"Ascertainable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... also one of the answers to the following plea. 'Though the knowledge of every positive truth is an useful acquisition, this doctrine cannot without reservation he applied to negative truth. When the only truth ascertainable is that nothing can be known, we do not, by this knowledge, gain any new fact by which to guide ourselves.'[10] But logical coherency, but a kind of practical everyday coherency, which may be open to a thousand abstract objections, yet which still secures both to the individual and to society a ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... basis is slender, and the proportion of brain to body-tissue has not been taken into account. On the other hand, the remains of this early race are, Professor Sollas says, "obviously more brutal than existing men in all the other ascertainable characters by which they differ from them." Nor are we confined to precarious measurements of skulls. We have the remains of the culture of this early race, and in them we have a surer ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... visibly marking the water boundary between the United States and Canada in the narrow channels that join the Great Lakes. The conventional line therein traced by the northwestern boundary survey years ago is not in all cases readily ascertainable for the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... a new prominence to an old problem—the precise definition of the functions and the powers of the Crown. Those functions and powers had become, in effect, his; and what sort of use was he making of them? His views as to the place of the Crown in the Constitution are easily ascertainable; for they were Stockmar's; and it happens that we possess a detailed account of Stockmar's opinions upon the subject in a long letter addressed by him to the Prince at the time of this very crisis, just before ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... increment, not easily ascertainable with exactness, but approximately ascertainable to the wealth of every country in the world. Just as when a man is working a farm there is in normal years an increment or accretion of wealth or income to him above ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... few ages have formulated a theory of war, or even been clearly aware of its influence; but nevertheless such theories have always existed, and even in their most nebulous and intangible shapes seem to have exerted an ascertainable influence on ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... would be a fair measure of the Possible: in the former case, an exact equivalent (e.g., in any instance of contradictory propositions, the most conceivable would certainly be true); in the latter case, a measure any degree less than an exact equivalent—the degree depending upon the then ascertainable disparity between the extent of the Possible and the extent of the Conceivable. Now the Unknowable (including of course the Inconceivable Existent) is a species of the Possible, and in its name carries the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... plain road to the desired end. That his papers were in arrear, and that he stood in need of assistance to develop the capacity of his business, was clear enough; but all the results of his undertakings during many years were distinctly set forth, and were ascertainable with ease. Nothing had been done for the purposes of the pending investigation; everything was in its genuine working dress, and in a certain honest rugged order. The calculations and entries, in his own hand, of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... while the temperature still lasted she developed a stupor which persisted for about a year. During this time her temperature rose to 100 deg. without ascertainable cause. She lay for the most part motionless, changing her position but rarely; her expression was stolid; she retained and drooled saliva, wet and soiled herself. She never answered any questions; showed no interest whatever. At times she was quite stiff and very resistive but never cataleptic. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... properties, other than those which are common to all animals whatever? If they had; if a flat nose were a mark or index to an indefinite number of other peculiarities, not deducible from the former by an ascertainable law, then out of the class man we might cut another class, flat-nosed man, which, according to our definition, would be a Kind. But if we could do this, man would not be, as it was assumed to be, the proximate Kind. Therefore, the properties ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... spirillae are all unwound, and we have a huge circle of the tiniest imaginable dots, like pearls threaded on an invisible string. These dots are so inconceivably small that many millions of them are needed to make one ultimate physical atom, and while the exact number is not readily ascertainable, several different lines of calculation agree in indicating it as closely approximate to the almost inconceivable total of fourteen thousand millions. Where figures are so huge, direct counting is obviously impossible, but fortunately the different parts of the atom are sufficiently alike to ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... deputies or representatives of the people in the national assemblies. But sovereignty cannot be represented, even as it cannot be alienated; it consists essentially in the general will, and the will is not ascertainable by representation; it is either itself, or something else; there is no middle course. A law not ratified by the people in person is no law at all. The English people believes itself free, but it greatly deceives itself; it is not so, except during the election of members of parliament. As soon as ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... is poetical is a thing solid and absolute; it is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion. It is not merely true, it is ascertainable. Men may be challenged to deny it; men may be challenged to mention anything that is not a matter of poetry. I remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a book in his hand, called "Mr. Smith," or "The Smith Family," or some such thing. He said, "Well, you won't ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Motions ascertainable in this way near the limb are, of course, horizontal as regards the sun's surface; the analogies they present might, accordingly, be styled meteorological rather than volcanic. But vertical displacements on a scale ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... part took little heed of shadows. Her clear, scientific stamp of mind searched for ascertainable facts, and on these she