"Indeterminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ears, and I felt that I should like to hear it again—and to see again that glint of laughter in his eyes that belied the impassioned seriousness of his face. And there were further reaches of vague and indeterminate feelings that stirred in me. I almost loved him then, though I am confident, had I never seen him again, that the vague feelings would have passed away and that I should ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Manorwater proceeded to hymn his excellences in an indeterminate, artificial manner, till the men came into the room, and conversation became general. Lord Manorwater made his way to Alice, thereby defeating Mr. Stocks, who tended in the same direction. "Come outside and see things, Miss Wishart," he said. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... from its very nature, vague, arbitrary, indeterminate. It rests, in truth, on an essentially subjective and fleeting conception, that of contrariety, which it is almost impossible to delimit scientifically; for, most often, contraries exist only by and for us. We know that this form of association is not primary ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... indeterminate sentence, allowing of parole when earned by continuous good conduct, and final release when reformation is ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... hares. He must have worked among machinery in early days, for before he stood still he always shouted to himself: "Stop the machine!" and before going on: "Full speed!" He had a huge black dog of indeterminate breed, called Arapka. When it ran too far ahead he used to shout to it: "Reverse action!" Sometimes he used to sing, and as he did so staggered violently, and often fell down (the wolf thought the wind blew him over), and shouted: "Run ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content to earn enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying. And then, after some time,—a very indeterminate time,—when he had learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and his name would be on all men's lips. But greater than that, infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of the stars still shining in the western half of the heavens, while it added still more to the darkness which gloomed away to the eastward of us. But presently, down in the midst of the dusky blackness broad on our port quarter, I caught a glimpse of a small, indeterminate shape of still deeper blackness, then another, and another, and another, until I had counted ten of them; and concentrating my gaze intently upon them, I felt sure I could occasionally distinguish a small, evanescent, silvery gleam like that of sea fire stirred into brilliance by the slow ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... He was Rand's assistant, and also Kathie's lover. He was five or six years older than his employer, and slightly built. His hair, fighting a stubborn rearguard action against baldness, was an indeterminate mousy gray-brown. It was one of his professional assets that nobody ever noticed him, not even in a crowd of one; when he wanted it to, his thin face could assume the weary, baffled expression of a middle-aged book-keeper with a wife ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... arrived at by Bulgaria and Serbia divided Macedonia between them in such a way that Bulgaria should obtain central Macedonia with Monastir and Okhrida, and Serbia northern Macedonia or Old Serbia; there was an indeterminate zone between the two spheres, including Skoplje (Ueskueb, in Turkish), the exact division of which it was agreed to leave to arbitration at a ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... various objects—a circular bench arrangement on a wooden flooring, batteries that filled the cup between the floor and the bottom arc of the sphere, tall metal cylinders, a small searchlight set next to a mechanism that was indeterminate. At three equidistant points on the sides there were glass handles, as thick as a man's thigh, cast integral with the walls. On the top ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... over to whisper in my ear; and then the good old judge, with his voice shaking a little, pronounced my sentence. Five years was the minimum for the offense with which I stood charged. But a law recently passed gave the judges a new power. Within the nominal period of five years my sentence was made indeterminate. The law was vindicated and ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... was broken presently by the sound of the old man's choking sobs, and the low, soothing tones of Natalie, murmuring against his ear. From the drawing-room came indeterminate scraps of Mrs. Wynyard's gay chatter, as she regaled Mrs. Rathbawne with the gossip gleaned in a round of calls. She herself was partly visible, drawing off her gloves before the fire. From the music-room beyond issued the chords of Dorothy's none-too-sure accompaniment, and ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... emanated from Captain Desmond, even in repose. With a rapidity born of much practice Honor took stock of him, from his helmet to his boots, as he sat awaiting her, with a coolness which at once amused her and piqued her interest. A slim square chin, indeterminate colouring, and eyes of a remarkable thoughtfulness under very level brows, went to make up a satisfying, if ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... each step to the ridge of the pass they climbed was an advance in splendour. Peaks of ashen hue and pale dry red and pale sulphur pushed up, straight, forked, twisted, naked, striking their minds with an indeterminate ghostliness of Indian, so strange they were in shape and colouring. These sharp points were the first to greet them between the blue and green. A depression of the pass to the left gave sight of the points of black fir forest ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is to move in an indefinite or indeterminate way which may or may not be a departure from a prescribed way; to deviate (L. de, from, and via, a way) is to turn from a prescribed or right way, physically, mentally, or morally, usually in an unfavorable sense; to diverge (L. di, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... no answer. She gazed out of the window as if she was mildly impressed with a solicitude for the welfare of her garden. There flitted into her mind a wavering, indeterminate sort of notion that perhaps Lanigan was a better fellow than he used to be, and that if she should succeed in her great purpose it might not be necessary that he should go away. But still,—and here prudence stepped in front of kindliness,—if that child's nurse ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... Russia, Asia Minor, Italy, Lorraine, The Deccan, Poland, Hungary, Catalonia, Corsica, Finland, Switzerland, and in Basque, Spain. The earliest form in which the pure type occurs is in Basile's Pentamerone, 1634, and of the indeterminate type in Bonaventure des Periers Nouvelles Recreations, 1557, though the latter seems more cognate to ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... get thin. Her face was growing sharp and peaked. The steady curve of her cheek had become a little indeterminate. Her chin had begun to sag and her eyes to look a little weary. But she had not observed these things, for we do not notice ourselves very much until some other person thinks we are worthy of observation and tells ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... (i.e., pigmy black) "type," says the authority whom I have just quoted, and to whom I shall have to be still further indebted,[A] "was first placed in South Asia, which it without doubt occupied alone during an indeterminate period. It is thence that its diverse representatives have radiated, and, some going east, some west, have given rise to the black populations of Melanesia and Africa. In particular, India and Indo-China first belonged to the blacks. Invasions and ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... Nineve was so called? and he will answer, from Schindler, that it was a compound of [472]Nin-Nau, [Hebrew: NIN NWH], a son inhabited. But is it credible, or indeed possible, for these cities to have been named from terms so vague, casual, and indeterminate; which seem to have so little relation to the places to which they are appropriated, or to any places at all? The history of the Chaldeans is of great consequence; and one would be glad to know their original. They are properly called Chasdim; and are, very justly, thought to have been the ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... carrying with it that of New Mexico, was a peculiar and unusual event, and one of immense significance in the expansion and development of the Republic. Together with the annexation of Texas, it was the most important result of the Mexican War. The California country, formerly an indeterminate territory of vast extent, was settled by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century. Their settlements within the present limits of the State of California date from the first foundation of San Diego in 1769. In 1822 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale—yet left the question in a wholly unsettled state. The fixing of fair rents, no doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants' point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and unsatisfactory system. It was incentive to indifferent farming, since the commissioners who had the fixing of rents, and the inspectors who examined the farms, made their valuations upon the farms as they saw them. True, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... and that's what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming. Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don't laugh, that's just what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt all your habits here: I've grown fond of going to the public baths, would you believe it? and I go and steam myself ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is very indeterminate," said Wallingford. "It may include one, or ten years, according to the facts in the case, the views of the ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... transform the popular theology. Such an intention, strange as it may appear to us with our rigid creeds, we shall see to be natural enough to the Greek mind, when we remember that the material of their religion was not a set of propositions, but a more or less indeterminate body of traditions capable of being presented in the most various forms as the genius and taste of individual poets might direct. And we find, in fact, that the most religious poets of Greece, those even who were most innocent of any intention to innovate on popular beliefs, did nevertheless ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... not show that 'drowned bodies' require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the surface. Both science and experience show that the period of their rising is, and necessarily must be, indeterminate. If, moreover, a body has risen to the surface through firing of cannon, it will not 'sink again if let alone,' until decomposition has so far progressed as to permit the escape of the generated gas. But I wish to call your attention to the distinction ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... particular fragrance enveloping my body, penetrating my very heart with an inconceivable intimacy, bringing me closer to her than the closest embrace, and yet so subtle that I sensed her existence in me only as a great, glowing, indeterminate tenderness, something like the evening light disclosing after the white passion of the day infinite depths in the colours of the sky and an unsuspected soul of peace in the protean forms of life. I had not known such quietness ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... developed under conditions which were first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the providence of God. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the Guide and Educator of our race. As "the offspring of God," humanity is not a bare, indeterminate potentiality, but a living energy, an active reason, having definite qualities, and inheriting fundamental principles and necessary ideas which constitute it "the image and likeness of God." And though ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... they all asleep, than a figure none of them had noticed, yet all perhaps had vaguely felt, rose out of the little ditch this side of the laurel shrubberies, and advanced slowly towards the old Mill House. The shape was shadowy and indeterminate at first; it might have been a bush, a sheaf of straw, a clump of high-grown weeds, for birds fluttered just above it, and the swallows darted down without alarm. A shaggy thing, it seemed part of ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... all day in a boat; lovely weather and almost dead calm, only the most infinitesimal and indeterminate of oscillations moved us hither and thither; the sails were duly set, and flapped about idly overhead. Our boatman was a man of a delightful humour, who told us many tales of the sea, notably one of a doctor, who was an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all fours, when my eye first took in that the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, made shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... causes of great phenomena. From boyhood I had pondered many things. I had lain on my back and looked up at the stars and wondered how far they were, and how far the farthest thing beyond them was. I had wondered at that indeterminate quotient in my sums, where the same figure came, always the same, running on and on. I used to wonder what was my soul, and I fancied that it was a pale, blue flaming oblate, somewhere near my back and in the middle of my body—such was my boyish guess of what they ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... children, or the fall chickens as they are called in recognition of the wide interval between their ages and those of the other children, are probably of the indeterminate character proper to their years. We think the girl rather inclines to a hauteur based upon the general neglect of that quality in the family, where even the eldest sister is too much engaged in ruling to have much force left for ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... to be seen as governed by absolutely determined laws of its own. It is heavy, then it will fall unless obstructed; it is solid, then it will resist intrusions. But considered as material for organization by higher forms, it is indeterminate. It acts in one sort of way under the persuasion of the sheep-form, and in another sort of way under the persuasion of the [16] dog-form, and we cannot tell how it will act until we know which form is going to capture it. No amount ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... precarious; and to the practical intelligence, which looks for some basis that cannot be argued about, there is still something to be said for Intuition. And when Mill, still in search of some precise formula, undertook to interpret persistent sequences by his theory of Real Kinds possessing an indeterminate number of coherent properties—so that our belief in the invariable blackness of crows is justified as a collocation of these visible properties—he merely throws the problem of Causation farther backward. We have to be content with direct observation of phenomena that ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... won, but at the moment neither side realized its decisive character. The Greeks had lost 40 ships; the Persians had lost over 200 sunk, and an indeterminate number captured. Nevertheless, the latter could probably have mustered a considerable force for another attack—which the Greeks expected—if their morale had not been so badly shaken. Their commander, Ariabignes, was ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... distrust—the fashion of the man himself. He was unprepossessing in every line. His thin, pale face widened rapidly, like a top, to a broad and shining pate, which looked not so much bald as half naked below its sparse covering of reddish hair. His eyes were glimmering and of an indeterminate colour. Yet his voice was not unattractive in its persuasive intonation, and his manner was friendly almost to the verge of effusiveness. Whatever might be his demerits from a physical point of view, he lacked the general air of inconsequence that characterised most of his companions. He conveyed ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... novel? No rascals, no literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me monthly,—what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... descendant of the Jason's-crew, who landed from the Argo-Mayflower, usually bearing a name thus significant, and manifesting, even at her age, traits of character justifying the compellation. What that age precisely was, could not always be known; indeed, a lady's age is generally among indeterminate things; and it has, very properly, come to be considered ungallant, if not impertinent, to be curious upon so delicate a subject. A man has no more right to know how many years a woman has, than how many skirts she wears; and, if he have any anxiety about the matter, in either case, his ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... received confirmed all his expectations,—the suit of Legard had replaced his own. It was then that Maltravers began to consider how far the fortune of Evelyn and her destined husband was such as to preclude all anxiety for their future lot. Fortune is so indeterminate in its gauge and measurement. Money, the most elastic of materials, falls short or exceeds, according to the extent of our wants and desires. With all Legard's good qualities he was constitutionally careless and extravagant; and Evelyn ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is good reason for believing, ought to be referred to the other. It is highly probable that future and more accurate observations will show that more than one species has been confounded under the general epithets of "the common Buffalo," "the domestic Buffalo," "the tame Buffalo," or, more indeterminate still, "the Buffalo." ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... himself was in harmony with his disorderly but picturesque surroundings, his clothes dirty and almost in rags; an old jersey in place of a shirt, and over it two and sometimes three waistcoats of different shapes and sizes, all of one indeterminate earthy colour; and over these an ancient coat too big for the wearer. The thin hair, worn on the shoulders, was dust-colour mixed with grey, and to crown all there was a rusty rimless hat, shaped like an inverted flowerpot. From beneath this strange hat the small ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... The indeterminate hum of life in the Thalia is enlivened by the discreet popping—at reasonable and salubrious intervals—of beer-bottle corks. Thus punctuated, life in the genial hostel scans easily—the comma being the favorite mark, semicolons frowned upon, ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... Roper who gave Maurice the necessary stiffening. Mr. Roper didn't like Winn, and though their intercourse had been limited to a series of grunts on Winn's part, Mr. Roper felt something unerringly inimical behind each of these indeterminate sounds. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... eyes and hugging his kaross around him because of the cold, and something in his anxious, indeterminate expression told me at once that he knew himself to be a man in terrible danger. Just behind him, dark and brooding, his arms folded on his breast, his eyes fixed upon the ground, looking, to my moved imagination, like an evil genius, stood the stately and graceful Saduko. ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... both shocked and displeased. There were droppings of food all down the front of his coat; the mouth under the ragged ill-grown beard drooped sullenly; the forehead was lined and contracted; and on the lean temples the hair was a dusty indeterminate colour that might or might not have been called gray. The utter misery and self-abandonment of the man appealed to her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the wicked feeling that he was humbled and brought low who had ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... standard for that dignity which Parliament had defined and limited to a legal standard. They gave themselves, under the lax and indeterminate idea of the honour of the Crown, a full loose for all manner of dissipation, and all manner of corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and inoperative Act of ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... was decided. He had deferred his visit till such peace and prosperity had dawned for Spain, that he could offer his bride not only a home suited to his rank, but the comfort of his presence and protection for an indeterminate time. He had come there purposely to reveal his long-cherished love; to conjure Marie to bless him with the promise of her hand; and, if successful, to return, in two short months, for the celebration of their marriage, according to their own secret ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... consciousness of the danger of the experiment. He showed her what few mortals have seen, a naked soul with its scars, its stains, and its ravages from flame and convulsion. He need not have apprehended a disastrous result. She was compounded of his essences, and her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius. She listened intently, the expression of torment displaced by normal if profound sympathy. He had begun ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... we have here is, to start with, content under the form of substance. Even when we say, "God," "spirit," we have only words, indeterminate representations. The essential point is to know what has been produced in the consciousness. And that is, first, the simple, the abstract. Here, in this first simple determination, we have God only under the form of universality. Only we do ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... begin to fish the first thing tomorrow morning. He was one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, and at twelve or thirteen years of age look as much alike as goslings,—a lad with light-brown hair, cheeks of cream and roses, full lips, indeterminate nose and eyebrows,—face in which it seems impossible to see anything but boyhood; as different as possible from poor Maggie's phiz, which Nature seemed to have moulded and colored with the most ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... in point of fact two Clevelands—before marriage and after marriage—the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate. Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so wholly ignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be told assigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylor ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... months of a dead world, changed as rapidly as had the smiling Place. From a shapeless gray-gold fuzzy baby, she grew lank and leggy. The indeterminate fuzz was buried under a shimmering gold-and-white coat of much beauty. The muskrat face lengthened and grew delicately graceful, with its long muzzle and ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... examined in 1910 and 1913, seems, like them, to have been thinly occupied in Roman times; at any rate the structures actually unearthed consisted only of a roughly built foundation (25 feet diam.) of uncertain use, which there is no reason to call a temple, some other even more indeterminate foundations, and two bits of road. More interest may attach to three ditches (one for sewage) and the clay base of a rampart, which belong in some way to the northern defences of the place in various times. The full meaning of these will, however, not be discernible till complete ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... of Damascus are three in number, and are all of a very similar type. They are indeterminate in size and shape, changing with the wetness or dryness of the season; and it is possible that sometimes they may be all united in one. The most northern, which is called the Bahret-esh-Shurkiyeh, receives about half the surplus water of the Barada, together with some ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... laughed uneasily. But for the corrugations of time, one might not have known if it were flour or age that had so whitened his long beard, which hung quivering down over the breast of his jeans coat, of an indeterminate hue under its frosting from the hopper. "He hev tuk up a tumble ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of our sensibility. That is to say, this conception contains the answer to the question: "Are there objects quite unconnected with, and independent of, our intuition?"—a question to which only an indeterminate answer can be given. That answer is: "Inasmuch as sensuous intuition does not apply to all things without distinction, there remains room for other and different objects." The existence of these problematical objects is therefore not absolutely ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... I must suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily set out from the one, to which therefore I give hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of them I should commence, there are ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... is said, have fallen within a few years. For this reason persons in the neighborhood are afraid to venture in. There is a rumor that the corpse of a woman, coated with stalagmite, can be seen in this cave; also several bodies (sex apparently indeterminate) lying like spokes in a wheel, with heads at the center. No one could be persuaded to go in and point out the ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... Prima" says the great Franciscan, "is the indeterminate element of contingent things. This does not exist in Nature, but it has reality in so far as it constitutes the term of God's creative activity. By its union with a substantial form it becomes endowed with the attributes of quantity, and becomes Secundo Prima. Subject ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... question which cannot be solved without leaving the limited domain of history to enter the indeterminate ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... any excess of pleasure, but through an impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem or through the music, we obtain but brief and indeterminate glimpses: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... of the faithful pass to rest and joy. But between these two representatives in the narrative, the one of the evil, the other of the good, there are the multitudes who are neither very good nor very evil, so varied in the indeterminate tokens of good and evil which marked their lives on earth, that it would seem to be impossible for us to know on which side of "the great gulf" their position ought to be. But if the extremes enter the Intermediate State, and there is room for ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... the principles proclaimed by President Wilson and recognized by the Allies. Nor would it suffice even to have the faculty of reoccupation, because "this faculty" could never be a valid substitute for occupation. As regards the suggestion that a long occupation or one for an indeterminate period would cause bad feeling, M. Poincare was convinced that this was an exaggeration. A short occupation causes more irritation on account of its arbitrary limit; everyone understands an occupation without other limit than ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... mind of a Caliban could it be other than terrifying. Things grew to a size out of all reason. The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists, fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things. Strange and indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the shadow of a wind-rift on the ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... been much increased by a class of verbs too frequent in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use so vague and indeterminate, and the senses detorted so widely from the first idea, that it is hard to trace them through the maze of variation, to catch them on the brink of utter inanity, to circumscribe them by any limitations, or interpret them ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same indeterminate quality. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... hand, particular propositions are regarded as implying the existence of their terms, and the corresponding equations are so framed as to express existence. With this end in view, the symbol v is adopted to represent 'something,' or indeterminate reality, or more than nothing. Then, taking any particular affirmative, such as Some metaphysicians are obscure, and writing x for 'metaphysicians,' and y for 'obscure,' we may ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the forecross-trees, glass in hand, his eyes in every quarter, spying for an entrance, spying for signs of tenancy. But the isle continued to unfold itself in joints, and to run out in indeterminate capes, and still there was neither house nor man, nor the smoke of fire. Here a multitude of sea-birds soared and twinkled, and fished in the blue waters; and there, and for miles together, the fringe of cocoa-palm and pandanus extended desolate, and made desirable green ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... law-abiding citizens who could be depended on in any crisis. There was a larger number who could be expected as a rule to stand with the angels, but who had friendly dealings with the outlaws and were open to suspicion. Then there was the indeterminate and increasing number of men whose sources of revenue were secret, who toiled not, but were known to make sudden journeys from which they returned with fat "rolls" in their pockets. It was to curb this sinister third group that Packard had attempted ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... like most women of her age. She was one of the blue-eyed women who looks well in lavender. Her blue eyes, now looking at her son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms. A deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the color of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... reassuring shadow; it seemed to spring from an indeterminate personality. Mr. Kerry Mackintosh repeated his question more bruskly; the shadow (obviously not a customer,—no one ever sought Mr. Mackintosh's wares!) started; his face showed signs of a ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... circumflowing; and foreign trade, therefore, as much concerned in the guilt of its expense as colonial traffic. The amount of charge, therefore, although remaining to be deducted from the colonial head, may be left as a neutral indeterminate item. But the military expenses for Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, about L.80,000, cannot be for colonial account at all, because stations merely for carrying on foreign trade, against which chargeable, with the civil establishments as well, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Teeth found in the floor. A third cavern. Breccia on the surface. Similar caverns in other parts of the country. At Buree. At Molong. Shattered state of the bones. Important discoveries by Professor Owen. Gigantic fossil kangaroos. Macropus atlas. Macropus titan. Macropus indeterminate. Genus Hypsiprymnus, new species, indeterminate. Genus Phalangista. Genus Phascolomys. Ph. mitchellii, a new species. New Genus Diprotodon. Dasyurus laniarius, a new species. General results of Professor Owen's researches. Age of the breccia considered. State of the caverns. Traces of inundation. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... great difficulty in being so. Without a constant struggle, she would have had loose plaits and hanging strings about her always. Lucy's trimness was a perpetual marvel to her. It was like the contrast between the soft indeterminate lines of her charming face and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... silent. But soon there arose from somewhere, from some indeterminate direction, which might have been the cellar as well as the attic, a powerful monotonous snore, a deep and prolonged noise, like the throbbing of a boiler under pressure—Mr. ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... suddenly, for without any further warning there had come a tiny indeterminate tapping against his panel. He held his breath and listened. It came again. Then fearlessly he drew back the bolts, slid the panel open and shut his eyes, dazzled by ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the arrears of the road; and she, poor thing! how little qualified ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... breaks the stillness of the day. From the higher ridges the eye falls upon the pallid ghost of the city. Blotches of juniper relieve the monotony of the brown, lifeless grass. Grays fade into leaden hues, to be absorbed in the ashy, indeterminate colors of the sun-soaked plains. No fitter setting for a superstition could be found. Once a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, the topography of ridge gave it an unusual shape. Ruins of three four-story terrace ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... massiness and solidity, such as I have seen in no other place; it rather awes than pleases, as it strikes with a kind of gigantick dignity, and aspires to no other praise than that of rocky solidity and indeterminate duration. I had none of my friends resident, and, therefore, saw but little. The library is ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... be summed up as follows: Equal guardianship of children; raising the "age of protection" for girls from 16 to 18 years; establishment of a State Home for Dependent Children; a State Industrial School for Girls; indeterminate sentence for criminals; a State Arbitration Board; open meetings of school boards; the removal of emblems from ballots; placing drinking fountains on the corners of most of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the red and green signal lamps hang high in the air; and one glides past a sleeping town, the lamps burning quietly in deserted streets; there are house-fronts below, in a long thoroughfare suddenly visible from end to end; above, there are indeterminate shadows, the glimmering faces of high towers; it is all ghost-like and mysterious; one only knows that men live and work there; and then the tides of slumber flow in upon the brain, and one dives thirstily to ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... gentle slopes, that the valleys between them are extensive and flat. Several contain an indeterminate depth of rich soil, capable of supporting the most exhausting vegetation, and are tolerably well watered by chains of small ponds, or occasional drains, which empty themselves into the river by ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... emphatically deserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was no real Prussia before Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised themselves as rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic and patriotic people. In this sense there was ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... on for a space of time seeming quite indeterminate. Little by little, however, a change came over things, or my impression of them. Is it that one's body being well broken, one's mind becomes more susceptible of homogeneous impressions? I know not. But the higher light, the incense, fills the space above all those black women's heads, over ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... squatted and lay in the darkness about me. Some were couched upon rough wooden shelves ranged around the walls, others sprawled upon the floor, in the center whereof, upon a small tea-chest, stood a smoky brass lamp. The room and its occupants alike were indeterminate, sketchy; its deadly atmosphere seemed to be suffocating me. A sort of choking sound came from one of the bunks; a vague, obscene murmuring filled ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... a criminal's dangerous activity is to reform him; to give him a new and absorbing interest. Experience at our best reformatories shows that with the indeterminate sentence a very large majority of young criminals can be transformed into safe and useful citizens. This method is both cheaper and more effective than direct punishment for ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... Her age is indeterminate; She is not a woman, yet She is no longer a child. It is hard to say even that She is grown up, just marriageable, a girl-child, so entirely is She refined above all humanity, beyond the world, so exquisitely pure ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... wrinkle? Is it the absence of a soul? It must be. For it is less true of the Bostonian than of the ordinary business American, in whose life exhilaration and depression take the place of joy and suffering. The women's faces are more indeterminate, not very feminine; many of them wear those 'invisible' pince-nez which centre glitteringly about the bridge of the nose, and get from them a curious air of intelligence. Handsome people of both sexes are very common; beautiful, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... no more pay for and support his wife than she would do so for him. They would be two friends, differing in kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves in a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as we have discussed it, is indeterminate between these alternatives. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... cotton surely would not grow, that rich country now known as Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. This region, late gained by war from Mexico, soon to be increased by purchase from Mexico on the South, was still of indeterminate status, slavery not being prohibited but permitted, by federal action, although most of this territory had been free soil under the old laws of Mexico. Moreover, as though sardonically to complicate all these much-mingled matters, there thrust up to the northward, ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... would reproduce it. It is this sketch, and this sketch only, which is represented in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is a margin for the image. Frame the image again, there remains a margin, and a still larger margin, for the thought. The thought is thus relatively free and indeterminate in relation to the activity which conditions it in the brain, for this activity expresses only the motive articulation of the idea, and the articulation may be the same for ideas absolutely different. And yet it is not complete liberty nor absolute ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... him to account if he had seen fit to enrol his own valet as an Executive Councillor. As matter of fact they were commonly selected from the judiciary and other salaried officials, and from the members of the Legislative Council. Their number was indeterminate, but was seldom less than four or more than six, in addition to the Lieutenant-Governor himself. Their functions consisted of giving advice to the Lieutenant-Governor on all matters of governmental policy, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... cross-examination, to be sure, but before all accessible to complete and unreserved study. This would mean a substantial participation of law in the promotion of knowledge of facts and constructive activity, and a conception of indeterminate sentence not merely in the service of leniency but in the service of the best protection of the public, and, if necessary, lasting detention of those who cannot be reformed, before they have had to do their worst. Whoever is clearly indicted for breaking the laws of social compatibility ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... which this Society proposes to work is to collect expert opinion on matters wherein our present use is indeterminate or unsatisfactory, and thus to arrive at a general understanding and consensus of opinion which might be relied ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... of the reign, how far he was [v.04 p.0817] thwarted by the baleful influence of Leicester and the caprices of the queen, remains to a large extent a matter of conjecture. His share in the settlement of 1559 was considerable, and it coincided fairly with his own somewhat indeterminate religious views. Like the mass of the nation, he grew more Protestant as time wore on; he was readier to persecute Papists than Puritans; he had no love for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and he warmly remonstrated with Whitgift over his persecuting Articles of 1583. The finest encomium was passed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... this, and this only:—What a pudder and racket in Councils about (Greek); and in the Schools of the learned about power and about spirit;—about essences, and about quintessences;—about substances, and about space.—What confusion in greater Theatres from words of little meaning, and as indeterminate a sense! when thou considerest this, thou wilt not wonder at my uncle Toby's perplexities,—thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon his scarp and his counterscarp;—his glacis and his covered way;—his ravelin and his half-moon: ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the timid solicitudes with which they rarefy in one line any enthusiasm they may have condensed in another — a process curiously analogous to those irregular condensations and rarefactions of air which physicists have shown to be the conditions of producing an indeterminate sound. Many of my critics have seemed — if I may change the figure — to be forever conciliating the yet-unrisen ghosts of possible mistakes." Enough quotations have already been given from his lectures in Baltimore to show his enthusiasm for many of the periods and ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... could hear the sound in the distance—the thunder of the captains of the storm and the shouting; but still so faint, so vague, so indeterminate and unearthly that it seemed like the sound in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... had, the dear creature, not only in her glances, indeterminate of colour, veiled or gay like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the draping of her dress, in everything about her, even to the long curl, falling over the neck erect and delicate as ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... will merely call attention to the fact, that if nature and the sacred text are fixed elements, this is not the case with the interpretations of theologians, and the results of geology. It is difficult to pronounce upon the exact relation of two quantities more or less indeterminate. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... servant or personal enemy, for I believe you are convinced we have not merited it either by our discourse or our actions: if we had, the charge would have been specific; but we have reason to imagine it is nothing more than the indeterminate and general charge of being aristocrates. I did not see my mother or sister all the day we were arrested, nor till the evening of the next: the one was engaged perhaps with "Rosine and the Angola", who were indisposed, and the other would not forego her usual card-party. ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the elevation is said to be eighty feet, perhaps a typographical error for eight, as, in a subsequent passage, the table of the khan is merely said to be higher than those of the rest who have the honour to dine along with him; the particular height, therefore, is left indeterminate in the text.—E. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... indeterminate sentence. This strikes directly at the criminal class. It puts that class beyond the power of continuing its depredations upon society. It is truly deterrent, because it is a notification to any one intending to enter upon that method of living that his career ends with his first felony. As to the ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... But this objection is of no weight, for it is only a dispute about words; as there is no general term which can be applied both to the office of a juryman and a member of the assembly. For the sake of distinction, suppose we call it an indeterminate office: but I lay it down as a maxim, that those are citizens who could exercise it. Such then is the description of a citizen who comes nearest to what all those who are called citizens are. Every one also should know, that of the component parts of those things which differ from each other ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... greenhouses—hung their long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed and miserable, beneath the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for hours like the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide roadway that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across the veldt, forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a lady's arm, was completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust. But the hot wind was going down now, as it always does towards sunset. Indeed, all that remained of it were a few strictly local and miniature whirlwinds, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... artifices for the simplification of equations, giving methods which are still in common use. In the body of the work he displays considerable ingenuity in reducing his problems to simple equations, which admit either of direct solution, or fall into the class known as indeterminate equations. This latter class he discussed so assiduously that they are often known as Diophantine problems, and the methods of resolving them as the Diophantine analysis (see EQUATION, Indeterminate.) It is difficult to believe that this work of Diophantus arose ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... negligible. To plead the Statute of Frauds in an action for non-delivery or non-acceptance of goods under such informal agreements might be a defence in the law courts, but would not save the defendant from the indeterminate but effective penalties due to the feeling of his fellows that he was acting dishonourably. It is instructive to notice that in dealing with the question of industrial disputes, which are in many ways analogous to international, ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... and current poetic forms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people, occupations, and aspirations of "these States," as yet undeveloped but vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tally the fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and a new world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope and flexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation and variety. Finding none ready to his hand, he created it. Not that Whitman did not draw ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... pause. The man leaned back, embracing one knee with both hands. They were nerveless, indeterminate hands, with long fingers, such as are in the habit of dropping things. Zora wondered how they supported his knee. For some time he stared into vacancy, his pale-blue eyes ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... of military pomp, or the animated scenes which the chace presents; and he seems to have exhausted all the efforts of his genius, in the variety of incident and richness of execution, which these subjects are fitted to afford. From the confused and indeterminate expression, however, which the multitude of their objects exhibit, we turn with delight to those simpler scenes in which his mind seems to have reposed, after the fatigues which it had undergone: ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... aloof and taciturn a client as Rammer Spacelines ever had picked up. A lean, blond character of indeterminate age, with pale eyes, hard mouth. Why he had selected a bulky semifreighter like the Queen for a mineralogical survey jaunt to a lifeless little sun system far beyond the outposts of civilization was a point he didn't discuss. Gefty, needing the charter money, had restrained his curiosity. If ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... the dress of these Southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... logic! Weight is only force, that is, a thing hidden from the senses, whose phenomena alone are perceptible,—a thing, consequently, to which the idea of division and indivision is inapplicable; and from the presence of this force, from the hypothesis of an indeterminate and immaterial entity, is inferred an indivisible ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the advance had stopped. Our recent capture of Beaumont-Hamel and St. Pierre Divion left local situations, which required clearing up. The fragments of newly-won trenches above Grandcourt, trenches without wire and facing a No-Man's-Land of indeterminate extent, gave their occupants their first genuine tactical problems and altogether more responsibility than before. In some respects the Germans were quicker than ourselves to adapt themselves to conditions approximating ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... gold salt is very characteristic. It is generally precipitated in the form of an oil which solidifies rapidly and may be crystallized from hot water after the addition of a little hydrochloric acid. This clouds in cooling, and after a certain time it separates in small crystals of indeterminate form which unite in warty concretions. After drying the salt forms a dull powder, melting between 275 deg. F. and 280 deg. F. It also melts in boiling water, and its aqueous solution exposed to the light is partially ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... for it than you had for your guess," he returned, and we drifted into an indeterminate wrangle, each of us defending his own theory rather because he had had the glory of originating it than because either of us had, I think, the ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... is a problem generally somewhat indeterminate. It is not so for those countries whose borders are covered with great natural obstacles, and which present but few accessible points, and these admitting of defense by the art of the engineer. The problem here is simple; but in open countries it is ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... of one kind or another, some of these being of hoary antiquity. In 'Hamlet,' for example, in the graveyard scene, it was the habit of the Second Grave-digger to take off his coat before beginning his work, and then to proceed to divest himself of an indeterminate number of waistcoats, to the increasing disgust of the First Grave-digger. Oddly enough, this same business is traditional in the 'Precieuses Ridicules,' the less important of the two comedians going through exactly the same mirth-provoking ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... morally imbecile, we must segregate these as fast as we are able to supply the right artificial environment for their weakness and treat them as incurable moral and mental invalids. We must cease to deal with such as with responsible human beings, who might do better if only they would. The "indeterminate sentence" is a step toward such treatment, but it is often rendered wholly futile by being mixed with "reward of shortening term for good behavior in prison." Good behavior inside prison walls gives no proof of ability to take good care of one's self outside those walls; it may be only a proof ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... slicker a most valuable classification until his junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... remember much of what I said, but if I may take the evidence of Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively. I told them, for one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri. Little Angelo was of that indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a drunken father without regard to the child-labour laws of the State of New Jersey. His people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of miles from the glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from his work ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... acquaint the reader with the titles of his different labours. I find in these journals a memoir upon the general solution of algebraic equations; researches on the methods of elimination; the demonstration of a new theorem of algebra; a memoir upon the indeterminate analysis; studies on general mechanics; a technical and historical work upon the aqueduct which conveys the waters of the Nile to the Castle of Cairo; reflections upon the Oases; the plan of statistical researches to be ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... been admitted to one of the officers' training-camps, and that he was making rather helpless and puzzled purchases. Going into his room she would find a dressing-case of khaki leather, perhaps, or flannel shirts of the same indeterminate hue. She would shed futile tears over them, and order them put out of sight. But she never ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... town, was discarded. A wild and indiscriminating change was abroad. Meetings, petitions, and addresses were got up on every hand, advocating extensive alterations in our representative system, all of which, however vague and indeterminate in their respective conditions, tended to confer the elective rights on a much larger proportion of the people than had hitherto enjoyed them. Threats were even uttered that a refusal of these rights would lead to a general convulsion, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... fame as tarred with their brush; and I was not so blind as to be unaware that for the clergy this meant not yet indeed prosecution, but proscription and exclusion from advancement by either party in the state, and for laymen a vague and indeterminate prejudice with serious doubts how far persons infected in this particular manner could have any real capacity for affairs. Sir Robert Peel must, I think, have exercised much self-denial when he put me in his cabinet ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... every world has in its career an intermediate period which may be called the epoch of life. Before the epoch of life begins there is in the given world no such form of existence. There is matter only. Then at a certain stage the epoch of life begins. The epoch of life continues for a vast indeterminate period. No doubt in some of the worlds an epoch of life has been provided ten times as great, possibly a thousand times as great, as in other planets. After the epoch of life begins only certain forms of existence are for a while possible. Then ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... predict the effect upon the question of the Pacific and of China, that by this war was assured the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon political and legal tradition over the whole American continent north of the tropics, and that the same tradition shall, for a future yet indeterminate, decisively shape the course of India and the Philippines? The preceding war, 1739-1748, had been substantially inconclusive on the chief points at issue, because European questions intervening had diverted the attention of both France and Great Britain from America and from India; and ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... ascent was finished and below him lay the house and climbing woods,—woods that crept into the bosom of the hills, the closely growing trees tipped with tender greens melting into the softest of indeterminate greys as the breeze rippled through their tops like fingers across a harp. The darker line of moorland in the background, scant as ever of herbiage, had yet lost its menacing bareness and seemed touched with the faint colour of the earth beneath, almost pink in the generous ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the shock of the Warsaw revolt, his passion for George Sand, the death of his father and of his friend Matuszynski, and the rupture with Madame Sand—these were crises of his history. All else was but an indeterminate factor in the scheme of his earthly sojourn. Chopin though not an anchorite resembled Flaubert, being both proud and timid; he led a detached life, hence his art was bold and violent. Unlike Liszt he seldom sought the glamor of the theatre, and was never in such public view ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... great saline stretch shone pale-blue, under the rising sun. The legs of our five mehara cast on it their moving shadows of a darker blue. For a moment the only inhabitant of these solitudes, a bird, a kind of indeterminate heron, rose and hung in the air, as if suspended from a thread, only to sink back to rest as ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... succeed in getting it if we try pertinaciously enough. This world is good, we must say, since it is what we make it,—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? M has its character indeterminate, susceptible of forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the other. All depends on the character of the {103} personal ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... indefinite leisure which had hitherto been so wholly lacking, for the events of ephemeral lives occur at indeterminate hours, at unexpected moments, and ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... house or effects. Yet such was his precaution and care for himself that he left no finger-print behind him nor any other token which could lead to personal identification. Even though his footsteps could be traced in much the order I have mentioned, they were of so indeterminate and shapeless a character as to convey little to the intelligence of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... the certainty of civil war, therefore, it was necessary to lay down the line of inheritance by a peremptory order; to cut off resolutely all rival claims; and in legislating upon a matter so vital, and hitherto so uncertain and indeterminate, to enforce the decision with the most stringent and exacting penalties. From the Heptarchy downwards English history furnished no fixed rule of inheritance, but only a series of precedents of uncertainty; and while at no previous ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... of indeterminate shape and size, Y, for inorganic matters, such as the salts of bone and teeth, and Z, to stand as a symbol of the fluids, and you have the letters of what I have ventured to call the alphabet ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Names with indeterminate connotation are not to be confounded with names which have more than one connotation, that is to say, ambiguous words. A word may have several meanings, but all of them fixed and recognized ones; as the word post, for example, or the word box, the various senses of which ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... falling into this twofold trap, the theorists will reply that the Scoliae are descended from a precursor, an indeterminate creature, of changeable habits and changing form, modifying itself in accordance with its environment and with the regional and climatic conditions and branching out into races each of which has become a species with the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... which separates the cotton region of the east from the tobacco belt that sweeps down the pleasant ranges of the Piedmont region, east of the Blue Appalachians. Or, to speak more correctly, the plantation was in that indeterminate belt which neither of the great staples could claim exclusively as its own—that delectable land where every conceivable product of the temperate zone grows, if not in its rankest luxuriance, at least in ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... revealed to him by the chance isolation - as he changes the position of his sunshade - of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had much ado to disguise his consternation. For a moment he thought of flattering her pride by unconditional surrender, by submissive appeal, but to that he could not bring himself. Her discovery, her contempt and menaces, had deeply offended him; the indeterminate and shifting sentiments with which he had regarded her crystallised into dislike—that hard dislike which commonly results, whether in man or woman, from trifling with sacred relations. That Constance had ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... consisting of objects one likes to possess, gathered in vast lots, which lots are distributed by hundreds of thousands over the twenty-six thousand square miles of territory. There are no owners for this property but the nation, an indeterminate, invisible personage; no barrier other than so many seals exists between the spoils and the despoilers, that is to say, so many strips of paper held fast by two ill-applied and indistinct stamps. Bear in mind, too, that the guardians of the spoil are the sans-culottes ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... at indeterminate sixteen, showed promise of great beauty, and her eyes sparkled with the insolence of the spoiled child who already knew the power of wealth. The girl she addressed had only a pair of dark intelligent eyes to reclaim an uncomely face. Her skin ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton |
