; so too are both useful and noxious animals.[87] Childish as it seems to us the worship of spirits is at least an advance upon this. It presupposes a certain power of reflection and abstraction by which men were led to conclude that intelligence and will are not necessarily bound up with a body that can be seen and touched. Life has been mobilized, if we may use such a phrase, and thus we arrive at polydemonism; by which we mean the theory that ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... important to the understanding of Dante as a poet than any other of his works. It shows him (and that in the midst of affairs demanding practical ability and presence of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative abstraction, equalling that of a Soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in some sort to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and force of will to that ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... policy, hasten the day when politics shall cease to be the shibboleth that creates perpetual warfare. The citizen of a State is far more sovereign than the citizen of the United States. The State is a real, tangible reality; a thing of life and power; while the United States is, purely, an abstraction—a thing that no man has successfully defined, although many, wise in their way and in their own conceit, have philosophized upon it to their own satisfaction. The metaphysical polemics of men learned in the science of republican ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... answer but continued my examination while Potts took his seat on the prayer-stool and seemed to go off into one of his fits of abstraction. ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... answered in the fashion which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits' are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the, after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that Numpholeptos is "an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who all the while" ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Consequently, the effect must appear to us as an average effect, as expressing an average of mankind. And, like all averages, this one is obtained by bringing together scattered data, by comparing analogous cases and extracting their essence, in short by a process of abstraction and generalisation similar to that which the physicist brings to bear upon facts with the object of grouping them under laws. In a word, method and object are here of the same nature as in the inductive sciences, in that observation is ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... them: that this history and hidden treasure (which we tend to forget too much as it is) phonetic spelling tends to make us forget altogether. Republic does not mean merely a mode of political choice. Republic (as we see when we look at the structure of the word) means the Public Thing: the abstraction which is us all. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... of the phenomena of the Cosmos in the unity of thought and under the form of a purely rational combination. Natural philosophy, which preceded all exact observation in antiquity, is a natural, but not unfrequently ill-directed, effort of reason. Two forms of abstraction rule in the whole mass of knowledge, viz.: the 'quantitative', relative determinations according to number and magnitude, and 'qualitative', material characters. Means of submitting phenomena to calculation. Atoms, mechanical methods of construction. Figurative representations; ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... sound bears the same relation to words that the whistle of a quartermaster bears to orders for the navigation of a ship transmitted by a speaking trumpet; it simplifies speech, reducing it as it were to a pure abstraction. At first it was believed that the creator had made the world with a word, then that he had made it by sound; but the further conception of his having made it by thought does not seem to have occurred ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... smoking-room at Warwick Lodge was lighted far into the night. Two men talked in low tones behind the carefully-shaded windows, one of them, the younger, lounging in the depths of an easy-chair, and the other pacing the floor in deepest abstraction. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... conduct of your colleagues in other branches of the Indian Service decides what the peoples of India are to think of British government and of those who represent it. Of course you cannot expect the simple villager to care anything or to know anything about the abstraction called the raj. What he knows is the particular officer who stands in front of him, and with whom he has dealings. If the officer is harsh or overbearing or incompetent, the Government gets the discredit of ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... had no notion at first that it could be turned into a negotiable security occupying as high a place in the market as, say, Argentine bonds. But it did not take them very long to find out that even an abstraction such as this could be turned to good account by discreet maneuvering. Truth sometimes is heard on an election platform, and yet truth is but an abstract quality. Why, then should not a Great and Living Truth become a regular gold mine to its inventor? It was as great an invention as the art of electroplating, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... moved nervously in his chair and glanced out of the corner of his eye at the lawyer, who had resumed his cards. Reassured by the apparent abstraction of his friend, the commandant gathered himself and essayed ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... this morning at breakfast. There came on a dreadful storm of wind and rain, which continued all day, and rather increased at night. The wind was directly against our getting to Mull. We were in a strange state of abstraction from the world: we could neither hear from our friends, nor write to them. Col had brought Daille on the Fathers[800], Lucas on Happiness[801], and More's Dialogues[802], from the Reverend Mr. M'Lean's, and Burnet's History of his own Times, from Captain M'Lean's; and he had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... she could not forgive him for having made fun of her more than once—in her eyes an unpardonable sin. M. Moriaz was enchanted to find himself once more in company with his dear Camille; but he kept asking himself, mournfully, "Why is not he to be my son-in-law?" Antoinette had several attacks of abstraction; she did not, however, omit the least friendly attention to Camille. Love had become master of this generous soul; it might cause it to commit many imprudences, but it was not in its power to cause it to ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... You ask my advice on a certain point. I will give it. In my opinion you could do nothing more unwise that to address a note to Miss Daw, thanking her for the flower. It would, I am sure, offend her delicacy beyond pardon. She knows you only through me; you are to her an abstraction, a figure in a dream—a dream from which the faintest shock would awaken her. Of course, if you enclose a note to me and insist on its delivery, I shall deliver it; but I advise ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... day of the funeral he refused to follow the corpse to the grave, but watched the procession move away from the door of Newstead; then, turning to Rushton, bade him bring the gloves, and began his usual sparring exercise. Only his silence, abstraction, and unusual violence betrayed to his antagonist, says Moore ('Life', p. 128), the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... compliment you on your power of lying; but you must learn to show your right face to me, or the very handsome feature, your nose, and that useful box, your skull, will come to grief. The whole business is a mystery. The letter (copy) was directed to you, brought to me, and opened in a fit of abstraction, necessary to commanding uncles who are trying to push the fortunes of young noodles pretending to be related to them. Go to Countess Lena. Count Paul is with her, from Bologna. Speak to her, and observe her and him. He knows English—has ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... particular, the individual was for them an embarrassment, a 'scandal of thought.' The sage always tries to escape from the moving world of becoming into the static world of being. But an ideal world, so conceived, can only be an abstraction, an impoverishment of reality. Such an idealism gives us neither a science of origins nor a science of ends. Greek wisdom sought eternity and forgot time; it sought that which never dies, and found that ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... since it insists upon the supreme importance of design and provides a new method for the expression of three dimensions; but this method will be barren unless those who practise it enrich it with their own observation and delight. Already some of them seem to be weary of the barrenness of pure abstraction; they see that any fool can hide his own commonplace in cubism as an ostrich hides its head in the sand; but we would rather have honest chocolate-box ladies than the kaleidoscopic but betraying chocolate-box fragments ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... woman's eyes to be able to tell the distinction between look and look. Through the prism of jealousy the eye-beam is refracted to its primary colors; and this wonderful optical analysis says: this is the twinkle of curiosity, that the coquettish ogle, this the fire of love, that the dark-blue of abstraction. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... their provinces, as they did do, arrived with the great good-will of the fleet, at Vera Cruz, June 1, 1683, whence they went to Mexico with all possible haste. There they comported themselves with the greatest rigor, observance, abstraction, and example, so that the hospitium appeared a desert. Thus they succeeded in obtaining the favor of the viceroy, the count of Paredes, [56] and the venerable archbishop Don Francisco de Aguiar y Seyjas, who visited the fathers in the hospitium, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... pardon," he said, in apologizing for his abstraction, "but I was thinking what a funny thing it would be to be a brother of the House of Martha. As to the address—let me see. Do you remember that lady who was staying with Mrs. Raynor, at her island, who called ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... mood for singing or playing chess, or even talking much, and his fit of abstraction lasted all day, or until late in the afternoon, when Bessie began to speak of getting herself in readiness for Grey, who was to come in the evening train from Carnarvon. Then Neil roused, and as if he had nerved himself for the sacrifice, manifested a great deal of ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... his attention. To Mr. Carstyle, Vibart was simply the inevitable young man who had been hanging about the house ever since Irene had left school; and Vibart's efforts to differentiate himself from this enamored abstraction were hampered by Mrs. Carstyle's cheerful assumption that he was the young man, and by Irene's ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... half of his book Nicolai undertakes to throw light upon this obscure realisation, and to establish it upon a scientific foundation. He undertakes to show that humanity is no mere abstraction, but a living reality, an organism that can be subjected to ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... a language every way fitted to the wants of the gospel, which is given not for the infancy of the world but for its mature age, and which deals not so much with the details of particulars as with great principles, which require for their full comprehension the capacity of abstraction and generalization. In the historical records of the Old Testament, and in its poetic and prophetic parts, the Hebrew language was altogether at home. But for such compositions as the epistle to the Romans the Greek offered a more perfect medium; and here, as everywhere ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... freedom," and to depict liberty as the object of a fanatical semi-religious adoration.[26] But as a rule where an Englishman adores he does not define, and if one asks the common devotee of liberty what he understands by the abstraction before which he prostrates himself, one generally requires but a small portion of the dialectic subtlety of Socrates to involve him in a hopeless tangle of contradictions. He can no more define liberty than ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... The flow of population has settled that matter. You have won all the Territories, not even excepting New Mexico, where slavery exists nominally, but is sure to die out under the hostile influences of unpropitious soil and climate. The Territorial Question has become a mere abstraction. We no longer talk ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... might have been a whistling of the wind or the swaying of a drapery, but it seemed to her like the sweeping along of a train of silk. At the moment she thought that Mrs. Hawthorne was passing through the entry, but rousing herself from her abstraction she saw her sister sitting quiet and remembered that she had been so sitting for a considerable interval. "Why, I distinctly heard," said she, "the rustling of a silk gown in the entry!" The sisters rose and went into the hallway for an explanation, but all was dark ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... companion watched him. At first she was puzzled. When she heard the woman's name which came so softly from his lips, she turned pale. Herr Freudenberg recovered from his fit of abstraction almost as quickly as ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... many trustworthy men, and men of Christian faith, to vouch for these and similar events occurring as foretold. I cannot pretend to explain them, but I know that our people possessed remarkable powers of concentration and abstraction, and I sometimes fancy that such nearness to nature as I have described keeps the spirit sensitive to impressions not commonly felt, and in touch with the unseen powers. Some of us seemed to have a peculiar intuition for the locality of a grave, which they explained ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... sent a telegram to England that nearly emptied her purse of francs. When she came out she was as pale as she had been flushed before—a little, terror-stricken figure, passing in a miserable abstraction through the intricate backways ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... one behaves as if it were the part of a wise man to pay it no heed, because it does not come within the scope of the lower powers of that nature. According to the word of the man, however, truth means more than fact, more than relation of facts or persons, more than loftiest abstraction of metaphysical entity—means being and life, will and action; for he says, 'I am ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... contains the following: 'Being, considered in the abstract, is logically equivalent to Not-Being or Nothing. For if by successive stages of abstraction, we divest the conception of Being of attribute and relation we reach the conception of that which cannot be, i.e. a logical contradiction, or the logical correlative of Being which is Nothing. (All this is well expressed in Caird's Evolution of Religion.) The failure to perceive this fact ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... present was over, matters seemed to settle down pretty much as before. Except in an increased anxiety for news from the front, Mrs. Gifford had differed in no degree from Miss Housman. To the school the Major was a mere abstraction; his leave had always occurred during the holidays, and up to this time his existence—apart from the element of romance with which it invested their head mistress—had not affected the atmosphere of Pendlemere ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... length upon the grass and Betty sat leaning against the tree. She took a biscuit in one hand, a pickle in the other, and began to chat volubly to Alfred of her school life, and of Philadelphia, and the friends she had made there. At length, remarking his abstraction, she said: "You ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... turquoise sky, out of which poured a flood of light on the roll of hilltops. Sometimes he read to himself, but he was still easily tired, and preferred usually to rest. More often she read aloud to him while he lay back with his leveled eyes gravely on her till the gentle, cool abstraction she affected was disturbed and her perplexed lashes rose to reproach the intensity ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... hardening process because of its powerful deoxidizing properties, and also because it forms a liquid film on the surface of the steel, which causes a more perfect contact between the steel and the water, thereby permitting a more rapid abstraction of heat. The inevitable formation of a thin coat of oxide is unfavorable to the process of rapid cooling; and as rapid cooling seems to be the one thing necessary for success in hardness, any means used for the removal of a bad ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... through this communication, and prepared to finish his work on the bar, when he noticed that it was the only one remaining. In his abstraction he had already cut through one end of the last bar—the only one to which he could secure the rope. Luckily, he had cut it at the top end; so he trusted that, if the rope were fastened securely at the ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... our would-be philosophers, When you tell us that matter is eternal, how does that account for the formation of this world? What is this matter you speak of? This world consists not of a philosophical abstraction called matter, nor yet of one substance known by that name, but of a great variety of material substances, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sulphur, iron, aluminum, and some fifty others already discovered.[2] ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... her confidences were not of great moment to him, the way he sat there beside her in a glum abstraction through the rather long silence that followed her preface, made it easier ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... aunt slyly exchanged smiles, which Darrell in his momentary abstraction failed to observe. They chatted pleasantly for a few moments, but underneath the light words and manner was a sadness that could not be disguised, and it was with a still heavier heart that Darrell returned to his work after Kate and her ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... his house. Although incumbered with a heavy carpet-bag, he started resignedly on his two-mile tramp without begrudging the neighborly act of his wife which had deprived him of his horse. It was "like her" to do these things in her good-humored abstraction, an abstraction, however, that sometimes worried him, from the fear that it indicated some unhappiness with her present lot. He was longing to rejoin her after his absence of three days, the longest time they had been separated since their marriage, and he hurried on with ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... I might not see him for another year; but as I left the office I found him coming up its steps outside, and not as though there were the affairs of a month to be got into two days, but in leisurely abstraction. He might have been making up his mind that, after all, there was no need to call there, for he was studying each step as if he were looking for the bottom of a mystery. His fingers were twirling ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... than the biography of great men. Through a succession of individuals we trace the character and destiny of nations. THE PEOPLE glide away from us, a sublime but intangible abstraction, and the voice of the mighty Agora reaches us only through the medium of its representatives to posterity. The more democratic the state, the more prevalent this delegation of its history to the few; since it is the prerogative of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has a long article (pp. 114, 115) on the meaning of Samadhi, which is one of the seven sections of wisdom (bodhyanga). Hardy defines it as meaning "perfect tranquillity;" Turnour, as "meditative abstraction;" Burnouf, as "self-control;" and Edkins, as "ecstatic reverie." "Samadhi," says Eitel, "signifies the highest pitch of abstract, ecstatic meditation; a state of absolute indifference to all influences ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... descendants, or the industrial methods which will then prevail; we do not even know whether there will be a twentieth generation; there are certain large inevitable wastes in postponed consumption by reason of the perishability of all material forms of wealth, or the abstraction of them by others than those for whose use they were intended. Moreover, we do not believe it would be good for our descendants to have the enjoyment of excessive wealth without a corresponding personal ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... thoughtful all that day, and performed no miracles except certain provisions for Winch, and the miracle of completing his day's work with punctual perfection in spite of all the bee-swarm of thoughts that hummed through his mind. And the extraordinary abstraction and meekness of his manner was remarked by several people, and made a matter for jesting. For the most part he ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... on Charlemagne or Caesar could be heard swearing at tyrants, cursing the conquerors, and claiming the hardest punishments for them. I thoroughly enjoyed this struggle between the man and the actor. Perhaps this perpetual abstraction from himself gives the comedian a more feminine nature. However that may be, it is certain that the actor is jealous of the actress. The courtesy of the well-educated man vanishes before the footlights, and the comedian who in private life would render a service to a woman in any difficulty ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... hand to work it into a single impression. And thus the general panorama, such as Thackeray displays, becomes the representation of the author's experience, and the author becomes a personal entity, about whom we may begin to ask questions. Thackeray cannot be the nameless abstraction that the dramatist (whether in the drama of the stage or in that of the novel) is naturally. I know that Thackeray, so far from trying to conceal himself, comes forward and attracts attention and nudges the ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... qu'exprime Macbeth; ce solennel prelude ou il s'oublie jusqu'a ce que l'horloge sonne l'heure qui doit l'appeler au meurtre de Duncan; lorsque nous ne lisons plus cela dans un livre, lorsque nous avons abandonne ce poste avantageux de l'abstraction d'ou la lecture domine la vision, et lorsque nous voyons sous nos yeux, un homme en sa forme corporelle se preparer actuellement au meurtre; si le jeu de l'acteur est vrai et puissant, la penible anxiete au sujet de l'acte, le ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... old women, and giving pretty girls dowries; scribbling one half-hour on philosophy, and the next on farriery; sitting up all night writing hymns and drinking strong liquors; off again on horseback at four the next morning; and talking by the hour all the while about philosophic abstraction from the mundane tempest. Heaven defend me from all two-legged whirlwinds! By the bye, there was a fair daughter of my nation came back to Alexandria in the same ship with me, with a cargo ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... aspiration. A medium is not, and should not be willing to become a mere irresponsible tool. For intelligent and beneficial association with, and inspiration from, the people of the higher life, a certain degree of abstraction is necessary. To cut one's self off from ordinary conditions, to retire into the sanctuary of one's own inner consciousness, to 'enter the silence' as it is sometimes called, is helpful training for ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... my friend, the Tamal, Stood and gazed upon the Sea Gulls. Long he gazed in deep abstraction, Then he said, "They still are searching, Still are calling to Ah-we-a. Would you know the Tamal legend Of Ah-we-a and ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... said he, with marked emotion, "is a stay-lace, with golden tags, which belonged to Miss FLORA'S mother. It was handed to me, in the abstraction of his grief, by Miss FLORA'S father, on the day of the funeral; be saying that he could never bear to look upon it again. To you, as Miss FLORA'S future husband, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... the flow came the ebb. Why had he chosen her? Was it merely as an abstraction—the embodiment of an ideal, a survival from a host of pleasant memories, and as a mother for his child, who needed care which no one else could give, and as a helpmate in carrying out his schemes of benevolence? Were ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... peace." Round her image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by heavy sorrow—a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... month elapsed without any incident affecting the Hard Cash, whose singular adventures I have to record. In this dearth, please put up with a little characteristic trifle, which did happen one moonlight night. Mr. Fullalove lay coiled below decks in deep abstraction meditating a patent; and being in shadow and silent, he saw Vespasian in the moonlight creeping on all fours like a guilty thing into the bedroom of Colonel Kenealy, then fast asleep. A horrible suspicion thrilled through Fullalove: a suspicion ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... many models and constructing a figure out of them as an ideal type, was productive of very dead and lifeless work. No account was taken of the variety from a common type necessary in the most perfect work, if life and individual interest are not to be lost, and the thing is not to become a dead abstraction. But the danger is rather the other way at the moment. Artists revel in the oddest of individual forms, and the type idea is flouted on all hands. An anarchy of individualism is upon us, and the vitality of disordered variety ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... at him through the corner of my eye—as, doubtless, he had anticipated, for he was glaring with an air of inspired abstraction into the ball of the decanter stopper. So we sat silent for, I suppose, some ten minutes. Then I heard him give another deep sigh. Opening my eyes, I saw him slowly ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... show that man depicts himself in his God, and that "God is the racial expression"; a pedagogue on the Nile, an abstraction in India, and an astrologer in Chaldaea; where Abraham, says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, Sec. 2, and II. 9, Sec. 2) was "skilful in the celestial science." He notices the Akarana-Zaman (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the working dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He brands ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... nearly all burned. He then pursued after the savages, but not coming up with them as soon as was expected, the men became fearful of the consequences which might result to their own families, by reason of this abstraction of their defence, provided other Indians were to attack them, and insisted on their returning. On the second day of the pursuit, it was agreed that a majority of the company should decide whether they were to proceeded farther or not. Joseph Friend, Richard Kettle, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... it is not said, I suppose, that I am in love with an abstraction. There must surely be a name mentioned in ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the speaker had very nearly, in his abstraction, brought out a name that would, to say the least, have astonished his sister. He caught himself up just ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... less abstracted during the entire dinner. He now offered, in a matter-of-fact tone, this explanation of his abstraction much as he might have observed that he would like a partridge, if it had happened to ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... cannot return. When the bucket next ascends, the water above it, not being able to return through the bucket valve, will be forced into the hot well through the delivery valve S. The hot water pump M, pumps a small quantity of this hot water into the boiler, to compensate for the abstraction of the water that has passed off in the form of steam. The residue of the ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... trio—one, two young men in black, who skirmished on either side of a very sedate girl in white; one, two girls who shoved one another, and giggled, walking in step three yards behind another young man with his hat on one side, who gloried in being talked at and pretended to be rapt in abstraction. Then some children came; then a family—papa walking severely apart in a silk hat, and mamma, stout and scarlet-faced, in the midst of the throng. Finally there came along a very old Darby and Joan, who with many ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... in deep abstraction. He then desired that the chapel might be cleared of all but the travellers of condition, the monks, and his judges. The request was granted, for it was expected that he was about to make an important confession, as indeed, in a certain degree, proved to ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... chair away from the poor lady of set purpose, and Miss Joliffe found herself at last left isolated from all, except Mrs Purlin, the builder's wife, who was far too fat and lethargic to be anything but ignorantly good-natured. Then, in a fit of pained abstraction, Miss Joliffe had made such a bad calculation as entirely to spoil a flannel petticoat with a rheumatic belt and camphor pockets, which she had looked upon as something of ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known generations of men have never yet been able to classify them. I do not speak of man's faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to confine itself within the Word,—a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which, nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... pale, and she was most unusually quiet all that day, falling into fits of abstraction as if her thoughts were far away. She was more tender than ever with Lena, knowing now too well the trouble which was weighing upon the heart and spirits of the sensitive young sister, and secretly sharing it with her. Hour after hour she pondered upon ways and means for relieving her ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... not feel Barclay's abstraction. But the colonel's face cleared like a child's, and he reached for the little man and hugged him off his feet. Then the colonel broke out, "May the Lord, who heedeth the sparrow's fall and protects ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... in a mechanical manner as he recognized some acquaintance, but there was nothing enthusiastic in his greetings. He had been standing at the entrance for about half-an-hour, when he was roused from his state of abstraction by a tremendous slap on the back, and a sturdy ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... expression of the human eye that generally indicates abstraction of mind, he feared that she had not heard his earnest appeal; but after some seconds, she smiled drearily, and repeated with singular and touching pathos, lines which proved that his words were ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... for such deep abstraction in one who bore the outward signs of so vigorous a manhood. Tall, well-formed, muscular as his faultless clothes half revealed, half hid, his bronzed face bearing the clear eyes and steady lips of a ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes a fair-weather abstraction named Compensation. One radical tragedy in nature he admits—'the distinction of More and Less.' If I am poor in faculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, in every sense an outcast from the inheritance of the earth, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... and neck had the downy softness sometimes seen which leaves the artist in doubt whether it is an effect of contour or color. To these charms of feature and person were added others more—an indefinable air of purity which only the soul can impart, and of abstraction natural to such as think much of things impalpable. Often, with trembling lips, she raised her eyes to heaven, itself not more deeply blue; often she crossed her hands upon her breast, as in adoration and prayer; often she raised her head like one listening eagerly for a calling voice. Now ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... govern psychical phenomena are as occult as the abstraction of the "fourth division of space"; and they defy the realism of common-place probability, mock all analysis, and annihilate distance. When Beryl had first met the keen scrutiny of Mr. Dunbar's glittering blue eyes, their ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Mr. Palma's abstraction increased, and by degrees Regina learned from his stepmother that a long pending suit involving several millions of dollars was drawing ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... in the South Church striking noon, and the shrilling of the steam-whistle softened by the thick-falling snow, roused Richard from his abstraction. He was surprised that it was noon. He rose from the bench and went home through the storm, scarcely heeding the sleet that snapped in his face like whip-lashes. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... had entered the room Brown had dropped into a seat by the window, his eyes two pin points. His abstraction was so deep, his absorption in his dreams so complete that when Smith spoke, he leaped to his feet and put himself ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... "The truth?" he queried, gently. "Now how, I wonder, did your lordship happen to think of that remote abstraction." For beyond doubt, Lord Falmouth's wooing had been that morning of a ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Michel de L'Hopital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent [17] and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival claims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the so-called "Political" party, professedly almost indifferent ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... the men of direct insight and vital hope. The poetry of Shelley in particular is typically poetical. It is poetry divinely inspired; and Shelley himself is perhaps no more ineffectual or more lacking in humour than an angel properly should be. Nor is his greatness all a matter of aesthetic abstraction and wild music. It is a fact of capital importance in the development of human genius that the great revolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that began with the Renaissance and is ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... most effective are (l) the addition of water to the soil by rains; (2) the evaporation of water from the topsoil, due to the more active meteorological factors during spring, summer, and fall; and (3) the abstraction of water from the soil by ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... rather silent when she joined them, and left the conversation to Cedric. More than once Malcolm wondered what made her so thoughtful; but when they reached the house, and she bade him good-night in the hall, there was no coldness or abstraction in ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... said, looking up at us from his momentary abstraction, "for the first part of General Clinton's letter I must be brief with you and very frank. There are no recruits to be had in this vicinity for Colonel Morgan's Rifles. Riflemen are of the elite; and our best characters and best ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... affairs were in progress, Napoleon, in Paris, was consecrating his energies with almost miraculous power, in developing all the resources of the majestic empire under his control. He possessed the power of abstraction to a degree which has probably never been equaled. He could concentrate all his attention for any length of time upon one subject, and then, laying that aside entirely, without expending any energies in unavailing anxiety, could ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... critically and turned up his eyes for greater abstraction. The wine was pleasant to the palate, ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... accurately, the maximum wage, and of course in what doesn't sound so Utopian since we have experimented with it, that favourite dogma of the near-Socialists, the Government ownership of railroads. His main theory, however, appears to be some far-fetched abstraction which he calls the humanizing of industry—you've heard that before! Mere bombast, you see, but the kind of thing that is dangerous in a crowd. It is the catchpenny politics that has been the curse ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... usual, he passes to his own experience, and meditates on the changed aspect of the world in youth and maturer life. The petty, personal emotions pass away, whilst the grand and ideal 'remains with us unimpaired in its lofty abstraction from age to age.' Therefore, though the inference is not quite clear, he can never forget the first time he saw Mrs. Siddons act, or the appearance of Burke's 'Letter to a Noble Lord.' And then, in a passage worthy of Sir Thomas ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... sea. From its eminences there sweep unequalled views over the Gulf of Georgia and northwestward along towering mountain ranges upon whose lower slopes the firs and cedars marshal themselves in green battalions. From his hotel window he would gaze in contented abstraction over the tidal surges through the First Narrows and the tall masts of shipping in a spacious harbor, landlocked and secure, stretching away like a great blue lagoon with motor craft and ferries and squat tugs for waterfowl. Thompson loved the forest as ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... among them, though ever deferring in all things to an old Indian of exceedingly fierce and malign aspect, though wasted and withered into the semblance of a consumptive wolf, who sat upon a stone, buried in gloomy abstraction, from which, time by time, he awoke, to direct the dispersion of the valuables, through the hands of his deputy, with exceeding great ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Gregg. Let's wish ourselves luck." From grim, silent abstraction, Grantline had now sprung into ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... it to think of other things. The imagination, therefore, considered in itself, of a new object is of the same character as other imaginations; and for this reason I do not class astonishment among the emotions, nor do I see any reason why I should do it, since this abstraction of the mind arises from no positive cause by which it is abstracted from other things, but merely from the absence of any cause by which from the contemplation of one thing the mind is determined to think other things. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... at all who, having given time and thought to the study of life's complicated problems, had not reached one step further than the Old-World thinkers. Perhaps he would quote one of his favourite philosophers, and then suddenly relapse into silence, returning to his wonted abstraction and to his indifference to his surroundings. Helen Stanley had learned to understand his ways and to appreciate his mind, and, without intruding on him in any manner, had put herself gently into his life as his quiet champion and his friend. No one in her ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... had won a stainless reputation in affairs of the widest public importance. Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of success. To the public he was a cold abstraction, wholly destitute of those rich lines of personality, that living warmth, and the peculiar faculty of stamping his own heart's impression on a multitude of hearts, by which the people recognize their favorites. And it must be owned that, ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a minister, and ministers are accustomed to penetrating the blue mazes of mental abstraction. This minister did. He began by telling three funny stories, and Eveley, who loved to exercise her sense of humor, came back to the Current Club ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... again upon the place where once had stood my chair. Suddenly, I passed from abstraction to intentness; for there, in its standing place, I made out a long undulation, rounded off with the heavy dust. Yet it was not so much hidden, but that I could tell what had caused it. I knew—and shivered ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the one hand, speculative jurisprudence, this abstract and exuberant thought-process of the modern State, is possible only in Germany, on the other hand, the German conception of the modern State, making abstraction of real men, was only possible because and in so far as the modern State itself makes abstraction of real men or only satisfies the whole of ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... knowledge of Deity than the common, 617-u. Psyche represented the Soul; her suitor was Dionusos, who awakened her, 586-l. Psyche, representing the Soul, had an earthly and an immortal lover, 519-l. Public not a vague abstraction, 198-u. Public Opinion a Force; in free governments omnipotent, 90-l. Public service only justly entered through door of merit, 47-u. Punishment and reward are the satisfaction of demerit and merit, 724-u. Punishment for sins a part of the Masonic Doctrine, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... whose self is contented with knowledge and experience, who is unmoved, who has restrained his senses, and to whom a sod, a stone, and gold are alike, is said to be devoted.... A devotee should constantly devote himself to abstraction, remaining in a secret place, alone, with his mind and self restrained, without expectations and without belongings. Fixing his seat firmly in a clean place, not too high nor too low, and covered over with ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... appreciated by the British student. See also Walter Bagehot's Economic Studies.] and in this Utopia deserves perhaps a word or so more. I write with the utmost diffidence, because upon earth economic science has been raised to a very high level of tortuous abstraction by the industry of its professors, and I can claim neither a patient student's intimacy with their productions nor—what is more serious—anything but the most generalised knowledge of what their Utopian equivalents have achieved. The vital nature of economic issues ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... tunnel's mouth. And, as he descended the incline again, he became aware of other couples standing about in the shadows, within alcoves of the cliff, or seated on the grassy slope just outside the wooden hand-rail. In his first abstraction he had ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... whole year and a half she had been mainly grave; not melancholy, but given to thought, abstraction, dreams. She was carrying France upon her heart, and she found the burden not light. I knew that this was her trouble, but others attributed her abstraction to religious ecstasy, for she did not share her thinkings with the village at large, yet ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... from the rafters, to be ready for distribution after the initiation on the following day. Several friends of the candidate, who are Mid[-e], are stationed at the doors of the Mid[-e]wign to guard against the intrusion of the uninitiated, or the possible abstraction of the gifts ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... invariably one who is beyond her talents, for reasons either fortuitous or intrinsic. Let us take, for example, a woman whose relative navetete makes the process clearly apparent, to wit, a simple shop-girl. Her absolute first choice, perhaps, is not a living man at all, but a supernatural abstraction in a book, say, one of the heroes of Hall Caine, Ethel M. Dell, or Marie Corelli. After him comes a moving-picture actor. Then another moving-picture actor. Then, perhaps, many more—ten or fifteen head. Then a sebaceous young clergyman. Then the junior partner ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... no benevolence of temper can altogether remedy. They may often violate the tastes and feelings of others, not from a want of proper regard for them, but from ignorance of custom, or want of habit, or abstraction of mind, or from other causes which demand forbearance and sympathy, rather than displeasure. An ability to bear patiently with defects in manners, and to make candid and considerate allowance for a want of advantages, or for peculiarities in mental habits, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... possession of all water-rights, to the exclusion of the original owners. He, however offered to supply them with water for their farms at a fixed rate; whereas they had hitherto enjoyed that free right for upwards of a century. This loss, or abstraction, of so important a supply, upon which the actual existence of the farms depended in seasons of drought, not only impoverished the cultivators during the present year of famine, but reduced the value of their land to an enormous extent, as farms with a water-supply ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... can only be produced by identity of cause. Law cannot be other than eternal and self-demonstrating, just as 2 x 2 must eternally 4; but it remains only an abstract conception until the Creative Word affords it a field of operation, just as twice two is four remains only a mathematical abstraction until there is something for you to count; and accordingly, as we have already seen, all our reasoning concerning the origin of Creation, whether based on metaphysical or scientific grounds, brings us to the conception of a Universal and Eternal Living Spirit localizing itself in particular ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
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