built up her philosophy of life and of the death that ends it. Of course all such contradictions may often be found in a single mind which believes at one time and rejects at another and sees two, or ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... may be, there is one symptom in modern politics of which the gravity is generally acknowledged, while its special connection with the towns is an easily ascertainable fact; I mean the growth of the cruder forms of Socialism. The town artisan or labourer, who sees displayed before him vast masses of property in which he has no share, and contrasts the smallness of his remuneration with the immense ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... in the fate of Scales, for whom in her own mind she had long prophesied evil, and when Birkinshaws' representative came she took care to be in the shop; her intention was to converse with him, and ascertain as much as was ascertainable, after Mr. Povey had transacted business. For this purpose, at a suitable moment, she traversed the shop to Mr. Povey's side, and in so doing she had a fleeting view of King Street, and in King Street of a familiar vehicle. She stopped, and seemed to catch the distant sound ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... course, be anywhere in the entire world, but the place where it is lying is either inside or outside the general boundary of these two parishes. If it has been deposited within the boundary of those two parishes, the fact must be ascertainable by examining the burial certificates issued since the date when the missing man was last seen alive and by consulting the registers of those specified places of burial. I think that if no record can be found of any such interment within the boundary of those two parishes, that fact will be taken ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... beginning of the year 169. On the other hand ancient authorities assign the Apology to the year 169 or 170; and, as there is no reason for rejecting their statement, we may suppose that it was written soon after the death of Verus. Probably its date was ascertainable within a year or two from internal evidence. This Apology however is regarded by Eusebius as the latest of Melito's writings [223:6]; and, as the catalogue of his works comprises some twenty treatises at least, his literary activity must have extended over a considerable period ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... was twofold: first, to report on matters of military importance, any notable activity by the enemy, the direction and nature of hostile fire upon our trenches, the effects of our own fire, when not otherwise ascertainable, the precise position on the map, especially after any action, of our own and of the enemy's lines, including saps, advanced posts and the like; second, to maintain a real contact and spirit of comradeship with the Italian ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... greater stock of just though unscientific observations than the more elementary sciences. It is these empirical truths that the later and more special sciences lend to the earlier; or, at most, some extremely elementary scientific truth, which happening to be easily ascertainable by direct experiment, could be made available for carrying a previous science already founded, to a higher stage of development; a re-action of the later sciences on the earlier which M. Comte not only fully recognized, but attached ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... p. 501.).—A discriminative account of the violins and basses by the great Italian makers, showing, in every ascertainable instance, the date of manufacture, and thereby forming to some extent a chronological catalogue, as it were, of the works of each master, would be, indeed, a curious and interesting achievement. Such a task, involving much consultation of books and examination of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... third, to give tillage and good care; and the fourth step is to apply fertilizers if they be found necessary. Few vineyards will be found to require a complete fertilizer. What the special requirements of a vineyard are can be ascertained only by experiment and are probably not ascertainable by analyses of the soil. This experiment furnishes suggestions as to how the grape-grower may test the value of fertilizers ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... significance; but it was long before I could get sufficiently accustomed to their vileness, their beastliness—I beg the beast's pardon!—to keep from leaving the room when a vein of that sort was opened. But I succeeded in schooling myself to bear it. 'For,' thought I, 'there must be some bond—some ascertainable and recognizable bond between these men and me; I mean some bond that might show itself as such to them and me.' I found out, before long, that there was a tolerably broad and visible one—nothing less than our human nature, recognized as such. For by ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... enough to "dismiss his known ancestry of small Lancashire gentry and plant himself modestly in the shadow of the newly discovered shield of arms of the noble house of Spencer, 'of which I meanest boast myself to be.'" And Lord Tennyson, whose ultimate ascertainable forefather was an eighteenth century Lincolnshire apothecary, was provided with a slightly differenced cadet's version of the arms of Archbishop Tenison, with whom he had no ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... popularly supposed to be occasionally restored without the aid of art, after long years of blindness. Benjamin Rush saw a man of forty-five who, twelve years before, became blind without ascertainable cause, and recovered his sight equally without reason. St. Clair mentions Marshal Vivian, who at the age of one hundred regained sight that for nearly forty years had gradually been failing almost to blindness, and preserved this new sight to ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to you as a choice, as if you might hold either of these creeds you liked best. But there is in reality no choice for you; the facts being quite easily ascertainable. You have no business to think about this matter, or to choose in it. The broad fact is, that a human creature of the highest race, and most perfect as a human thing, is invariably both kind and true; and that as you lower the race, you get ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... do know of her up to the time of her liaison with Cardinal Roderigo is that she was born on July 13, 1442, this fact being ascertainable by a simple calculation from the elements afforded by the inscription on her tomb in Santa ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... anti-English complex and your pro-French complex entice your memory into retaining only evil about England and only good about France. That is why I pull out from the recorded, certified, and perfectly ascertainable past, these few large facts. They amply justify, as it seems to me, and as I think it must seem to any reader with an open mind, what I said about ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... theory of evolution by natural selection is a mechanical theory. It endeavours to comprise all the facts of adaptation in organic nature under the same category of explanation as those which occur in inorganic nature—that is to say, under the category of physical, or ascertainable, causation. Indeed, unless the theory has succeeded in doing this, it has not succeeded in doing anything—beyond making a great noise in the world. If Mr. Darwin has not discovered a new mechanical cause in the selection principle, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... of Chaucer's character and intellectual tastes and tendencies be in the main correct, there will seem to be nothing paradoxical in describing his literary progress, so far as its data are ascertainable, as a most steady and regular one. Very few men awake to find themselves either famous or great of a sudden, and perhaps as few poets as other men, though it may be heresy against a venerable maxim to say so. Chaucer's works form a clearly recognisable series of steps towards ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... commonly as fits or falling sickness—is not as hereditary as it was one time thought to be, its hereditary character being ascertainable in only about 5 per cent. of cases, nevertheless, it is a decidedly dysgenic agent, and marriage with an epileptic is distinctly advised against. Where both parents are epileptics, the children are almost sure to be epileptic, and such a marriage should be prohibited by ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... to say is more to the purpose. I think it much to his credit that his first ascertainable emotion after the buffet of assault was one of wildest exultation at the prospect. It shows that he had never for a moment distrusted the meek little partner of his fortunes. Whisps of such doubt did afterwards float across his pretty morning ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... little withdrawn from our national fleet lay two French frigates, and, in another direction, an English sloop, under that banner which always makes itself visible, like a red portent in the air, wherever there is strife. In pursuance of our official duty (which had no ascertainable limits), we went on board the flag-ship, and were shown over every part of her, and down into her depths, inspecting her gallant crew, her powerful armament, her mighty engines, and her furnaces, where ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mind, that nothing should be undertaken until the will of the deities concerned had been ascertained and that early form of conscience satisfied? Let us remember that the whole story of the Aeneid is one of the bending of the will of the hero, as a type of the ideal Roman, to the ascertainable will of the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... remarkably effective profile sketches of the author himself. The Mr. Palmer who held the little book was a relative of the landscape painter of the same name, who was Blake's friend, and hence the authenticity of the manuscript was ascertainable on other grounds than the indisputable ones of its internal evidences. The book was offered to Rossetti for ten shillings, but the young enthusiast was at the time a student of art, and not much in the way of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... navigators sailing at different times, under different circumstances of wind and weather, and under different plans of exploration, is impossible. So far as regards the distances running north and south, such an agreement might happen, because the truth in that direction was ascertainable by any one, by means of observations of the latitude; but not as regards those running east and west; for these, no means of determining them existed, as before explained: and accordingly on the Ribero map they are grossly incorrect. From the Montana verde to the C. de Muchas yllas, that is, ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... and left, up and down, to and from us—changes in the intensity of illumination by changes of distance—besides variations occurring at regular and ascertainable intervals, there are stars called temporary, shining awhile and then disappearing; new, coming to a definite brightness, and so remaining; and lost, those whose first appearance was not observed, but which have ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... the situation was reversed, the dotted line showing roughly the position of the Russian line when the counter-drive by the Czar's forces was launched and the solid line its position, so far as was ascertainable, on May 15.] ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... into business in the face of a possibility of failure through uncontrollable circumstances; not in defiance of an ascertainable, insufferable incompetency. They toil on, accepting adversity with such equanimity as God gives them, so long as they are permitted to believe that their misfortunes are not chargeable upon their incapacity or self-indulgence. But when it is made apparent that they are not in their proper ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Physician and Surgeon, beneath his window. The proprietor of the Keystone thought it gave a desirable, professional air to the house. But Webber, the young man in the Baking Powder Trust, was sceptical of its commercial value to the doctor. Certainly the results from its appearance were not ascertainable. Sommers had no patients. The region about the Keystone was a part of the World's Fair territory, and had been greatly overbuilt. It had shrunk in these stagnant months to one-tenth of its possible population. There ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... that land should rise gradually in some places and be depressed in others. Such changes have actually occurred in our own days, and are now in progress, having been accompanied in some cases by violent convulsions, while in others they have proceeded so insensibly as to have been ascertainable only by the most careful scientific observations, made at considerable intervals of time. On the other hand, there is no evidence from human experience of a rising or lowering of the sea's level in any region, and the ocean can not be raised or depressed in one place without its level being changed ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of Nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition[7] counts for something as a condition of the course ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... very much in my own state of mind—inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists, "a plague on both your houses!" and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion, to labour in the fertile fields of ascertainable fact. And I may, therefore, further suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the 'Origin' in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... enable a man to perform it without losing actually any of his flesh or his nervous energy, is as absolutely fixed a quantity as the weight of powder necessary to carry a given ball a given distance. And within limits varying by exceedingly minor and unimportant circumstances, it is an ascertainable quantity. I told the public this five years ago—and under pardon of your politico-economical contributors—it is not a ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... intervals of frowning sternly on the throng, as much as to say that he would stand no nonsense, would cry, "Next!" and another dull-eyed wreck would drift through, to be followed a moment later by yet another. The one fact at present ascertainable concerning the unknown searcher for reckless young men of good appearance was that he appeared to be possessed of considerable decision of character, a man who did not take long to make up his mind. He was rejecting applicants now at the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... an habitual (and threatens to become a rule-of-thumb) criterion of pictorial merit; the more so that qualities of two-dimensional shape, being intrinsic and specific, are difficult to run to ground and describe; whereas the quality of three-dimensional suggestion is ascertainable by mere comparison between the shapes in the picture and the shapes afforded by real things when seen in the same perspective and lighting. Most people can judge whether an apple in a picture "looks as if" it were solid, round, heavy and likely ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... juxtaposition. Equality being predicated of things which give us indistinguishable impressions, and no accurate comparison of impressions being possible unless they occur in immediate succession, it results that exactness of equality is ascertainable in proportion to the closeness of the compared things. Hence the fact that when we wish to judge of two shades of colour whether they are alike or not, we place them side by side; hence the fact that we cannot, with any precision, say ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... before very long they were to be quarrelling over his grave. Pope's will showed at once that his quarrels were hardly to end with his death. He had quarrelled, though the quarrel had been made up, with the generous Allen, for some cause not ascertainable, except that it arose from the mutual displeasure of Mrs. Allen and Miss Blount. It is pleasant to notice that, in the course of the quarrel, Pope mentioned Warburton, in a letter to Miss Blount, as a sneaking parson; but Warburton was not aware ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... upon several of the earliest British coins; which whether issued as some say before, or as others aver after, the advent of Julius Caesar, were admittedly of pre-Christian date. Evidences of the veneration of the cross in France before our era are so numerous and easily ascertainable, that it will only be necessary to refer the reader to the Collection Roujou, the pages of the Revue de Numismatique, and the writings of Messieurs De la Saussaye, Lenormant, De Saulcy, E. Lambert, and other ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... unsound in its conclusions. The work cannot halt here. Vocal Science must be reconstructed. This can be done only by following the general plan of all scientific investigation, beginning with the observation of all ascertainable facts bearing on ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... no question of 'spirits,' with all their physical and metaphysical difficulties. Nor is there any desire to shirk the fact that many 'presentiments' and hallucinations of the sane coincide with no ascertainable fact. We only provisionally posit the possibility of an influence, in its nature unknown, of one mind on another at a distance, such influence translating itself into an hallucination. An inquiry into this subject, in the ethnographic and modern fields, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... intended by the phrase "internal improvements"? What does it embrace and what exclude? No such language is found in the Constitution. Not only is it not an expression of ascertainable constitutional power, but it has no sufficient exactness of meaning to be of any value as the basis of a safe conclusion either of constitutional ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... Lord; but it has pleased Providence, in these modern times, that science should make it the humble messenger of man, and we know that every flash that shimmers about the horizon on a summer's evening is determined by ascertainable conditions, and that its direction and brightness might, if our knowledge of these were great enough, have ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of the information available on the pharmacology of coffee indicates that it should be used in moderation, particularly by children, the permissible quantity varying with the individual and ascertainable only through personal observation. Used in moderation, it will prove a valuable stimulant increasing personal efficiency in mental and physical labor. Its action in the alimentary regime is that of an adjuvant food, aiding digestion, favoring increased flow of the digestive ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... account of this development as far as it is ascertainable may be found in the fifth chapter of Pratt's ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... or three ballots each—and who was there to oppose them? Who wanted to be school director? It was a post of no profit, little honor and much vexation. And yet, there are always men to be found who covet such places. Curiously there are always those who covet them for no ascertainable reason, for often they are men who have no theory of education to further, and no fondness for affairs of the intellect. In the Woodruff District, however, the incumbents saw no candidate in view who could be expected ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... romanticists, contains a large admixture of modern thought and feeling. The brilliant pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouque give no faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers |
