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Primal   Listen
adjective
Primal  adj.  First; primary; original; chief. "It hath the primal eldest curse upon it." "The primal duties shine aloft like stars."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Primal" Quotes from Famous Books



... better employed), yet I am nearly, if not wholly of his mind respecting the works of the Fathers. Those which appear to me of any great value are valuable chiefly for those articles of Christian Faith which are, as it were, 'ante Christum' JESUM, namely, the Trinity, and the primal Incarnation spoken of by John i, 10. But in the main I should perhaps go even farther than Luther; for I cannot conceive any thing more likely than that a young man of strong and active intellect, who has ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... also prak/ri/ti, is the primal causal matter of the world in the /S/a@nkhya-system. It will be fully discussed in later parts of this work. To avoid ambiguities, the term pradhana has been left untranslated. Cp. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... the fitness of the soul for its proper task, which was conceived as the attainment of the good or the morally beautiful. As man has three functions or aspects, a cognitive, active, and appetitive, so there are three corresponding virtues. His function of knowing determines the primal virtue of Wisdom; his active power constitutes the virtue of Courage; while his appetitive nature calls for the virtue of Temperance or Self-control. These three virtues have reference to the individual's personal life. But inasmuch as a man is a part of a social organism, and has relations ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... orators, continually falling back to the old ground, are bundles of contradictions on this vital question. Inasmuch as we are, first, citizens of the United States, and second, of the State wherein we reside, the primal rights of all citizens should be regulated by the national government, and complete equality in civil and political rights everywhere secured. When women are denied the right to enter institutions of learning, and practice in the professions, unjust discriminations made against sex ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... well. Within the hour Kurho's forces were scattered, as attack and counter-attack surged and slashed in wild eruption of the long-shafts. Just as eruptive were the neuro-emotives, as each in his primal way must have known that this was the long awaitment, this was the grim finality in Kurho's boast and Otah's ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse

... the causal substance, i.e. dung (to which you refer as proving the identity of cause and effect), is not observed to take place!—You misstate the case, we reply; here also we do recognise in the effect that substance which is the primal cause, viz. earth.—But in smoke, which is the effect of fire, we do not recognise fire!—True! but this does not disprove our case. Fire is only the operative cause of smoke; for smoke originates from damp fuel joined with fire. That smoke is the effect of damp fuel is proved thereby, as well ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... There was the usual crush, but he could see the tall figure passing up the steps to the depot. He tried to force his way and was called a brute by a crowded woman. He ran down the platform to the gates he had entered with the truck. They were automatic and had locked. Then he became a primal creature being cheated of a lawful mate and climbed the high iron fence and ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter

... tricks which were constantly being employed in politics to effect one end or another, were greatly cheered by this so-called "public uprising." They little knew the pawns they were in the game, or how little sincerity constituted the primal impulse. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... primal law, simple yet complex, which we who understand life's manifold ascensions grow to symbolize in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... said Uncle Blair emphatically. "You're back in the youth of the race—back in the beguilement of the young world. Everything is in this hour—the beauty of classic myths, the primal charm of the silent and the open, the lure of mystery. Why, it's a time and place when and where everything might come true—when the men in green might creep out to join hands and dance around the fire, or dryads steal from their trees to warm their white limbs, grown chilly ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... our children, then, we have first to conquer ourselves—that painful, reiterated, primal necessity, which must underlie all teaching. Having done so, we shall find our task easier than we supposed. The children's own questions will lead us; and if we simply make it a rule never to answer a question falsely no matter how far it may probe, we shall find ourselves ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne

... should have known no less: It hath been taught us from the primal state That he which is was wish'd until he were; And the ebb'd man, ne'er lov'd till ne'er worth love, Comes dear'd by being lack'd. This common body, Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide, To ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... in front, inclosed the two or three rooms that may have been above the ground floor. The principal door was in the middle of the front, and there was one small window on each side of it. Apparently there was a low extension in the rear. This manner of house immediately succeeded the primal log cabins of the Western States, and such houses have sufficed for the happy shelter of large families of strong boys and blooming girls, as sound in body and soul, if not so refined and variously accomplished, as are reared in mansions of more pretension. Love, ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen

... years are fleeting, With their burden of toil and pain, We know that the page Of that primal age Will be opened ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster

... once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be, In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering, In the faith that looks through death, In years ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... before. It was love as his heart had imagined it in the days before he became the thrall of Miss Poppy Grace. He had known the feeling, but until now he had not known the woman who could inspire it. It was as if his heart had renewed its primal virginity in preparation ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... blue and shallow as a doll's, and edged with long, fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing them. Kirkwood returned their questioning glance, transfixed in indecision, his primal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear from this child who could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go; while by remaining he might perchance worm from him something ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... produce of his sudden gains. If, in the darkness, wife was separated from husband, or parent from child, vain was the hope of reunion. Each hurried blindly and confusedly on. Nothing in all the various and complicated machinery of social life was left save the primal law of self-preservation! ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded nymph among the sedges may awaken the primal desire of Pan among the reeds.... Saxham, even in the years of his degradation, had scarcely sunk to the level of the crook-shinned, hairy-thighed, hoofed satyr. But he had built his nest with the birds of night, and slaked his thirst at impure ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... cuts the Lake of Brienz rather to the eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen. That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... Eternal Decrees which have been visibly presented through Nature since the earliest dawn of creation, a faulty civilisation sets in and is presently swept back upon its advancing wheels, and forced to begin again with primal letters of learning. In the same way a faulty Soul, an imperfect individual Spirit, is likewise compelled to return to school and resume the study of the lessons it has failed to put into practice. Nevertheless, people cannot bear to have ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... yet—God knows—it is the best we can; And better than the world's way, to forget." So saying, like one that murmurs happy words To torture his own grief, half in self-scorn, He breathed a scrap of balladry that raised The mists a moment from that Paradise, That primal world of innocence, where Kit In childhood played, outside his father's shop, Under the sign of the Golden ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... equal to that obtainable from the combustion of 6,000 times the weight of the earth of solid coal. With the quickness of genius he saw that we had here a power sufficient to produce the enormous temperature of the sun, and also to account for the primal molten condition of our own planet. Mayer shows the utter inadequacy of chemical forces, as we know them, to produce or maintain the solar temperature. He shows that were the sun a lump of coal it would be utterly consumed in 5,000 years. He shows the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... drives you at this moment to despair is the idea of perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered. But when you understand that the primal idea itself was human, small and restricted, you will see that it is little more than a rung in the rotten ladder ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... the tired and hungry citizens of New York, jostling one another in their efforts to board a homeward train, present an unlovely spectacle; but do they, as Mr. Page affirms, reveal "such sheer and primal brutality as can be found nowhere else in the world where men and women are together?" Crowds will jostle, and have always jostled, since men first clustered in communities. Read Theocritus. The hurrying Syracusans—third century ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... ears, yet he heard around him still the mellow murmuring of bees, and saw the butterflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only the present, crowned, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... it;—till—till the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality (as towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there: then why should anybody travel the way?—Habit is our primal, fundamental law; Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learning, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... of an emblazoned page, The calendar of every age Down from Creation's primal dawn; With archetypes of spears and bones, And tons of undeciphered ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... to repeat the tale to the nori seller, his good neighbour. The good wife and wives listened again with open mouths. The Baba was the most interested of them all. This choice morsel of gossip was to be gathered at the primal source, from the lips of O'Taki herself. She was all sympathy in her curiosity—ranging in the two cases of Cho[u]bei and wife on the one part, and the metal dealer and his insulted household on the other part. Away she stepped quickly from the assembly of ward gossips. At the door of Cho[u]bei's ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... a long dissertation on the primal sin; the gist of which was that though the woman had never been warned not to eat of the Forbidden Fruit, she had to bear the brunt of the punishment. Then—though one is almost ashamed to chronicle such a triviality—he ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... of many primal influences forgotten or denied by races of higher type and deeper culture. Very little is known concerning the Malayan people who mingled with almost every Oriental stock. Amphibious tastes suggest picturesque traditions of prolonged voyaging ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... should be brought into a certain relation with us by something intermediate,) we find nothing in mesmerism contradictory of nature. Under its influence, the human frame continues to be still a system of nerves acted upon by elastic media, for the purpose of conveying to us the primal impulse of the Almighty Mind, which made, sustains, and moves the universe—having, as I trust, shown the conformity of mesmerism in all essential points with the principles of nature, and the inferences ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... will, and it dare not leave to the choice, or even to the conscience, of the individual an option as to which of its commands shall be obeyed, and which not. To do so would be to loose the bands of society, to bring to an end the reign of law, and to plunge the community once again into that primal chaos of anarchy from which in the beginning it painfully emerged. The State demands, and must necessarily demand, implicit obedience. From the loyal it receives it. Those from whom it does not receive it are rebels, no matter how ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... intelligence, of individual character, absolutely open and broad minded; and show how the Creator of the earth has got him in a rat trap—put him here "willy nilly" (you know the Omar verse); and then I want to show what he does about it. There is always the eternal question from the Primal Source—"What are you ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... was vital she should hang as straight as a picture on the wall. Had it ever yet befallen any young woman in the world to wish with secret intensity that she might have been, for her convenience, a shade less inordinately pretty? She had come to that, to this view of the bane, the primal curse, of their lavish physical outfit, which had included everything and as to which she lumped herself resentfully with her mother. The only thing was that her mother was, thank goodness, still so much prettier, still so assertively, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... divided by the officers of the church.* Tullidge, explaining this view in his history published in 1886, says that this was simply following out the social plan of a Zion which Smith attempted in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, under "revelation." He explains: "According to the primal law of colonization, recognized in all ages, it was THEIR LAND if they could hold and possess it. They could have done this so far as the Mexican government was concerned, which government probably never would even have ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... blood on the steps of the Criminal Courts Building and, through the favour of The Organisation that breeds such pests, escaped scot-free under the convenient fiction of "suspended sentence"; and knowing well the nature and the power of the man, the primal concerted thought had been to flee the place before bullets began to fly. In blind panic like that of sheep, they rose as one in uproar and surged toward the outer doors. November himself, struggling up from beneath the table, was caught and swept on willy-nilly in the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm To thy sick heart. Thou wilt find nothing here Of all that pained thee in the haunts of men, And made thee loathe thy life. The primal curse Fell, it is true, upon the unsinning earth, But not in vengeance. God hath yoked to guilt Her pale tormentor, misery. Hence, these shades Are still the abodes of gladness; the thick roof Of green and stirring branches is alive ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... off. Some one has entered, and is standing by me. It is a footman, with a telegram on a salver. Albeit I know the trivial causes for which people employ the telegraph-wires nowadays, I never can get over my primal deadly fear of those yellow envelopes, that seem emblems and messengers of battle, murder, and sudden death. As I tear it open, a hundred horrible impossible possibilities flash across my brain. Algy ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... King. O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't, A brother's murder. Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will: My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... steam-liners that began and closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and the prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless, like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... is really a universe in himself. Of the functions he performs in reference to the worlds that surround him we know a little; but how his heat is sustained—what is attraction—what is his destiny—is all unknown. If we are so ignorant of this primal source of life in all these planetary worlds, are we likely to be informed of the methods of moral discipline, probably in some ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio

... was not because Charles violated the constitution, it was because he violated truth and equity, and the nation's good, that he opposed him. Cromwell usurped his prerogatives, and violated the English constitution; but he did not transgress those great primal principles of truth, for which constitutions are made. He looked beyond constitutions to abstract laws of justice; and it never can be laid to his charge that he slighted these, or proved a weak or wicked ruler. He quarrelled with parliament, because ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... dark swamp that primal battle with the Word. She hated it and despised it, but her pride was in arms and her one great life friendship in the balance. She fought her way with a dogged persistence that brought word after word of praise and interest from Bles. Then, once well begun, her ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... causes of migration are primal and most important, and since like causes played such a large part in giving rise to this recent movement, it might be well to pause here to enumerate some of these causes, and to note briefly the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... book that ever man Looked into since the world began Is Woman! As I turn those pages, As fresh as in the primal ages, As day by day I scan, perplext, The ever subtly changing text, I feel that I am slowly growing To think no other work worth knowing. And in my copy—there is none So perfect as the one I own— I find no thing set down but such ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... into India through its one open door—that in the northwest. But when?—Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B.C., says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and their primal civilization. After Sir William Jones and others had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that Sanskrit was the parent of all these ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... to the colored man's interest in the professional and business ventures of his race-variety can be of weight, there are several antecedent facts of primal value to be considered. If devotion to either class is lacking, it must be remembered, that shortcoming is traceable to causes which, however marked may be their effects in the Negro's case, are equally marked and striking ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... was struck with the impression that there was something marked, something individually addressed to himself, in the old man's words; at any rate, it appealed to that primal imaginative vein in him which had so often, in his own country, allowed itself to dream over the possibilities of his birth. He knew that the feeling was a vague and idle one; but yet, just at this time, a convalescent, with a little ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... what man sees, but what God sees,—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand,—it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity, he has to do; and he digs where he stands,—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... my wife, "what must be the universal grief for the bridegroom so untimelily taken off in the primal crescence of his honeymoon! Your funeral will be unparalleled both for sympathy and splendor; all Tunbridge will attend in tears; and 'twill afford me a melancholy but sincere pleasure to extend to you the hospitality of the Allonby mausoleum, which many connoisseurs have accounted ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... occupations, and contact with her has to be carefully regulated. I agree with Mr. Andrew Lang that in the regulations concerning women amongst uncivilised people we have another illustration of the far-reaching principle of taboo (Social Origins and Primal Law, p. 239) she suffers because of her sex, and because of the superstitious dread to which her sex nature ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... divinity, and he first speaks: "How sorely mortals blame the Gods!" It is indeed an alienated discordant time like the primal fall in Eden. But why this blame? "For they say that evils come from us, the Gods; whereas they, through their own follies, have sorrows beyond what is ordained." The first words of the highest God ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... was abominable—he could not understand it. The woman was nothing to him—less than nothing—yet the blood hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely lowered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt—almost a physical nausea. The poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... It is not of earthly origin, though it is often prostituted to earthly uses. It is a God-made arrangement for human development and happiness, and woe be to him who defiles it with sensuous abuses. It is before the Church, before any of the solemn ordinances of God's house, the primal decree of the Father for his human children. To degrade or abuse the Marriage covenant is blasphemy, irreverence, sacrilegious wickedness. If one would enter the portals of the church bowed in reverence to God, much more should he thus enter the sanctuary of Marriage. If he should sit reverently ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... become | | musical—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech | | of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All | | deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central | | essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings | | and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all | | things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the | | feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the | | soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music.... | | See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature | | being ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... author here seems to be pointing to an intellect not human but divine. And yet, if in the moral sphere we are supposed to lift ourselves up to a higher region through faith in God, Virtue and Immortality, so drawing nearer to the Primal Being, why should it not be likewise in the intellectual? By contemplation (Anschauen) of an ever-creative nature, may we not make ourselves worthy to be spiritual sharers in her productions? I at first, led by an inner urge that ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye on your sights and the other on Cosmos. Blow the reek of burned powder from before you so you may look over the edge of the abyss of the Great Primal Cause. Duck to the whistle of a bullet and commune with Schopenhauer. Perhaps I am a little mad. Perhaps I am supremely intelligent. But in either case I am not understandable to myself. How, then, be ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... imaginative faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal commands we refuse ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... queen of all the flowers, Whose faintest sigh is like a spell, Was born in Eden's sinless bowers Long ere our primal parents fell. ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... held in the darkest hours, in his brutal moments; for in this fight between appetite and will there are moments when only the animal seems to exist, and the soul disappears in the glare and gloom of the primal emotions. Nancy he called his "lucky sixpence," but he called ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. We will grieve not—rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been, must ever be. In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering! In the faith that looks through death— In years, that ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... to become) erstwhile was a foliaged clump; and oft on Cytorus' ridge hath this foliage announced itself in vocal rustling. And to thee, Pontic Amastris, and to box-screened Cytorus, the pinnace vows that this was alway and yet is of common knowledge most notorious; states that from its primal being it stood upon thy topmost peak, dipped its oars in thy waters, and bore its master thence through surly seas of number frequent, whether the wind whistled 'gainst the starboard quarter or the lee or whether Jove propitious fell on both the sheets at once; nor ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... not repress her primal woman's instinct of revolt from the thoughts which his quiet interrogation sent at her, like an arrow. But she struggled to keep down the little shudder which woke and stirred within her. He had done nothing more than respond ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... eyes; the thought of its incalculable value overpowered his intellect. He knew that what he held in his hand was worth more than many years' purchase of an archiepiscopal see; that it would build cathedrals more stately than Ely or Cologne; that he who possessed it was set free for ever from the primal curse, and might follow his own inclinations without concern or hurry, without let or hindrance. And as he suddenly turned it, the rays leaped forth again with renewed brilliancy, and seemed to ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... me? The sensation goes over into thought, the thought into action. Thus the impression of the object is built into the little universe of his mind. The object and the action it implies are closely associated. As more objects are apprehended, more complex relations arise, but the primal condition remains—What can I do with it? Sensation, thought, action—this is the natural sequence of each completed mental process. As volition passes over into action, so does science into art, knowledge into power, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... considering his age and circumstances. Some of them remind us of some of the best Proverbs of Solomon. In general, we should say that to his mind filial piety and fraternal submission were the foundation of all virtuous practices, and absolute obedience to rulers the primal principle of government. He was eminently a peace man, discouraging wars and violence. He was liberal and tolerant in his views. He said that the "superior man is catholic and no partisan." Duke Gae ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... it. But there could be no more outrageous travesty. Morality in its springs is absolutely one with that clinging to life which is the most deep-lying of all interests, and with that relish for life in which its goodness needs no philosopher's approval. The primal determination to be and to sell one's self dearly, is not different, except in its limits, from the moral determination to be and to attain to the uttermost. The whole force of life is behind every moral scruple, and guarantees the sanity even of a ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... the Marquesan legendary chant, the primal command of their God after creation. Vevau and Hawaii were placed in their former abode toward India (Hawaii being undoubtedly Java; and Vevau being Vavao, in Malagasy); but they had brought the names with them, and when they reached the present ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... religion in this book, does not consider that my note on p. 19 meets the point of his argument. As to the Australians, I mean no more than that, AMONG endless low myths, some of them possess a belief in a "maker of everything," a primal being, still in existence, watching conduct, punishing breaches of his laws, and, in some cases, rewarding the good in a future life. Of course these are the germs of a sympathetic religion, even if the being thus regarded is mixed up with ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... and enthusiastic admirers,—the proportion of those who yield to his genius a cold and reluctant homage is probably greater in Scotland than in any other country in Christendom. "The rest of mankind recognize the essential truth of his delineations, and his loyalty to all the primal instincts and sympathies of humanity"; but the Scotch cannot forget that he opposed the Reform Bill, painted the Covenanters with an Episcopalian pencil, and made a graceful and heroic image of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... child of a kingly race. Undemonstrative? Yes, in a measure, But every movement replete with grace. Whiles we mocked at the monkeys' tricks Or pored apart on the apteryx; These could yield but a passing pleasure; Yours was the primal place. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various

... individualities that make up nearly every human being swung and seesawed. The kind-hearted, helpful, considerate man kept on surging upward, in the trust that his arrival would avert all trouble. Then this phase of his being would pass off and the great primal creature would take its place and come uppermost, with lustful ideas of vengeance, visions in which everything was tinged with red, and then his great voice would ring out in the still woods and the dogs would pull desperately, with never a pause, ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick

... length so accustomed to their hurtless menaces that I fell to beguiling the way with the invention of monstrosities, never suspecting that I owed each moment of life to the staring moon. Though hers was no primal radiance, it so hampered the evil things, that I walked in safety. For light is yet light, if but the last of a countless series of reflections! How swiftly would not my feet have carried me over the restless soil, had I known that, if still within their range when ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... the full and rounded outline of the figure, garbed in a loose robe of crimson, which contrasted beautifully with her luxuriant dark tresses, had that voluptuous development and grace which only maturity and maternity can impart to the female form. In short, never had Mercedes, in the days of her primal bloom, presented a person so fascinating as now. She was a woman to sigh for, perchance to die for, and one whom a man would willingly wish to live for, if he might but hope she would live for him, or, peradventure, he might even be willing not only ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg

... believe, between the careful preparation of the gradations of drawing in the one, and the daring assumption of massy light in the other. There are theorists who would assert that their system was the same—but they forget the primal work, with the point underneath, and all that it implied of transparency above. Van Eyck secured his drawing in dark, then threw a pale transparent middle tint over the whole, and recovered his highest lights; all was transparent ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... such a Church there is. If we follow the inclinations of our fallen nature, ever averse to the control of authority, we there find the reason why so many who love this world, receive not the authority that He planted, to endure like His primal creation, ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan

... despised by those who measure education in terms of material gains and losses. These insist on trying to sum up the account and find out exactly how much of the lesson imparted can be rendered up. But children, and those who are not over-educated, dwell in that primal paradise where men can come to know without fully comprehending each step. And only when that paradise is lost comes the evil day when everything needs must be understood. The road which leads to knowledge, ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... answerable for the "spasmodic" school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle's admirable distinction between the Horrible and the Terrible in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the "Duchess" and "Vittoria." His nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... the hideous and blasphemous phrase of Wordsworth, "the light of common day." We are inclined to increase our claims. We are inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to demand a green sun. Humility is perpetually putting us back in the primal darkness. There all light is lightning, startling and instantaneous. Until we understand that original dark, in which we have neither sight nor expectation, we can give no hearty and childlike praise to the splendid sensationalism ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... uneasiness. Was it because he was tired by the struggle for this girl, for whom he had labored so faithfully? After three years of unflagging devotion, was he truly relieved to have her dismiss him? Or was it that here, in this primal country, stripped of all conventions, he saw her and himself in a new light? He ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... union of Christ with his church, it is very probable that the church "fostered a feeling that a lifelong union of one man and one woman is, under all circumstances, the single form of intercourse between the sexes which is not illegitimate; and this conviction has acquired the force of a primal moral intuition."[1379] What has chiefly aided this effect has been the rise to wealth and civil power of the middle class of the later Middle Ages, in whose mores such views had become fixed without ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... magnificence of the old religion, the foster-mother of all that is finest and highest in art, and if I have such a thing as a literary project, it is to write a romance, of which Reading Abbey in its primal magnificence should form a part, not the least about forms of faith, understand, but as an element of the picturesque, and as embodying a very grand and influential part of bygone days. At present I have just finished (since writing Country Stories, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... heard this reference to becoming Galus. Ahm had spoken of it many times. Lys and I decided that it was a sort of original religious conviction, as much a part of them as their instinct for self-preservation—a primal acceptance of a hereafter and a holier state. It was a brilliant theory, but it was all wrong. I know it now, and how far we were from guessing the wonderful, the miraculous, the gigantic truth which even yet I may only guess at—the thing that sets ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... there his journey stayed, He raised two pillars toward the evening sun, And carved them by a goddess' subtle aid. Upon their shafts were sacred legends traced, And round the twain a serpent cincture placed: 'T was at this bound the primal world stood still, And of ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... view that the sentiment has a purely conventional or customary source. Now, if we accept some such view of the constitution of primitive society as has been suggested by Messrs. Atkinson and Lang (PRIMAL LAW), namely, that the social group consisted of a single patriarch and a group of wives and daughters, over all of whom he exercised unrestricted power or rights; we shall see that the first step towards ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... eternal pot, with its hissing note of preparation; the old dame who tended it, and the ragged urchins who learned from its contents the first reward of theft and the earliest temptation to it,—all these are blended into agreeable confusion as the primal impressions of my childhood. The woman who nurtured me as my mother was rather capricious than kind, and my infancy passed away, like that of more favoured scions of fortune, in alternate chastisement and caresses. In good ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... ancestor of the Otomo chief who led the Imperial troops, and Kume became the ancestor of the Kumebe, a hereditary corporation of palace guards. Further, they hold that whereas Ninigi and his five adjunct Kami all traced their lineage to the two producing Kami of the primal trinity, the special title of sovereignty conferred originally on the Sun goddess was transmitted by her to the Tenson (heavenly grandchild), Ninigi, the distinction of ruler and ruled being thus clearly defined. Finally they hold that Ninigi and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... have done the best it could with a very difficult problem. It has not actually allowed different codes of morals to men and women, and it may have had to wink on that account. Right there, in your Schopenhauer, you have a primal reason, that is, if you chose to follow your philosopher to the extent of actually believing that Nature has deliberately, from the beginning, protected women against that sin of which so much is made, and to which she has, ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... She had not been deceived in that! He and she had really been wedded in mind as well as in heart. But until now there had not arisen in their lives one of those searching questions which call into play emotions rooted far below reason and judgment, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It is easy to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning on them the full light of acquired knowledge; but too often one must still grope one's way through the personal difficulty by the dim taper ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... when the stability of the human race was, more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families—a father, an uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of children—wandered wherever food seemed most abundant, and fought with ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... complete the history of Man's Creation; which presents us with the primal institution of all,—that, namely, of Marriage.—"On the seventh Day, GOD rested from all His work which He had made; and blessed the seventh Day, and sanctified it; because that in it He had rested from all His work."—This ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... America," he went on suddenly, "to whom the future belongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured. Life has become once more the primal fight for bread. Of course the dollar is a complicated form of the food the cave man killed for and slunk after, and the means of combat are different, but it is as brutal. From that crude animal brutality comes all the vigor of life. We have none of it; we are too tired ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools that disprove Hell; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices innocence ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... the bough, The clod commoved with April, and the shapes Lurking 'twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark. Mocked I thee not in every guise of life, Hid in girls' eyes, a naiad in her well, Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled, Luring thee down the primal silences Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb? Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out Relentlessly from the detaining shore, Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices, Forth from the last faint headland's failing line, Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge And ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... make the earliest appeal to the child's eyes, and we can use them for our educational play. The duplicate set of worsted balls of the seven primal colors can be increased to include easily distinguishable shades. The child can be sent on entertaining voyages of discovery around the room with a ball of a certain color to find other objects similar in color in the rugs, books, ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright

... common tree—IXORA TIMORENSIS—is silent on a quality that appeals to the unversed admirer almost as strongly as the handsome flowers, which occur in large, loose panicles at the terminals of the branches. Boldly exposed, the white flowers as they lose primal freshness change to cream, but last for several weeks. The omitted compliment from formal records is the singular fragrance of the flowers—strong, sweet, and enticing, though with a drug-like savour, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so dreadful. It was, perhaps, part of the expiation of her sin that, at a moment when she most lacked her sex's intuitive tenderness and care, she met only the half-contemptuous ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... he held her, as the primal man takes and holds his woman, tightly against his beating heart as though he would defy the world, lost in a sea of strange new emotions that rolled in golden billows high ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... early primal melody of thousands of years ago may have been one can hardly suggest, but that the subject-matter of the song was mythical there can be very little doubt, and, like folk-lore tales, built upon and around nature worship; for as the capacity for creating language ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... Venice are true. Indeed they are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... pity moves. But tell me; in the time of your sweet sighs, By what, and how love granted, that ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes?" She replied: "No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when mis'ry is at hand! That kens Thy learn'd instructor. Yet so eagerly If thou art bent to know the primal root, From whence our love gat being, I will do, As one, who weeps and tells his tale. One day For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. Ofttimes ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... then Into thy healing seas again.... For when we swim out, side by side, Like a lover with his bride, When thy lips are salt with brine, And thy wild eyes flash in mine, The music of a mightier sea Beats with my blood in harmony. I breast the primal flood of being, Too clear for speech, too near for seeing; And to his heart, new reconciled, The Eternal takes ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes

... shot with crescent lightnings. Alien in his desolation, he wondered if her solemn leaps, as the music dashed with frantic speed upon his ear-drums, signified the incarnation of Devi, dread slayer of men! The primal charmers affrighted his vision: Lilith, Ourania, Astarte, Ashtaroth, Belkis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Cotytto, and many immemorial figures from before the Flood streamed by and melted into the woven paces of Debora—this new Jephtha's daughter dancing to her doom as her father ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... wondrous song in melting strains To our mute hearts swift entrance gains; By magical yet unfelt force, We see creation's mighty course: The firmament appears in space— God breathes upon the water's face. One flashing word bids primal light appear, Revolving stars begin their vast career; Upheaving mountains now are seen, Tall trees and tender herbage green; Young animals to being rise, And animate by living cries; We hear the mighty thunder roar, And rains in gushing ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... one case than in the other, namely, by generation and birth. There remains, therefore, only the redemptive act itself, and this is transcendant, ineffable, and 'a fortiori', therefore, inexplicable. Like the act of primal apostasy, it is in its own nature a mystery, known only through ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... system: a place for every man, and every man in his place; "to insure to each human being the freest development of his faculties": there is a grand fragment of absolute truth in that, a going back to primal Nature, to a like life with that of sunshine and pines, a Utopia more Christ-like than the heaven (which Christ never taught) of eternal harp-playing and golden streets. But as for making it real, every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... doth transcend our muses, Our Sirens, in those dulcet clarions, As primal splendor that ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... unifying thought of this volume is that the necessary ideas and laws of the reason, and the native instincts of the human heart, originally implanted by God, are the primal and germinal forces of history; and that these have been 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... fact caused him no regrets at all. Catie, as he still called her on occasion, should, of course, have been the one to comprehend him; but, like the cicada, he merely iterated "Catie didn't." And comprehension is the primal need of ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... cultivators of her soil, her down-trodden peasantry, sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely the farmer's lot, plus education and plus habits of mental activity, is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless, considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is the advantage which he has even then ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... through such length of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting nature have her ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... administering food and drink to himself with a serious air of delicate zest, as though he were presiding benevolently at some work of charity and mercy. He had certainly flourished on his idleness like a green bay tree! Hugh was inclined to believe in the necessity to happiness of the observance of some primal laws, like the law of labour, but here was a contradiction to all his theories. He sighed to think of the mountains of carefully prepared food that this rosy, well-brushed person must have consumed in the course of his life! He was a ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... switched round. The accomplishments came first; I became fascinated by a voice and a mind. But when I saw her face.... Oh, well! Mrs. Sandford warned me against her; the woman herself has warned me; the primal instinct of self-preservation has warned me; yet, here I am! I had not intended to bother ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath



Words linked to "Primal" :   key, primaeval, central, primordial, early



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