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Centripetal   Listen
Centripetal

adjective
1.
Tending to move toward a center.
2.
Tending to unify.  Synonym: unifying.
3.
Of a nerve fiber or impulse originating outside and passing toward the central nervous system.  Synonyms: receptive, sensory.



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"Centripetal" Quotes from Famous Books



... analysis, from my point of view, of Randall's character. Centripetal forces were too strong for the young man. I dissertated on his ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... old, into a veritable household Pharisee, a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained in artistic values and artistic weights and measures, to study all the arts and sciences of the beautiful, and then she is charming. Most useful, most needful, these little women: they have the centripetal force which keeps all the domestic planets from gyrating and frisking in unseemly orbits,—and properly trained, they fill a house with the beauty of order, the harmony and consistency of proportion, the melody of things moving in time and tune, without violating the graceful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... reflect the larger movements of more general Greek history. All through Greek history we may trace, in every sphere of the activity of the Greek mind, the action of these two opposing tendencies,—the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, as we may perhaps not too fancifully call them. There is the centrifugal, the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency, flying from the centre, working with little forethought straight before it, in the development ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... if you think that somehow the law of the spiritual world would admit of exception, and that you can win happiness, goodness, and the full tide of life; become the best that you are capable of being, while remaining isolated, self-absorbed—by being centripetal, not centrifugal. It cannot be. Now this is worth saying to you, because you know here at school what a united social life is. All girls do not know this. You do. There is distinctly here a school life, a school feeling, a house feeling. No casual visitor to your ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson

... synanthic Calceolarias, before referred to, considers that the direction in which fusion acts is centripetal, e.g. from the circumference towards the centre of the flower, thus reversing the natural order of things. He considers that there is a radical antagonism between the normal organizing forces and the teratological disorganizing forces, and explains in this way the frequent sterility of monsters ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... that air then penetrated to the smaller bronchi. Inspiration and expiration were artificially imitated about ten times to the minute. In performing expiration the chest was thoroughly compressed. The lower extremities were raised, and manual centripetal frictions freely applied. In the intervals of these applications warmth to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... stronger and more active feeling than the humanitarian or other dislike of slavery; the first feeling, indeed, soon developed into a passion, the second into a self-reproachful obstruction. Thus the logical view, that slavery as well as the slaveholding interest was right, exercised a powerful centripetal attraction; and many minds were betrayed into adopting it as a truth, or using it for a purpose, without probing the depth of apostasy to their own more solid convictions, or of moral disingenuousness, which the practice involved. The South ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... of Paris, has likened the law of similarity to the centripetal force, and the law of variation to the centrifugal force; and in truth their operations seem analogous, and possibly they may be the same in kind, though certainly unlike in this, that they are not reducible to arithmetical calculation and cannot be subjected to definite ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale

... grew up round a seaport, having little or no overland connexion with other Australian colonies, kept them long apart; and the commercial interests centred in these ports are still centrifugal rather than centripetal in sentiment. Hence powers, not specifically assigned to the Federal government, remain in the hands of the individual states; the Labour party, however, inclines towards a centralizing policy, and the general trend seems to be in that direction. It will probably ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... however, quite easy to understand how, this Tristram legend existing by hypothesis already or being created at the same time, the curious centripetal and agglutinative tendency of mediaeval romance should have brought it into connection with that of Arthur. The mere fact of Mark's being a vassal-king of Greater Britain would have been reason enough; but the parallel between the prowess of Lancelot and Tristram, and between ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... Haeckel looks upon the causes which have led to the present diversity of living nature as twofold. Living matter, he tells us, is urged by two impulses: a centripetal, which tends to preserve and transmit the specific form, and which he identifies with heredity; and a centrifugal, which results from the tendency of external conditions to modify the organism and effect its adaptation to themselves. The internal ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of ruin. It is not by the negro—it is by injustice to the negro—that our country has been brought to her present deplorable condition. Were Slavery and all its evil brood of wrongs and vices eradicated this day, the Rebellion would die out to-morrow and never have a successor. The centripetal tendency of our country is so intense—the attraction of every part for every other so overwhelming—that Disunion were impossible but for Slavery. What insanity in New-Orleans to seek a divorce from the upper waters of her superb river! What a melancholy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... driven out of the circle, mental sulks and muscular mischief must ensue. Nothing so surely generates spavins, curbs, and thorough-pins. When skilful, you may make the colt change without stopping, or longe a figure of 8. This may be done, even without the long cord, by the centripetal force of carrots and the centrifugal force of the stick. When this is done in the open field it looks like mesmerism or magic. When in this way you have made the colt thoroughly to love, honour, and obey you, the saddling, mounting, and ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... shattered peaks of Ben Laoghal, where I saw an eagle poising day after day as if some invisible centripetal force bound him forever to that small circle of air, there was a loch with plenty of brown trout and a few salmo ferox; and down at Tongue there was a little river where the sea-trout sometimes come up with ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... dogs fighting, is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes;" it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... smoothly, with such inherent power of motion, that it was less like motion visible than motion heard. Nothing was distinguishable but the belt of pale fire. That which I had seen before they had now become—a ring of flame intensely swift. As if sucked upward by a centripetal force it rose in the air. Wheeling still with a sound incredibly shrill it rose to my level, swept by me heralded by a keen wind, and was followed by a draught which caught leaves and straws of grass ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... the situation of the Irishman's illimitable rope, with the end cut off. So while Roger was brewing up vast schemes of nascent wealth, and prosperous days at last, the filched sovereign, attracted by centripetal gravity, had found a passage downwards, and had straightway rolled into a crevice of mother-earth, long before its "brief lord" had commenced his day's labour. Yes, it had been lost a good hour ere he found it out, for he had fancied that he had ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... The fort's centripetal attraction had caught the doctor's party, and was drawing it to the focus. They reckoned the days on their fingers and pressed forward with a feverish hurry. They were like wayworn mariners who sight the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... part. When we make enquiries from the physiologist or the psychologist with regard to the origin of these images and representations, we are sometimes told that, as the centrifugal movements of the nervous system can evoke movement of the body, so the centripetal movements—at least some of them—give rise to the representation, mental picture, or perception of the external world. Yet we must remember that the brain, the nerves, and the disturbance of the nerves are, after ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... fact: in bursting bud and falling seed, in the updrawn waters and the descending rain; throw a stone into the air, and when the impulse is exhausted, gravity brings it to earth again. In civilized society these centrifugal and centripetal forces find expression in the anarchic and radical spirit which breaks down and re-forms existing institutions, and in the conservative spirit which preserves and upbuilds by gradual accretion; they are analogous to igneous and to aqueous action in the formation and upbuilding ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... exerted on this body? Clearly, there is only one such force, and that is, the force which holds it to the center, and compels it, in its uniform motion, to maintain a fixed distance from this center. This is what is termed centripetal force. It is obvious, that the centripetal force, which holds this revolving body to the center, is the only force which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various



Words linked to "Centripetal" :   inward-developing, afferent, centralising, inward-moving, centrifugal, centralizing



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