"Fortuitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fortuitous occurrence," the doctor went on. "I have often had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Rossitur's family in church in the little church at Queechy Run and that enabled me to recognise your cousin, as soon ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... connection. What would Englishmen have felt, how would Englishmen have acted, had two or three individuals, strangers to their country, despicable in point of birth or talents, and considerable only from fortuitous elevation to offices which they were unfit to fill, ventured to insult their national character—to accuse of treason every man who dared to complain of his sufferings or his privations, or assumed the courage to exercise the ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... world lost so much that it greatly needed. I knew that there were others, like Chandler, Gales, Greeley, Ritchie, Prentice, and Kendall, who were more read and heeded, but I was consoled by the charitable reflection that entirely by reason of fortuitous circumstance they were known and I was not. Then to me life was a song with my generously self-admired newspaper as the chorus. There came rude awakenings, of course, from those blissful dreams as the shock of editorial conflict gradually taught me that journalism was one ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was ascribing to the good offices of ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... to consider this war as a fortuitous event, which might, indeed, have been staved off, but which, having disturbed for a time the easy movement of our insular life, will die away and leave us free to continue our progress on the same lines as before. But this faith is hardly more than ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... were somewhat relaxed in the holidays. On the day of Uncle Bobby's visit, by a fortuitous circumstance, Miss Sallie was five miles away, superintending a new incubator house at the school farm. The Dowager and Miss Wadsworth and Miss Jellings were scheduled for a reception in the village, and the other teachers ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... origin and formation of the solar system, which it treats not as eternal after the manner of the Stoics, but as having had a definite beginning, and as being destined to a natural and inevitable decay. He applies his principle of "Fortuitous Concurrence" to this part of his subject with signal power, but the faultiness of his method interferes with the effect of his argument. The finest part of the book, and perhaps of the whole poem, is his account of the "origin of species," ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... incorporation of Parma and Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!" Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences resulting from preconcerted plans and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... long ago, bring no answering emotion to his heart? Who, after all, had ever so worshipped him? And must he now really lose her? Might it not be that he had been made the victim of some conspiracy, aided by fortuitous elements? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tide of a Homer. Elfonzo and Ambulinia soon repaired to the scene, and fortunately for them both the house was so crowded that they took their seats together in the music department, which was not in view of the auditory. This fortuitous circumstances added more the bliss of the Major than a thousand such exhibitions would have done. He forgot that he was man; music had lost its charms for him; whenever he attempted to carry his part, the string of the instrument would break, the bow became ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life contains every great thing, and contains ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... but it was not likely. As the hours passed, and the man neither returned nor answered Stonor's frequent shouts, the policeman began to wonder if an accident could have occurred to him. But he had certainly been alive and well within a half-hour of their arrival, and it seemed too fortuitous a circumstance that anything should have happened just at that juncture. A more probable explanation was that the man had seen them coming, and had reasons of his own for wishing to keep out of the way. After all, Stonor had no precise ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... right to exercise his rights of citizenship; for, many of the most useful and valuable of our voters, of both races, are "non-property-holding" voters. The fact of holding property is frequently predicated on conditions altogether fortuitous—a reverse of the wheel of fortune, a large or expensive family—a drought or flood, as well as many other contingencies all play conspicuous parts in preventing good and true citizens from accumulating property, even to the extent of an humble homestead; while fire, cyclone and flood often ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the new art demands a more subtle construction than this, something that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul. This "concealed construction" may arise from an apparently fortuitous selection of forms on the canvas. Their external lack of cohesion is their internal harmony. This haphazard arrangement of forms may be the future of artistic harmony. Their fundamental relationship will finally be able ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... "Messianic" Eclogue, the fourth, which was addressed to Pollio during his consulship. By its fortuitous resemblance to the prophetic literature of the Bible, it came at one time to be the best known poem in Latin, and elevated its author to the position of an arch-magician in the medieval world. Indeed, this poem was largely influential ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... due to the ancestry of the individual—that is, they must be matters of heredity in the ordinary sense, coupled with the fortuitous variations which accompany heredity ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... message, but they seemed to him, in contrast with the still deeper and far more perfect union, which was being brought about in Christ, of men of all nationalities and belonging to mutually hostile races, to be little better than the fortuitous union of a pile of stones huddled together on the roadside. Measured against the architecture of the Church, as Paul saw it in his lofty idealism, the aggregations of men in the world do not deserve the name of buildings. His point of view is the exact opposite of that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... a muffled scream came from the cavernous mouth of the dark hole beyond the sacrificial altar through which the priestess had entered the temple. Without even a thought for his own safety, or the possibility for escape which this rapid series of fortuitous circumstances had thrust upon him, Tarzan of the Apes answered the call of the woman in danger. With a little bound he was at the gaping entrance to the subterranean chamber, and a moment later was ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... action, or of fitness to survive The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind between permanent subjects and changing attributes; the conception of classes with sub classes within them; the separation of fortuitous from regularly caused connections; surely all these were once definite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempt to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences into a more shareable and manageable ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... mistress-of-the-house till a call ended, to stop to try to think it out. Later on, tonight, after the children were in bed, when she was brushing her hair . . . oh, probably she'd find as you so often did, when you went after the cause of some unexpected little feeling, that it came from a meaningless fortuitous association of ideas, like Elly's hatred of grape-jelly because she had once taken some ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... of things! Intellectual nations are advancing in an eternal circle of events and passions which succeed each other, and the last is necessarily connected with its antecedent; the solitary force of some fortuitous incident only can interrupt this concatenated ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and to observe strict chastity for nine days. Similar cases of incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. It seems unlikely that such reports are without foundation, and perhaps equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous outbursts of unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on a practice actually observed for a definite reason in certain special circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced through women only, and where consequently the king held office merely in virtue of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... done," he answered, giving back the Marquis look for look and scowl for scowl. "You deem it so because I am the secretary to the Marquis de Bellecour and she is the daughter of that same Marquis. But these are no more than the fortuitous circumstances in which we chance to find ourselves. That she is a woman must take rank before the fact that she is your daughter, and that I am a man must take rank before the fact that I am your secretary. Not, then, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... that McClellan's great need was not the reinforcements for which he so constantly clamored, but decision and energy of character. Had he possessed these qualities he could have won for himself, from the fortuitous order which fell into his hands, a wreath of unfading laurel, and perhaps have saved almost countless lives of his fellow-countrymen. As it was, if he had only advanced his army a little faster, the twelve thousand Union soldiers, surrendered by the incompetent and pusillanimous Gen. Miles, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... that I regard with anxiety a too great freedom, what I may call an unrestrained intercourse, between members of the two churches—that is, indeed, if I am justified in describing as a church that which I have heard stigmatised as 'a fortuitous ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the landing she could still be heard giving vent to her feelings. Helene sat a long time plunged in the stupor which the information, supplied by this woman with such fortuitous seasonableness, had brought upon her. She now knew the place of assignation. It was a room, with pink decorations, in that old tumbledown house! She once more pictured to herself the staircase oozing with damp, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... through our schools without ever dreaming that an ancient writer could pen three consecutive sentences with a connected meaning: chaos is felt to be natural to ancient literature: no search is made for sense, and the Latin or Greek book is looked upon as a more or less fortuitous concourse of words;' when Dr. Rouse can assert, 'The public schoolboy at nineteen is unable to read a simple Latin or Greek book with ease, or to express a simple series of thoughts without atrocious blunders: he has learnt from his classics neither accuracy ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... and marriage had been so sudden, unpremeditated, adventurous, that she could hardly believe that she had played her part in such a reckless drama. Of all the few hours of her life with Charles, the portion that most insisted in coming back to memory was their fortuitous encounter on the previous Saturday, and those bitter reprimands with which he had begun the attack, as it might be called, which had piqued her ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... rise to a suspicion, where these stains have, perhaps, been occasioned by the spilling of some liquid on the surface of the paper? and would it not be rash and unjust to raise an accusation from such a fact? There would indeed be great temerity in drawing such a conclusion from a fortuitous circumstance; but the inference which may be drawn from the place occupied by these stains on the surface of the paper, from the more or less significant words found in those places, would not permit an accusation to be so lightly ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... this singular commission were, to fix a money rental for all lands, free and unfree, in Clare and Connaught; to assess the taxation fairly due to the crown also in money; and to substitute generally the English law of succession for the ancient customs of Tanistry and gavelkind. In Clare, from fortuitous causes, the settlement they arrived at was never wholly reversed; in Connaught, the inhuman severity of Bingham rendered it odious from the first, and the successes of Hugh Roe O'Donnell, a few years later, were hailed by the people of that province ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... reasons directly connected with this desirable country property that he sought audience of his aunt immediately upon his return home. She was not to be found anywhere downstairs, and since his impatience did not welcome the idea of waiting for a fortuitous opportunity to chat with her in private, he took the stairs three at a time and rapped eagerly on the ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... head. The divergency even of a second may amount to millions of miles if you only have your lines long enough. The Projectile had certainly gone off its direct course; whatever the cause, the fact was undoubted. It was a great pity. The daring attempt must end in a failure due altogether to a fortuitous accident, against which no human foresight could have possibly taken precaution. Unless in case of the occurrence of some other most improbable accident, reaching the Moon was evidently now impossible. To failure, therefore, our travellers had ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... amazing has been the South Sea Drift. Blind, fortuitous, precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless the islands in that waste of ocean have received drift after drift of the races. Down from the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan drift that built civilisations in Ceylon, Java, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... often surprised out of long years of prejudice, and even of dislike and suspicion, by some fortuitous incident, which might have chanced to two who had every impulse towards each other, not such antagonisms as lay between Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and this Huguenot refugee. She had every cue to hate hum. Each moment of her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 210 ff.) And as regards originality in the treatment of a purely scientific subject, a good deal depends on the meaning we attach to the term. If we understand by it striking conclusions drawn from theoretic premises, (as in Knox's "Races of Man,") clever generalizations from fortuitous analogies and coincidences insufficiently weighed, (as in Pococke's "India in Greece,") or, to take a philologic example, speculations suggestive of thought, it may be, but too insecurely based on positive data, (as in Rapp's "Physiologie der Sprache,") we shall vainly seek for such originality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... then it would appear, plain as the writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element utterly irreconcilable with all that has appeared previously manifests itself in him, not as an accident or a fortuitous occurrence, but as an essential, nay, as the essential law ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... be made in Genetics, work of a different kind was required. To learn the laws of Heredity and Variation there is no other way than that which Darwin himself followed, the direct examination of the phenomena. A beginning could be made by collecting fortuitous observations of this class, which have often thrown a suggestive light, but such evidence can be at best but superficial and some more penetrating instrument of research is required. This can only be provided by actual ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... fortuitous of circumstances did we escape complete annihilation the first moment we appeared within range. We had no idea what lay ahead—although the guides we had brought with us from the Lone City informed us we were nearing our destination—and ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... must admit in each case that anything in the vaguest way approaching a proof was lacking. Just before he closed the deal with the lumber company that had taken over his timber tract a forest fire had broken out. Luck and a fortuitous shifting of the wind had saved ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... to send larger and purer streams of knowledge to the soul, has been unanswerably proved by an accumulation of unquestionable testimony. Most persons, however, allow the senses to remain uneducated, except as they may be cultivated by fortuitous circumstances. Eyes have they, but they see not; ears have they, but they hear not; neither do they understand. It is not impossible, nor perhaps improbable, that he who has these two senses properly cultivated will derive more unalloyed pleasure in spending a brief hour ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Another fortuitous gift to Jamaica, so far as human intention is concerned, was the invaluable donation of the Guinea grass. Toward a century ago some African birds were brought as a present to a gentleman in the west of the island. Some grass seeds had been brought along for their feed; and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... that is to say, of Democritus, I could write of natural philosophy in as plain a style as Amafanius. For what is the great difficulty when you have put an end to all efficient causes, in speaking of the fortuitous concourse of corpuscules, for this is the name he gives to atoms. You know our system of natural philosophy, which depends upon the two principles, the efficient cause, and the subject matter out of which the efficient cause forms and produces what ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... and the cheek-bones, just a shade high, and the clearly pencilled brows and the clean modelling of the straight young chin, there was a certain openness and firmness, a fortuitous blending of form and proportion that would have made the head a perfect model for a coin, a wonderful study in pastels. Looking at her, an artist would have fancied her a bold and charming and boyish-looking little girl, fifteen years ago, ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... that there was an end of our fortuitous intercourse, and that he should be just as chatty and familiar with any man who might happen to be in the same carriage with him between Boulogne and Paris. I watched him hand his wife into a basket phaeton, smooth her dress, arrange ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... Burmans believe in dreams, omens, and unlucky days; observe the flight and feeding of fowls, the howl of dogs, and the aspect of the stars; they regard the lines in the hand, the knots in trees, and a thousand other fortuitous circumstances, and by these allow their actions ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... was to be fought. With that I think the court should be content. It has been necessary for Colonel Grant to explain to the court his own presence at Monsanto at midnight on the 28th. It would have been better, perhaps, had he simply stated that it was fortuitous, although I can understand that the court might have hesitated to accept such a statement. That, however, is really all that concerns the matter. Colonel Grant happened to be there. That is all that the court need remember. Let me add the assurance that it would not in the least assist the court ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... to her sex, a striking example of what a quiet country girl can accomplish without money or fortuitous circumstances. ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... logically and historically justified in employing the word "accidental" as the word which serves most properly to convey the meaning that they intend—namely, variations due to causes accidental to the struggle for existence. Similarly, when it is said that variations are "spontaneous," or even "fortuitous," nothing further is meant than that we do not know the causes which lead to them, and that, so far as the principle of selection is concerned, it is immaterial what these causes may be. Or, to revert to ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... the principal hotel, he there witnessed, through one of those fortuitous occurrences which are sometimes the mask of fate, a sufficiently indifferent performance by native jugglers, the chief of whom was exceedingly lean and so dirty as to suggest that he was remote from godliness. During the course of the conjuring this personage held the doctor by a certain ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... he made a fortuitous expedition to Frankfort-on-the-Main—an expedition partly prompted by the outbreak of cholera at Berlin at the time, and partly by the portent of a dream (he was credulous in such matters) which at the beginning of the year had intimated his death. Here, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... remarked as peculiar to Editors of the class in which I venture to enrol you, is the happy combination of fortuitous circumstances which usually put you in possession of the works which you have the goodness to bring into public notice. One walks on the sea-shore, and a wave casts on land a small cylindrical trunk or casket, containing a manuscript much damaged with sea-water, which is with difficulty ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... for a while after she had left him, forming his plans. He was grateful to her for a tact which had not transgressed beyond the limits of unspoken thought during their brief interview, but he was more pleased with the fortuitous absence of Phil and Musard at that period of his investigations. He welcomed the opportunity of working unquestioned, because he was not prepared to disclose the statements of Nepcote and Hazel Rath to any of the inmates of the moat-house ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual of Expiation—whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... which swell the rivers, after fertilizing the country; the thousands of fountains which start from the same source, and which water animal and vegetable kind; all these things seem no more the effect of a fortuitous cause and of a declension of atoms, than the retina which receives the rays of light, the crystalline lens which refracts them, the incus, the malleus, the stapes, the tympanic membrane of the ear, which receives the sounds, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... gathering on the steps? It was fortuitous, like everything destined to confound us. There stood Lady Jocelyn with Andrew, fretting his pate. Harry leant against a pillar, Miss Carrington, Mrs. Shorne, and Mrs. Melville, supported by Mr. George Uplift, held watchfully by. Juliana, with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the ladder of promotion; and during the time which he remained in that situation, what chance had he of making an independence, and proposing for the hand of Isabel Revel? But now that, by a chain of circumstances peculiarly fortuitous, he was in command of an East Indiaman, returning home after having beat off a vessel of equal if not superior force, and preserved a cargo of immense value, he felt confident that he not only would be confirmed ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Gulf, and prevents the effects of the heavy southerly seas from being felt in it. There is, perhaps, no gulf, whether it is entered by the eastern or western passage, the navigation of which is so easy as that of St. Vincent, and so clear of dangers, that it can only be by the most fortuitous circumstances, or the most culpable neglect, that any accident can befal a ship in its ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... I have not forgotten anything unintentionally, these are the principal opinions concerning the soul. I have omitted Democritus, a very great man indeed, but one who deduces the soul from the fortuitous concourse of small, light, and round substances; for, if you believe men of his school, there is nothing which a crowd of atoms cannot effect. Which of these opinions is true, some God must determine. It is an important question for ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... that the dependent and affectionate man opposite her was the one who had filled her with fear and resentment such a short time ago. She found herself actually laughing aloud once at the absurdity of it all. Had her dread of him been fortuitous, his tyranny a mere sham? Had he really liked her all the time, and had she been a sensitive fool? She would have thought so, indeed, but for the memory of the perplexed and distracted face of her ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... they really do. The qualities of the mind do, in reality, establish the truest superiority over one another: yet should not these so far elevate our pride as to inflate us with contempt, and make us look down on our fellow-creatures as on animals of an inferior order; but that the fortuitous accident of birth, the acquisition of wealth, with some outward ornaments of dress, should inspire men with an insolence capable of treating the rest of mankind with disdain, is so preposterous that nothing less than daily experience ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... may be interpreted, there are in it coincidences with ascertained facts so marked that they cannot possibly be fortuitous. They prove therefore that Moses was in possession of some accurate information on the subject on which he ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... profound delight to menace, distress, and anger; they have the ode of the queen, the song of abundance, the psalms of grief, and, lastly, the long and mysterious war-cries the adolescent princesses send forth during the combats and massacres that precede the nuptial flight. May this be a fortuitous music that fails to attain their inward silence? In any event they seem not the least disturbed at the noises we make near the hive; but they regard these perhaps as not of their world, and possessed of no interest for them. It is possible that we on our side hear only a fractional ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... courts declared state laws in conflict with the United States Constitution, and the Fourteenth Amendment therefore acted as a protective bulwark in state as well as nation. In brief, then, the legal position of the big industrial organizations was almost impregnable because of the fortuitous circumstance that the words of a part of the Constitution might be held to mean something which probably did not enter the minds of the Congress or the state legislatures which placed ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... 'Why, Mr. President, according to Military Science it is our duty to guard against every possible or supposable contingency that may arise. For example, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the Enemy, by any chance or freak, should, in a last resort, get in behind Washington, in his efforts to capture the city, why, there the fort is to ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... artificially produced in plastic material. In this way a utensil may acquire ornamental characters long before the workman has learned to take pleasure in such details or has conceived an idea beyond that of simple utility. This may be called unconscious embellishment. In this fortuitous fashion a ribbed variety of fruit shell would give rise to a ribbed vessel in clay; one covered with spines would suggest a noded vessel, etc. When taste came to be exercised upon such objects these features would be retained and copied for the ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... these: Five or six years ago, I knew a little of Alan Walcott. I had made his acquaintance in a fortuitous way, and he once did me a good turn by coming forward as a witness in ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Egyptians of all ranks, who made them offerings of figs, grapes, cucumbers, vegetables and water. The most famous of them all, the Sycamore of the South, used to be regarded as the living body of Hathor on earth. Each family possessed gods and fetishes, which had been pointed out by some fortuitous meeting with an animal or an object; perhaps by a dream and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... do in the way of coming upon a solution of the problem of life, neither society nor the school has any special warrant for exultation. These defectives did not just happen. The law of life is neither fortuitous nor capricious. On the contrary, like begets like, and the law is immutable. With lavish hand, society provides the pound of cure but gives only superficial consideration to the ounce of prevention. The title of education will ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... M. le Marquis de Firmin-Latour, you understand, Sir, are destined by Nature first and by fortuitous circumstances afterwards to become the clients of men of ability like myself. I knew that sooner or later the elegant young soldier would be forced to seek the advice of someone wiser than himself, for indeed his present situation ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... forgotten that to admit any such constant operation of any such unknown natural cause is to deny the purely Darwinian theory which relies upon the survival of the fittest by means of minute fortuitous indefinite variations. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... one word more—either for you, or any other readers who may be startled at what I have been saying, as to the peculiar stress laid by the Founder of our religion on right dealing with wealth. Let them be assured that it is with no fortuitous choice among the attributes or powers of evil, that "Mammon" is assigned for the direct adversary of the Master whom they are bound to serve. You cannot, by any artifice of reconciliation, be God's soldier, and his. Nor while the desire of gain is within your heart, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... last gasp, and had mentally resigned themselves to death, when there came a tremendous shock, throwing the two lads off their feet only just in time to avoid the final thrusts from the two pirates, to which fortuitous circumstance they owed their lives. As they lay on the deck, struggling to regain their footing, they were trampled on and knocked over again by a swarm of men who were rushing in over the port bulwarks. It was the Tiger's crew, who ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... but that did not occur to Dr. Hibbert. His last case is the apparition of Mrs. Donne, with a dead child, to Dr. Donne, in Paris, as recorded by Walton. As Donne was a poet, very fond of his wife, and very anxious about her health, this case is not evidential, and may be dismissed for 'a fortuitous coincidence' (p. 332). ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Brunt's romance and Godwin's tale a century earlier are too striking to be fortuitous, and, indeed, there is no question that Brunt used Godwin as one of his chief sources. An earlier Robinson Crusoe, an idyllic Gulliver's Travels, Godwin's The Man in the Moone helped to establish in English literature the vogue of the traveler's ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... no means assert that they have found a law by which the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law, there is only chance. Hence it is clear that what we are asked to believe is that ancient Greek speculation was after all not far from the truth, that through a fortuitous (accidental) concourse of atoms the world came into being, and that by chance combinations of elements the great variety ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... go back to the Memoires, partly in compliment to the master of all mid-nineteenth-century critics, but more because of their almost fortuitous good luck in ushering Manon into the world. There is something in them of both their successors, Cleveland and the Doyen, but it may be admitted that they are less unreadable than the first, and less trivial than the second. The ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... for every man. We are born with different equipments, but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The handle of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... that it is not entirely fortuitous that this added impulse is given to our work just at this time. We all feel that the present is a moment when the very foundations of our ethical life—both as individuals and as groups—have received a rude shock. At such a time—more than ever—we need to understand and to ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Hall was the ultra-respectable Abram S. Hewitt, a millionaire capitalist. The Republican party nominated a verbose, pushful, self-glorifying young man, who, by a combination of fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose pugnacious disposition, indifference to political conventionalities, capacity ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... common law,—as I looked back over my long interest in the position of woman, I felt that my greatest drawback had been the want of such an example. Every practical experiment that the world recorded had been made under such peculiar circumstances, or from such a fortuitous height, that it was at ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... strive for beauty of form, and would be ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the British story-tellers. A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recently remarked acutely that "Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of construction. Where, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he constructs too well, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... inscrutable instincts and results of habit! A circumstance, apparently fortuitous and accidental, placed him in the midst of an Indian family, the female owner of which loved him with the most disinterested tenderness, and lavished upon him all the affectionate sentiments of a mother towards a son. Had the die of his lot been cast otherwise, all the inhabitants of the village ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... say—"These things do not happen,"—because it is indisputable that they do happen. That combination which comprises a dark night, a highwayman armed and hatted to the teeth, and myself, may be a purely fortuitous one, but will such a criticism bring any comfort to the highwayman? And the concourse of three benevolent millionaires with the person to whom poverty can do no more is so pleasant and possible that I marvel it does not occur more frequently. I am prepared to believe on the ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... gust of wind, after which Dee sat pondering deeply on the matter, but unable to come to any satisfactory conclusion. He never suspected for one moment what in this evil and matter-of-fact generation would have occurred even to the most credulous—to wit, that either insanity or fanaticism, aided by fortuitous events, if we may so speak, was the cause of this delusion, at least to the unhappy woman now the object of Dee's most abstruse speculations. His thoughts, however, would often recur to his quondam associate, Kelly, and, if in the neighbourhood, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... suggestion became so insistent that I went further and began to wonder whether I was not in fact reading a "story-form" of some already triumphant film. Certainly the resemblance is almost too pronounced to be fortuitous; from the sensational branding scene, through cowboy stunts, to the up-town playhouse, where a repentant and wife-seeking hero recognises his mark upon the shoulder of the leading lady—and so to reconciliation, slow fade-out, and the announcement of Next Week's ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... concern ourselves. The larva of Sitaris is then in conditions exceptionally favourable for growth; but, in spite of appearances, there is no reason for admiring the marvellous foresight and extraordinary sureness of instinct; nearly everything depends on a fortuitous circumstance, a chance. This becomes very evident if we study another related beetle; it is called the Sitaris colletis, and lives at the expense of the hymenopterous Colletes, as its relative at the expense of the Anthophora. ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... and its processes were sometimes discussed, and some thought that "time" was the ultimate cause of all, others that all these had sprung forth by their own nature (svabhava), others that everything had come forth in accordance with an inexorable destiny or a fortuitous concourse of accidental happenings, or through matter combinations in general. References to diverse kinds of heresies are found in Buddhist literature also, but no detailed accounts of these views are known. Of the Upani@sad type of materialists the two schools ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the result of organization maintain the doctrine of spontaneous generation; that is, the production of life without any agency other than the recognized forces of nature being brought about simply by a fortuitous combination of atoms. Although this doctrine cannot be said to be inconsistent with the theory of life presented, yet it is by no means a legitimate or necessary result of it; and observation ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... responsibility of each, the exact measure of their guilt; but I do not myself believe that the Countess was a prime mover, or, indeed, more than an accessory. She was drawn into it, perhaps involved, how or why we cannot know, but possibly by fortuitous circumstances that put an unavoidable pressure upon her; a consenting party, but under protest. That is my view ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... marks of electrical action in the cases cited, and since we know something of the subtlety of the agent; that it may be "amassed, condensed and rarefied," that it is not loose and wandering, and the mere plaything of fortuitous forces, as the atmosphere is supposed to be; but, on the contrary, has close and most sympathetic adjustment with the earth-force; and that it is the invisible hand that holds and manages the grosser atmospheric matter; since we ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... years, including the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and of Philip II., is, in a way, one of unmatched splendor. Spain had not like England by slow degrees expanded into great proportions, but through strange and perfectly fortuitous circumstances, she had, from a proud obscurity, suddenly leaped into a position of commanding power and magnificence. Fortune threw into her lap the greatest prize she ever had to bestow, and at the same time gave her two sovereigns of exceptional qualities and ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... universe a finite and determinate quantity of matter, gifted with a definite number of properties, and susceptible of modification, but not of progress; in which certain productive forces act by the fortuitous agglomeration of circumstances not to be predicated or foreseen; or through the necessary succession of causes and effects,—of events inevitable and independent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... situation of the hero winning his magic reward by saving some person or animal from choking appearing in Roumania and the Philippines, and in connection, too, with incidents from the "Magic Ring" cycle. The resemblance can hardly be fortuitous. ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... a matter so fortuitous that Mr. Hammond could not accept Ruth's version of the loss without some doubt, in any case. And then, her suddenly finding in the only good scenario submitted to him by any of his company, one that she believed was plagiarized from her lost story, seemed to put a cap on the whole matter. Ruth ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... a widow; she suffered much from rheumatism; she was slowly going blind; she was deemed unlucky and avoided. For more than once of late years she had in important crises predicted disaster, and this prophecy, by fortuitous circumstances, had been fulfilled; thus those to whom a deceitful hope is preferable to a warning of trouble sought by fleeing the oracle to elude the misfortune. Being esteemed a witch, and associated with dark dealings and prone to catastrophe, she lived in peculiar ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... by an extension of the circle of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries, and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through fortuitous or systematic exploration. The Northmen visited the coasts of Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers. Norman and Breton fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland thirty years before Cartier sailed up the St. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... After the fortuitous meeting of those men had come irresistible attraction and communion, moral, intellectual and scientific—friendship to the full meaning of ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... against the imputation, colonel," said Devers, to all appearances much injured at such injustice. "The wagon rarely, if ever, goes to town on Monday, and that Private Paine should have gone with it is equally fortuitous." ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... figures. As Metak walked quickly across the pavement with the girl at his side, Bertha Kircher could only guess at the man's intentions. She could see no way in which to escape and so she went docilely with him, hoping against hope that some fortuitous circumstance might eventually arise that would give her the coveted ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... basis of the possibility of experience itself, and consequently prove their existence a priori. For whence could our experience itself acquire certainty, if all the rules on which it depends were themselves empirical, and consequently fortuitous? No one, therefore, can admit the validity of the use of such rules as first principles. But, for the present, we may content ourselves with having established the fact, that we do possess and exercise a faculty of pure a ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... with him. This pressure, coming collectively the next day, had compelled him to close his doors, though he had not really expected to up to the last moment. His call for the sixty-thousand-dollar check at the time had been purely fortuitous. He needed the money, of course, but it was due him, and his clerks were all very busy. He merely asked for and took it personally to save time. Stener knew if it had been refused him he would have brought suit. The matter of depositing city loan certificates in the sinking-fund, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... exhibition of what is good. This is what we might expect of our religious musical foundations, which are justifying the standing condemnation of utilitarian economists so long as the stipendiaries are content indolently to follow the fortuitous traditions of the books that lie in the choir, supplemented by the penny-a-sheet music of the common shops. In the Universities, too, it should be impossible for an undergraduate not to gain acquaintance with good ecclesiastical music, and this is not ensured by an occasional rare performance ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... "Naturally! A fortuitous function of the nerve centres of our brain, like the unforeseen chemical action due to new mixtures and similar also to a charge of electricity, caused by friction or the unexpected proximity of some substance, similar to all phenomena caused by the infinite ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... through swinging doors to the dining-room. Again, embracing Lanyard, his glance seemed devoid of any sort of intelligible expression; and if its object needed all his self-possession in that moment, it was to dissemble relief rather than dismay. An accent of the fortuitous distinguished this second encounter too persuasively to excuse further misgivings. What the adventurer himself hadn't known till within the last ten minutes, that he was coming to Troyon's, Roddy couldn't possibly have anticipated; ergo, whatever the detective's business, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... that had so quickly taught him the secret of the ax-swing. He knew that each of the things he saw, no matter how trivial, was either premeditated or the product of chance. If premeditated, he tried to find out its reason for being. If fortuitous, he wished to know the fact, and always attempted to figure out the possibility ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... had felt that it would be. But he could not afford to take any risks. Having found nothing in Swing's warbags save his friend's personal belongings, Racey slid the knife up his sleeve and went downstairs to breakfast. On the way he stopped a moment at a fortuitous knothole in the board wall. When he passed on his way the knife was no ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... fortuitous. The tree has the irregularity and abandon of the picturesque. The pruning of man is for a different end, and it produces the comely well-proportioned tree of the orchards. The tree becomes a manipulated subject, comforting to the ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... comparatively recent,—but the eternal existence of Matter and Motion; and attempts to account for the origin of the world and of the races by which it is peopled, either by ascribing it, with Epicurus, to a fortuitous concourse of atoms, or, with more modern Speculatists, to a law of progressive development. This has been called the Epicurean Hypothesis, because Epicurus, while nominally admitting the existence of God, denied the creation ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... to pour in! Was ever marriage so fortuitous! The Coles' farm joined that of the Days and the union between the two only children would cement the friendship between the families. The fact that Uncle Bart was a joiner, Cephas a painter, and Abel Day a mason and bricklayer made the alliance ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... position to review the general tenour of Leonardos writings, I may perhaps be permitted to add a word as to my own estimate of the value of their contents. I have already shown that it is due to nothing but a fortuitous succession of unfortunate circumstances, that we should not, long since, have known Leonardo, not merely as a Painter, but as an Author, a Philosopher, and a Naturalist. There can be no doubt that in more ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... many thousands of gold-seekers and emigrants came in the days of California's gold excitement. Every mile has some story of pioneer bravery or heroism, of hairbreadth escape from hostile Indians or fortuitous deliverance from storm or disaster. It was over this route the pilgrims came who sought in Utah a land of freedom where they might follow their own peculiar conceptions of religion and duty, untrammeled and uninterfered with by hostile onlookers and disbelievers. Here came the home-seekers ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Sovereign will always exert himself to repair fortuitous disasters, and will allow those who have paid their taxes punctually in prosperity, considerable liberty in times of barbaric invasion. On this ground, and on account of the incursions of the Suevi, the King grants for this year, the fifteenth Indiction[820], ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... German tale bears to the first part of "All Baba" is striking, and is certainly not merely fortuitous; the fundamental outline of the latter is readily recognisable in the legend of The Dummburg, notwithstanding differences in the details. In both the hero is a poor woodcutter, or faggot-maker; for the band of robbers a monk is substituted in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... doing, and marry a neighbouring estate, or a covetable title, with some conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these, their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached to them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology for their peculiar forms of illbreeding. It is quite curious how ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... intelligence alone they owe their regeneration, but to certain sublime doctrines—originated in causes quite extrinsical from human nature—which, having found their way to them through a concourse of favourable and apparently fortuitous circumstances, were more or less readily admitted, as notions gained from without, and by degrees ingrafted, under various modifications, on their own ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... in the "Descent of Man" the manner of formation of the wondrous ball-and-socket ornaments, and I will swear to the truth of this case. (243/3. See "Descent of Man," II., page 141. Darwin says that no one will attribute the shading of the "eyes" on the wings of the Argus pheasant to the "fortuitous concourse of atoms of colouring-matter." He goes on to say that the development of the ball-and-socket effect by means of Natural Selection seems at first as incredible as that "one of Raphael's Madonnas should have been formed by the selection of chance ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... go by a law which does not recognize the loftiest in him, a man feels to be a mockery of him. There lies little more satisfaction in such a condition of things than if the whole were the fortuitous result of ever conflicting, never combining forces. Wherever individual and various necessity, choice, and prayer, come in, there must be the present God, able and ready to fit circumstances to the varying need of the thinking, willing being he has created. Machinery will not do here—perfect ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... often say something better. But there is no reason why the general reader should not thoroughly enjoy it. Certainly it ought to be more generously recognised than it is. So many persons at present think of it as merely accidental and fortuitous, as if there was no mind in it, as if all the excellent things loosely described as errata, all the curios felicitates of the setter-up of texts, were casual blunders. Such a view reminds one of the way in which the last- century critics used to speak of Shakspere ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... I had never seen, yet knew that I should recognize when found. My quest was not aimless and fortuitous; it had a definite method. I turned from one street into another without hesitation and threaded a maze of intricate passages, devoid of the fear of losing ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... the clearest symptom of the weakness of their empire and of the small power wielded by their King of kings. In contrast alike with its predecessors and successors the Arsacid dominion was peculiarly a chance formation—a state which had come into existence through fortuitous external circumstances, and had no firm foundation within itself, or any ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the picture writings these days of the week are placed respectively north, south, east, and west, and that in the Maya language the quarters of the indiction still bear the names of the cardinal points, hinting the reason of their adoption.[74-1] This cannot be fortuitous. Again, the division of the year into four seasons—a division as devoid of foundation in nature as that of the ancient Aryans into three, and unknown among many tribes, yet obtained in very early times among Algonkins, Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Aztecs, Muyscas, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... business was to eschew idle speculations and go ahead and save his life if it wasn't already too late. Thereupon the doctor opened up the wound and extracted a section of a fine needle. The other half was found sticking in the window sill where a careless seamstress had fixed it. The spider had been a fortuitous arrival. The man made one of the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... before. Here grotto within grotto safe defies The sunbeam. There imbossed and fretted wild, The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain The likeness of some object seen before. Thus nature works as if to mock at art, And in defiance of her rival powers; By these fortuitous and random strokes Performing such inimitable feats, As she with all her rules can never reach. Less worthy of applause though more admired, Because a novelty, the work of man, Imperial mistress of the fur-clad ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... These fortuitous happenings and incidents are nothing compared with one consideration which makes me the happiest man in the world. It is not that I made a lucky venture in stocks and acquired more millions than all of my ancestors ever possessed. That is something, of course, but I had enough money ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... the man who had frustrated it. Payment of Mr Simpson's annuity was resisted, and the poor mathematician was in great straits for those necessaries of life, which, necessary as they may be, are often with a great portion of the human family very fortuitous. Ask not on what legal pretexts Sir John had been successful in inflicting this revenge. Such pretexts are "thick as blackberries." Facilis est descensus—No rich suitor ever sought long for admission into the Court of Chancery, however difficult even he may have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... extraneousness &c 57; accident; appearance, phenomenon &c 448. Adj. derived from without; objective; extrinsic, extrinsical^; extraneous &c (foreign) 57; modal, adventitious; ascititious^, adscititious^; incidental, accidental, nonessential; contingent, fortuitous. implanted, ingrafted^; inculcated, infused. outward, apparent &c (external) 220. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... property, have taken two principal directions, the first a juridical, the second a political one. The axiom, res nullius cedit primo occupanti (compare L. 3, Digest, XLI, 1), explains only the smallest part of the relations of property, and that only because of a very fortuitous circumstance. According to Hobbes (Leviathan, 24), property has its origin in the recognition of it by the power of the state, by the autorite publique, the gouvernement (Bossuet, Politique tiree de l'Ecriture, Sainte, L. 3, 4), or as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois XXVI., 15) more ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... equally little encouragement from his companions. The important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... theory is a very plausible one; it is one of the best cosmogonies that the wit of man has ever framed. It is a revival of the old atheistic hypothesis,—the Epicurean doctrine of the formation of the universe by a fortuitous concourse of atoms,—with all the modifications and improvements that were rendered necessary by the discoveries of modern science. We call it an atheistic theory, because, though the writer supposes that primitive matter was first endowed by divine power with its mysterious ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... the other hand, while admiring the bright object ever in his mind, feared venturing a disclosure, which, in his position and prospects, his conscience whispered to him would be considered presumptuous. Thus matters rested, until a fortuitous circumstance broke the spell that bound these two young hearts, and disclosed to each the transitory ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... his charity, no poor cripple to seek his sympathy; she was almost alone. She could have fled, but felt herself fixed to the ground, and with desperate efforts endeavored to conceal her excitement. He approaches nearer; with glistening eye she watches and hopes some fortuitous circumstances may call him aside. Their glance meets; she blushes and trembles, Father Francis ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the ratio et institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu of Claudius Aquaviva, and, following that, they distinguish two courses of teaching, a higher and a lower. The lower included nothing but an external knowledge of the Latin language, and some fortuitous knowledge of History, of Antiquities, and of Mythology. The memory was cultivated as a means of keeping down free activity of thought and clearness of judgment. The higher course comprehended Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... been; to make his name famous; and confirm the English in their mad method of fighting, like Baresarks or Janizaries rather than strategic human creatures. [See, in Busching's Magazin, xvi. 169 ("Your illustrious 'Column,' at Fontenoy? It was fortuitous, I say; done like janizaries;" and so forth), a Criticism ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... supreme and peculiar obligation of her being. Though she was less fine than Jenny, who in her studious way was a girl of much character, she was by no means as superficial as she appeared, and might in time, aided by fortuitous circumstances, make a strong and capable woman. Her faults, after all, were due in a large measure to a training which had consistently magnified in her mind the space which she would ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... intimation could not be accidental—-it could not be fortuitous, the resemblance of that half-seen but beautiful female hand with one which his lips had once touched, and, while they touched it, had internally sworn allegiance to the lovely owner. Had further proof been wanting, there was ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... going to relate the fortuitous circumstance which led Murat to the moat of Pizzo, then we will leave it to fatalists to draw from this strange story whatever philosophical deduction may please them. We, as humble annalists, can only vouch for ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... trampled grass-banks, the lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of the suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... owing to this fortuitous intervention that when Dr. Hooper called a couple of days after to see his patient he was able to certify to a remarkable change for the better in her. All the distressing symptoms had disappeared; the pain in her side had died ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... decaying specimens, they too will be infected; he will see that too close crowding renders the prospect for good fruit doubtful; and, by natural transition of thought, will be glad that his boys and girls are not shut in to the fortuitous associations of hall- way and street. The area of land purchased will depend largely on the desires and purse of the buyer; but about one acre appears to satisfy the majority of people. This amount is not so great ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... races, also that he was dealing not with all societies but all that had any permanence. He argues that the promiscuous horde, where and when it is found, is to be explained as an abnormal case of retrogression due to a fortuitous scarcity of females resulting in polyandry, and he opposes to the theory of its predominance the potency of sexual jealousy which might serve as only another name for the patriarchal power. On the whole the better opinion is certainly with Maine. His theory, at any rate, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... picture in black and white. It wandered into the gallery of Sir George's Pro-Consulship in South Australia. At the entrance to Spencer's Gulf lies an island, on which a fortuitous little colony had established itself. The colonists were mostly escaped convicts, from the penal settlements of Australia and Van Diemen's Land, or sailors who had deserted their ships. The men killed the seals which frequented the island, trading ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... future. We know that from the Past, stretching back into infinity, we have ourselves made the Present,—and according to Divine law we also know that from this Present, stretching forward into infinity, we shall ourselves evolve all that is yet To Come. There is no power, no deity, no chance, no 'fortuitous concurrence of atoms' in what is simply a figure of the Universal Mathematics. Nothing can be 'forgiven' under the eternal law of Compensation,— nothing need be 'prayed for,' since everything is designed to accomplish ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... necessity and fortuitous circumstance seemed to make advisable another Southern effort in Parliament. The cotton loan, though fairly strong again because of Confederate governmental aid, was in fact a failure in its expected result of public support for the South; ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... of a Saviour was almost coeval with the world; and during the long succession of ages which had since elapsed, and the infinite diversity of events, so perplexing to the human eye and so apparently fortuitous, the love of God was pursuing its high purpose. The frequent intimations given to the ancient patriarchs, and to the prophets of Israel, proved that the eternal Ruler of the universe was producing, by a vast series of preparatory means, the last and best days of time, when ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... the only plausible reason of this deviation. However slight it might have been, it had sufficed to modify the course of the projectile. It was a fatality. The bold attempt had miscarried by a fortuitous circumstance; and unless by some exceptional event, they could now never ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... subterfuge, whatever might be the event. To this are owing the prognostics with regard to futurity, which men fancied they should find in the entrails of beasts, in the flight and singing of birds, in the aspect of the planets, in fortuitous accidents, and in the caprice of chance; those dreadful prodigies that filled a whole nation with terror, and which, it was believed, nothing could expiate but mournful ceremonies, and even sometimes the effusion of human blood: in fine, those ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... and corrupted again into it. His infinite is nothing else but matter." "Whence," says Cudworth, "we conclude that Anaximander's infinite was nothing else but an infinite chaos of matter, in which were actually or potentially contained all manner of qualities, by the fortuitous secretion and segregation of which he supposed infinite worlds to be successively generated and corrupted. So that we may easily guess whence Leucippus and Democritus had their infinite worlds, and perceive how near akin these two Atheistic hypotheses were."[421] The reader, whose curiosity ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... consultation, making fine promises to the Sieur Avenelles, whom with the greatest difficulty they allowed, towards midnight, to depart, at which hour he issued secretly from the castle. At this moment the pages of the gentleman and all his people were having a right jovial supper in honour of the fortuitous wedding of their master. Now, arriving at the height of the festivities, in the middle of the intoxication and joyous huzzahs, he was assailed with jeers, jokes, and laughter that turned him sick when he came into his room. The poor servant wished to speak, but the advocate ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... name on the boat as Roger Johnston, which was true so far as it went, and he signed this same name at the hotel where he put up till morning. The place was an entirely unknown one to him and he was unknown to it. Both fortuitous facts, he thought, in the light of his own perplexity as to the position in which he really stood towards ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... crime was their religion; and for this crime they had been discarded. In great perturbation men began to look round for help; and soon all eyes were fixed on one whom a rare concurrence both of personal qualities and of fortuitous circumstances pointed out ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mankind—that as a species we have in our possession the as yet unwrought elements of content—and that, even now, in the present darkness and madness of all thought on the great question of the social condition, it is not impossible that man, the individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
