"Proximate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... account of the argument it contains may well precede the suggestions presently to be set forth concerning the Unseen World; and we shall find it most convenient to begin, like our authors, with a brief statement of what the principle of continuity teaches as to the proximate beginning and end of the visible universe. I shall in the main set down only results, having elsewhere [2] given a simple exposition of the arguments upon which these results ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Thus proximate, they by and by both heard something very like a groan behind them, and looking round, beheld the Saurian eye. Lady Blandish smiled, but the baronet's discomposure was not to be concealed. By a strange fatality every stage of their innocent ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... set about making some more. In examining Miss Baker's teeth at the preliminary sitting he had found a cavity in one of the incisors. Miss Baker had decided to have it filled with gold. McTeague remembered now that it was what is called a "proximate case," where there is not sufficient room to fill with large pieces of gold. He told himself that he should have to use "mats" in the filling. He made some dozen of these "mats" from his tape of non-cohesive gold, cutting it ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... was the proximate cause of the River War was born by the banks of the Nile, not very far from Dongola. His family were poor and of no account in the province. But as the Prophet had claimed a royal descent, and as a Sacred Example was sprung from David's ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... expressed a certain abhorrence of sin by the punishment of the world. Christ now suffers only as much pain as will express the same amount of abhorrence. And considering the dignity of the Sufferer, and his relations to the Father, there was no need of suffering the same, or even any proximate amount of pain, to make an expression of abhorrence to sin, that is, of justice, equal to that produced by the literal punishment of the race. Still, it will be seen to be a part of this more mitigated view, that Christ suffers evil as evil; which evil suffered is accepted as a compensative ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... wound up by the Supreme Artist. Self-consciousness would indeed make him a thinking automaton; but the consciousness of his own spontaneity would be mere delusion if this were mistaken for freedom, and it would deserve this name only in a comparative sense, since, although the proximate determining causes of its motion and a long series of their determining causes are internal, yet the last and highest is found in a foreign hand. Therefore I do not see how those who still insist on regarding time and space as attributes belonging to the existence of things ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... of proctitis are more or less accompanied by constipation and diarrhea. In all cases of chronic constipation I have found proctitis, and often colitis, and am forced to believe it is the most common and proximate cause of chronic constipation of the bowels. Constipation being a primary symptom, there must of necessity follow numerous secondary symptoms, of which diarrhea well marks the progress of septic infection. ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... reason associate those which they acquire with tenacity; they cannot reason concerning general causes; they expect that any event, which has once or twice followed another, will always follow in the same order; they do not distinguish between proximate and remote causes, between coincidences and the regular connection of cause and effect: hence children are subject to feel hopes and fears from things which to us appear matters of indifference. Suppose, for instance, that a child is very eager to go out to walk, that his mother puts on her ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... recurrences in the future? Or have we in reality only penetrated the crust of the question, and ascertained the immediate and superficial causes, not the radical and basic ones? The latter is the case. We have thus far seen the apparent and proximate causes merely—which brought to the surface, at the present time, a riotous disposition, always existent in the community, a volcano slumbering and smouldering, ever ready to burst forth and deluge ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... New York, opposed the bill principally on the ground of the expense involved in its execution. After having presented many columns of figures, Mr. Taylor arrived at this conclusion: "The cost or proximate cost of the bureau for one year, confining its operation to the hitherto slave States, will be $25,251,600. That it is intended to put the bureau in full operation in every county and parish of the hitherto ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... general to admit of a positive solution; but should he specify the commodity and place of investment in the seventeenth century and to-day of the 1000l., our statistics might still be at fault, and deny us even a proximate determination of his inquiry. Even his 1000l., which he may consider a fixed measure of value, or punctum comparationis, is varying in value (power of purchase) daily, even hourly, as regards almost every exchangeable ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... occurred to you what a wonderful piece of mechanism is that hand with which Nature has equipped you for seizing the oars of life's activities? Galen, the famous anatomist, after a prolonged study of the human hand, conceiving it to be the proximate instrument of the soul, was forced to renounce atheism, to acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being. Scientists regard the human hand as being the most remarkable organ, not vital, in the whole ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... of Rome over the western region of the Mediterranean. Moreover, in its further development, it led to that necessary contact and interaction between the state systems of the east and the west, which the first Punic war had only foreshadowed; and thereby gave rise to the proximate decisive interference of Rome in the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... architectural monuments, that a voice may forever be sounding audibly in human ears of homage to these powers, and that even alien feelings may be compelled into secret submission to their influence. Therefore, amongst the number of those who value such things, upon the scale of direct proximate utility, rank not me: that arithmetica officina is in my years abominable. But still I affirm that, in our analysis of an ordinary university, or "college" as it is provincially called, we have not yet arrived at any element of service rendered to knowledge or education, large enough to call ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Foods. Foods may be conveniently divided into four great classes, to which the name food-stuffs or alimentary principles has been given. They correspond to the chief "proximate principles" of which the body consists. To one or the other of these classes all available foods belong[16]. The classification of food-stuffs ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... which most directly conduce towards the first two of these ends, and which may be considered their proximate and efficient causes are contained in human nature itself, so that their acquisition hinges only on our own power, and on the laws of human nature. It may be concluded that these gifts are not peculiar to any nation, but ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... great cause of this condition is man's evil heart of alienation, the spirit of slumber—but we may find proximate and special causes. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... encounter more than any man ever did, that hostility which such conduct, however necessary, never fails to produce. This great change in our commercial policy, however unavoidable, must be regarded as the proximate cause of his final expulsion from office in July, 1846. His administration, however, had been signalized by several measures of great political importance. Among the earliest and most prominent of ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... certitude, and come into the domain where Conjecture, varying from the strongest presumption to mere plausibility, is the highest proof. Laws or Principles are yet undiscovered there, and in their place we find Generalizations—Suppositive or Proximate Laws—which are in process of proof, or already established by such evidence as the Inductive Method can array, and which carry the conviction of their correctness with varying degrees of force, to larger or ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... replied, and went vaguely off in the direction of the billiard-room. It was light and warm there, though the place was empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution. He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco's substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and not really thinking of anything very definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... supreme cause is necessary, the effect may be contingent by reason of the proximate contingent cause; just as the germination of a plant is contingent by reason of the proximate contingent cause, although the movement of the sun which is the first cause, is necessary. So likewise things known by God are contingent on account ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Tiberius Gracchus was tribune (and the coincidence is significant), it was found necessary to send a consul to put down the first slave revolt in Sicily. It is not known when it broke out. [Sidenote: Story of Damophilus.] Its proximate cause was the brutality of Damophilus, of Enna, and his wife Megallis. His slaves consulted a man named Eunous, a Syrian-Greek, who had long foretold that he would be a king, and whom his master's guests had been in the habit of jestingly asking to remember ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... that she had been out of her mind for some time. Indeed rumours of the sort had been afloat before. The proximate cause of her insanity was not certainly known. Some suspicion of the worthlessness of her lover, some enlightenment as to his perfidy, or his unaccountable disappearance alone, may have occasioned its manifestation. But there is great reason to believe that she had a natural ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... henceforth obstructs John's vision. "The darkness is past, and the true light now shineth."—"At evening time it shall be light." (Zech. xiv. 7.)—"And they sat on them." Who?—There is here what may be termed a remarkable chasm in the language of the text. There is no visible or proximate antecedent. Who are they who "sit on thrones?" Did Millenarians only put this question, and patiently search for the solution in the context, agreeably to the allegorical texture of this whole book, all their hallucinations might be easily and happily obviated. ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... moonlighting incident, now appearing for the first time on this or any other stage. Some tenants years ago were evicted on the Langford estates. Negotiations were proceeding for their proximate restoration, but nothing could be settled. A few days ago a small farmer named Benjamin Brosna, aged 55, agreed with the proper authorities to graze some cattle on the land in question pending the arrangement ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... to be acting with the perfect disinterestedness which can only be accounted for by superficial reasoners on the assumption of some such abstract notion as religion, moral sense, or duty. Since the behaviour of mankind at large, therefore, is invariably guided by a remote or proximate consideration of utility; since conduct depends upon character, and character is shaped by external conditions and positive sanctions, it is possible to frame, on utilitarian principles, scientific rules of behaviour which can be powerfully, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... how we can proximate ourselves inter th' vicinity of it lessen we delegate th' imperial functions of orinthological specimens t' some member of this here party," ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... vicissitudes of this wonderful pile of architecture are not yet ended. The discovery of Perrault's base at the east and of Lemercier's at the north, will inevitably lead to their proximate disclosure. Ample space remains at the east for the excavation of a wide and deep fosse, which would expose the wing to view as Perrault intended it; but on the Rue de Rivoli side the problem is more difficult, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... eventful morning, as he sauntered along from his boarding-house to Mr. Rayne's. His sentiments were most likely those that form an item of the very smallest experience, when its victim is forced to realize that he has made a very unwilling sacrifice voluntarily; that he himself is the remote, proximate, direct and indirect cause of his own misfortune. Still, this was the only room for hope left in Guy. So long as a man condemns himself before his own tribunal, making of his inner self the truthful witness and impartial judge, those ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... time the bereaved Farfrae had learnt the, at least, proximate cause of Lucetta's illness and death, and his first impulse was naturally enough to wreak vengeance in the name of the law upon the perpetrators of the mischief. He resolved to wait till the funeral was over ere he moved in the matter. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... take it he was not very well pleased with Wharncliffe's last letter, in which he distinctly told the Duke that his speech on the Address, and declaration against any Reform, was what overthrew his Government. This he never will admit, and, passing over the proximate cause, always refers his fall to (what was certainly the remote cause) the Catholic question—that is, to the breaking up of the Tory party which followed it, and the union of the old Tories with the Whigs and Radicals on purpose to turn him out. In this correspondence Wharncliffe ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... With regard to the proximate cause of Mr. Darwin's defense of his father's views on language—viz. an article in the "Quarterly Review," Imay say at once that I knew nothing about it till I saw Mr. G. Darwin's article; and if there should be any suspicion in Mr. Darwin's mind that the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... an unknown and apparently unknowable element, then, but not till then, does the idea God present itself to us. So at coroners' inquests juries never say the deceased died by the visitation of God if they know any of the more proximate causes. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Army an agreement to move progressively toward full integration. Gradual integration was disregarded, however, when the Army, fighting in Korea, was forced by a direct threat to the efficiency of its operations to begin wide-scale mixing of the races. Specifically, the proximate reason for the Army's integration in the Far East was the fact that General Ridgway faced a severe shortage of replacements for his depleted white units while accumulating a surplus of black replacements. So pressing was his need that even before permission ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... about the far future—that awaiting them at Cadiz. But the ladies cannot overlook, or forget, some perils more proximate. The retrospect of the day throws a shadow over the morrow. That encounter with De Lara and Calderon cannot end without further action. Not likely; and both aunt and niece recall it, questioning their now affianced lovers—adjuring them ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... These were examined carefully in respect to their physical as well as mental condition, no inquiry being omitted which was calculated to throw light upon the remote or immediate causes of this mournful imperfection in the creation of God. The proximate causes Dr. Howe mentions are to be found in the state of the bodily organization, deranged and disproportioned by some violation of natural law on the part of the parents or remoter ancestors of the sufferers. Out of 420 cases of idiocy, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... may not be justly held accursed. For though history is a thing that never repeats itself—since no two historical propositions are alike—one perennial truth holds good, namely, that every social hardship or injustice may be traced back to the linked sins of aggression and submission, remote or proximate in point of time. And I, for one, will never believe the trail of the serpent to be so indelible that barefaced incongruity must ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Kelleher puts it on a later page, 'There is a sense certainly in which, with a solitary exception in the case of wages, it may be said with perfect truth that the common estimation determines the just price. That is, the common estimation is the proximate ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... cruelly, would be cast off in the very particular in which its incidence in our own day is not otherwise than welcome. The Law of the Twelve Tables permitted the execution of Testaments in the only case in which it was thought possible that they could be executed, viz. on failure of children and proximate kindred. It did not forbid the disinherison of direct descendants, inasmuch as it did not legislate against a contingency which no Roman lawgiver of that era could have contemplated. No doubt, as the offices ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... qualities, whether as appreciated by the Esquimaux as a material for huts, or by the agriculturists of our own climate as sheltering the seed, are too well known to require any particular remarks. Strange as it may appear, the proximate cause of the formation of snow is not yet fully agreed upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... spark will kindle a flame where everything lies open to catch it. I have absolutely forgot the proximate cause of quarrel, but it was some trifle which occurred at the card-table which occasioned high words and a challenge. We met in the morning beyond the walls and esplanade of the fortress which I then commanded, on the frontiers ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... foregoing experiments I have demonstrated the two proximate constituents of common air, because it was not necessary to know anything more about it for a clear knowledge of fire. I shall now go further, and see whether a still deeper decompounding ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... undated, but it was probably made on the last day of May. It has served to fix the proximate time of the illness and disquiet which led to his first withdrawal ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... other paraphernalia as one would have thought the space could possibly contain, and was sitting in the corner section reflectively chewing a toothpick. There appeared to be a distressing lack of interest in the train on the part of all its proximate officials; no one seemed ready ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the Clayton Act. Despite this, the injunction was confirmed and the boycott again declared illegal, the court holding that the words "employer and employes" in the Act restrict its benefits only to "parties standing in proximate relation to a controversy," that is to the employes who are immediately involved in the dispute and not to the national union which undertakes to bring their employer to terms by causing their other members ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... to Stephen that that was what she called real wickedness, the kind that did the most harm, and invited him, by inference, to a liberal judgment of stupid sinners. He sat emitting short unsmiling sentences with eyes nervously fugitive from Lady Dolly's too proximate opulence until the third act began. Then he gave place with embarrassed alacrity to Colonel Cummins, and folded his arms again at the back of ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... designed to convey the expression of the wish that on the 25th of December and proximate days you, and those not distantly connected with you by family ties, may have enjoyed a season of Wholesome Hilarity, and that the new period of twelve months, upon which we are about to enter, may be ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... that which is deduced is higher than that for which it is deduced, as, "Rain water in its ultimate genus is that which descends from heaven and is increased by showers," but in reference to its more proximate sense, under which the right of keeping it off is comprised, the genus is, mischievous rain water. The subordinate species of that genus are waters which injure through a natural defect of the place, or those which are ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... cloistered) system of government, thereafter known as Insei. For, in 1086, after thirteen years' reign, he resigned the sceptre to an eight-year-old boy, Horikawa, his son by the chugu, Kenko. The untimely death of the latter, for whom he entertained a strong affection, was the proximate cause of Shirakawa's abdication, but there can be little doubt that he had always contemplated such a step. He took the tonsure and the religious title of Ho-o (pontiff), but in the Toba palace, his new residence, he organized ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... "or some of his imitators". The proximate cause of the 'Citizen of the World', as the present writer has suggested elsewhere, 'may' have been Horace Walpole's 'Letter from XoHo [Soho?], a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking'. This was noticed as 'in Montesquieu's manner' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... conqueror of the most dangerous of the barbarians: it is by no means clear that he was not "innocent" of any treasonable designs against Valentinian. If the early acts of his life, the introduction of the Huns into Italy, and of the Vandals into Africa, were among the proximate causes of the ruin of the empire, his murder was the signal for its almost ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... a secluded, dark, and out-of-the-way place, is the "home plantation" of Col. Edward Lloyd, on the Eastern Shore, Maryland. It is far away from all the great thoroughfares, and is proximate to no town or village. There is neither school-house, nor town-house in its neighborhood. The school-house is unnecessary, for there are no children to go to school. The children and grand-children of Col. Lloyd were taught ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... the morning when Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or thereabouts—and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place of residence to-day than in the stirring times of the Saxon invasion. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... for two motives, one to preserve the democracies of Europe, the other for our own preservation. The sinking of our ships by submarines was merely the immediate cause, the match that lit the fire, just as the firing on Fort Sumter was the proximate but not the real cause of our Civil War. The real cause of our Civil War was, as Lincoln said, because this nation "could not endure half slave and half free." The real cause of the present World War is because civilization cannot endure half military autocracy and half free ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... abstraction of them by others than those for whose use they were intended. Moreover, we do not believe it would be good for our descendants to have the enjoyment of excessive wealth without a corresponding personal effort of producing, nor would it be good for us to exert effort without some proximate and corresponding enjoyment. The limits of individual life rightly demand that a large proportion of individual effort shall fructify ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... of the patient, generally attributes the sickness to uncertain causes and sometimes so remote that they have no connection with the case in question; and, since he prescribes his remedies for such causes, the true, proximate, and essential causes which are working out of sight without any check, end, if not by killing the patient, by placing him in evident risk. All see and recognize that the commerce of the Indias is in a feeble condition, that the merchants are losing, that the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... of two kinds: the remote or far and the proximate or near; they differ in the degree of facility with which they furnish temptation, and in the quality and nature of such temptation. In the former, the danger of falling is less, in the latter it is more, probable. In theory, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... caught. It is a curious fact, that the warmer the water, the brighter are the colours of the fish which inhabit it; though, as food, they are generally of much less value. While the Gulf Stream largely benefits the globe, it is at the same time the proximate cause of shipwreck and disaster, from the storms which it creates, in consequence of the irregularity of its temperature, and that of the neighbouring regions, both in air and water. Perhaps nowhere is a more terrific sea found than when a heavy ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... they reached the beanstalk a hundred yards ahead of the giant. Down the stalk they slipped and dropped, the Giant lumbering after. Once at the bottom, Jack ran to the garage and got out his man-killer, and when the Giant reached ground he was knocked, as Jack had promised, into the middle of the proximate month. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... that the streams make their last leap into the sea, so that the ship of commerce brought the staple to the manufacturing power. This made you a commercial and manufacturing people. In the Southern States great plains interpose between the last leaps of the streams and the sea. Those plains most proximate to navigation, were the first cultivated, and the sea bore their products to the most approachable water power, there to be manufactured. This was the first cause of the difference. Then your longer and more severe winters—your soil not as favorable ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... which took place during the residence of Clapperton at Sockatoo, we shall be obliged in several instances to be very circumstantial, as they have all a reference proximate or remote to the affairs which took place, when he visited the place at a future period, in company with Richard Lander, in whose papers some highly interesting information is contained, respecting the conduct of the sultan and the natives, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... this forged document were printed and distributed, and it was widely considered by the people to be genuine, and no doubt led to the belief by the members of the Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army that they would shortly be disarmed. This undoubtedly became one of the proximate causes of ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... formal cause of virtue, as of everything, is gathered from its genus and difference, when it is defined as "a good quality": for "quality" is the genus of virtue, and the difference, "good." But the definition would be more suitable if for "quality" we substitute "habit," which is the proximate genus. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... passage, some such threatened change of front at the consulate, opposed with outcry, would explain what seems otherwise inexplicable, the bitter, indignant, almost hostile tone of a subsequent letter from Brandeis to Knappe—"Brandeis's inflammatory letter," Bismarck calls it—the proximate cause of the German ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... analysis will soon open a wide field of knowledge and inquiry; but it is sufficient for our present purpose, if, by a careful study of the composition and chemical disposition of the proximate compounds of the coal and the wood fuel, we arrive at the conclusion that both are the result of forces which, very slight in themselves at any moment, yet when acting through long periods of time become laid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... of the Kentish dialect (with the exception of the Epinal Gloss) are of much later date than the times which our narrative has yet reached; and they are only offered as a proximate representation of that which was the first of English dialects to receive literary culture. This dialect is peculiarly interesting as being that from which the West Saxon was developed; in other words, it is the earliest ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... latter part of this sentence—famine was not all a pretext, but it was certainly used by ministers as a cry to strengthen their Corn Law policy. "It was," said Sir Robert Peel, "that great and mysterious calamity, the potato failure, that was the immediate and proximate cause which led to the dissolution of the Government on the 6th of December, 1845." Two most important points, he said, they had now before them; (1) the measures to be immediately adopted in consequence of the potato blight; (2) and the ultimate course to ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... of the human body or any other object into Parts, Limbs, Members, etc., and the recombination of these into a structural whole, arises in the scale of creation above the Domain of Elements (Ultimate, Proximate, Chemical, etc.), this last embracing only the qualitative nature of the substances entering into the structure. In the Universe at large, therefore, this Relational Domain is that in which we shall find Things, Properties, Actions, and, specifically, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 2: The proximate end does not exclude the ultimate end. Therefore that corporeal creatures were, in a manner, made for the sake of the spiritual, does not prevent their being made on account ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... exists, or did exist, in the popular mind; and fire, in an insurance sense, as distinct from explosion, was accurately defined by Justice McIlvaine, of the Supreme Court of Ohio (1872), in the case of the Union Insurance Company vs. Forte, i.e., an explosion was a remote cause of loss and not the proximate cause, when the fire was a burning of a gas jet which did not destroy, though the explosion caused by the burning gas-jet did destroy. Earlier than this decision, however (in 1852), Justice Cushing, of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... in which they coexist, has not been reduced to a law; and this is why the sequences or coexistences among the effects of several of them together cannot rank as laws of nature, though they are invariable while the causes coexist. For this same reason (since the proximate causes are traceable ultimately to permanent causes) there are no original and independent uniformities of coexistence between effects of different (proximate) causes, though there may be such between different effects ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... been instituted at Madrid for a full treaty not open to these objections and in the line of the general policy touching the neighborly intercourse of proximate communities, to which I elsewhere advert, and aiming, moreover, at the removal of existing burdens and annoying restrictions; and although a satisfactory termination is promised, I am compelled to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... must be conceded that a political party ought to have proximate aims, measures which it hopes to carry in the next session or the next parliament, as well as a more distant goal. Marxian socialism, as it existed in Germany, seemed to me to suffer in this way: although ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... us that since the time of his first essay, "written as far back as 1842," his "ultimate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large a scientific basis.... Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularisation of morals is becoming imperative. ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... when? and desired to be employed by him in whatever service he should think fit. The Prince only asked what he now thought of predestination? and advised, if he had a mind to be busy, to consult the canons." The Bishop omits mentioning the proximate cause of the Prince's question, and says nothing about his declining the offer of his services, which indeed it is not likely that he did, at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... noted respecting these forms, except that, in fig. 1, the two lower rolls, with the angular projections between, represent the fall of the mouldings of two proximate arches on the abacus of the bearing shaft; their two cornices meeting each other, and being gradually narrowed into the little angular intermediate piece, their sculptures being slurred into the contracted space, a curious proof of the earliness of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... (inferiority) 34[obs3]. afterbirth, afterburden[obs3]; placenta, secundines[Med]. V. succeed; come after, come on, come next; follow, ensue, step into the shoes of; alternate. place after, suffix, append. Adj. succeeding &c.v.; sequent[obs3]; subsequent, consequent, sequacious[obs3], proximate, next; consecutive &c. (continuity) 69; alternate, amoebean[obs3]. latter; posterior &c. 117. Adv. after, subsequently; behind ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... proportion to that physical ultimate we name the electron, as is the firmament immensely vast in proportion to a single star. It has been suggested that in the infinitely minute of organic bodies there is a power of movement in a fourth dimension. If so, such four-dimensional movement may be the proximate cause of the phenomenon of growth—of those chemical changes and renewals whereby an organism is enabled to expand in three-dimensional space, just as by a three-dimensional power of movement (the act of walking) man is able to ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... question our Chamber is taking a lead in Composed, as you know, of the Flowers of Dunedin, Intelligent Druggists, rhetorical Quakers, Broad acres—a few—but no want of wiseacres. All are perfectly clear that these horrid restrictions Are the proximate cause of our present afflictions, Obstructing the bowels, as 'twere, of the nation, And entirely deranging our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... good for culinary purposes only from the time of their ripening till they begin to sprout. The process of germination changes their proximate elements, and renders them less fit for food. Select turnips which are plump and free from disease. A turnip that is wilted, or that appears spongy, pithy, or cork-like when cut, is ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... which had uniformly attended the case, was again baffled. He was never able to see the statement of the "refugee" or even to get his name, though, according to General McClellan, the testimony of the refugee was the proximate and apparently decisive cause ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... perfection of the moral character is, not in a stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... from understanding, and that a system of Induction may be constructed upon the axiom of Causation, regarded as a principle of Reason, just as well as by considering it as a law of Nature, and upon much the same lines. The Materialist, admitting all this, may say that a judgment is only the proximate meaning of a proposition, and that the ultimate meaning, the meaning of the judgment itself, is always some matter-of-fact; that the other schools have not hitherto been eager to recognise the unity of Deduction and Induction or to investigate the conditions ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... will. The third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do so, so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. So vital is the religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of education from the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of obligation, or finite from infinite duties. Those whose training has been more religious than ethical can hardly teach morality per se satisfactorily to the noli me tangere ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... are accomplished only slowly, the change of the so-called consanguine into the punaluan family must unquestionably have engaged vast periods of time, and been broken through by many relapses, still noticeable in much later days. The proximate external inducement for the development of the punaluan family was, possibly, the necessity of splitting up the strongly swollen membership of the family, to the end that new grounds could be occupied for cattle ranges and agriculture. Probably, also, with the reaching of a higher ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... cause of this condition of the centres is supposed to be the same as that of the torpidity of all the other organs in sleep, namely, the retardation of the circulation. But, though there is no doubt as to this, the question of the proximate physiological conditions of sleep is still far from being settled. Whether during sleep the blood-vessels of the brain are fuller or less full than during waking, is still a moot point. Also the qualitative condition of the blood in the cerebral vessels ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... benevolence is that it looks only to proximate and immediate results without considering either alternatives or distant and indirect consequences. A large and highly respectable form of benevolence is that connected with the animal world, and in England it is carried in some respects ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of Professor Arber's generally excellent "Story of the Pilgrim Fathers," so often referred to herein, to find him sharply arraigning "those members of the Leyden church who were responsible for the fitting of the SPEEDWELL," alleging that "they were the proximate causes of most of the troubles on the voyage [of the MAY-FLOWER] out; and of many of the deaths at Plymouth in New England in the course of the following Spring; for they overmasted the vessel, and by so doing ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... ascend other plants spirally east-south-west, as Humulus, Hop, Lonicera, Honey-suckle, Tamus, black Bryony, Helxine. Others turn their spiral stems west-south-east, as Convolvulus, Corn-bind, Phaseolus, Kidney-bean, Basella, Cynanche, Euphorbia, Eupatorium. The proximate or final causes of this difference have not been investigated. Other plants are furnished with tendrils for the purpose of climbing: if the tendril meets with nothing to lay hold of in its first revolution, it makes ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... growing luminous through the gloom, "you called me a witch, and now you shall see. I wave my hands, so—and you are no more in Galloway. You are in the land of faery. I blow you a kiss, so—and lo! you are no more William, sixth Earl of Douglas and proximate Duke of Touraine, but you are even as True Thomas, the Beloved of the Queen of the Fairies, and ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... chemistry. It has shown us how bodies stand affected to each other through an almost boundless range of combinations. It has given us a most ingenious theory to account for certain fixed relations in these combinations. It has successfully eliminated a great number of proximate compounds, more or less stable, from organic structures. It has invented others which form the basis of long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we are perhaps becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... who accompanied with lively songs, gestures, and movements, such heroic adventures as were of a more cheerful hue, (many in the Odyssey for instance; for here, also, as in many other respects, the germ is to be found in Homer,) or, at least, could be made to wear such an appearance. The proximate cause of this species of drama was derived from the festivals of Bacchus, where satyr-masks was a common disguise. In mythological stories with which Bacchus had no concern, these constant attendants of his were, no doubt, in some sort arbitrarily introduced, but still not without a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... consent to go out by the door to avoid it." His cousin, the Duke of Elbeuf, paid him a visit at night to urge him to withdraw himself from the plot hatched against him. "If it were necessary to lose my life in order to reap the proximate fruits of the states' good resolution," said Guise, "that is what I have quite made up my mind to. Though I had a hundred lives, I would devote them all to the service of God and His church, and to the relief of the poor people for whom I feel the greatest pity;" then, touching ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... an animal can thus only be preserved by a mixed food; that is, food which contains all the proximate principles just noticed. Starch or sugar alone cannot sustain the animal body, since neither of them furnishes the materials to build up the fleshy parts of the animal. When fed on substances in which an insufficient quantity ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... are?" "I do, to a great extent; I seldom knew any instance when there was sufficient employment for the people that they were inclined to be disturbed; if they had plenty of work and employment, they are generally peaceable." John Leslie Foster, Esq., M.P., in his examination, states: "I think the proximate cause [of the disturbances] is the extreme physical misery of the peasantry, coupled with their liability to be called upon for the payment of different charges, which it is often perfectly impossible for them to meet." Matthew Singleton, Esq., ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... library from a small bookcase filled with Patent Office Reports and similar offerings of a beneficent government. This station embraced a wide prospect of shady street flanked by pleasantly sloping lawns and dwellings of various architectural pretence. Most proximate and most interesting to Mrs. Bowers was the Hilliard house, and while she rocked placidly over her darning, she contrived to hold this gingerbread edifice in a scrutiny which permitted the escape of no slightest movement of chick or child. She ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... for its own sake, but at fitting the individual for social service. Our school system tends ever to forget this truth. It is in constant danger of losing sight of this ultimate aim of education by keeping its attention too narrowly fixed on some nearer and proximate aim. It tends often to lay too much stress on mere examinations and examination results. It forgets that the only true test of knowledge gained lies in the pupil's ability to use it intelligently in the furtherance of some purpose—and ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... the stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in the best and deepest part of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... their great object, and wickedness was left unrebuked both in Clergy and laity. A great impulse was given to the sale of indulgences or pardons, an evil practice which brought in large sums of money to the papal exchequer, and at the same time led to such abuses as probably to become a principal proximate cause ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... agricultural chemistry 31 Development of agricultural research in Germany 32 The Rothamsted Experiment Station 33 Sir J. B. Lawes and Sir J. H. Gilbert, the nature and value of their experiments 33 Review of the present state of our knowledge of plant-growth 36 Proximate composition of the plant 36 Fixation of carbon by plants 37 Action of light on plant-growth, Dr Siemens' experiments 38 Source of oxygen and hydrogen in the plant 39-40 Source of nitrogen in the plant 40 Relation of the free nitrogen to leguminous plants ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... eminence which we all know him to have reached. It is not necessary for me more than to advert to his discovery of nitrous oxyde; to his investigation of the action of light on gases; on the nature of heat; to his successful discrimination of proximate vegetable elements; nor to his most scientific, ingenious, and useful invention, the safety-lamp,—an invention reasoned out from its principles, with all the accuracy and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... interval was still wider, and the inferiority in kind, and not only in degree, was unequivocally expressed. If we take into account the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great First Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be obtained by comparing the narratives of the same event in the Psalms and in the historical books; and if we further reflect that the distinction of the providential and ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... seeker after theological knowledge resorts, not to these worthies themselves, with whom he professes to have no acquaintance, but to certain disciples of theirs. In this manner he gets a definition of “proximate power,” from which it is apparent that, while the Jesuits and Dominicans are only agreed in using the same expression—the meanings they put into it being entirely different—the Jansenists and Dominicans agree in substance, while only differing in the use of words. ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... in which the heroism of Sir Charles Napier, and the handful of troops under his command, against fearful numerical odds, alone prevented the repetition, on a smaller scale, of the Affghan tragedy. The proximate cause of the rupture was the refusal of the Ameers to permit the clearing away of their shikargahs, or hunting-grounds, which were guarded with a rigid jealousy, paralleled only by the forest laws of William the Conqueror, and extended for many miles along the banks of the Indus, in a broad belt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... firmly in the earth about three yards apart, and slanting outward. At the end toward Ioco a similar goal was prepared. Every time the ball should be thrown over either goal the play would count one for the proximate town, and the game was of twelve or twenty points according to compact, the catcher of the twentieth ball being entitled to especial honor. It was of course the object of each side to throw the ball over the goal toward their own ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Imports; How paid for; Planters pay for more than three-fourths; Slavery intermediate between Commerce and Agriculture; Slavery not self-sustaining; Supplies from the North essential to its success; Proximate extent of these supplies; Slavery, the central power of the industrial interests, depending on Manufactures and Commerce; Abolitionists contributing to this result; Protection prostrate; Free Trade ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... why, having been able to go so far, it should go no further. Every man and every race is capable of education up to a certain point, but not to the extent of being made from a sow's ear into a silk purse. The proximate cause of the limitation seems to lie in the absence of the wish to go further; the presence or absence of the wish will depend upon the nature and surroundings of the individual, which is simply a way of saying ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... reduced from utter extinction. In considering all these far extending consequences of the deposition of Richard II., and the substitution of Henry of Lancaster in his stead, we must give due weight to his unsuccessful Irish wars as proximate causes of that revolution. The death of the Heir-Presumptive in the battle of Kells; the exactions and ill-success of Richard in his wars; the seizure of John of Ghent's estates and treasures; the absence of the sovereign at the critical moment: all these are causes which operated ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... This was Thomas Pounde, of Belmont or Beaumont, near Bedhampton, a landed gentleman of means, an enthusiastic Catholic, and for the last five years or so a prisoner for religion. Mr. Pounde's message in effect was this. "You are going into the proximate danger of capture, and if captured you must expect not justice, but every refinement of misrepresentation. You will be asked crooked questions, and your answers to them will be published in some debased form. Be sure that ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... preliminary SYMPTOMS of that dismal business. "As to the primary CAUSES of it," says one of my Authorities, "these lie deep, deep almost as those of Original Sin. But the proximate causes seem to me to have been these two: FIRST, That the Jesuit-Priests and Principalities had vowed and resolved to have, by God's help and by the Devil's (this was the peculiarity of it), Europe made Orthodox again: ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... conditions which render it feasible for labor to live under most sanitary conditions in houses closely proximate to both the plants and the city, with sewerage and water connections, and with street car transportation facilities to and from the plants and to and from the amusement centers of ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... class of young ladies, who had without discomfiture or emotion seen Caroline the object of Count Altenberg's attention, were struck with indignation the moment they suspected her of pleasing Colonel Spandrill. Envy seldom takes two steps at once: it is always excited by the fear of losing the proximate object of ambition; it never exists without some mixture of hope as well as of fear. These ladies having no hope of captivating Count Altenberg, Caroline did not then appear to be their rival; but now that they dreaded her competition with a man whom they had hopes of winning, they pulled her ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... not the final explanation of the universe, but it is probably the largest generalization of the modern mind. Science has to start somewhere, and it starts with the universe as it finds it and seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes; the evolutionist seeks to trace the footsteps of creative energy in the world of animal life. How did God make man? Out of the dust of the earth, says the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches essentially the same thing, only ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... and in so far as it is successful it will thus be directly fruitful of fulfilment. And it matters not how broad a purpose constitutes its ultimate motive; for purposes can be served only through a variety of activities, each of which will have its proximate interest and its own continuous yield of satisfaction. Life pays as it goes, even though it goes to the length of serving humanity at large, and the larger enterprises owe their very justification to this additive and ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... defects of human nature is twofold: the first is remote, and results from the material principles of the human body, inasmuch as it is made up of contraries. But this cause was held in check by original justice. Hence the proximate cause of death and other defects is sin, whereby original justice is withdrawn. And thus, because Christ was without sin, He is said not to have contracted these defects, but to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... repulsion or antipathy! It is true, they say that such words only express results or phenomena, and others equivocate by saying there is in no case any contact:—but I reply, that to give names to proximate causes does not correspond with my notions of the proper business of philosophy; and that, in thousands of instances, there is sensible contact, and in all nature some contact of intermediate media, in the affections of which, may be traced the laws governing the phenomena of distant ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... deem it my duty to acquaint your Excellency with these facts, and to invoke your authority for the preservation of my just rights within your waters. I take the following principles, applicable to the present case, to be well settled by the law of nations:—Firstly, that no act of hostility, proximate or remote, can be committed by any belligerent in neutral waters; secondly, that when a cruiser of one belligerent takes refuge within the waters of a neutral power, a cruiser of the opposite belligerent cannot follow ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... by the perception of a peril so proximate and imminent paralysed every tongue. Even the ex-herdsman himself was silent, and appeared to reflect what had best be done to ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... compound substance into its constituents, as in chemical analysis. The constituents may themselves be compounds or proximate constituents, or may ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... Confederate notes, besides other valuables, were found on his person, it was thought well that I should assist at the inventory and attest its correctness. It seemed that some hasty words of the Superintendent, reflecting on the remissness of the soldiers on duty, had been the proximate cause of the slaughter, I do believe that the death-warrant was unwittingly spoken. The man's bearing and demeanor are rough, even to coarseness, and his sensibilities probably blunted from having perpetually to listen to complaints and tales of wrong-doing, which he must perforce ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... calculation should be based on an ultimate analysis, which reduces the fuel to its elementary constituents of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, ash and moisture, to secure a reasonable degree of accuracy. A proximate analysis, which determines only the percentage of moisture, fixed carbon, volatile matter and ash, without determining the ultimate composition of the volatile matter, cannot be used for computing the heat of combustion ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co. |
