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Assimilation   /əsˌɪməlˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Assimilation

noun
1.
The state of being assimilated; people of different backgrounds come to see themselves as part of a larger national family.
2.
The social process of absorbing one cultural group into harmony with another.  Synonym: absorption.
3.
The process of absorbing nutrients into the body after digestion.  Synonym: absorption.
4.
A linguistic process by which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound.
5.
The process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.  Synonym: acculturation.
6.
In the theories of Jean Piaget: the application of a general schema to a particular instance.



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"Assimilation" Quotes from Famous Books



... for at least a partial solution of the fact. Such as these form the first class.—The second class takes some one particular function of Life common to all living objects,—nutrition, for instance; or, to adopt the phrase most in vogue at present, assimilation, for the purposes of reproduction and growth. Now this, it is evident, can be an appropriate definition only of the very lowest species, as of a Fungus or a Mollusca; and just as comprehensive an idea of the mystery of Life, as a Mollusca might give, can ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... were mental gymnastics. I was learning, as all young and inexperienced persons learn, by assimilation and imitation, to put ideas into words. Everything I found in books that pleased me I retained in my memory, consciously or unconsciously, and adapted it. The young writer, as Stevenson has said, instinctively tries to copy whatever seems most admirable, and he shifts his admiration with astonishing ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... of Deism, the theory which explicitly denies the Divine immanence, we already had occasion to acknowledge that quality of intelligibleness which makes this doctrine easy of assimilation, and accounts, e.g., for the success of Islam, the deistic religion par excellence, as a propagandist creed. There is, however, another aspect of Deism, none the less real because it is not always recognised at first sight, which perhaps an illustration will serve to bring home ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... case that fell under my observation not only produced such misery as to entail a loss of rest and of appetite, but even induced such a disturbance of assimilation and nutrition that the resulting hypochondriacal condition that developed from these enervating causes ran the patient into a low condition, ending in complete prostration of all vital powers and death, without the intervention of any other disease. ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... The assimilation of intelligence-strategically, culturally, and operationally-is a central thrust and component of the knowledge aspect of Rapid Dominance. Our forces must not only fight smarter; these forces, at all or most levels, must ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade

... appease the manes of its victims, a ceremony called Hydrophoria was observed, having so close a resemblance to that in use at Hierapolis, in Syria, that we can hardly fail to look upon it as a Syro-Phoenician importation, and the result of an assimilation established in remote antiquity between the Deluge of Deucalion and that of Khasisatra, as described by the author of the treatise 'On the Syrian Goddess.' Close to the temple of the Olympian Zeus a fissure in the soil was shown, in length but one cubit, through ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... surfaces. As roots cannot penetrate to the interior of pebbles and compact particles of earth, in search of the food which they require, but can only take that which is exposed on their surfaces, and, as the oxydizing effect of atmospheric air is useful in preparing the crude minerals for assimilation, as well as in decomposing the particles in which they are bound up,—a process which is allied to the rusting of metals,—the more freely atmospheric air is allowed, or induced, to circulate among the inner portions of the soil, the more readily are its fertilizing parts made ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring

... Madame, who was an elderly dame of elephantine girth, had resided in the hotel for half a dozen years, during which period her sole exercise had been taken in slowly descending from her chamber in the upper regions for her meals, and then, leisurely assimilation completed, in yet more slowly ascending. Madame's allotted seat was placed in close proximity to the hot-air register; and though Madame was usually one of the first to enter the dining-room, she was generally the last to leave. Madame's appetite was as animated as her body was lethargic. ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... essential to vegetation explains the conditions of different latitudes, which, so far as the assimilation of carbon is concerned, are much the same. At the Equator the days are but about twelve hours long. Still, as the growth of plants is extended over eight or nine months of the year, the duration of daylight is ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring

... and (as Spencer adds) likeness. Hence the absolute, the idea of which excludes every relation, is entirely beyond the reach of an intelligence which is concerned with relations alone, and which always consists in discrimination, limitation, and assimilation—it is trebly unthinkable. Therefore: Religion and Science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is capable of relative knowledge only or of a knowledge of the relative (Relativity). Nevertheless, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... change as but part of a mightier process, even the universal subjection of all things unto Christ Himself. The Emperor reduces the whole world to subjection, and the glorifying of the body as the climax of the universal subjugation represents it as the end of the process of assimilation begun in this mortal life. There is no possibility of a resurrection unto life unless that life has been begun before death. That ultimate glorious body is needed to bring men into correspondence with the external universe. As is the locality so is the body. Flesh and blood cannot ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... been everywhere felt, even when it has not been consented to. The vital strength of the American church, as of the American nation, has been subjected to the test of the importation of enormous masses of more or less uncongenial population, and has shown an amazing power of digestion and assimilation. Its resources have been taxed by the providential imposition of burdens of duty and responsibility such, in magnitude and weight, as never since the early preaching of the gospel have pressed upon any ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... were many excuses for him. The "guide-book novel" had already, and not so very long before, been triumphantly introduced by Corinne. It had been enormously popularised by Scott. The close alliance and almost assimilation of art and history with literature was one of the supremest articles of faith of Romanticism, and "the Gothic" was a sort of symbol, shibboleth, and sacrament at once of Romanticism itself. But Victor Hugo, like Falstaff, has, in this and other respects, abused his power of pressing subjects ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... is the pathway of holiness. Its every act is a link to the living God, a surrender of the being for God's will, for God Himself to take possession. In the process of assimilation, slow but sure, by which the will of God, as the meat of our souls, is taken up into our inmost being, our spiritual nature is strengthened, is spiritualized, growing up into an holy temple in which God can reveal Himself and ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray

... power over the State and then surrendering it to the people from whom it came. Rome is Repblican virtue, and imperial power,—and also, alas! imperial degradation. Imperial Rome represents persecution of religion which does not recognize Caesar as a god and the assimilation of religions which do not hesitate to add a god to those they adore. Rome, too, symbolizes the tendency to unity which survives and inspires the life of the nations of Europe, if not of the world,—a tendency altogether manifest in the last gigantic ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell

... the music probably acts by banishing fatigue, which interferes with the proper assimilation of food. Hence one may derive benefit from listening to the orchestra during meal-times at fashionable hotels. Milton believed in the benefit to be derived from listening to music before dinner, as a relief to the mind. And he also recommended it as a post-prandial exercise, "to assist and cherish ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... Douglas Campbell would say Dutch, but even so the stock is the same. Though thus somewhat gorged with food not wholly to its taste, our political digestion has contrived so far to master the incongruous mass of materials it has been unable to reject; and if assimilation has been at times imperfect, our political constitution and spirit remain English in essential features. Imbued with like ideals of liberty, of law, of right, certainly not less progressive than our kin beyond sea, we ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age. Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete equality; but it assuredly affords some presumption that ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill

... that form a prominent feature in the Flora of other equinoctial countries, tend, in some measure, to diminish the peculiar character of the vegetation of Terra Australis on those shores, and thus it is a considerable assimilation to the Flora of a part of a neighbouring continent that has been traced. About thirty species are preserved in the collections of these voyages, for the most part belonging to genera existing in India, but more abundant in the tropical ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... were indisputable. The Chinese had been steadily arriving in California for more than a quarter of a century, and they had not in the least degree become a component part of the body politic. On the contrary, they were as far from any assimilation with the people at the end of that long period as they were on the first day they appeared on the Pacific Coast. They did not come with the intention of remaining. They sought no permanent abiding-place. They did not wish to own the soil. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... in it the artist has become almost a mechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed phase of consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made to look like some blindly organic process of assimilation. The work of art is likened to a living organism. That expresses [81] truly the sense of a self-delighting, independent life which the finished work of art gives us: it hardly figures the process by which such work was produced. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... remains, then, the only one which seems likely to present any difficulty of assimilation. The main obstacle that retards the absorption of the Negro into the general population is the apparently intense prejudice against color which prevails in the United States. This prejudice loses much of its importance, however, when it is borne in ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... benefit both in the highest degree, realizing the aspirations of the community that has cast its lot with us and elected to share our political heritage, while at the same time justifying the foresight of those who for three-quarters of a century have looked to the assimilation of Hawaii as a natural and inevitable consummation, in harmony with our needs and in ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley

... the same market. Consequently, the moment things return to their pacific and ordinary course, will be the period when the necessity of the future existence of this establishment will cease, or at least, when the propriety will be evident of its reform or assimilation to the other commission houses, carrying on trade in Vera Cruz, Mexico, etc., which, not being hired establishments, do not create expenses when ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... character which clogged geography as well as all other branches of knowledge in the Middle Ages; and the entire absence of scientific principle in what passed for geography, so that there was no organ competent to the assimilation of a large ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... hypothesis found very few contradictors, even among rigorous minds; but soon these individual corporeal emanations were endowed, relatively towards those, (without the least appearance of proof,) either with a great power of assimilation, or with a decided antagonism, or with a complete neutrality; but they pretended to see in these occult qualities the material causes of the most mysterious affections of the soul. Oh! then doubt had a legitimate right ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... determinism, has no bearing on the question whatever. The view that it has a bearing rests upon the belief that causes compel their effects, or that nature enforces obedience to its laws as governments do. These are mere anthropomorphic superstitions, due to assimilation of causes with volitions and of natural laws with human edicts. We feel that our will is not compelled, but that only means that it is not other than we choose it to be. It is one of the demerits of the traditional theory of causality that it has created ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... the vision of her mind, detaching now this virtue, now that for particular assimilation, dwelling on her deficiencies, seeing in the whole the fulfilment of all aspirations, the sum of all for which men had hoped—that Spirit of Peace, so long hindered yet generated too perpetually by the passions of the world, forced into outline and being by the energy of individual lives, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... the flooring of Robb—Robb in his symbolic sense—can only be brought about by assiduous study and assimilation of what I will call bio-sociology. Not only must we, the leaders, have thoroughly grasped this science, but we must find a way of teaching it to the least intelligent of our fellow citizens. The task is no trifling one. I'm very much ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... liverworts, on the other hand, water is absorbed directly by the whole general surface, and the rhizoids are of subordinate importance. Many forms only succeed in a constantly humid atmosphere, while others sustain drying for a period, though their powers of assimilation and growth are suspended in the dry state. The cell-walls are capable of imbibing water rapidly, and their thickness stands in relation to this rather than to the prevention of loss of water from the plant. The large surface presented by the leafy forms facilitates the retention ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... gratification of the appetite has both blessed and cursed the race. Life has ever depended upon food; hence food has been the chief concern of man. During the history of the world the race has been ignorant of the processes of digestion and assimilation. They have known nothing of the chemistry of this source of life. They have gone on from age to age building up their bodies by taking food, wholly ignorant of the process by which it was done. The value of the thing eaten has never depended on a knowledge of the process by which it was assimilated. ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... same definite effort to make in assimilation today as then. Knowing and growing demand the same personal struggle in the cushions of the "frat" house as back on the old oak-slab bench ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... elector finds his choice limited to what is left—the intellectual skimmed milk, of which the cream has been carried to New York or other big cities. No country can exist without a metropolis, and as such a centre by a natural law of assimilation absorbs the best brains of the country, in other nations it has been found to the interests of all parties to send down brilliant young men to the "provinces," to be, in good time, returned by ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... assimilates, and they are all brother tars, embarked together in the same bottom, and in the same pursuit of interest, curiosity or fame; while the rigid discipline of an army does not admit of this association and assimilation. A sailor, therefore, greets a sailor, as his brother; but has not yet learned to greet a soldier as his brother; nor has the American soldier ever felt the fraternal attachment to the sailor. It should be the policy of our rulers, and military commanders, to assimilate ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse

... doing. If we are required to believe them—which only means to fuse them with our other ideas- -we either take the law into our own hands, and our minds being in the dark fuse something easier of assimilation, and say we have fused the miracle; or if we play more fairly and insist on our minds swallowing and assimilating it, we weaken our judgments, and pro tanto kill our souls. If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... expanded in the conviction. She moved in a kind of tide of infectious vitality, subtly drawing from every human flavour in the room the power to hold and show something akin to it in herself, a fugitive assimilation floating in the lamplight with the odour of the flowers and the soup, to be extinguished with the occasion. They looked at her up and down the table with an odd smiling attraction; they told each other ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... the firm expresses in II. PURPOSE OF SCHOOL these words: "To hasten assimilation 1. Firm's statement necessary to national unity, to promote industrial betterment, by reducing Statement in general the friction caused by failure to comprehend terms directions, and to decrease the waste and loss of wage ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... cane sugar, grape sugar or glucose, and sugar of milk (lactose). As food, sugars have practically the same use as starch; sugar, owing to its solubility, taxes the digestive organs very little. Over-indulgence in sugar, however, tends to cause various disorders of assimilation and nutrition. Sugar is also very fattening, it is a force producer, and can be used with greater safety by those engaged in active muscular work. Cane sugar is the clarified and crystallized juice of the sugar cane. Nearly half the sugar used ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless

... process which Genghis Khan had so easily accomplished in the thirteenth century. And as the Russians had scarcely yet begun to be affected by Western civilisation, there was no great cleavage or contrast between them and their new subjects, and the process of assimilation took place easily. But the settlement of Siberia was very gradual. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the total population of this vast area amounted to not more than 300,000 souls, and it was not until the nineteenth century that ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... about assimilation, not knowing to what pattern, if any, foreign peoples should be assimilated. The missionary goes abroad and extracts from the heathen even the nobilities of his own faith and leaves him often the miserable animosities of a creed. Political ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... which many of our friends or acquaintances never see us. Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. For, in the first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last record, if you happened to read that document. And secondly, each of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther, into our face, and each sees in it the ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... decides; the teeth are put in action, the tongue unites with the palate in tasting, and the stomach soon commences the process of assimilation. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin

... turn out to have been mere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion by that superior creature? A shocking thought, no doubt, like the thought of death, and more distressing to our vital feelings than is the pleasing assimilation of grass and mutton in our bellies. Yet I can see no ground, except a desire to flatter oneself, for not crediting the elan vital with some such digestive intention. M. Bergson's system would hardly be more ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... say of particular couples, "born for each other." Sometimes a man or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation. There is a class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men, because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but for the guiding providence of a good wife. I have known many such cases. It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called upon to decide, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... have dwelt heavily on acquirement, somewhat lightly on mental assimilation and digestion, and have left action almost untouched. In these two latter respects, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... Influence of light: Light is required by the leaves in the process of assimilation. Cutting off some of the light from a tree affects its form. This is why trees grown in the open have wide-spreading crowns with branches starting near the ground as in Fig. 90, while the same species growing in the forest produces tall, lanky trees, free from branches to ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison

... unless these visions can be realized during the present generation, they are foredoomed to failure. Owing to the unprogressive character of the purely Boer communities and to the rapid expansion of the English-speaking peoples by natural increase, by direct immigration, and by the assimilation of the Boers themselves, the future 'South African Dominion' can, in any case, never be an 'African Holland.' Whenever the present political divisions are merged in one State, that State must sooner or later constitute ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler

... the assimilation of new United members are worthy of note. The cruder amateurs should not feel discouraged by the extraordinary average scholarship of the recent element, but should rather use it as a model for improvement. They should establish correspondence with the cultivated recruits, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... poetry, and romance, naturally raises in the mind an idea of the picturesque and the aweful; but we are now approaching no gothic perspectives, no "long drawn aisles and fretted vaults," and scarcely able to bring a single instance of assimilation, we visit indeed an Abbey only in name; yet we visit a spot well adapted to the purposes to which it was appropriated. Sequestered, surrounded by pleasing objects, and dignified by the not uncertain evidences of history, it offers to the thinking ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts

... a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction: the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire.... The path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... These are the results of AUTO-INTOXICATION, the worry, hurry, eating fast, eating too much, over exerting, anxiety, all of these poison the process of digestion and assimilation. Take a dose of epsom salts, castor oil, or cascara sagrada, then regulate your diet. REST IN BED FOR A DAY. This done at once will save many a ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft

... and more intellectually isolated from his colleagues. They had no interest in, no sympathy for, no understanding of, what he was driving at. From May, when college closed, to October, when he left for the East, he read prodigiously. He had a mind for assimilation—he knew where to store every new piece of knowledge he acquired, and kept thereby an orderly brain. He read more than a book a week: everything he could lay hands on in psychology, anthropology, biology, philosophy, psycho-analysis—every ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... The food must undergo mastication, digestion, etc., while an argument necessitates a long chain of states of consciousness, each implying a change of the preceding state. Vital change is further made up of many simultaneous changes. Assimilation and argument both include many actions going on together. Vital changes, both visceral and cerebral, also differ from other changes in their heterogeneity; neither the simultaneous nor the serial acts of digestion or of ratiocination are at all alike. They are again distinguished ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... removed him from the temptation to imbibe the beverage that destroys human faculties and has accustomed him in a measure to the beneficial use of purified water. It has undertaken through carefully selected work, exercise and recreation to perfect the habits of digestion, assimilation and elimination. The result has been indeed marvelous. No America Negro who went to fight for humanity will return to America as the same physical being. No American will dare stand before the returned Negro trooper and say: "Behold a sub-species of mankind, wooly ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... isolated from the beautiful words, objects, or sounds; sometimes almost unconscious; permeating the whole rest of life in certain highly aesthetic individuals, and, however mixed with other activities, as constant as the life of the intellect and sympathies; nay, as constant as the life of assimilation and motion. We can live off a beautiful object, we can live by its means, even when its visible or audible image is partially, nay, sometimes wholly, obliterated; for the emotional condition can survive the image and be awakened at ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... however, no doubt that at the present time the knowledge of these stories tends to die out. Under the peace which British rule brings there is more intercourse between the different communities and castes, a considerable, degree of assimilation takes place, and old customs and ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas

... particular importance because the ethnical disappearance of the northern peoples in China had nothing to do with any racial inferiority or with any particular power of assimilation; it was a natural process resulting from the different economic, social, and cultural organizations of the northern peoples and ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... in the bones, though this is contained abundantly in the greater part of those vegetable substances which form part of our nourishment. It is not the same with man as with animated beings placed lower in the scale of organization. In the former, assimilation is exerted only on those substances that enter essentially into the composition of the bones, the muscles, and the medullary matter of the nerves and the brain. Plants, on the contrary, draw from the soil the salts that are found accidentally mixed in ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... inhabitants of Macedonia. In 1905 the Rumanian Government secured from the Porte official recognition of their separate cultural and religious organizations on a national basis. Exposed as they are to Greek influence, it will be difficult to prevent their final assimilation with that people. The interest taken in them of late by the Rumanian Government arose out of the necessity to secure them against pan-Hellenic propaganda, and to preserve one of the factors entitling Rumania to participate in the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... can be done with her? I tell you, Mrs. Archibald," he said, turning to her, earnestly, "it is getting to be unbearable. The whole evening, ever since you left the camp-fire, she has been talking to me on the subject of mental assimilation—that is, the treatment of our ideas and thoughts as if they were articles of food—intellectual soda biscuit, or plum pudding, for instance—in order to find out whether our minds can digest these things and produce from them the mental chyme and chyle necessary to our ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton

... invented for the Albanians an alphabet), tells us, for instance, how in his travels through Albania he was assured by natives that they and the Serbs lived together as if they were members of one family, while the Ku['c]i in eastern Montenegro had, by a gradual process of assimilation, become transformed from Catholic Albanians into Orthodox Montenegrins. It is told that in the wondrous hours when the [vc]if[vc]ija gloried in the soil he was about to win, even the notoriously wild Klementi, filled with hunger for the land, ran ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... time the Palestinian Jews had a different political history from the Egyptian. The compulsory Hellenization by Antiochus aroused the best elements of the Jewish nation, which had seemed likely to lose by a gradual assimilation its adherence to pure monotheism and the Mosaic law. The struggle of foe as against the Hellenizing party of his own people, which, led by the high priests Jason, Menelaus, and Alcimus, tried to crush both the national ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... North America, as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is more directly to our purpose to observe their character as it is displayed in their conquest of the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, in their facile reception and ready assimilation of the Roman language and arts which they found in Gaul, and in their forcible occupancy, under William the Conqueror, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... Spreading and ramifying, growing together in an impenetrable network of foliage, they bore buds, leaves and fruits. Every pinnacle became a sprig, even the pendant icicles reappeared in the gable-boards. But the assimilation of natural objects did not cease there; tiny animals, light as a feather, run over the tendrils, lizards, birds, even the gnomes of German mythology, find their way into the Gothic cathedral. Not the traditional Greek acanthus leaf, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... philosophical or religious teaching as it was offered to them, and as we find it recorded in the books of the teachers. The mores of the masses admit of no such sudden and massive modification by doctrinal teaching. The process of assimilation is slow, and it is attended by modifying influences at every stage. What the classes adopt, be it good or ill, may be found pervading the mass after generations, but it will appear as a resultant of all the vicissitudes of the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... life from the world of matter made by God, by an assimilation of the elements suited to and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... permitted myself any innovation upon the original term (Terra Australis), it would have been to convert it into Australia, as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne

... sect but every individual modifies the general attributes of the Deity towards assimilation with his own character: the just man dwells on the justice, the stern upon the wrath; the attributes that do not please the worshipper he insensibly forgets. Wherefore, O my pupils, you will not smile when you read in Barnes that the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... into contact with the external air, and the process of making food (Assimilation 4) is carried on. "Physiologically, leaves are green expansions borne by the stern, outspread in the air and light, in which assimilation and the processes connected with ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell

... this law, we will take first a low instance, wherein the opposite principles stand apart, rather upon terms of outward covenant, or of mere mixture, than of mutual assimilation. Man is infinite; men are finite: the purest aspect of great laws never appears in collections and aggregations, yet the same laws rule here as in the soul, and such excellence as is possible issues from the same sources. As an instance, accordingly, of that ruder reciprocation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... and words, it was only necessary to commit them to memory to have mastered the language. His mistake was that of the person who should suppose that since strength is derived from food, the more food he swallows the stronger he becomes. He exceeded his capacity of mental digestion and assimilation. ...
— The Aural System • Anonymous

... its disposition does no harm (or has not been guilty of a particular offence), and connotes a harmless character (or freedom from particular guilt); 'edible' denotes whatever can be eaten with good results, and connotes its suitability for mastication, deglutition, digestion, and assimilation. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... cure of tuberculosis is a question of nutrition; digestion and assimilation control the situation; make a patient grow fat, and the local disease may be left to take care of itself. There ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... There may be some truth in all this. But two generations is a long time, and France has proved her ability to make six decades count in attaching to herself and stamping in her image other border populations. Two factors have worked against the assimilation of Nice: the maintenance of the independence of Monaco, with privileges and no responsibilities for its inhabitants; and the enormous number of foreign residents, who have lost their attachment to their own countries and who do not care to give or are incapable of giving allegiance ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... felt long before one gets there. There is a sort of undertow in the city tides far up from the river-front. There is a greater tangle of travel as you approach the streets leading to the ferry. There is a perceptible assimilation of trade to the supposed demands of householders living out of town. The retail Mammon dethrones his proud wholesale rival. The sidewalk- or gutter-stand thrusts itself out in advance of the store. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... because they are extravagantly handled. The chief function of fatty food is to repair and renew the fatty tissues, to yield energy and to maintain the body heat. The presence of fat in food promotes the flow of the pancreatic juice and bile, which help in the assimilation of other foods and assist the excretory functions of the intestine. These are badly performed if bile and other digestive fluids are not secreted in sufficient quantity. The absence of fat in the diet leads to a state of malnutrition, predisposing to tuberculosis, especially ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss

... essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly—I do not mean in place nor ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... every scale. What adoption is at the hands of the family, naturalization is at the hands of the State. And the same process extends itself from adopted or naturalized individuals to large classes of men, indeed to whole nations. When the process takes place on this scale, we may best call it assimilation. Thus Rome assimilated the continental nations of western Europe to that degree that, allowing for a few survivals here and there, not only Italy, but Gaul and Spain, became Roman. The people of those lands, admitted step by step to the Roman franchise, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... you deprive the universe of all human knowledge, which I have appropriated to myself by assimilation," said the madman, becoming animated by degrees, and commencing to gesticulate with ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... overcame the spirit of the tree, and it rent and consumed the blue-green birds till not a plume was left, and returned to the quiet tribe of trees. But they say that when spring came all the other trees put forth leaves, but this put forth feathers of a strange hue and pattern. And by that monstrous assimilation the saint knew of the sin, and he rooted that one tree to the earth with a judgment, so that evil should fall on any who removed it again. That, Squire, is the beginning in the deserts of the tale that ended here, almost ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton

... materialistic abominations they would be supreme even in the East; they would extinguish with their dominating spirit of trade every noble virtue of the soul. And yet, they make presumption of introducing civilisation by benevolent assimilation, rather dissimulation. For even an Englishman in our country, for instance, is unlike himself in his own. The American, too, who is loud-lunged about democracy and shirt-sleeve diplomacy, wheedles and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... make oneself consubstantial therewith, these passionate joys of poor mediaeval humanity are such as we should contemplate with sympathy only and respect, even when the miracle is conceived and felt in the grossest, least spiritual manner. That act of material assimilation, that feeding off the very Godhead in most literal manner, as described in the hymn to the Most Holy Sacrament, was symbolic of the return from exile of the long-persecuted instincts of mankind. It meant ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... tastes good. There is a better reason. We eat to live. We know that the food which we take into our bodies is digested, elaborated and assimilated—that is, made over into ourselves—and unless this digestion, elaboration and assimilation is properly conducted, we shall not be fully and completely nourished. Our body is made up of cells; the food which we eat is transformed into cell structure, and this new cell-material takes the place of the worn-out ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen

... immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any GENERAL assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex-organs make to the blood, the brain would not be ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... the corner of the waste ground at the back of Field Lane—have done me the honour to give me the rank of Major, and I don't see why I shouldn't retain the distinction. My proclivities are entirely aristocratic: I have no power of assimilation with the canaille. This is the sort of thing that suits me. Here I am in ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... chemical changes that take place in the living body, beginning with assimilation and ending with excretion, is included in one word, metabolism. The process of building up living material, or the change by which complex substances (including the living matter itself) are built up from ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... and his ability to use such right for the promotion of the public good. And that is the very matter in dispute. But the point does not turn simply upon the inferiority of the negro race; for differences without inferiority may unfit one race for political or social assimilation with another, and render their fusion in the same government incompatible with the general welfare. It is, as I conceive, upon these principles that we must settle the question whether this is a white ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... hurtful. Egg switched in cream, rum, brandy, and such things are to be carefully avoided. Alcoholic liquors are especially fatal. See Alcohol; Assimilation; Diet; Drinks: Foods, etc. ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... in whom I take pleasure, whom I like to regard as peculiarly English, and who are the products of the countryside; fellows who grow like vegetables, and, without knowing how, put on sense as they put on flesh by an unconscious process of assimilation; who will stand for an hour at a time watching a horse or a pig, with stolid moon-faces as motionless as a pond; the sort of men that visitors from town imagine to be stupid because they take five minutes to ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... lamentable and unnatural thing to see a number of men subject to no government, actuated by no ruling principle, and associated by no common affection: but it would be a more lamentable thing still, were it possible, to see a number of men so oppressed into assimilation as to have no more any individual hope or character, no differences in aim, no dissimilarities of passion, no irregularities of judgment; a society in which no man could help another, since none would be feebler than himself; no man admire ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin

... second half of the question, whether natural forces are adequate to explain the running of the machine, we have again been able to reach a satisfactory positive answer. Digestion, assimilation, circulation, respiration, excretion, the principal categories of physiological action, and at least certain phases of the action of the nervous system are readily understood as controlled by the action of chemical and ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... differing from nobody. That trimming to catch all winds never gains any. Mr. Facing-both-ways is not a powerful evangelist. The motive of becoming all things to all men must be plainly disinterested, and the assimilation must have love for the souls concerned and eagerness to bring the truth to them, and them to the truth, legibly stamped upon it, or it will be regarded, and rightly so, as mere cowardice or dishonesty. And there must be no stretching the assimilation to the length of either concealing truth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... statement is so far true, that the former are used with advantage on the turnip, while the latter act with great benefit on grain crops and more especially on oats and barley. The effect of the latter, however, is more or less apparent in all crops and on all soils, because it promotes the assimilation of the mineral matters already present. But its peculiar importance lies in the power which it has of promoting the rapid development of the young plant, causing it to send its roots out into the soil, and to spread its leaves into the air, thus enabling it to take from those ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson

... which could not fail sooner or later to exhaust itself through chronic anarchy. The only remedy lay either in some kind of permanent federation, combined with representative government; or else in what we might call "incorporation and assimilation," after the Roman fashion. But the incorporation of one town with another, though effected with brilliant results in the early history of Attika, involved such a disturbance of all the associations which in the Greek mind clustered about the conception of a city ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... Who could tell when or where except God Himself? And the higher choice the only food by which character can grow! So men must often fall. Fall to what end? To pass into that boundless gulf of distant light into which everything is passing, passing straight by the assimilation of its proper food, circuitously by weakness and failure, but still coming, growing, reaching out into infinite light, for all is of ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall

... surrounded by rivals ready to spring upon them when a false step should be made. The Albizzi oligarchy was a masterpiece of art, without any force to sustain it but the craft and energy of its constructors. It had not grown up, like the Venetian oligarchy, by the gradual assimilation to itself of all the vigour in the State. It was bound, sooner or later, to yield to the renascent impulse of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... and ingenuity of the lively Greeks, who accommodated every religious system to their own, and from some real or fancied resemblance, identified the gods of Olym'pus with other nations. The Romans never used this process of assimilation, and, consequently, introduced so much confusion into their mythology, that philosophers rejected the entire system. This circumstance greatly facilitated the progress of Christianity, whose beautiful ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... individual pupils. To world problems biology bears many relations, for example, it is fundamental in the analysis of immigration problems, especially those phases concerning health, over-population, and the probable hereditary effects of assimilation through hybridization. State problems of health protection, conservation of game and forests, control of rodents and other crop pests, and others can only be solved after gaining a thorough knowledge of the underlying ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald

... various conversations, he presented with much force: namely, that Russia, having within its borders more Jews than exist in all the world besides, and having suffered greatly from these as from an organization really incapable of assimilation with the body politic, must pursue a repressive policy toward them and isolate them in order to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... sticks to the cloven hoof, I am happy to say, notwithstanding the favorable verdict of the French savans on the flavor and nutritious properties of horse-flesh. The femurs and tibias of frogs are not visible here. At this point I will quote in extenso from Wilkinson's chapter on Assimilation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... three weeks, sometimes the last few days, before examination, when they employ tutors at exorbitant prices with the money often earned by hard-working parents, to stuff their idle brains with the pabulum of knowledge; not to increase their grasp or power of brain, not to discipline it, not for assimilation into the mental tissue to develop personal power, but to fatten the memory, the liver of the brain; to fatten it with crammed facts until it is sufficiently expanded to insure fifty ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... love is no more made by talking of it, than a black pudding would be. Habit, association, assimilation of tastes, communion of thought, kindness without pretension, solicitude without effort, a tacit agreement and a silent sympathy; these are the excitements and stimulants of the only sort of love that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various

... well enough to leave it? He may set up specific purposes to be accomplished, as has been suggested. Yet even these may be only ideas; what means has he for knowing when they have been attained? It is a long distance from the first approach to an important thought, to its final assimilation, and nothing is easier than to stop too soon. If there are any waymarks along the road, indicating the different stages reached; particularly, if there is a recognizable endpoint assuring mastery, one might avoid many dangerous headers by knowing ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... too—to her, perhaps, secretly a guarantee—was to him a perpetual restlessness. L'union libre as the French artist understands it was not in his social tradition, whatever might be his literary assimilation of French ideas. He might passionately adopt and defend it, because it was her will; none the less was he, at the bottom of his heart, both ashamed and afraid because of it. From the very beginning ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... these scraps of information and snatches of literature, this infinite variety and medley, in which no subject is adequately treated, is distracting and debilitating to the mind. It prevents the reading of anything in full, and its satisfactory assimilation. It is said that the majority of Americans read nothing except the paper. If they read that thoroughly, they have time for nothing else. What is its reader to do when his journal thrusts upon him every day the amount contained in a fair-sized duodecimo volume, and on Sundays the amount of two of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... mechanic as longeth to the production of the natures afore rehearsed, than that some grains of the medicine projected should in a few moments of time turn a sea of quicksilver or other material into gold. So it is more probable that he that knoweth the nature of arefaction, the nature of assimilation of nourishment to the thing nourished, the manner of increase and clearing of spirits, the manner of the depredations which spirits make upon the humours and solid parts, shall by ambages of diets, bathings, anointings, medicines, motions, and the like, prolong life, or restore ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... initiated in the earliest phases of Gothic, there is something like Greek Love. The simple trefoil aperture seems a fair architectural version of the clover-leaves. But the propriety of the use of these clover-lines was hinted by a constructive exigency, the pointed arch. The inevitable assimilation of the natural forms of leaves with this feature was too evident not to be improved by such active and ardent worshippers as the Freemasons. Thus originated Gothic tracery, which afterwards branched out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... sugar in a form suitable for such quick assimilation, it should be taken generally in some combination less easily absorbed, otherwise the digestion may be upset by too speedy a glut of heat production, and of energy. Therefore the bread and Honey of time-honoured memory is a sound form of sustenance, as likewise, the proverbial milk ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... however great reluctance, it must be admitted that the close study and admiring imitation of Milton bring in their train some lesser evils. Meaning may be arranged too compactly in a sentence; for perfect and ready assimilation some bulk and distention are necessary in language as in diet. Now the study of Milton, if it teaches anything, teaches to discard and abhor all superfluity. He who models himself upon this master will never "go a-begging for some meaning, and labour to be delivered of the great burden ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... this process. Habit formation—when the learner analyzes his progress or failure, when he tries to find a short cut, or when he seeks for an incentive to insure greater improvement—may serve as a situation calling for thinking. The process of apperceiving or of assimilation may involve it. Studying and trying to remember may involve it. Constructive imagination often calls for it. Reasoning, always requires it. In the older psychology reasoning and thinking were often used ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy

... appropriated into muscle and bone (if you will permit me to use these terms), and are obtained by reuniting and re-combining spent forces. This explanation is somewhat mystical, but I can do no better in describing the food production and assimilation in a pure fire-world like this one on which I ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... and grass crops have thus been experimented upon. Incidentally there have been extensive sampling and analysing of soils, investigations into rainfall and the composition of drainage waters, inquiries into the amount of water transpired by plants, and experiments on the assimilation of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... complicated affairs, haphazard opinion is very tricky. There are few big issues in public life where cause and effect are obvious at once. They are not obvious to scholars who have devoted years, let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage movements, or the migration and the assimilation of peoples, or the diplomatic purposes of foreign powers. Yet somehow we are all supposed to have opinions on these matters, and it is not surprising that the commonest form of reasoning is the intuitive, post hoc ergo ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann



Words linked to "Assimilation" :   relationship, developmental learning, malabsorption, social process, Westernisation, constructive metabolism, biological process, Westernization, Anglicisation, Anglicization, Americanization, linguistic process, Americanisation, anabolism, assimilate, Europeanisation, organic process, Europeanization, education



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