"Imponderable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first place, Science has no grounds for supposing that light is in any way absorbed or destroyed merely by its passage through the "ether," that imponderable medium which is believed to transmit the luminous radiations through space. This of course is tantamount to saying that all the direct light from all the stars should reach us, excepting that little which is absorbed in its passage through our own atmosphere. If stars, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... happened, after a long time and much discussion, that someone accidentally weighed a fish, when it was found there was no difference. The question of expression, however, could not be decided in that way, expression being imponderable; and it was pretty generally acknowledged that the truth could not be ascertained and must therefore remain a matter of opinion. But that did not stop the talk. Once, indeed, someone declared positively that the state of a man's feelings at the moment would influence ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of the Planet, was a man in middle life. There was something in his massive frame which suggested massiveness, and a certain quality in the poise of his great head which indicated a balanced intellect. His face was impenetrable and his expression imponderable. ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... perfect are the animals! How perfect is my Soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect, The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids are perfect; Slowly and surely they have passed on to this, and slowly and ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... the result of changing poles. Chemical affinities and revulsions are believed to be only the more delicate forms of electrical attraction and repulsion; the ultimate particles of matter, no less than matter in masses, being subject to the control of electrical laws. The imponderable agents, light and caloric, under the ingenious tests of scientific scrutiny, are beginning to give some very decided indications of being simply electric phenomena. Indeed, the doctrine or theory that supposes caloric to be simply atomic motion is even now being very generally accepted ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can afford to use for the assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... existence, between him and the lower mammals, then he has a right to answer—as he will answer—So much the worse for the microscope and scalpel: so much the better for my old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life, death, a substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, invisible, unknowable by any physical science whatsoever. If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction from ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... been found that the languages spoken by Europeans, in their airy sounds, are more permanent monuments than granite or enduring brass. Stamped on these light, imponderable words are marks of a gray antiquity going back to times before Herodotus, before Moses and the book of Genesis, before the Vedas in India, before the Zendavesta in Persia. It has been proved, first, that nearly all the languages of Europe belong to one linguistic family, and ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the flank by an amphibious birch. The navigator lifts his canoe out of water, and bonnets himself with it. He wears it on head and shoulders, around the impassable spot. Below the rough water, he gets into his elongated chapeau and floats away. Without such vessel, agile, elastic, imponderable, and transmutable, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot would be no thoro'fares for human beings. Musquash might dabble, chips might drift, logs might turn somersets along their lonely currents; but never voyager, gentle or bold, could speed through brilliant perils, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... an intermediary substance between the universe and ourselves? The od, a new imponderable, a sort of electricity, is perhaps nothing else. Its emissions explain the light that those who have been magnetised believe they see: the wandering flames in cemeteries, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... soil that will nourish more and more fully each succeeding generation of plants. But in the absence of water, any surface of earth will soon become a barren sand. The wind will drive away every thing imponderable, leaving only the heavy sands, to drift in storms, like fields ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... short man with a mustache resting like a small white cloud beneath his undistinguished nose. He had reached the stage where his value as a social creature was a black and imponderable negative. His ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before; his mind steered a wabbly and anaemic course in the wake of the daily newspaper editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying Western university, he had entered the celluloid business, and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... narrow and violent to understand the world. The root of the evil is that a whole range of the higher values is inaccessible to the majority, because they know nothing of intellectual wealth. And yet the real wealth of a nation consists in its imponderable possessions—in those things wherein one man's gain is not another man's loss, and which are not proved incapable of increase by any laws of thermo-dynamics. An inexhaustible treasure is freely open to all who have ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... knowledge, viz.: the 'quantitative', relative determinations according to number and magnitude, and 'qualitative', material characters. Means of submitting phenomena to calculation. Atoms, mechanical methods of construction. Figurative representations; mythical conception of imponderable matters, and the peculiar vital forces in every organism. That which is attained by observation and experiment (calling forth phenomena) leads, by analogy and induction, to a knowledge of 'empirical laws'; their gradual simplification and generalization. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... whom Amoretti writes,) a man of such susceptibility, was cured of convulsive attacks by change of place. Penriet could find repose while in one part of Calabria, only by wrapping himself in an oil-cloth mantle, thus, as it were, isolating himself. That great sense of sidereal and imponderable influences, which afterward manifested itself so clearly in the Seherin, probably made this change of place very unfavorable to her. Later, it appeared, that the lower she came down from the hills, the more she suffered from spasms, but on the heights ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... in its immediate neighbourhood, each grub emits from its spinning glands short cables so slender that it takes an attentive lens to catch a glimpse of them. This is enough to ensure the equilibrium of the almost imponderable atom. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity, that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH{3} and H{2}O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... much less consequential discovery, did it not foreshadow the coming time when mind will speak to mind regardless of desert wastes and imponderable mountains that seemingly intervene. Wireless messages are the result of vibrations set in motion by means of a dynamo and received by an instrument attuned to a corresponding rate of motion. But no dynamo ever invented has the power ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... different kinds of matter, and that all matter is susceptible of infinite division. This has proved to be altogether a mistake. If matter were infinitely divisible in this sense, its particles must be imponderable, and a million of such molecules could not weigh more than an infinitely small one. But the particles of that imponderable matter, which, striking upon the retina, give us the sensation of light, are not in a ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... floor, her loose skirt, held out between her dainty fingers, resembling wings, she swam through the air, up and down the room of the old plantation house, as though she were indeed the creature of an element wherein all was imponderable, light and free of hampering influences. Darting, nodding, beckoning, courtesying to something that she saw—it must have moved you to applause, had you seen Miss Lady dance! You might have been restrained by the feeling that this was almost too unreal, too unusual, this dance ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... shone in the sky, and the vague sensation of space, of the infinity of those imponderable worlds, filled their spirits ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of Lavoisier's day has been disproved in its turn. A thousand scientists have declared flying impossible to man, yet today men fly. Lavoisier was right, no doubt. Combustion is the combination of an element with oxygen. He proved that with his chemist's balance. Yet how did he prove that some imponderable element does not leap from wood in flame? As well say that when a man dies the spirit has not left the body because he weighs the same. Watching the falling embers of the Yule log leap into flames before they turn gray, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... the boards behind him brought a smile to his lips; but he neither turned nor stirred. An instant later, hands cool and imponderable as snowflakes rested on his forehead, and silken strands of hair brushed it softly as his wife leaned over him, nestling her head against ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... 'The mother, convinced by her reading, as well as by messages in writing, believes that the spirits of her dead are trying to communicate with her, and so sits night after night terrified yet hoping, waiting for further instructions from the imponderable ones.'" Britt turned a few pages rapidly. "Listen to this. Here is the key to the old man's change of heart: 'To-night the child began to speak to me in the voice of a man. Hoarse words rose from deep in her throat, a voice and words impossible to her in her normal condition. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... For them there is no hint "of the incommunicable dream" in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness. The "profundity" of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's Song of Innocence, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... them—these Southern noons. If no ghost resided in the melancholy ruin hard by, there might well be some imponderable hostile essence afloat in the still air of midday. Anything, he felt, could happen at this unearthly hour. The wildest follies might be committed at the bidding ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... I am Steering," smiled the visitor, sinking into a chair adaptably, though he realised that, for two men who had never seen each other before, the meeting had been unusual. He also realised that, off somewhere in the sphere of imponderable influences, the effect when his hand clasped the big man's hand had been exactly that of ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... (That is the essential difficulty in all Creationism.) But something must be assumed to get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much in that resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuous and imponderable forms—which is the tendency of modern science—to render this assumption less difficult to the rational imagination than perhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements in matter have become electrons and the electron is ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... may be wanting one particular woman. . . . But the mood was ephemeral; he had been too close to her a moment before. Moreover, she was still unpossessed. . . . She seemed to take shape slowly in the white whirling snow, as white and imponderable. . . . A Nordic princess drifting northward over her steppes. . . . God! Would he ever get her? . . . If he did not it would be because one of them was qualifying for ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the world's sages stands accused of idiotic superstition. Why not try and understand the true meaning of the figurative statement before criticising? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from man to what is termed an inanimate object, is far greater. Indeed, it is 'life atoms' that a man in a blind passion throws off unconsciously. ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... element of rather stupid convention in it. It was fatuous to miss so little the fine perceptions one didn't have: so far from its showing experience it showed a sad simplicity not to FEEL Francie Dosson. He thanked God she was just the sort of imponderable infinite quantity, such as there were no stupid terms for, that he did feel. He didn't know what old frumps his father might have frequented—the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... felt I had the man's soul naked before me. An imponderable hand plucked away my garments ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... photographs you bring home will mean a great deal more to me than any I could buy," she said. "I shall almost feel as if I had seen the pictures themselves." Every letter which came from the absent sister did inclose some imponderable unmounted photograph, with comments. The sister at home, studying these one by one, learned almost more of the meaning of the pictures than the one who saw their visible beauty. One of my friends says, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... organization, but as a distinct substantive product, generated, indeed, from matter, and partaking, therefore, of its nature, but so exquisitely subtle and ethereal that it has no resemblance to the grosser materials of the body, and admits only of being compared with the Dynamides—the imponderable elements and forces of Nature. This "spirit" is generated in man by his peculiar organization, and especially by the action of the brain; it is capable of surviving the dissolution of the body, of retaining its individual consciousness after death, of passing into new ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... germ. Can you define the yearnings that the mother feels toward her child, the tie that binds son to father? Then you can define the sentiment that attaches me to the land from whose breast I have drawn life. The love of country is more invisible, more imponderable, more inappreciable than the electricity that fills the air and flows with perpetual variation from pole to pole of the earth. It is as deep, as unsearchable, as ineffable as the power which sways me to you. It is the sublimation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... is neither exclusively my own, nor very new—we shall find a certain satisfaction in watching the discussions of physicists on the essence of matter, on the nature of force and of energy, and on the relations of ponderable and imponderable matter. We all know how hot is the fight raging on this question. At the present time it is increasing in intensity, in consequence of the disturbance imported into existing theories by the new discoveries of radio-activity.[8] We psychologists can look on very calmly at these discussions, with ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... the question, let us consider the parallel relation of other imponderable forces to matter. Take, for instance, electricity. A galvanic battery is set in action. Chemical decomposition is in progress; one or more new compounds are produced; the quantitative differences are exactly accounted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty pinched her for it, she had ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... compost for succeeding harvests of romance. Though probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill's books—perhaps not even one—can be expected to outlast a generation with much vitality, he cannot be denied the honor of having added something agreeable if imponderable to the national memory and so of having served his country in one real ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... imponderable force of the intellect to the problem and check with you later. Now, Gene, about the proposed Galactic Service, the Council, and so on. What is the reaction? ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... be seen, yet can be felt, weighed, handled, transferred from place to place, be judged by its effects, and so forth; or if this may not be, give us half a grain of hydrogen, diffused through all space and invested with some of the minor attributes of matter; or if you cannot do this, give us an imponderable like electricity, or even the higher mathematics, but give us something or throw off the mask and tell us fairly out that it is your paid profession to hoodwink us on this matter if you can, and that you are but doing your best to earn ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... essence. This "soul-substance" subsists independently of the animal-body, and stands in only a temporary connection with certain organs of that body—the soul-, or mental-organs. It has been imagined that this soul-matter, which resembles that imponderable ether which is the medium of light, is diffused between the ponderable molecules of the soul-organs and especially of the nerve-cells, and that this connection of the imponderable "soul" with the ponderable body subsists only so long as the ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... iron float in a sea of ether, just as do our planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful than ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... ferment, barm[obs3], yeast. lighter-than-air balloon, helium balloon, hydrogen balloon, hot air balloon. convection, thermal draft, thermal. V. be light &c. adj.; float, rise, swim, be buoyed up. render light &c. adj.; lighten, leaven. Adj. light, subtile, airy; imponderous[obs3], imponderable; astatic[obs3], weightless, ethereal, sublimated; gossamery; suberose[obs3], suberous[obs3]; uncompressed, volatile; buoyant, floating &c. v.; portable. light as a feather, light as a thistle, light as air; lighter than air; rise like a balloon, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and it will remain fixed to it. The suspension-bridge is thrown; and the Spider can set out. The South-American Indians are said to cross the abysses of the Cordilleras in travelling-cradles made of twisted creepers; the little Spider passes through space on the invisible and the imponderable. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... possession is personality—that indefinable, imponderable something which sums up what we are, and makes us different from others; that distinctive force of self which operates appreciably on those whose lives we touch. It is personality alone that makes us long for higher things. Rob us of our sense of individual life, with ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... that of mere chance; absolutely irresistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate forms such for instance as the charm, true or illusory, of a human being. It is very difficult to put one's finger on the imponderable, but I may venture to say that it is Flora de Barral who is really responsible for this novel which relates, in fact, ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... prevented him writing; but the world had turned upside down. It was not a board Pike's men had swung around in that appalling moment when he had watched them appear on the balcony. It was the accustomed and imponderable world, awfully unbalanced. Nona would understand. Nona always understood everything. He wondered how she had maintained this terrific day. He was assured that he knew. She would have felt just as he had felt. He thought, with a most passionate ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... 'potential' in both of them, requiring only the proper conditions of temperature to bring it into action? Again I answer for myself in the affirmative. I am, however, quite willing to discuss with Mr. Martineau the alternative hypothesis, that an imponderable formative soul unites itself with the substance after its escape from the liquid state. If he should espouse this hypothesis, then I should demand of him an immediate exercise of that Vorstellungs-faehigkeit, with which, in my efforts to think clearly, I can ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and perfect are the animals! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect, The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids perfect; Slowly and surely they have pass'd on to this, and slowly and surely they yet ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... from the house, their golden hair shining like aureoles about their eager faces. Their sandaled feet hardly touched the ground, and, indeed, could they have been weighed at that moment, it surely had been found that they had become almost imponderable because of the ethereal lightness of their spirits. Their arms were outstretched; their eyes burning like the eyes ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... and echoing dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its exquisite and elaborate art—this music which drifted before the senses like iridescent vapor, suffused with rich lights, pervasive, imponderable, evanescent. It was music at once naive and complex, innocent and impassioned, fragile and sonorous. It spoke with an accent unmistakably grave and sincere; yet it spoke without emphasis: indirectly, flexibly, with fluid and ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... been supposed by some that they are made of the most attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass through one of them we would be unconscious of the contact. Others have imagined them to be mere smoke-wreaths, faint mists, so rarefied that the substance of one a hundred million miles long could, like the genie in the Arabian story, be ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the path of Vesalius. Throughout the Middle Ages it was believed that there exists in man a bone imponderable, incorruptible, incombustible—the necessary nucleus of the resurrection body. Belief in a resurrection of the physical body, despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, had been incorporated into ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... from her frame. The spirits of all things, of which mankind in general have no perception, were perceptible to and operated upon her, more particularly the spirits of metals, herbs, men, and animals. All imponderable matters, even the rays of light, had an effect upon her when she was magnetised." The smell of flint was very agreeable to her. Salt laid on her hand caused a flow of saliva: rock crystal laid on the pit of her stomach produced rigidity of the whole body. Red grapes ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... "by affinity. The power of vision which makes the poet, the power of deduction which makes the man of science, are based on invisible affinities, intangible, imponderable, which vulgar minds class as moral phenomena, whereas they are physical effects. The prophet sees and deduces. Unfortunately, such affinities are too rare and too obscure to be subjected ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... lectures the great military problems might be discussed from the standpoint of military philosophy, and the hearers might gain some insight into the legitimacy of war, its relations to politics, the co-operation of material and imponderable forces, the importance of free personality under the pressure of necessary phenomena, sharp contradictions and violent opposition, as well as into the duties of a commander viewed from ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... to say. Friendship between alien intelligences is an imponderable. They are not dangerous, I think. We've come across other groups that could not maintain equilibrium after the atomic war stage and you know the results. Introversion. Retreat. Gradual decadence ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... offspring to subject her to either of the schemes of the equally unscrupulous philosophers. Indeed, the most complete knowledge of the laws of nature would have been unserviceable in her case; for it was impossible to classify her. She was a fifth imponderable body, sharing all the other ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... buoy; ether, air. leaven, ferment, barm^, yeast. lighter-than-air balloon, helium balloon, hydrogen balloon, hot air balloon. convection, thermal draft, thermal. V. be light &c adj.; float, rise, swim, be buoyed up. render light &c adj.; lighten, leaven. Adj. light, subtile, airy; imponderous^, imponderable; astatic^, weightless, ethereal, sublimated; gossamery; suberose^, suberous^; uncompressed, volatile; buoyant, floating &c v.; portable. light as a feather, light as a thistle, light as air; lighter than air; rise like a balloon, float ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with the sleek dark hair, which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impassable barrier. The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!" and she had carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who appeared ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... room, Sommers examined the few objects about him in the manner of a man who draws his conclusions from innumerable, imponderable data. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience of intimacy ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... property of any man, but is the Divine Essence which has no body, no form, which is imponderable, invisible, and indivisible, that which does not exist and yet is, as the Buddhists say of Nirvana. It only overshadows the mortal; that which enters into him and pervades the whole body being only it's omni-present ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... is, because gravity is a function of the ether. And the ether is an imponderable substance, so impalpable that it passes right through all solids as though they ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... in the present day upon the trace of a great many important facts relating to the imponderable agencies employed in nature. Light, heat, and electricity are no longer the simple matters, or effects of matter, that they have aforetime seemed to be. New wonders point to more beyond. In magnetism, the researches of Faraday, and others, are beginning to open, in our own ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of the glands of internal secretions as an interlocking directorate presiding over all the functions of the organism is still exceedingly meagre. As yet, we seem to be knocking at the portals of the chemistry of the imponderable. There are holes in the bronze doors, and we glimpse the unfathomable distances of unexplored regions. But we do see something, and we do glimpse a beginning. Already the outlines of a differential ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... wonder, if she actually carried that imponderable secret about with her. I used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if she, too, saw the oncoming of the inevitable. She was limited enough in her ideas, but not too stupid to take that in if it presented itself. Indeed they have that sort of idea rather grimly before ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... a whole, however, these people with a sense of the imponderable human value of natural ways and natural things may constitute the most powerful support available for thoughtful planning and conservation. In a precipitate and voracious society plunging on into its future, they look back and seek to retain the best ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... the imponderable, transcendental virtues of charity, morality, patience, energy, meditation, and likewise wisdom, in order that, having reached the farther shore of the sea of existence, you may ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... quote the story of the Prince of Huai-nan, second century B.C., who is said, after years of patient experiment, to have finally discovered the elixir of life. Immediately on tasting the drug, his body became imponderable, and he began to rise heavenward. Startled probably by this new sensation, he dropped the cup out of which he had been drinking, into the courtyard; whereupon his dogs and poultry finished up the dregs, and were soon sailing up to heaven ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... accused of idiotic superstition. Why not try and find out, before condemning, the true meaning of the figurative statement? Why should we scoff before we understand? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvium a something, a stuff, or a substance, invisible, and imponderable though it be? If the learned authors of "The Unseen Universe" object to light, heat and electricity being regarded merely as imponderables, and show that each of these phenomena has as much claim to be recognized as an objective ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... background of the immense room lost in shadow and receiving almost no light save through the arched glass roof over which the moon was climbing in a pale sky of night blue, a veritable sky of the opera, the silhouette of the famous dancer stood out all white, like a droll little shadow, light and imponderable, which seemed rather to be flying in the air than springing over the floor; then, erect upon the tips of her toes, supported in the air only by her extended arms, her face lifted in an elusive pose, which left nothing visible but the smile, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Euler called it in question, until well on towards the close of the century. Current speech referred to the materiality of the "imponderables" unquestioningly. Students of meteorology—a science that was just dawning—explained atmospheric phenomena on the supposition that heat, the heaviest imponderable, predominated in the lower atmosphere, and that light, electricity, and magnetism prevailed in successively higher strata. And Lavoisier, the most philosophical chemist of the century, retained heat and light on a par ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... others, that it is the universe itself. A large class speak of it as the great soul of the world, while the more materialistic regard it as the world itself, body and soul; the soul being the sum of all the imponderable forces, such as gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, vegetable and animal life, and especially the mesmeric influence, of which many of them regard intellect as a modification; and the body being the sum ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... is an agglomeration of imponderable particles, which, relatively to their dimensions, are as far removed from each other as the celestial bodies are in space, so say works on molecular physics. It is these atoms that by their vibrating movement produce light and heat by making four hundred and ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... in parallel lines, and strikes the globe and its superficial ethereal envelope just as we have shown its action on the atmosphere; but in this last case the magnetic equator is not a great circle, neither can we suppose its effects to be an accumulation of a fluid which is imponderable at points 90d from the plane passing through the centre of the earth and sun, and coincident with the plane of the central meridian, and a depressing effect on that meridian. Its precise influence must be, from the nature of the cause, to ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... it is doubtful if any painter's fashion of seeing things has had such an influence on the generation following him. The name of Degas, the pastels of Degas, the miraculous draughtsmanship of Degas created an imponderable fluid which still permeates Paris. Naturally, after the egg trick was discovered we encounter scores of young Columbuses, who paint ballet girls' legs and the heads of orchestral musicians and scenes from the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... endless colorings and capricious rhythms. The instrument vibrated with these new, nameless effects like the violin in Paganini's hands. It was ravishing. He was called the Ariel, the Undine of the piano. There was something imponderable, fluid, vaporous, evanescent in his music that eluded analysis and illuded all but hard-headed critics. This novelty was the reason why he has been classed as a "gifted amateur" and even to-day is he regarded by many musicians as a skilful inventor of piano passages ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... you see, man, that an idea is something, yet it is not a substance. Thought, which is so potent a factor in this world, is not a substance, yet it cannot be called nothing. It is a condition—it is the result of brain-atoms in action. Electricity is sometimes described as an 'invisible imponderable fluid,' but that is not quite correct, because a fluid is a substance. It is a better definition to say that electricity is a manifestation of energy—a result of substance ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... our own expressions, we are limited, by the oneness of quasiness, to the very same methods by which orthodoxy established and maintains its now sleek, suave preposterousnesses. At any rate, though we are inspired by an especial subtle essence—or imponderable, I think—that pervades the twentieth century, we have not the superstition that we are offering anything as a positive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that we're any less superstitious and credulous than any logician, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... pursuing their never-ending quest in meek, faltering wonder, and longing for the goal which surely they must reach at last, the white, unquestioning souls of children floating like heavenly strains of unheard music in the void immensity, but one and all invisible imponderable. They were there, the monarchs of buried centuries and the thousands who had knelt at their thrones, the high and the low, the outcast and the shrived, but each as alone as if the solitary inhabitant of all Space And he, who would have fled from his fellow-men on earth, must long in vain for ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... curiosity—for the sake of intellectual satisfaction. Nothing was altered by the fact that Bernard had told him a sorry tale; it had not modified his behavior—that effect would have been traceable. It had simply affected his imagination, which was a consequence of the imponderable sort. This view of the case was supported by Gordon's mention of his good spirits. A man always had good spirits when he had acted in harmony with a conviction. Of course, after renouncing the attempt to make himself acceptable ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... to apply the term degree (736.), in analogy with the use made of it with respect to another most important imponderable agent, namely, heat; and as the definite expansion of air, water, mercury, &c., is there made use of to measure heat, so the equally definite evolution of gases is here turned to a similar ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... imponderable physical agent, cause, force or the molecular movement, by which, under certain conditions, certain phenomena, chiefly those of attraction and repulsion, . . . are produced. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... Queen Sylvia Tereu, and comforted her. Then, finding her quite willing to be comforted, Jurgen sat for a while upon the dark steps, with one arm still about Queen Sylvia. The effect of the potion had evidently worn off, because Jurgen found himself to be composed no longer of cool imponderable vapor, but of the warmest and hardest sort of flesh everywhere. But probably the effect of the wine which Jurgen had drunk earlier in the evening had not worn off: for now Jurgen began to talk wildishly in the dark, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Christian era the opinion was entertained that all of the phenomena of nature might be reduced to one principle of explanation; that there was more than a connection between the imponderable agents—more than a relationship even,—that there was an ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... has been the epoch of investigation into the nature of the imponderable forces. Sound and light and heat have been known as the principal agents of sensation since the first ages of man-life on the earth; but their nature has not been well understood until within the memories of men still living. Electricity was also vaguely ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... was no mean conception to plan for the "man of commerce" who would cross from one region to the other, with his "assorted cargo,"[344] for in that cargo were the destinies of two sections and his greatest commerce was to consist in the exchange of imponderable ideas. The ideal which inspired Douglas never found nobler expression, than in these words with which he replied to Webster's slighting reference ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... whole, then, leaving their miraculous hours out of the account—and, being incommensurable, imponderable, they couldn't be included in an inventory—their honeymoon, considered as an attempt to revisit Arcady, to seize a golden day that looked neither toward the past nor toward the future, complete in ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... this reflected chatter, was his son like? What would he be? And Helena! They eluded him like bright and featureless bits of glass. His effort to draw closer to them was proving a failure; what could he give them safer than their attachment to the imponderable body of public opinion and approval? He had nothing but doubts, unanswerable questions; and a mental, a moral, isolation. It was easier to remain in the dancing class than to be sent out in an agony of revolt ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... low to high may climb, Andean peak to deep-caved southern sea, With lifted hand and voice of gathered sound, And echoes in his tossing quiver bound And loosed from height into immensity; Yet of his freedom tires, remaining free. —Moulding and remoulding imponderable cloud, Uplifting skiey archipelagian isles Sunnier than ocean's, blue seas and white isles Aflush with blossom where late sunlight glowed;— Still of his freedom tiring yet still free, Homelessly roaming between sky, earth ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... as if he were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island. An island is but the top of a mountain. Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which embrace the continents of this globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... has been marked by bold hypotheses dealing with imponderable forces, and by experiments disclosing hidden properties of matter. The hypothetical ether has been as fruitful in the liberation of thought as the demonstration of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... his outstretched hands. Yet if he lit a candle it had no power to stir its flame; yes, while it still blew sharp upon him the flame of the candle did not move. Then the wind would cease, and within him the intangible, imponderable power would arise, and the voices would speak like the far, far, murmur of a stream, and the thoughts which he could not weigh or interpret would soak into his being like some strange dew, and, soft, soft ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... there was a nest of young mutineers just there, which must be broken up by a coup d'etat. This was easily effected by redistributing the seats and arranging the scholars according to classes, so that a mischievous fellow, charged full of the rebellious imponderable, should find himself between two non-conductors, in the shape of small boys of studious habits. It was managed quietly enough, in such a plausible sort of way that its motive was not thought of. But its effects were soon felt; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... of nature—whether the rare mould of her features or the gift of the spirit that informed them—had held her loveliness intact, preserving the clear lines of youth after its bloom was gone, and making her seem like a lover's memory of herself. So she appeared at first, a bright imponderable presence gliding toward him out of the past; but as her hands lay in his the warm current of life was renewed between them, and the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... he went forth where she would be, the spell of the place was once more laid upon him, as it had been laid in the hour of his coming. Once more, as in the hour when he had first looked down upon the valley brimming with a light "better than any light that ever shone" he was at one with the imponderable things which, always before, had just eluded him. Now, as then, the thought of Olivia was the symbol for them all. So the two went on through the winding galleries—silent, haunted—to the great staircase, and below into the ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... a ray of almost infinite frequency, much higher than the disintegrating ray the Jovians use. Instead of resolving materials into light and energy, these devices will absolutely destroy the ether, that imponderable substance which permeates and ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... fought away from his control, as the sledge slipped along over the frozen river again. It was very cold, but the full sun on his head afflicted him like heat. It was the blaze of light that beat up from the snow, too. His head felt imponderable; and yet he could not hold it up. It was always sinking forward; and he woke from naps without being sure that he had ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... which medicine must work. The great bulk of his fraternity went through their studious, conscientious, hard-working, and not infrequently heroic lives under the contented conviction of having to deal with two principal facts—disease and medicine—both accessible through study. To them the imponderable factor of the patient represented such or such an aggregation of material—muscle, nerve, blood, brawn, bone, and tissue—which might be counted upon to respond to such and such a treatment in such and such a manner, with very slight variation. The Doctor envied them their simplicity ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... nothing is so unfavorable to the working of the wheels as light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and, generally, all the imponderable and uncatchable essences that float about in the air; and these, it is thought, are generated and diffused by these villanous newspapers. Certain kinds of books are also forbidden, as being electric conductors. Most of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... orders; thenceforth he had the far more trying duty of issuing orders—a truly awful responsibility and one which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily off-set by the imponderable, the unguessable. ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... certainty and surmise. The certainty is that the world will pass through catastrophic changes to a perfect world. The grave of uniformitarianism is already covered with grass. He that creates promises to complete. The invisible, imponderable, inaudible ether is beyond our apprehension; it transmits impressions 186,000 miles a second; it is millions of times more capable and energetic than air. What may be the bounds of its possibility none can imagine, for law is not abrogated ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... can," he said. "Let us begin with the assumption that the atom is an infinitesimal magnitude. Very good. Let us grant, then, that though it is imponderable and indivisible it must have a spacial content? You grant ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... of Helmholtz, Joule, and Mayer, of Grove, Faraday, and Tyndall, may be fitly named beside those of the leading thinkers of past ages. The physical forces are no longer to be looked upon as inscrutable material entities,—forms of matter imponderable, and therefore inconceivable; but they have been shown to be diverse, but interchangeable modes of molecular motion, omnipresent, ceaselessly active. The wondrous phenomena of light, heat, and electricity are seen to be due to the rhythmical vibration of atoms. There is thus no such ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... will not like them and they will not like him, nor will they be interested in him or interested in working with him. Everything that artists or men of creative temperament try to do with the common run of millionaires—all these huge, blind, imponderable megatheriums, stamping along through life, ordering people about—ends in the same way—in irksomeness, bewildered vision, fear, compromise, and failure, as seen from the inside. Seen on the outside or before the public, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... all these complexities in his own work. He is in literary evolution, a sport. Critics who have tried to show how his predecessors and contemporaries have influenced him, have come out lamely from the attempt. He has been sensitive not to individual writers, but to that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in literature. He throws back to much in the past, while in the van of modern thought. What, to illustrate, could be more of the present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence, "Modern ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... our youngest (spoilt), proceeds to cram His ample crop with plum and rhubarb jam. No more when twilight fades from tower and tree Shall I conceal what still remains of thee Lest that the housemaid or, perchance, the cat Should mischief thee, imponderable pat. Ah, mine no more! for lo! 'tis noised around How thou wilt soon cost seven bob a pound. As well demand thy weight in radium As probe my 'poverished poke for such a sum. Wherefore, farewell! No more, alas! thou'lt oil These joints that creak with unrewarded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... round to avoid it; nor could, he said, "the prettiest girl in the country" persuade him to see her home after a party if he were alone. He feared everything, for he had looked at the face no man can see unchanged-the imponderable ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... later he was out in the open air, walking with a strange new activity. His very body seemed imponderable. He crossed the railway near the Kimball House and went on to Decatur Street. Along this street he walked for a few blocks and then turned off. Before long he was in the most dilapidated, sordid part of the city. He knew where Henderson lived. He had seen the old man pottering about the narrow ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... before them, the ghost of a great house with many solemn windows for eyes. It looked blank, uninhabited, lifeless. Between the house and the river moonlight smoothed the lawns. The moon made that cold stone phantom imponderable, a grey mirage. Radway could not believe, for a moment, that it was real; but the sense of Gabrielle's cold cheek against his lips, her fingers twined in his, and her soft, unhurried breathing recalled him, telling him that he was ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... the advice or reject it. This character often depends little, if at all, in some cases, upon the intellect, or even upon the moral qualities, the goodness or badness, of the individual. It is itself an imponderable something; yet it carries weight with it. There may be abler men, cleverer men; but it is the one possessed of will who rises to the surface at these times—the one who can by some subtle power ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... performed the process for Marsyas. All the world has to submit to it,—kings and queens with the rest. The monuments of Art and the face of Nature herself are treated in the same way. We lift an impalpable scale from the surface of the Pyramids. We slip off from the dome of St. Peter's that other imponderable dome which fitted it so closely that it betrays every scratch on the original. We skim off a thin, dry cuticle from the rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened paper without breaking a bubble or losing a speck of foam. We steal a landscape from its lawful ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... which it will one day be condensed, and carried forward amongst the planetary bodies. My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised. Sublimed into imponderable vapour, I mingle and am lost in the endless foods of those vast globular volumes of vaporous mists, which roll upon their flaming ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... contact with it, as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it. Bellegarde did not in the least cause him to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen are of a frothy and imponderable substance; he simply reminded him that light materials may be beaten up into a most agreeable compound. No two companions could be more different, but their differences made a capital basis for a friendship of which the distinctive characteristic ...
— The American • Henry James
... know, is only one form of the force by which the universe is upheld. But the phenomena of light lead us to infer the existence of what we call Ether, which is supposed to be a perfectly elastic fluid, imponderable, and in fact exempt from almost all the conditions to which matter, as we know it, is subject, except that POSSIBLY it offers resistance to bodies moving in it. [Footnote: Encke's comet shows signs of retardation, as if moving in a resisting medium; but it is possible that that resistance ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... surrounds him, there is also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his situation. He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honour of a representative attitude—perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world on the other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author of The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses from ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... workshop is the brain of man! Its noiseless machinery cuts, and carves, and moulds, in the imponderable material of ideas. It works its endless miracles through the brawny arm of labor, and the deft fingers of skill, and the world moves forward by its magic. Aladdin rubbed his lamp and the shadowy genii of fable performed impossible wonders. The dreamer of to-day rubs his fingers through his hair ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... quarter was careering up the harbor in the teeth of a north wind, through the swift waters of an ebbing tide, and making for the Hudson. A signal from the Battery to heave to and account for herself being disregarded, a cannon was trained upon her, and a ball went whistling through her cloudy and imponderable mass, for timbers she had none. Some of the sailor-folk talked of mirages that rose into the air of northern coasts and seas, but the wise ones put their fingers beside their noses and called to memory the Flying Dutchman, that wanderer of the seas ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... her hair, and the robin-wing flutter of her lids over her gray eyes when she smiled. I moved convulsively in my intense desire. I would have given my soul, my share of eternity, my honour, only to see that flutter of the lids over the shining gray eyes. I never felt I was beneath the imponderable pressure of a prison's wall till then. She was infinite miles away; I could not even imagine what inanimate things surrounded her. She must be talking to someone else; fluttering her lids like that. I recognized with a physical agony that was more than jealousy how slight was ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... the soul, not letters, but thrills, would have been its result. Thus the magic of personal influence of all kinds would have radiated from it in omnipresent and colliding circlets forever, as the mighty imponderable agents are believed to radiate from some hidden focal force. He would trace his idea in the massive architecture and groping science of Egypt,—in the elegant forms of worship, thought, institutes, and life among the Greeks,—in the martial and systematizing genius of Rome,—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... seemed to us that he described—was it at Doctor Anthon's?—the largest of all. If there was a bigger place than Doctor Anthon's it was there he would have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any push toward vaster suppositions. But let me cease to stir this imponderable dust. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... hurried across the vast untroubled sky—shepherdless, futile, imponderable—and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb |
