"Inchoate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contract and might be entered into legally by a boy of fourteen or a girl of twelve years of age, provided they were under no legal disability to contract marriage. This was called the age of consent, or discretion, and a marriage contracted prior to this time was inchoate only, and might be repudiated by either party upon arriving at the legal age. If one of the parties was above and the other under the required age, the marriage might still be disaffirmed by either. If after reaching ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... the case of any known human language, and therefore that animal language is incomparably less subtle and less capable of expressing delicate shades of meaning than our own, these differences are nevertheless only those that exist between highly developed and inchoate language; they do not involve those that distinguish language from no language. They are the differences between the undifferentiated protoplasm of the amoeba and our own complex organisation; they are not ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... companies which he knew were famous, and rooms where millionaires met in secret conclave, but the contrast awakened only his sense of humor. Yet he was always relieved after he had reached his own floor. Possibly its incompleteness and inchoate condition made it seem less lonely than the desolation of the finished and furnished rooms below, and it was only this recollection of past human ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... progress from everlasting to everlasting, was all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... his thoughts became more tumultuous than ever; while among all the inchoate and fragmentary sketches of this dreadful day, now rising before him, the clearest was of his uncle collapsed in a big chair with a white tie dangling from his hand; and one conviction, following upon that picture, became definite in George's mind: ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... unity which is the total of life. As part of a whole which can be apprehended, immediately it acquires purpose and becomes significant. It is the sense of meaning in life which gives color and warmth to the march of uniform days. So the literary artist shapes his inchoate material to a definite end; out of the limitless complex details at his command, he selects such passages of background, such incidents, and such traits of character as make for the setting forth of the idea he has conceived. Clearly the artist cannot use everything, ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... capital are lost in the obscurity which covers all the germs of civilization. The more one comes to understand the case of the primitive man, the more wonderful it seems that man ever started on the road to civilization. Among the lower animals we find some inchoate forms of capital, but from them to the lowest forms of real capital there is a great stride. It does not seem possible that man could have taken that stride without intelligent reflection, and everything we know about the primitive man shows us that he did not reflect. No doubt accident ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... secret of Walker's curiosity—that he respected him. He would have liked to talk to him—not precisely to ask his advice, but to lay before him some of the difficulties that were inchoate in his soul. He had an idea that this man with the grave, suffering face—yes, there was suffering in his face, as one could see on ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... second tendency which at the present moment dominates writers is, as I have said, the rising democratic interest in the things of the mind. This is at present a very inchoate and uncultivated interest: but in days of cheap publication and large audiences it dominates many writers disastrously. The temptation is a grievous one—to take advantage of a market—not to produce what is absolutely the best, but what is popular and effective. It ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... subject when they legislated upon it in 1792 what were their views of the powers of Congress on the subject of where the power was lodged and what was the proper measure of its exercise, but we can gather equally well from the inchoate and imperfect legislation of 1800 what those men also thought of their power over this subject, because, although differing as to details, there were certain conceded facts as to jurisdiction quite as emphatically expressed as if their propositions had been enacted into law. Likewise ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... a Trust so long as it remains at warfare, for it is compelled to expend all that it gains from the enlarged scale of business and from the cessation of competition among its constituent companies upon the strife with its single antagonist. A Trust in this inchoate condition has no special economic character distinguishing it from other large aggregates of competing capital. It is with fully-formed trusts which are able to control prices and regulate to some degree production and profits that we are concerned. An economic ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... God is the primary mediatrix; the Father, at her intercession, obtains for the founder an auspicious audience of the Son; and the Son authenticates the use to be made of his name in this instance; and so it is that the inchoate order is to be the "Society ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Errington's future relations with Thelma, was a riddle impossible of explanation. He thought, too, with a sort of generous remorse, of that occasion when Sigurd had visited him on board the yacht to implore him to leave the Altenfjord. He realized everything,—the inchoate desires of the desolate being, who, though intensely capable of loving, felt himself in a dim, sad way, unworthy of love,—the struggling passions in him that clamored for utterance—the instinctive dread and jealousy of a rival, while knowing that he was both ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... breeding, which together with his temperament governs his art from within, even amid all its personal reserve and its objectivity. The gradually increasing power of these elements gave his tales greater intensity and reach, and was to lift his romances to another level; for what was inchoate and experimental in the tales, in many ways, was to receive a new and greater development in his later work, on which his world-wide fame rests. The tales had not brought him fame; as yet, his audience was small, and confined to ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... to him with a smile. Eleanor Scaife began to argue the pros and cons of the Accident-Liability Clause, as to which, she considered, there might fairly be a difference of opinion. Lady Eynesford cut across the inchoate disquisition by remarking, ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... through a priest. But just as a man in love may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrow expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individual man may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music that is in harmony with his inchoate feelings. Many of the samurai, therefore, will set themselves private regimens that will help their secret religious life, will pray habitually, and read books of devotion, but with these things the Rule of the order will have nothing ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... notes together, and passed out. Dave looked at Mr. James Ward wonderingly, until that gentleman broke his train of inchoate thought. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... condition of the still inchoate Whig party in 1836, and the extraordinary popularity of Jackson, resulted in the complete victory of Mr. Van Buren. But the General's chosen successor and political heir found the great office to which he had been called, and which he so eagerly desired, anything but a bed of roses. The ruin which ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each other's blunders with gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nor to the dazzling colour effects that tantalised while they delighted the eye. But to-night they shrivelled into insignificance before the splendour of his inner vision. A radiant dreamland palace, his play, had risen from the night of inchoate thought. It was wonderful, it was real, and needed for its completion only the detail of actual construction. And now the characters were hovering in the recesses of his brain, were yearning to leave that many-winded labyrinth to become ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... management of the inns. We then hear of governors, treasurers, and the control of affairs in the different houses lay with the senior members of the societies, who were styled ancients or benchers. The apprentices may be regarded as inchoate Serjeants—Serjeants in the making, persons on the way to become Serjeants. The Serjeants had their own inns; and, on joining the brotherhood, the newly-appointed dignitary was rung out of the inn to which he had previously belonged by the ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... inchoate ... a disjunctive ... patchwork," replied the Wonder. His abstracted eyes were blind to the objective world of our reality; he seemed to be profoundly analysing the very elements ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... form in Fig. 15 bears much the same relation to that of Fig. 14 as did the clearly outlined projectile of Fig. 10 to the indeterminate cloud of Fig. 8. We could hardly have a more marked contrast than that between the inchoate flaccidity of the nebulosity in Fig. 14 and the virile vigour of the splendid spire of highly developed devotion which leaps into being before us in Fig. 15. This is no uncertain half-formed sentiment; it is the outrush ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... plead the justification of Falconbridge for his mother's trangression with the lion-hearted king—such a sin was self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome? Then, by that consummation, he caused her to fulfill the functions of her nature; he compelled her to exchange the imperfect and inchoate condition of a mere faemina for the perfections of a mulier. And, metaphor apart, we maintain that Rome lost no liberties by the mighty Julius. That which in tendency, and by the spirit of her institutions—that which, by her very corruptions and abuses co-operating ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... work in its own mysterious fashion. If a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... transferring the command of the Virginia troops to the Confederate Government. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. ii. p. 911.] During the whole of May, therefore, Virginia's position was unsettled. Her governor, by the authority of the convention, regarded her as independent of the United States, but by an inchoate act of secession which would not become final till ratified by the popular vote. The Virginia troops were arrayed near the Potomac to resist the advance of national forces; but Confederate troops had been welcomed in eastern Virginia as early as the 10th ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... over him. When he opened his eyes, this portion of the plain was like a sea between cross winds. All the broken waves were wildly tossing. Here they recoiled, fled, even across the gully; here they seethed, inchoate; there, regathering form and might, they readvanced to the echoing hill, with its three breastworks and its eighty cannon. Death gorged himself in the tangled slashing, on the treacherous banks of the slow-moving creek. A. P. Hill was a superb fighter. He sent in his brigades. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... problem of nursing their dwarfed resources so as to avoid eventual insolvency. Everything had shrunk fifty—often one hundred—per cent., for the basis of Benham's semi-fabulous development had been borrowed money. Many of Benham's leading citizens were down to hard pan, so to speak. Their inchoate enterprises were being carried by the banks on the smallest margins consistent with the solvency of those institutions, and clear-headed men knew that months of recuperation must elapse before speculative properties would show life again. Benham was consequently gloomy for once in despite ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... the material world—it is certain that the thirst for the ideal ever increases in exact proportion with the development of the race. The true and high task of the artist, the poet, is to divine these wants of humanity, to cultivate these inchoate aspirations for the infinite, to hold its nectar to the toil-worn, weary lips, to soothe and elevate the restless spirits, to cultivate, in accordance with the essence of Christianity, this excess of moral and intellectual being, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... I told him all about the program we had planned, which is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be preserved forever and ever), a class song, a procession, and a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be handed down from class to class. He asked us if we had the spade yet, and I told him "no," but Alice and I were going to buy it for the class in the ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... imitation the more easily, the more their forefathers practiced the same act. The thing imitated, therefore, must already exist, and cannot be explained as an impulse." "As soon as instinct ceased to be sole ruler of living creatures, including inchoate man, the latter must have made mistakes in the struggle for existence which would soon have finished his career, but that he had instinct and the imitation of what existed to guide him. This human primeval stupidity is the ultimate ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... theatre—a very fatiguing enterprise, and also, for Edward Henry, a very nervous one. He was as awkward in displaying that inchoate theatre as a newly-made father with his first-born. Pride and shame fought for dominion over him. Nellie was full of laudations. Ralph ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... brooding in the autumn calm over the long succession of her sons. The continuity, the complexity of human experience; the unremitting effort of the race; the stream of purpose running through it all; these were the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and fragmentary shape, pervaded the boy's sensitive mind as he rambled with his mother from ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... easily managed Alice. This fellow's strange death gives him the halo of martyrdom. He is out of my reach now. The old man must have feared the 'Iron Gate' of Death! And, after all, his plans to 'efface' Clayton were only inchoate. I cannot terrify them with any hearsay projects. I must get what I can, cling to Dunham, ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... even an excessive degree; but it possesses it, and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism. It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It has escaped also that almost abject worship of classic models which Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy—not to speak of its echoes elsewhere. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... million, there was no moon, only the earth as a molten globe, rapidly spinning on its axis—spinning in about three hours. Gradually, by reason of some disturbing causes, a protuberance, a sort of bud, forms at one side, and the great inchoate mass separates into two—one about eighty times as big as the other. The bigger one we now call earth, the smaller we now call moon. Round and round the two bodies went, pulling each other into tremendously elongated or prolate ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... not prepared, nor was Buonaparte. The essential of Corsican annexation to France was order. The Corsican folk flocked to protect Paoli in Corte, and the local government declared for him. There was inchoate rebellion and within a few days the districts of Calvi and Bastia were squarely arrayed with Salicetti against Bonifacio and Ajaccio, which supported Paoli and Pozzo di Borgo. The Buonapartes were convinced that the decree of the Convention was precipitate, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... almshouses, roads, canals, aqueducts, town streets, mountain roads—anything, in short, which would arouse local enthusiasm and benefit the country at large. Many—most, perhaps—of these schemes remained inchoate; but many of the grandest were executed, and Napoleon has left his impress as indelibly upon France itself as upon its society. The routes of the Simplon and Mont Cenis, the great canals which bind ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... two derive their titles from their productive attributes. But as to what they produced or how they produced it, no special indication is given. Thereafter two more Kami are born from an elementary reedlike substance that sprouts on an inchoate earth. This is the first reference to organic matter. The two newly born Kami are invisible like their predecessors, and like them are not represented as taking any part in the creation. They are solitary, unseeable, and functionless, but the evident idea is that they ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the slave were not yet ended. The time came when he was permitted to become a citizen. For two years he had led an inchoate, nondescript sort of existence: free without power or right; neither slave nor freeman; neither property nor citizen. He had been, meanwhile, a bone of contention between the Provisional Governments ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... have its emblem in the vast unfinished Capitol, at that moment surrounded by masses of stone and prostrate columns never yet lifted into their places, seemingly the monument of high but delusive aspirations, the confused wreck of inchoate magnificence, sadder than any ruin ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... often said, still an embryo, of which no one can yet quite foresee the final development; and from its not having the same experience and self-knowledge as the aristocratic and middle classes. Honesty it no doubt has, just like the other classes of Englishmen, but honesty in an inchoate and untrained state; and meanwhile its powers of action, which are, as Mr. Frederic Harrison says, exceedingly ready, easily run away with it. That it cannot at present have a sufficiency of light which comes by culture,—that is, by reading, observing, and thinking,—is clear from the very nature ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... of using electricity for conveying intelligence, and that he gave utterance among his intimates to these dreams; but the practical means of so utilizing this mysterious agent did not take shape in his mind until 1832. An inchoate vision of the possibility of using electricity is far different from an actual plan eventually ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... are very distinctly stated in the Bible; when the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" in the darkness that was "upon the face of the deep,"[205] the great deep of matter showed no forms, it was void, inchoate. Form was given by the Logos, the Word, of whom it is written that "all things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made."[206] C. W. Leadbeater has well put it: "The result of this first great outpouring [the ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... than quote at length from an important summary of the remaining doctrines of Pythagoras, which Diogenes himself quoted from the work of a predecessor.(3) Despite its somewhat inchoate character, this summary is a most remarkable one, as a brief analysis of its contents will show. It should be explained that Alexander (whose work is now lost) is said to have found these dogmas set down in the commentaries of Pythagoras. If this ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... name was "promptly adopted" by the geographers, at the same time it "came slowly into use," for geographical knowledge was then in an inchoate state, especially as respected the New World. It is said to have first appeared on a map ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci in 1514; but in a pamphlet accompanying "the earliest known globe of Johann Schoener," made ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... strong. I had clinched again, as I had often clinched, my right to the title of "Prince." Also, my attitude may be considered, in part, as a reaction from my childhood's meagreness and my childhood's excessive toil. Possibly my inchoate thought was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a prince than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... revelations of his duty, and expose him as he is in fact: an organism infinitely more sensitive and responsive than other organisms, but still a mere organism in the end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa, swayed by the same inscrutable fortunes, condemned to the same inchoate errors and irresolutions, and surrounded by the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... victory in a solemn ritual dance. In Greek art and literature, on the other hand, where we might expect to find an even more advanced conception, we are faced with one seemingly more primitive and inchoate, i.e., the idea of a constantly recurring cycle of Birth, Death, and Resurrection, or Re-Birth, of all things in Nature, this cycle depending upon the activities of an entity at first vaguely conceived of as the 'Luck of the Year,' the Eniautos Daimon. This Being, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... religions are animal worships, others that the spirits of ancestors or chiefs are the primitive gods. Local divinities and personal spirits are found in the rudest culture, while simple fetichism, or the vague shapes presented by dreams, play a large part in the most inchoate systems. The prominence of one or the other of these elements depends upon local and national momenta, which are a proper study for the science of mythology, but need not detain us here. The underlying principle in all these conceptions of divinity is that of the res per accidens, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... become a citizen, are worthy of definition by statute. The stranger coming hither with intent to remain, establishing his residence in our midst, contributing to the general welfare, and by his voluntary act declaring his purpose to assume the responsibilities of citizenship, thereby gains an inchoate status which legislation may properly define. The laws of certain States and Territories admit a domiciled alien to the local franchise, conferring on him the rights of citizenship to a degree which places him in the anomalous position of being a ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... form of political government is the oldest we know and is not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements of permanence. Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is disappearing, as the rudest types of inchoate human society have disappeared. ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... "The inchoate first-lieutenant was in ecstasies; a gentleman by birth and education, he longed for the shoulder-straps. He appeared joyously grateful; and only wanted leave to run up to Fort Pulaski for the purpose of collecting his traps, taking leave of his former comrades, ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... process of organization. It had few arms, and the enemy would come sometimes and "practice" on it. It was several times chased all over that country. When we reached Gallatin, this regiment joined the brigade; it was still in an inchoate state, but it was anxious to revenge the trouble it had been occasioned. It was organized with James Bennett as Colonel, W.W. Ward, Lieutenant Colonel, and R.A. Alston, formerly Morgan's Adjutant General, as Major. The senior captain—the famous Dick McCann—was ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... of this new menace I returned quickly to the coal office, with some inchoate idea of trying to bully the scoundrelly chief of police through the hold I had acquired upon the coal company. The office was empty when I reached it, and at first I thought Mullins had gone out. But at a second glance I saw that he was in the telephone ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... after the sacrifice, during the subsequent course of the voyage, will pay nothing; an interest which has become depreciated will pay in proportion to the diminished value. The liability to contribute is inchoate only when the sacrifice has been made. It becomes complete when the adventure has come to an end, either by arrival at the destination, or by having been broken up at some intermediate point, while the interest in question still survives. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of disorder, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... firm and steady guidance the training of his yet undeveloped genius, gleams of which from time to time, but fitfully and erratically, illumine his earlier correspondence. The material was there from the first, but inchoate, ill-ordered, confused, and therefore not readily available to correct passing impressions, wild rumors, or even to prevent the radically false conceptions of an enemy's possible movements, such as we have had before us. Bonaparte, furthermore, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... daunted. It is strange to see in strong human character the strength and the weakness, two flat contradictions, existing side by side and making weak what seems so strong and making strong what seems so weak. However, human character is a tangle of inconsistencies, as disorderly and inchoate as the tangible and visible parts of nature. Susan felt weak, but not the kind of weakness that skulks. And there lay the difference, the abysmal difference, between courage and cowardice. Courage has full as much fear as cowardice, often more; but it has a something ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... than his, as Antony's before Augustus. And what had he to oppose against the seasoned veterans of the English army, thrice armed in the consciousness of their unparalleled achievement?—Five weak and astounded battalions, and a horde of inchoate peasants. But Montcalm did not falter; by ten he had taken up his position, and by eleven, after some ineffectual cannonading, to allow time for the arrival of re-enforcements which came not, he led the charge. The attack was ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... to what he would include in these and the main criteria which he gives for each of them. He would place the savage condition as being that of the lowest tribes known to us. They have little or no agriculture; their commerce is very inchoate and rude: they have no knowledge of the metals as such; their best weapon is the bow and arrow, or the throwing stick; and their best tool is the stone hatchet and the stone spade. This is very much like the lowest condition of the "wild people" to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... and twisting slowly in the sunlight. As the monoplane shot through it, I was aware of a faint taste of oil upon my lips, and there was a greasy scum upon the woodwork of the machine. Some infinitely fine organic matter appeared to be suspended in the atmosphere. There was no life there. It was inchoate and diffuse, extending for many square acres and then fringing off into the void. No, it was not life. But might it not be the remains of life? Above all, might it not be the food of life, of monstrous life, even as the humble grease of the ocean ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of their hiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy atmosphere, and wistfully ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... choice or arrangement. There are certain spots on the earth where the advance of "civilization" is unfelt, and the nineteenth century fever is kept at bay. In these favored places there is always time, always opportunity, for the realities of life; they are not crowded out by the doings of an inchoate, money-loving, pleasure seeking society. While there are adepts upon the earth, the earth must preserve to them places of seclusion. This is a fact in nature which is only an external expression of a profound ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... and sage have reiterated this in unmistakable language, and the enlightened of the older races have caught the straying tones of the vibrant air of the beyond, and have beheld the mirage of the homes of the blest, and have sought to impress the truth of the living reality of the beyond upon the inchoate brains of their fellows. But superstition rears its grizzled front alike in seats of learning, in the homes of the cultured, and in the hovels of the outcasts; in this sense, all the human family are of hellish kin, and ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... unfinished skeleton of a small sea-going vessel on rude stocks; on the plaza rose the framed walls and roofless rafters of a wooden building; near the Embarcadero was the tall adobe chimney of some inchoate manufactory whose walls had half risen from their foundations; but all of these objects had evidently succumbed to the drowsy influence of the climate, and already had taken the appearances of later and less picturesque ruins of the past. There were singular innovations in the costumes: ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... cabinet was a cubbyhole with handgrips on all four sides and straps into which one could slip his feet. When Joe turned handles, needle sprays sprang at him from all sides, and simultaneously a ventilator fan began to run. When in space that fan could draw out what would otherwise become an inchoate mixture of air and quite weightless water-drops. In space a man might drown in his own shower bath without the fan. The apparatus for collecting the water again was complex, but Joe didn't think about that at the moment. He considered ruefully that however convenient this system ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... appraising eyes, she ignored the women as, already, she had ignored the men. With obliterating unconcern, she reduced them to the fluidity of the inchoate. Other matters occupied her, and, primarily, a trick, an extremely shabby one, from which ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... to the promised land of Biggs was one of those oversized, under-calculated dwellings conceived and erected in the extravagance of the San Francisco builder's hopes, and occupied finally in his despair. Intended originally as the palace of some inchoate California Aladdin, it usually ended as a lodging house in which some helpless widow or hopeless spinster managed to combine respectability with the hard ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... his duty means success in life, and that his nonperformance means failure; when you can show him that this law is immutable, you have made of him a useful citizen and have instilled into his mind a firm belief that the freedom and liberty of which we boast is not an inchoate substance to be dreamed of ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... we seek is already found, his features rapidly becoming distinct. He is the offspring of Northern Europe; he occupies Central North-America. Other fresh forms are doubtless to appear, but, though dimly shaping themselves, are as yet inchoate. But the Anglo-American is an existing fact, to be spoken of without prognostication, save as this is implied in the recognition of tendencies established and unfolding into results. The Anglo-American may be considered the latest new-comer into this planet. Let us, then, a little celebrate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Jimmy that the shadowy and inchoate vision of a combat, a fight, a brawl of some kind persisted in flitting about in the recesses of his mind, always just far enough away to elude capture. The absurdity of the thing annoyed him. A man has either indulged in a ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... condition of things gave rise, I assumed at the outset that the obligations of the treaty with Mexico were to be respected and enforced. This treaty had stipulated for the protection of all rights of property of the citizens of the ceded country; and that stipulation embraced inchoate and equitable rights, as well as those which were perfect. It was not for the Supreme Court of California to question the wisdom or policy of Mexico in making grants of such large portions of her domain, or of the United States in stipulating for their protection. I felt the force of what Judge ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... the next settlement who, I have reason to believe, had never set eyes on her or them. The twins were quite naturally alike—having been in a previous state of existence two ninepins—and were still somewhat vague and inchoate below their low shoulders in their long clothes, but were also firm and globular about the head, and there were not wanting those who professed to see in this an unmistakable resemblance to their reputed ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... vehemently opposed this amendment; but various members accustomed to go with ministers declared their intention to vote for it. Sir James Graham thought it would simplify the question if the amendments were limited to the rights of freemen under the reform bill, because the question of inchoate rights would arise more properly under another clause. Sir William Follett acceded to this suggestion; but Lord John Russell still maintained that the provision contained in the clause was a necessary consequence of adopting this new municipal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of the next generation's or century's civilization. These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet; some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and these are what must form the future. A man's general notions are not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the minds of others. One must be in the HABIT of talking ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... which had the effect rather of making music in the hearer than of containing it in themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving, initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself that he was a drain- pipe for the spirit—a dark saying to Glyde, who was himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition. The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved by this chaotic piece. He was for ever ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... of lines is not to be found in Corot; the rhythm may sometimes be weak, but his lines never run out of metre. For the rhythm of line as well as of sound the artist must seek in his own soul; he will never find it in the inchoate and discordant jumble which ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... upon by uncertain breezes, that murmur the memory of tropical groves and sigh with the sadness of exile. There is no "OLD EMMET." If there is, let him be brought forward—not to be chucked out of the window, as Mrs. F.'s AUNT might suggest,—but to be thanked and wondered at as an inchoate OFFENBACH, who might, under other circumstances, have written an American opera-bouffe, or, better still, as a possible CHOPIN, who might have written a second "March Funebre" as hopeless and desolate and fascinating as that of the despairing and poetic ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... four seamen defended them at a great expenditure of learning and lies. He argued at great length:— "That there was no evidence that a master mariner named Blogg ever existed; that he was an outlaw, and, as such, every British subject had an inchoate right to kill him at sight, and, therefore, that the seamen, supposing for the sake of argument that they did kill him, acted strictly within their legal rights; that Blogg drowned himself in a fit of delirium tremens, after being drunk on rum three ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... this point—we find ourselves at the beginning of the thirteenth century face to face with a University at Cambridge, a University which, existing originally in its inchoate condition of an association vaguely aiming at the improvement of the methods of education and the encouragement of scholars, had gradually grown into a recognized and powerful body, with direct influence and control over its members; a body, too, which had become so identified ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... perfection of human good, which is called happiness, cannot be caused by human knowledge: but rather human knowledge of another's happiness proceeds from, and, in a fashion, is caused by, human happiness itself, inchoate or perfect. Consequently man's happiness cannot consist in fame or glory. On the other hand, man's good depends on God's knowledge as its cause. And therefore man's beatitude depends, as on its cause, on the glory which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... on disregarding them; and accordingly a separate treaty was negotiated with England. In settling the claims to the western territory, much stress was laid on the old colonial charters; but underneath all the verbiage it was practically admitted that these charters conferred merely inchoate rights, which became complete only after conquest and settlement. The States themselves had already by their actions shown that they admitted this to be the case. Thus North Carolina, when by the creation ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... thought, something perfectly inchoate, which she did not recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books into her school-bag. Her face was rosy ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... importance of the ideas to which they are applied. His pages are frequently as chaotic as those of Wagner's music; leaf after leaf may be turned over in the despairing search for a single crystallized idea. Fiery sparks, flying meteors, inchoate masses of nebulous matter are around us, but no glass in our possession can resolve them into ordered orbs of thought and beauty. If a man have anything to say, why not say it in clear, terse, vigorous ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to her eyes. Honor—personal or national—the word was to Diana like a spark to dry leaves. Her whole nature flamed to it, and there were moments when she walked visibly transfigured in the glow of it. Her mind was rich, moreover, in the delicate, inchoate lovers, the half-poetic, half-intellectual passions, the mystical yearnings and aspirations, which haunt a pure expanding youth. Such human beings, Mrs. Colwood reflected, are not generally made for happiness. But there were also in ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or writing.'' The statute does not create an absolute or indefeasible right immediately on the expiration of twenty years. Unless and until the dominant owner's claim is brought into question (s.4) no absolute or indefeasible title can arise under the act. The dominant owner has only an inchoate right to avail himself under the act of the twenty years' uninterrupted enjoyment, if his claim is brought into question. But in the meantime, however long the enjoyment may have been, his right is just the same, and the origin ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... less or more than woman had she not wished to learn the whole truth in a matter of this nature. She hoped that her lover was right, and that Graham's heart, in accordance with his development theory, was so inchoate as to be incapable of much suffering. She was not sure, however. There was something she surmised rather than detected. She felt it now in Mrs. Mayburn's presence, and caught a glimpse of it in the flush that was ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... curb. As it moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean and lost itself among the inchoate night masses of the great buildings, among the now stilled, now strident, cries and clangings, Anthony put his arm around the girl, drew her over to him and kissed her ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... give it effect. The constitutional capability of becoming a voter created by this Amendment lies dormant, as in the case of an infant, until made effective by legislative action. Congress, the legislative power of this jurisdiction, as yet, has not seen fit to carry the inchoate right into effect, as is apparent in the law regulating the franchise of this District. When that shall have been done, it will be the pleasure of this court to administer the law as they find it. Until this shall be done, the consideration of fitness and unfitness, merit and demerit, are considerations ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of romanticism, rewrite the lanuginous works of the Cherbuliez and Feuillet tribe, or, worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of Theuriet and George Sand? Then what was to be done? And Durtal, with desperate determination, set to work sorting out a tangle of confused theories and inchoate postulations. He made no headway. He felt but could not define. He was afraid to. Definition of his present tendencies would plump him back into ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... inchoate commonweal, Lo, at last we catch the thrill: Now we found and forge the steel, Scoop ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... these tent-cloths of fog pressed out into uncouth, dumbly pathetic shapes by the struggle for existence that seethes below it always—always! Decidedly I must begin to-morrow to practise walking. It seems a necessary step towards acquainting myself with the inner life of these inchoate millions, which must be well worth knowing. Papa, on arriving at our door, plunged into an altercation with a cab-tout. What a man! And yet sometimes I could find it in my heart to envy his robustness, his buoyancy. A Huntley and Palmer's Nursery Biscuit in a little hot water has somewhat ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by the coyote, fox, and sand rabbit, covers these fringing sand hills. North and south, Sansome, Montgomery, Kearney, Dupont, Stockton, and a faint outline of Powell Street, are roadways more or less inchoate. An embryo western Paris. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... to them, on the part of a few delegates, on the ground that they were "Intellectuals" and not members of the proletariat, a criticism which pursued them all through their lives. Their views found general favor, however, as might be expected from such an inchoate mass of men, revolutionaries to the core, and waiting only for effective leadership. A resolution was adopted requesting Marx and Engels to prepare "a complete theoretical and working programme" for the League. This they did. It took ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... the Psalms to one tone. For a moment it seemed as if he would contradict himself in his strict rule of going by authority against what he liked, and would change the tones so as to have the peregrinus." He somewhere, however, calls Gregorian an "inchoate science." Could mediaeval work, largely out of touch with the times, claim for itself a monopoly of existence to the exclusion of the modern? So loyal a son of Holy Church as Dr. Ward had let fall that a plain chant ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... lip of the gigantic cone soon disappeared, its component vessels subsiding into a sluggishly flowing stream of allotropic iron. Instantly the fleet abandoned the attack upon the planetoid and swung its cone around, to bring the flame-erupting axis to bear upon the inchoate something dimly perceptible to the ultra-vision of the Secret Service observers. Furiously the gigantic composite beam of the massed fleet was hurled, nor was ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... which I had been inquiring about, so far as relates to their management as a part of the public domain, was one that belonged properly to the United States Government; Missouri was but a territory having only inchoate rights. The whole mineral domain was held, in fee, by the General Government, and whatever irregularity had been seen about the collections of rents, &c., constituted a question which Congress could only solve. I determined to visit Washington, and lay the subject before the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... whomsoever written, be other than inchoate and illusory—nay, can it fail to be fraught with danger to the memory of the dead, with danger to the peace of the living, until years have fully calmed the air around the dead man’s grave? So long as the man to be portrayed cannot be ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... on the part of all concerned. The Manchu dynasty has collapsed, though the "Emperor" still remains as a quasi-sacred, priestly personage, and the princes have been pensioned off. The Great Republic of China has come into being, albeit it is in large measure inchoate and, as it were, on trial. China has long been the land of rebellions and risings, and it is hardly to be expected that the novel republican form of government, however well constructed, intentioned, or conducted, will escape altogether from internal attacks. And nearly everything has ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... you study Chamberlain's history of the eighteen centuries you will find that, after all, the men who were real factors in the world civilization were the geniuses who were able to interpret and enforce what was inchoate in the minds of all but had no definite expression and led to no useful action. Each atom counts something, two make a molecule and the world is made up of them—at least it was in my college days. Therefore, what we are here for is to make the best possible ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... expelled from the parent's body—I have been witness to the birth—each contains about one-sixth ounce of vital element, fluid and glistening. Physical changes in this protoplasm manifest themselves in the course of a few days. The central portion becomes a little less fluid, and from an inchoate blur a resemblance to a diaphanous shell develops and floats, cloud-like, in a perfectly limpid atmosphere. Gradually it becomes denser though still translucent, as it seemingly absorbs some of the fluid by which it is surrounded. The model of the future animal, exact even to the dainty contours ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... for Philadelphia have been a dream for many years, and spasmodic efforts have been made from time to time to produce the reality, but as yet nothing tangible has resulted. The idea has been too inchoate to develop much enthusiasm, and year after year our citizens have returned from enjoying the delights of foreign gardens, and mildly wondered, in the true Philadelphia style, why we should not have them. Nor is this marvelous when ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... duration of the war, which many had supposed would be brief, was still undetermined. While affairs were in this uncertain and inchoate condition, and the Administration had no declared policy on some of the most important questions, Congress came together fired with indignation and revenge for a war so causeless and unprovoked. A ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... enough to make an important difference in the situation. So when her husband disclosed his bad news, she opened her private drawer and disclosed her banknotes, with such a smile in her eyes as I can easily picture to myself. Stimulated by the miracle, he remembered that the inchoate elements of a story, in which was to figure prominently a letter A, cut out of red cloth, or embroidered in scarlet thread, and affixed to a woman's bosom, had been for months past rumbling round in his mind; now was the time of times to shape it forth. Yonder upon the table ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... yet uncreate, Amid a chaos inchoate, An uncreated being sate; Beneath him, rock, Above him, cloud. And the cloud was rock, And the rock was cloud. The rock then growing soft and warm, The cloud began to take a form, A form chaotic, vast and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... system had full sway. Since the early part of the period specified, the working theology of the Roman Church has undergone but few, and, as pertaining to our subject, unimportant, changes or developments. Previous to that time her doctrinal scheme was inchoate, gradually assimilating foreign elements and developing itself step by step. The principal changes now concerning us to notice in the passage from patristic eschatology as deducible, for instance, from the works of Chrysostom, or as seen ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of it you will find the great forest sweeping away in a bay- like curve behind it against the dull gray sky, the splendid columns of its cotton and red woods looking like a facade of some limitless inchoate temple. Then again there is that stretch of sword-grass, looking as if it grew firmly on to the bottom, so steady does it stand; but as the Move goes by, her wash sets it undulating in waves across ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the lower animals, and even to the growth of plants. Now, apart from a craze of generalization we should hardly think of the "stern daughter of the voice of God" in connection with an amoeba corresponding successfully to stimulus, yet the creature in its inchoate way is exhibiting a dim analogy to duty. The term in question was first used by Zeno, and was explained by him, in accordance with its etymology, to mean what it came to one to do, so that as far as this goes, 'becomingness' would be the ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... friends to Tenedos—his second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives." Never for him, then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... when lovers are supposed by poets and romancists to walk 'on air,' so as John Walden was long past the age when men are called young, it is difficult to determine the kind of buoyant element on which he trod when he left the Manor that evening. Youth!—what were its vague inchoate emotions, its trembling hesitations, its more or less selfish jealousies, doubts and desires, compared to the strong, glowing and tender passion which filled the heart of this man, so long a solitary in the world, who now awaking to the consciousness of love in its noblest, purest ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... international humiliation. Six years of stormy happenings had certainly bred in the nation a desire for constitutionalism and a detestation of military domination. But this desire and detestation required firm leadership. Without that leadership it was inchoate and powerless, and indeed made furtive by the constant fear of savage reprisals. A great opportunity had come and a great opportunity had been lost. President Li Yuan-hung's personal argument, communicated to the writer, was that in sealing the Mandate dissolving ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... days, but I know as little about the exact function of a Buergermeister as about the functions of a Mayor. In short, my knowledge of Germany, like my knowledge of England, is based on a series of life-long, unclassified, more or less inchoate impressions, and the only excuse I have for writing about either country I find in my own and some other ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick |
