"Coherence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... three pictures thrown into one, and in some respects well governed as a single composition. Conceive, however, this subject bereft of the darkened corners, and the gradations which create a focus. The figures would lie upon the canvas somewhat in the shape of a letter Z, devoid of essential coherence, with the details in the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... the days of the madrigalists. The work is unified not only by the consolidation of the four movements into one, but as well by a central movement, a "durchfuehrung" which, introduced between the scherzo and the adagio, reveals the inner coherence of all the themes. There is no sacrifice of logic to the rules of harmony. Indeed, the work is characterized by a certain uncompromisingness and sharpness in its harmonies. The instrumental coloring is prismatic, all the registers of the strings being utilized with great deftness. Exclusive ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... formless; no doubt it was the first which came to hand for expressing what he had to say. He begins sentences and omits to finish them; he goes off into digressions and forgets to pick up the line of thought he has dropped; he throws out his ideas in lumps instead of fusing them into mutual coherence. ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... better appellation than that of "Anti-Federalists." In the process of time their great chief gave them a name, a set of principles, a war-cry, an organization, and at last an overwhelming victory. They began to take on something like form and coherence in resisting Hamilton's financial measures; but the success of his policy was so dazzling that they were rather cowed by it, and were left by their defeat little better off in the way of discipline than ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... borough Once an eagle used to fly, Making observations thorough From his station in the sky, And presenting the appearance Of an animated V, Like the gulls that lend coherence Unto ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... grandfather—should be thus flouted and put upon by the daughter of Flint, that parvenu, absolutely floored him. For a moment he sat there speechless, unable even to reach for his drink; but presently some coherence returned. He was about to utter what he conceived to be a strong rejoinder, when the girl suddenly standing up, turned her back upon him and ignored him as completely as she might have ignored any of the menials ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the signs of returning coherence that he could have hugged the doctor, but he only said, "You've had enough for to-night. And you won't get out, because if you try to I'll knock you senseless in the bottom ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... hand-bound to strangers. Had they but succeeded in arresting Charles and destroying his forces at Fornovo, it is just possible that then—even then, at the eleventh hour—Italy might have gained the sense of national coherence, or at least have proved herself capable of holding by her leagues the foreigner at bay. As it was, the battle of Fornovo, in spite of Venetian bonfires and Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her conscious of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... (Review of Goethe's Italian Travels) in that happy soil, that you should seek to explain me and my endeavors at that laborious time, and that attentively and lovingly you should have traced back that which in my efforts might seem incidental or lacking in coherence, in sequence, to a spiritual necessity ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... educational structure are many, and in some cases obvious to all. In the first place, it is said, and with much truth, that there is no systematic coherence between the different parts of our educational machinery, and no thorough-going correlation between the various aims which the separate parts of the system are intended to realise. As Mr. De Montmorency has recently pointed out, we have always had ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... to meet it, and to be myself present at the meeting. But that hasn't taken place as yet; often as he has lately been in the way of coming to see me here—yes, in particular lately—he hasn't showed to-day." It was with her managed quietness, more and more, that she talked—an achieved coherence that helped her, evidently, to hear and to watch herself; there was support, and thereby an awful harmony, but which meant a further guidance, in the facts she could add together. "It's quite as ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... curious standard; and to reach this constantly approached and constantly receding emblem of perfection, was the unwearied effort of his life. This crowning principle of conduct, never ceasing to inspire his energetic mind, introduced a consistency into his actions, a firm coherence into his character, which the changeful condition of his history rendered of peculiar importance. His resources, his place of residence, his associates, his worldly prospects, might vary as they pleased; this purpose did not vary; it was ever present with him to nerve every ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... above rendering of this story with the Hindoo variant entitled "The Valiant Chattee-Maker,"[4] and the closely-related German version called by Grimm "The Valiant Little Tailor,"[5] he will see how far it surpasses them both in unity of conception, in coherence of detail, in keen appreciation of humor and in skill of literary treatment. The grotesque statement of impossibilities with which it begins is the Caucasian story-teller's conventional method of forewarning his hearers that they are about to listen to a burlesque, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... are so senseless that throughout the whole of your speech you were at variance with yourself; so that you said things which had not only no coherence with each other but which were most inconsistent with and contradictory to one another; so that there was not so much opposition between you and me as there was between you and yourself. You confessed that your stepfather had been duplicated in that ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... responsible and those who may be supposed to be the helpless victims of their instincts and tendencies.[15] If it is true, as one has said, that "the test of sound moral character is that it possesses coherence under liberty and has learned those various arts of adaptation to ever-varying circumstance which make it a working quality, constant, rational, and automatic," we must perceive the intimate connection between mental power and moral competency. In point of fact, we now know that ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... schools and the conditions giving rise to them, which are here to be treated for the first time from the point of view of a modern history of literature, the reader will readily convince himself that the subject lacks neither coherence nor unity. It is superfluous to say that in this first attempt at a history of modern Hebrew literature, the grouping of movements and schools borrowed from the Occidental literatures is bound to ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate the doubting Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff, and who would otherwise surely say that the coherence of my dreams is due to overstudy and the subconscious projection of my knowledge of evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I have never been a zealous student. I graduated last of my class. I cared more for athletics, and—there is ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... The reader will have some difficulty, I fear, in keeping clearly in his mind the various divisions of our subject; but, when he has once read the chapter through, he will see their places and coherence. We have next to consider the expression throughout of the minds of men who indulge themselves in unnecessary play. It is evident that a large number of these men will be more refined and more highly educated than those who only play necessarily; the power of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... history,—including therein naval,—simply and clearly presented in its leading outlines, divested of superfluous and merely technical details, would be found to possess an interest far exceeding that which is commonly imagined. The logical coherence of any series of events, as of any process of Nature, possesses an innate attraction for the inquisitive element of which few intelligent minds are devoid. Unfortunately, technical men are prone to delight ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... reorganization have done so in the name of Socialism. Mr. J. R. MacDonald, recently chairman of the British Labour Party, for example writes that the problem set up by the Socialists is that of "co-ordinating the forces making for a reconstruction of society and of giving them rational coherence and unity,"[9] while the organ of the middle-class Socialists of England says that their purpose is "to compel legislators ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... a singular fact, as illustrating the tenacity and coherence of the Church of Rome, that while all Protestant endowments were thus indiscriminately swept away, no voice was raised against the retention, by the Roman Catholic clergy, of the vast possessions ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... beautiful to other appearances or qualities than these, is either false or metaphorical, as, for instance, to the splendor of a discovery, the fitness of a proportion, the coherence of a chain of reasoning, or the power of bestowing pleasure which objects receive from association, a power confessedly great, and interfering, as we shall presently find, in a most embarrassing way with ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... fickleness; and while I would not superstitiously venerate form to the sacrifice of substance, neither would I forget that an adherence to precedent and prescription can alone give that continuity and coherence under a democratical constitution which are inherent in the person of a despotick monarch and the selfishness of an aristocratical class. Stet pro ratione voluntas is as dangerous in a majority as in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... the next day in the hotel parlor, she reminded him in her exquisite beauty of a play seen from the back of the stage; the illusion so successful with the audience is there an exposed sham, without coherence, and without beauty. Her eyes had a scared look. She had to say to herself, if this is Horace then my time has come, if it is Arthur Dillon I have nothing to worry about, before her hate came to her aid and gave her courage. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... attempt might have secured. The present rising is justified, however, as an effort to carry out the principles of the new charter.[21] There are the same suggested force and suppressed fury as in his previous manifesto, the same fervid rhetoric, the same lack of coherence in expression. The same two elements, that of the eighteenth-century metaphysics and that of his own uncultured force, combine in the composition. Naturally enough, the unrest of the town was not diminished; there was even a slight collision ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... home. It makes a unity of affection, so that the temper, hopes and interests of each member have a living echo and response in all the others. It gives to home its unitive heart, preserves its vital coherence, fuses all the hearts together, makes each a thread in the web of home-being, where each finds its true measure, is inspired with the home-feeling when all is right, and oppressed with ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... could cajole a woman or a dun with a volubility, and an air of simplicity at the same time, of which many a creditor of his has been the dupe. His tales used to gather verisimilitude as he went on with them. He strung together fact after fact with a wonderful rapidity and coherence. It required, saving your presence, a very long habit of acquaintance with your father to know when his lordship was l——,—telling ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... This is what a consideration of the superstitions of savages would lead me to expect. The belief in fairies, ghosts, and witches is a survival of those superstitions. It is, of course, not found in equal coherence, equal strength of all its parts, equal logic (if I may so express it) everywhere. We must not be surprised if, as it is gradually penetrated by the growing forces of civilization, it becomes fragmentary, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... and give themselves up to whatever Conceit the Extravagancy of their Inclination, or their Fancy, shall suggest; they can think as wildly as they talk and act, and will not endure that their Wit should be controuled by such formal Things as Decency and common Sense: Deduction, Coherence, Consistency, and all the Rules of Reason they accordingly disdain, as too precise and mechanical for Men ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... apparent coherence and relevancy Sinnet continued, but his voice was not so even as before. "Em'ly was a girl that wasn't twice alike. She was changeable. First it was one, then it was another, and she didn't seem to be able to fix her mind. But that didn't prevent her leadin' men on. She ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... until he fell the victim of a court intrigue—being poisoned by a rival named Hamar. With Toto disappeared the last possible champion of the Mongols, and the only thing needed to insure their overthrow was the advent of a capable leader who could give coherence to the national cause, and such a leader was not long in making ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... is easily thrown into any shape, it is also easily thrown out of shape. It has little coherence or stability, less than masonry and very considerably less than timber. If any unequal settlement in the foundation of a brick building occurs, those long zigzag cracks with which we in London are only too familiar set themselves up at once; and if any undue load, or any variation in load, exists, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... or the reviewers of the next generation, quitted—as they seldom did quit—the ground of external form and regularity and logical coherence, it was only to ask: Is this work, this poem or this novel, in conformity with the traditional conventions of respectability, is it such as can be put into the hands of boys and girls? To them this was the one ground on which the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and overshadowing growth to credulity and superstition. A defect in his education, perhaps, in part, a natural defect, left him without any true logical culture, so that he seems, in his productions and conduct, not to discern the sequences of statements, the coherence of propositions, nor the consistency of actions, thereby entangling him in expressions and declarations that have the aspect of untruthfulness—his language often actually bearing that character, without his discerning ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... recognize our friend Faust when we find him dancing with naked witches and singing lewd songs on the Brocken. The scene was written in 1800 when Goethe had become a little cynical with respect to the artistic coherence of Faust and looked on it as a "monstrosity." It was a part of the early plan that Faust should add to the burden of his soul by frivolously deserting Margaret in the shame of her approaching motherhood and spending some time in gross pleasures. The visit to the Witches' Sabbath on the Brocken ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... his mouth save to eat—for his appetite, thanks to certain daily exertions on the part of the communal doctor, was still fairly satisfactory. When he spoke at all it was in scattered monosyllables which even the most devoted of his disciples were unable to arrange into such coherence as to justify their inclusion in the GOLDEN BOOK. All this, though hidden from the world at large, had been observed with dismay by the initiated. It was an open secret among them that the last twenty-one ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... among the jumbling memories; but, as if she made for herself a picture of all these fragments, throwing them upon the canvas haphazard, she saw them all just touched with the one tainting quality that gave them coherence, the faint, false haze she had put over this friendship by her own pretendings. And, if this terrible dinner, or anything, or everything, had shown that saffron tint in its true colour to the man at her side, last night almost a ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... Fillmore! I knew that I could rely on your sympathy and friendship, under all circumstances. Please pardon any lack of coherence or orderly arrangement of details, in what I am about ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... hindered from descending downwards, and were compelled to reside in those places capable to receive them; and these were the heavenly spaces, unto which a multitude of these small bodies were hurled, and these being thus shivered fell into coherence and mutual embraces, and by this means the heaven was produced. Then a various and great multitude of atoms enjoying the same nature, as it is before asserted, being hurried aloft, did form the stars. The multitude of these exhaled bodies, having struck and broke ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the night passed, with all that could be done for her, whose most collected phrase, frequently uttered in the doctor's face, was: "Mind, Augustine, I won't have a doctor—I can manage for myself quite well." Once for a few minutes her spirit seemed to recover its coherence, and she was heard to whisper: "God has given me this so that I may know what the poor soldiers suffer. Oh! they've forgotten to cover Polly's cage." But high fever soon passes from the very old; and early morning brought a deathlike exhaustion, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... and his play, "The Night Asylum," have the genuine Russian note of reality, and a rude strength much too great for its owner's control. He has never written a successful long novel, and his plays have no coherence; but, after all, the man has the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... be? Are they huge phosphorised fishes? If so, what monsters! Or are they crystals? a kind of igneous snow-flakes? floating in a fluid of their own, or very nearly their own, specific gravity? Some kind of solidity or coherence they must have, or they would not retain their shape in the violent movements of the atmosphere which the change of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... in the latter case, the bond of union is a relatively loose one, and evidently subordinate to that which binds the citizens of individual states, the community proper may be regarded as that group which is characterized by a relatively great degree of inner coherence ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... even of those systems, which have obtained the greatest credit, and have carried their pretensions highest to accurate and profound reasoning. Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... work of art grows slowly from confusion and lack of form to coherence and symmetry to the moral joy of its maker, so her experience in human plastic enterprise filled the heart of Miss Willis with a vital happiness. For two years—day in and day out—she never flagged in her task of giving ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... of LAPLACE. The rotation of each nucleus or sun round its axis produces centrifugal force; that force, by refrigeration, increases beyond the centripetal force of gravity; in consequence rings are formed and detached from the surface, whose unequal coherence of parts mostly causes them to break into separate masses or planets, partaking of the motion of the bodies from which they have been separated, and these primaries in their turn becoming centres of gravitation and centrifugal force, throw off ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... at the fatigue, up the ascent from the orchestra to the stage, which frequently represented the slope of a hill. He is always endeavouring to move, and for the sake of emotion, he not only violates probability, but even sacrifices the coherence of the piece. He is strong in his pictures of misfortune; but he often claims our compassion not for inward agony of the soul, nor for pain which the sufferer endures with manly fortitude, but for mere bodily wretchedness. He is fond of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... afternoon with my father. It was the first time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it very much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a lack of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily passed off, for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description; but when, a little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian verse describing how, turning from barbaric ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... past the point of comfort and the lamp seemed to make little headway with its thin volume of ascending warmth. Fred wrapped himself in a blanket and sat half shivering in the gloom. At first, detached and unrelated thoughts ran through his brain, but gradually his musing assumed a coherence. To-morrow, at this time, he might be either a hunted murderer or a victim himself of Storch's desperation. In any case, he would be furnishing the text for many a newspaper sermon. How eagerly they would trace his downfall, sniffing out ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... words themselves take on meaning and coherence, or was it something within himself?—Garry could not have told. But, with the startling clarity of a radio switched full on, he got the impress of her thoughts, and his own brain took them and put them into ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the "properties" with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... two pages of the manuscript are missing. There is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story. It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with the record of Mr. Joyce-Armstrong's qualifications as an aeronaut, which can be gathered from other sources and are admitted to be unsurpassed among the air-pilots of England. For many years ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the sudden revelation in which she herself had so painful a part. These broken reflections were in her mind like the falling of snow. They whirled through the vague world of her troubled soul without consequence or coherence; all that had nothing to do with her. Her husband was no villain, and the woman—the beautiful, smiling woman, so much fairer, greater, more important than Lucy, she was no wretched, degraded creature. What was she then? His wife—his true ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... condition for publication, but the alterations which have been made are slight and few, being in most cases verbal, and such as the sense absolutely required, or transpositions of sentences to secure coherence with the rest, in places where the author, in his more recent insertion of them, had overlooked the connection in which they stood. In no case has the meaning been in any degree ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... no real property of any kind. A child's utterances are not the same to him as to us; he does not attach to them the same ideas. If he has any ideas at all on the subject, they have neither order nor coherence in his mind; in all his thoughts nothing is certain or stable. If you watch your supposed prodigy attentively, you will sometimes find him a well-spring of energy, clear-sighted, penetrating the very marrow of things. Much oftener the same mind appears commonplace, dull, and ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... success and perfect welfare, and indeed the very continuance of Him, that is the Administrator of the whole, doth in a manner depend on it. For the whole (because whole, therefore entire and perfect) is maimed, and mutilated, if thou shalt cut off anything at all, whereby the coherence, and contiguity as of parts, so of causes, is maintained and preserved. Of which certain it is, that thou doest (as much as lieth in thee) cut off, and in some sort violently take somewhat away, as often as thou art displeased with anything ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... history of Maria Walpole, niece of the famous Horace Walpole and illegitimate daughter of his brother, Sir Edward Walpole. The letters are a potpourri of town and family gossip, and in gathering the references to Maria Walpole into coherence, I am compelled to omit much that ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... found in intellectual youths. He seems to have acquired much of his father's command of reading, and to have inherited those rarer faculties of selection and generalization which give to learning its coherence and significance. In contrast to the precise and somewhat hard literary style of the elder Hallam, the diction of the son glows with the sensitiveness of a highly artistic nature. Arthur's attainments in the modern languages appear to have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... follow you, good Master Robert Shallow. Bardolfe, looke to our Horsses. If I were saw'de into Quantities, I should make foure dozen of such bearded Hermites staues, as Master Shallow. It is a wonderfull thing to see the semblable Coherence of his mens spirits, and his: They, by obseruing of him, do beare themselues like foolish Iustices: Hee, by conuersing with them, is turn'd into a Iustice-like Seruingman. Their spirits are so married in Coniunction, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... story with such coherence as he could. He and his son had come up into the hills to arrange for the purchase of a property which they had become interested in through a third party, Gardiner. They carried with them a large sum of money ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... in getting it into finished form, the toaster will do well to remember those three essentials to all good composition with which he struggled in school and college days, Unity, Mass and Coherence. The first means that his talk must have a central thought, on which all his stories, anecdotes and jokes will have a bearing; the second that there will be a proper balance between the parts, that it will not be all ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... of the naval war till the close of 1780— directed by the allies to such secondary objects as the capture of West Indian islands, or of Minorca and Gibraltar, and by Great Britain to defensive movements—began to assume a degree of coherence in 1781. Holland having now joined the allies, the British government was compelled to withdraw part of its fleet from other purposes to protect the North Sea trade. A desperate battle was fought on the Dogger Bank on the 5th of August ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... positive scientific inquiry into wrong channels. There was indeed nothing to prevent investigating the mode of action of the supposed plastic or vital force by observation and experiment; but the phrases gave currency and coherence to a false abstraction and generalization, setting inquirers to look out for one cause of complex phaenomena which undoubtedly ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... "spirits" who, to the mere tactile sense, have been indistinguishable from flesh and blood; and, occasionally, have wrestled with all the vigour of Jacob's opponent; yet, further, to the speech, in the language of raps, of spiritual beings, whose discourses, in point of coherence and value, are far inferior to that of Balaam's humble but sagacious steed. I have not the smallest doubt that, if these were persecuting times, there is many a worthy "spiritualist" who would cheerfully go to the stake in support of his pneumatological ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... impression, taken in three hours on the following night, showed further "that the nebulosity extends in streamers and fleecy masses till it seems almost to fill the spaces between the stars, and to extend far beyond them."[1562] The coherence of the entire mixed structure was, moreover, placed beyond doubt by the visibly close relationship of the stars to the nebulous formations surrounding them in Dr. Roberts's striking pictures. Thus Goldschmidt's notion ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the Parable, as I had read it, progressed onward with some coherence and concatenation, a coherence and concatenation growing perhaps more disjointed as it advanced. Now it began to be broken with interjectory sentences, and just here was one, the tenor of which I could not altogether understand, but have since comprehended more or less clearly. I ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... For this purpose the fibrous coats of the plant were peeled off, the whole length of the stem. One layer of fibres was then laid across another upon a block, and being moistened, the glutinous juice of the plant formed a cement, sufficiently strong to give coherence to the fibres; when greater solidity was required, a size made from bread or glue was employed. The two films being thus connected, were pressed, dried in the sun, beaten with a broad mallet, and then polished with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... the objects created or embellished for them by my imagination. I was no longer myself for a moment, my delirium never left me. After many useless efforts to banish all fictions from my mind, they at length seduced me, and my future endeavors were confined to giving them order and coherence, for the purpose of converting them into a species ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... years which preceded the outbreak of the war were marked in this country by a revival of public interest in the art of poetry. To this movement coherence was given and organisation introduced by Mr. Edward Marsh's now-famous volume entitled Georgian Poetry. The effect of this collection—for it is hardly correct to call it an anthology—of the best poems written by the youngest poets ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... their meagre wardrobes of the antique furnish. The wider the divergence from present fashions the better. Chance may bring together the styles of a dozen successive periods, and render the whole without coherence. In such an exhibition our interest is felt simply in the grotesque. It shows us how a countenance familiar to us is set off by a strange and outlandish costume. It represents no history. Such was not this procession. Its front had twelfth century costumes of peasants, burghers, and even ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... extraordinary genius slung and pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write Religio Laici and the Hind and the Panther and yet be the same man, every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat, change his master, and yet never change his nature." He ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... they resolve to do me hurt? for what profit either unto them or the universe (which they specially take care for) could arise from it? But if so be that they have not deliberated of me in particular, certainly they have of the whole in general, and those things which in consequence and coherence of this general deliberation happen unto me in particular, I am bound to embrace and accept of. But if so be that they have not deliberated at all (which indeed is very irreligious for any man to believe: for then let us neither sacrifice, nor pray, nor respect our oaths, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... Netherlands, and he started for Paris where he hoped to meet contingents from the two Burgundies and his brother peers of France with their own troops. His men were good individually but they had not been trained to act as one, and there was no coherence ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... Charlotte Wiehe acted in New York a one-act play, entitled La Main, which held the attention enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was spoken. The little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and coherence, and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn; and it secured this achievement by visual means alone, with no recourse whatever to the spoken word. Here was a work which by no stretch of terminology could have been ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... cope. The conviction of her helplessness prostrated her. She sate her down upon the steps before the door of that dreary house, within the railings of that gloomy court, and buried her face in her hands: a wild vision of the past and the future, without thought or feeling, coherence or consequence: sunset gleams of vanished bliss, and stormy gusts of ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... honesty did not permit it. Her limitations tormented her. It was like having a cork leg in a race. If she could only get rid of her Lampton, materialistic, common-sense nature, she would be more able to advise and counsel her lover. Poor Meg! Thoughts like these had fought for coherence all night. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Nestorius, I ask, dare to call the one man and the one God in Christ two Christs? Or why does he call Him Christ who is God, if he is also going to call Him Christ who is man, when his combination gives the two no common factor, no coherence? Why does he wrongly use the same name for two utterly different natures, when, if he is compelled to define Christ, he cannot, as he himself admits, apply the substance of one definition to both his Christs? ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... be seen that Maine's work, like that of most great thinkers, presents a singular coherence and intellectual elegance. It is distinguished also by an extraordinary wide range of vision. He lays under contribution with equal felicity and suggestiveness the Old Testament, the Homeric poems, the Latin dramatists, the laws of the Barbarians, the sacerdotal laws of the Hindus, the oracles ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... also the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete effects of the division of the churches was the separation ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... goads, struggling against the final abandonment to death, do we all live, as the beasts live, glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted, forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood after mood but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence within us, until we find God. And God comes to us neither out of the stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a still ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... adopted the policy here considered, are not trusting completely to chance. Each of them has a body of regular troops, fitted for police duty in time of peace and for field duty in time of war, and serving as a nucleus fitted to give a degree of coherence to raw militia when the sword is drawn. Subsidiary to these are bodies of volunteer troops, training as a recreation rather than as an occupation, yet constituting a valuable auxiliary to the regular forces. This system possesses the advantage ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... position, my first duty was to make a careful study of the publications of the parent society in England, with a view of learning their discoveries. The result was far from hopeful. I found that the phenomena brought out lacked that coherence and definiteness which is characteristic of scientific truths. Remarkable effects had been witnessed; but it was impossible to say, Do so and so, and you will get such an effect. The best that could ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... into a kind of admiration; But Cato jesting at it, said, "Have we not a pleasant Consull?" A quicke cunning Argument, and a wittie saying, whether it go before or come after, it is never out of season. If it have no coherence with that which goeth before, nor with what commeth after; it is good and commendable in it selfe. I am none of those that think a good Ryme, to make a good Poeme; let him hardly (if so he please) make a short syllable long, it is no great ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... nerves. "Alas, poor Garrick!" was one of her typical lapses. Nor was Ledgar himself more of a success with Mary, who found him (and here my sympathies went over to her) lacking in force and coherence. But as Mary eloped with somebody else at the end of part one she hadn't my prolonged experience of Ledgar's incomprehensibility. Nor did the question of his semi-lunatic friend worry her, or the whole problem of what, if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... into an approbation of these particular Poems: and I was still more unwilling to undertake the task, because, adequately to display the opinions, and fully to enforce the arguments, would require a space wholly disproportionate to a preface. For, to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing out in what manner language and the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... structure thus built up is not physical, but societal and institutional, that is to say, it belongs to a category which must be defined and studied by itself. It is a category in which custom produces continuity, coherence, and consistency, so that the word "structure" may properly be applied to the fabric of relations and prescribed positions with which societal functions are permanently connected. The process of making folkways is never superseded or changed. It goes on now just as it ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... husky laugh came through those heavily bearded lips, and the stranger flung out his hands in a sweeping gesture, sunken eyes glowing with an almost savage light as he spoke with more coherence: ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... are seldom bathed in tears or steeped in fire, yet he never writes beneath his subject. He had a rare command of an excellent work-a-day dramatic style, clear, vigorous, free from conceit and affectation. But he is apt to grow didactic, and tax the reader's patience; and there is often a want of coherence in his sentences, which amble down the page in a series of loosely-linked clauses. I will not examine scene by scene in detail; for I must frankly confess that I feel myself sometimes at a loss to determine whether a particular passage ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... to its quintessence, holds it tight in a principle so simple that it can be thought empty: from this principle we then draw out what we have virtually put into it. In this way we may no doubt show the coherence of intelligence, define intellect, give its formula, but we do not trace its genesis. An enterprise like that of Fichte, although more philosophical than that of Spencer, in that it pays more respect to the true order of things, hardly leads us any further. Fichte takes thought in a concentrated ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... his end; and he distinctly saw in what manner alone this end could be attained. There was, in truth, about all his notions a clearness, a coherence, a precision, which, if he had not been pursuing an object pernicious to his country and to his kind, would have justly entitled him to high admiration. He saw that there was one instrument, and only one, by which his vast and daring projects ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... facts: he had not the art of condensation. But those who have occasion to refer to his speeches and calmly to examine them, will be struck by the amplitude and the freshness of his knowledge, the clearness of his views, the coherence in all his efforts, and often—a point for which he never had ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... told a scattered tale, and soon stated that she was single, explaining later that she had two husbands, and one was dead, while the other had disappeared from her ten years ago. Gradually her alarm subsided and she achieved coherence. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... partisanship. But if there is to be responsible party government, the party label must be something more than a mere device for securing office. Unless those who are elected under the same party designation are willing to assume sufficient responsibility and exhibit sufficient loyalty and coherence, so that they can cooperate with each other in the support of the broad general principles, of the party platform, the election is merely a mockery, no decision is made at the polls, and there is no representation of the ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... of another person instead of one of my own to analysis, the result is the same; the motives for convincing others is, however, changed. In the dream of a healthy person the only way for me to enable him to accept this repressed idea is the coherence of the dream thoughts. He is at liberty to reject this explanation. But if we are dealing with a person suffering from any neurosis—say from hysteria—the recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by reason of their connection with the symptoms of his illness and of the improvement resulting ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... coherence has this remark with the matter in question? Have a little patience, and you shall presently see the application. I say then, that a thorough true blue hearty Protestant would conclude from this quotation, that wine bestowed so much eloquence and penetration to these northern ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... time of destruction. These periods of revolution are naturally more difficult to decipher than the periods of rest; for they have so torn and shattered the beds they uplifted, disturbing them from their natural relations to each other, that it is not easy to reconstruct the parts and give them coherence and completeness again. But within the last half-century this work has been accomplished in many parts of the world with an amazing degree of accuracy, considering the disconnected character of the phenomena to be studied; and I think I shall be able to convince my readers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... motion and excitement; Paris Bordone, who mingled on his canvas cream and mulberry juice and sunbeams; the Robusti, the Caliari, the Bassani, and others whom it would be tedious to mention. One breath, one afflatus, inspired them all; and it is due to this coherence in their style and inspiration that the school of Venice, taken as a whole, can show more masterpieces by artists of the second class than any other in Italy. Superior or inferior as they may relatively be among themselves, each bears the indubitable stamp ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... ferrugineux en font beaucoup moins que le fond meme du gres. De meme si l'on compare entr'eux les gres qui renferment des cailloux avec ceux qui n'en contiennent pas, on trouve dans ceux-ci plus de gluten calcaire, l'eau-forte diminue beaucoup plus leur coherence. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... most important factors in the development of man, the recognition—profound and complete recognition—of the law of universal unity and coherence. The separation which exists between individuals, between worlds, between the different poles of the universe and of life, the mental and physical fantasy called space, is a nightmare of the human imagination. That nightmares exist, and exist only to torment, every ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... guest to try to win my daughter away from everything worth holding to and everything she has been taught. I was a blind fool. I was a watchman fallen asleep at the gate—a sentry unfaithful at his post." The voice of the minister settled into a clearer coherence as he went on in deep bitterness. "You say I have accused you sternly. I am also accusing myself sternly—but now the scales have fallen from my eyes and I recognize my remissness. God grant I am not ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... more of him than that he loves music and love, books and flowers, and that he despises wealth and company; accordingly, when he contradicts himself, we may suspect that Shakespeare is letting himself speak freely without much care for the coherence of characterization. And the result of this frankness is that he has given a more intimate, a more confidential, sketch of himself in Duke Orsino of "Twelfth Night" than he has given us in any play ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... yourself," entreats Dora, seeing the girl has some important news to impart, but is so nervous and unstrung as to be almost incapable of speaking with any coherence. But presently Florence grows calmer, and then, her voice becoming clear and full, she is able to ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... it, and yet all that I could say in its favour would not avail. It would certainly be better if it were considerably shorter. I estimate that between fifty and a hundred pages of small talk and miscellaneous observation could be safely removed from it without impairing the coherence of the story. The amount of small talk recorded is simply terrific. Not bad small talk! Heard in real life, it would be reckoned rather good small talk! But artistically futile! Small talk, and cleverer small talk ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... water if the table were not well made, if powers appropriate to tables were not present and mutually cooperating? Unless equipped with intrinsic goodness, the table can exhibit no extrinsic goodness whatever. And, on the other hand, intrinsic goodness, coherence of inner constitution, is always found attended by some degree of extrinsic goodness, or influence over other things. Nothing exists entirely by itself. Each object has its relationships, and through these is knitted into the frame ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... of our study it will suffice to say that in delirium and in insanity, which we might very broadly call a prolonged delirium, the toxic brain becomes a house in disorder. The censor is sick, and sequence and coherence are lost as the thronging thoughts of the unconscious mind press beyond the portals into consciousness, disordered and confused. We shall later find, however, that this very disorder falls into a sort of order of its own, ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... said Mr. Holden, when the mise-en-scene was quite to his liking, "that a good map, and a few realistic models of the principal buildings dealt with in my discourse, give a lucidity and a coherence ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... faculties were in a whirl—he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert, while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without coherence—scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration—a speech of hers, a look, an inflection—then the whole ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... gentleman who wished to remain loyal, without forfeiting his faith, was taught to see that a sovereign under the Papal curse had no longer a claim on his allegiance. If he disobeyed the Pope, he had ceased to be a member of the Church of Christ. The Papal party grew in coherence, while, opposed to them as their purpose came in view, the Protestants, who at first had been inclined to Lutheranism, adopted the deeper and sterner creed of Calvin and Geneva. The memories of the Marian cruelties revived again. They saw themselves threatened ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... limited by the rights and welfare of others that subordination, in its best sense, takes place. To direct a body of men toward the acceptance of this principle, so that thereby they may attain social coherence as a group and greater strength of personal character, is the most solid contribution that an officer can make to the arms of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... and start apologizing for themselves the moment they see a woman. His idea of conversing with a girl was to perspire and tie himself into knots, making the while a strange gurgling sound like the language of some primitive tribe. If ever a remark of any coherence emerged from his tangled vocal cords it dealt with the weather, and he immediately apologized and qualified it. To such a man women are merciless, and it speedily became an article of faith with the feminine population of this locality that Ramsden Waters was an unfortunate incident and ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... piece of writing, either true or made up by the author, and consisting of Introduction, Body and Conclusion. It should contain Unity, Coherence, Emphasis, Perspecuity, Vivacity, and Presision. It may be ornamented with ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of us what we are able to receive of it in "wise passiveness," and then are able by the constructive force of our individuality to shape into coherence and completeness. As the landscape which an artist paints is the landscape visioned in imagination, though composed of forms given in nature, so life furnishes us the elements of experience, and out of these elements we construct a meaning, each for himself. To one man an object or incident is ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... spherical, though rather an oblate spheroid. This spheroid is hollow, as are all such forms, for it is slowly increasing in size—gradually radiating outward from its centre, but growing proportionately less vivid and more ethereal in appearance as it does so, until at last it loses coherence and fades away much as a wreath of smoke might do. The golden glory surrounding and interpenetrating it indicates as before the radiation of its vibrations, which in this case show the dominant yellow in much greater proportion than did ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... up rhythmically for my own use, as if I hadn't made it on the spur of an inspired moment! They also told me that I couldn't write a fugue; that my orchestration was overloaded, and my work deficient in symmetry, repose, development and, above all, in coherence. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... consenting states bound themselves to maintain their demands by force, if necessary; but no declaration of war was issued. Great Britain, in accepting the challenge, equally abstained from acts which would constitute a state of war; but she armed at once to shatter the coalition, before it attained coherence in aught but words. From first to last, until the Armed Neutrality again dissolved, though there was hard fighting, there was ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... said, like most of his contemporaries, considered poetry almost exclusively from the didactic and logical point of view. He always inquires what is the moral of a work of art. If he does not precisely ask "what it proves," he pays excessive attention to the logical solidity and coherence of its sentiments. He condemns not only insincerity and affectation of feeling, but all such poetic imagery as does not correspond to the actual prosaic belief of the writer. For the purely musical effects of poetry he has little or no feeling, and allows ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... to stand as so many Records against him. Dryden might have told his Fate, that having his extraordinary Genius flung and pitcht upon a Swivle, it would certainly turn round as fast as the Times, and instruct him how to write Elegies to O. C. and King C. the Second, with all the Coherence imaginable; how to write Religio Laicy, and the Hind and Panther, and yet be the same Man, every Day to change his Principle, change his Religion, change his Coat, change his Master, and yet never change ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... studio was a huge, empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an old fresco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in Rowland's more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... though they might have been a dream born of her fever. She could scarcely believe that she had ever left Limasito; the climacteric weeks in New York, the trip to Topaz Gulch and the later scene in Jim Baggott's hotel had alike faded into a vague, nebulous shadow without substance or coherence, and she herself seemed ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... before marriage, Mr. Casaubon had often dwelt on some explanation or questionable detail of which Dorothea did not see the bearing; but such imperfect coherence seemed due to the brokenness of their intercourse, and, supported by her faith in their future, she had listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments to be brought against Mr. Casaubon's entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities, thinking ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... these special needs has stimulated inventions adapted to a special end. Inventions in the social and political order answer to the conditions of collective existence; they arise from the necessity of maintaining the coherence of the social aggregate and of defending it against inimical groups. The work of the imagination whence have arisen the myths, religious conceptions, and the first attempts at a scientific explanation may seem ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... on this point, as indicating the habitual healthiness of Mother Juliana's soul—a quality which is also abundantly witnessed by the unity and coherence of the doctrine of her revelations, which bespeaks a mind well-knit together, and at harmony with itself. The hysterical mind is one in which large tracts of consciousness seem to get detached from the main body, and to take the control of the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... of slight fever and inflammation, the Englishman recovered coherence and thanked the Chaplain and his wife, and Lispeth—especially Lispeth—for their kindness. He was a traveller in the East, he said—they never talked about "globe-trotters" in those days, when the P. & O. fleet was young and small—and had come from Dehra Dun to hunt ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling |
