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Factitious   /fæktˈɪʃəs/   Listen
Factitious

adjective
1.
Not produced by natural forces.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Factitious" Quotes from Famous Books



... suffrage shall be adjusted carefully and strictly to the normal basis. But before this the Gospel must be preached to all nations, the rough places must be made smooth and the paths straight for the coming of the Most High. Whatever unjust barriers or factitious discrimination there may be against any must be abolished, and equality must be for all. Wisdom or virtue is not the monopoly of any class or sex or race. By all the proprieties of nature, woman should have with man a voice in the enactment of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... fondly of the many hands, dead and gone, through which his 'find' has passed; he loves to imagine that it may have been held between the fingers of some person or persons of distinction; he is in the seventh heaven of exaltation if he can be quite certain it has had that honour. But suppose this factitious charm is really wanting? Suppose a volume is dirty, and ignobly so? Must one necessarily delight in dogs' ears, bask in the shadow of beer-stains, and 'chortle' at the sign of cheese-marks? Surely it is one of the merits of new leaves that they come direct from the printer ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams

... genuine and educative only as it represents a reaction of the information into the individual's own powers, so that he can bring them under control for social ends. Culture, if it is to be genuine and educative, and not an external polish or factitious varnish, represents the vital union of information and discipline. It designates the socialization of the individual in his whole outlook upon life and mode of dealing with it." I have had a large number of graduate students who found it very difficult to state the point of this paragraph, ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... at all one must have seen far under the surface of that bland and factitious normality which he maintained before his fellows. In his veins ran a mongrelized strain of tendencies and vices which had hardened into a cruel and monstrous summary of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... of modern Europe are aristocracies neither of arms nor of law. They are aristocracies of social and political privilege alone. They owe, and are half conscious that they owe, their present existence only to factitious weaknesses of human nature, and to the antiquated terrors of communities long kept in leading-strings and afraid to walk alone. If there were nothing but reason to dispel them, these fears might long retain their sway over European society. But the example of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... force of Mrs. Hilbrough, but as the queen bee of this widespread toil and traffic, fed and clad and decked as she was by the fruits of the labor of a hundred thousand men, Mrs. Van Horne had an enormous factitious value in the world. How to bear her dignity as the wife of a man who used the million as a unit she did not know, for though she affected a reserved stateliness of manner, it did not set well on such a round-faced, impressionable little woman quite incapable of charting ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... cries against them and] These murders God undoubtedly will shortly avenge. Nor indeed do we find fault with all, for we are of the opinion that there are here and there some good men in the monasteries who judge moderately concerning human and factitious services, as some writers call them, and who do not approve of the cruelty which the hypocrites ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon

... Eskimo plays a very unimportant role. Perhaps in no other race is the combative instinct less predominant; in none is quarrelling, fierceness of disposition, and jealousy more conspicuously absent, and in none does the desire for the factitious renown of war exist in a more rudimentary and undeveloped state. Perhaps the constant fight with cold and hunger is a compensation which must account for the absence of such unmitigated evils as war, taxes, complex social organization and hierarchy among the curious people of the icy ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse

... it seems paradoxical to define modesty as an aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary, to be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the problem, we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal functions, disengaged from its superstitions, its variegated customs and prejudices, the true modesty of simple and healthy natures, as far removed from prudery as from immodesty. And what ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... it may, the First Consul did not behold with pleasure the factitious influence of which Fouche had possessed himself. For some time past, to the repugnance which at bottom he had felt towards. Fouche, were added other causes of discontent. In consequence of having been deceived by secret reports and correspondence ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgresses similarly into a denial of gladness. His gloom, we feel, goes too far. It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a factitious gloom. He writes a poem called Honeymoon Time at an Inn, and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us to the bridegroom ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... there is no uncomfortable complication of politeness in such matters. On a brief journey there might be, but on a long journey the thin veil of factitious courtesy is cast aside; each wants his fair share of what is best and makes no pretense to ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... said he; "the laws of the mental world, in my judgment, require that your recovery should follow the period concerning which your factitious ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... appeared The Pioneers. This book has passages of masterly description, and is as fresh as a landscape from another world; but it seems to me that it has always had a reputation partly factitious. It is the poorest of the Leather Stocking tales, nor was its success either marked or spontaneous. Still, it was very well received, though it was thought to be a proof that the author was written out. With this book commenced the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... predilection d'artiste for hoary mediaeval families with ancestors in alabaster and primogenitive renown. Seeing this he dwelt on those topics which brought out that aspect of himself more clearly, talking feudalism and chivalry with a zest that he had never hitherto shown. Yet it was not altogether factitious. For, discovering how much this quondam Puritan was interested in the attributes of long-chronicled houses, a reflected interest in himself arose in his own soul, and he began to wonder why he had not prized these things before. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... ("Correspondance de Mirabeau et du Comte de la Marck," II. 326.) Letter of M. de Montmorin, July 13, 1792. On the disposition of the people of Paris, wearied and worn out "to excess." "They will take no side, either for or against the king... They no longer stir for any purpose; riots are wholly factitious. This is so right that they are obliged to bring men from the South to get them up. Nearly all of those who forced the gates of the Tuileries, or rather, who got inside of them on the 20th of June, were outsiders or onlookers, got together at the sight of such a lot of pikes and red ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... pliant enough to yield. She stared at the fact on the journey back to Versailles, and all that sleepless night in her room; and the next morning, when the housemaid came in with her breakfast tray, she felt the factitious energy that comes from having decided, however half-heartedly, ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... There is nothing so consoling to the depressed man as the unmitigated misery of a walk through the London rain. One is not mocked by any factitious gaiety. The mind is in harmony with the sodden universe. It is well to have everything in the world wrong at ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... as some of a more rational kind are exhibited; such as the nun, partly concealed in a truss of straw, and strapped on the catering friar's back; the effect of the galvanic fluid; and many others too numerous to mention. No factitious mirth was this year displayed; it was all natural; and if it did not add to the small sum of happiness of the distressed part of the Parisian community, it must, for a while at least, have made them forget their ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... quite gone from life, the veil fallen from truth, and that I see both in naked reality, yet, certainly, many things are not to me what they were ten years ago; and amongst the rest, "the pomp and circumstance of war" have quite lost in my eyes their factitious glitter. I have still no doubt that the shock of moral earthquakes wakens a vivid sense of life both in nations and individuals; that the fear of dangers on a broad national scale diverts men's minds momentarily from brooding over small private perils, and, for the time, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... throne and of the altar. This epithet, "fascinating," in turn fascinated me; and I thought that my prose was, like some serpent, about to fascinate all the butcher-birds and ducks of the democratic marsh. A year passed away; these fine friendships cooled: 't is the fate of these factitious tendernesses. With winter my second volume appeared, and Monsieur Louis Ulbach set to work again; but this time he found me merely "ingenious." It was a good deal more than I merited, and I would willingly have contented ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... is which comes from the deeps of a man's being. But Hardy is so much a special pleader for Tess, that the argument suffers and a grave fault is apparent when the story's climax is studied. There is an intrusion of what seems like factitious melodrama instead of that tissue of events which one expects from a stern necessitarian. Tess need not be a murderess; therefore, the work should not so conclude, for this is an author whose merit is that his effects of character are causal. He is fatalistic, yes; but ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... Minstrelsy. It was contributed by R. Surtees of Mainsforth, co. Durham, and described by him as having been taken down from the recitation of Anne Douglas, an old woman who weeded in his garden. It is however most likely that it is altogether factitious, and Mr. Surtees' own production, Anne Douglas being ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various

... Victor Escousse, stifled by the pride which had been implanted in him by a factitious triumph, was for a time the "Marseillaise" of the volunteers of art who were bent on inscribing their names on ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... recognized its special character, that its course during the period in question exhibits no mere series of lawless oscillations, but a process of development, often checked and retarded, often prematurely hastened, but passing from stage to stage without suffering itself to be stifled by factitious aid or crushed by arbitrary repression. What underlies the history of these events, what distinguishes it from the galvanic agitations of the torpid Spanish populations in Europe and America, is the constant presence and activity of ideas, shaping and shaped ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... these institutions, by giving a more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent. The use of gold and silver is in a great measure factitious; but it would be impossible to enumerate the important and various services which agriculture, and all the arts, have received from iron, when tempered and fashioned by the operation of fire, and the dexterous hand of man. Money, in a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... Universelle, para Turgot (by Durozoir).) flock hither and thither, dangerous, aimless; get the length even of Versailles. Turgot is altering the Corn-trade, abrogating the absurdest Corn-laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even 'factitious;' an indubitable scarcity of bread. And so, on the second day of May 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles Chateau, in wide-spread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present, as in legible ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Science still rages, in spite of the declaration of Professor Huxley that in his opinion the conflict between the two is entirely factitious. But theologians are wiser now than they were in the days of Galileo; they are waiting to see what the scientists can prove, and then, when the various hypotheses are shown to be true, it will be time enough to reconcile the verities of ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... itself is apt to be so distinguished as itself to supply the element of character, and character consequently particularly refined and immaterial. And one quality is always present: elegance is always evidently aimed at and measurably achieved. Native or foreign, real or factitious as the inspiration of French classicism may be, the sense of style and of that perfection of style which we know as elegance is invariably noticeable in its productions. So that, we may say, from Poussin to ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... subject of the relation subject-object. We artificially endow this personality with the faculty of having consciousness; and it results from this that the entity consciousness, so difficult to define and to imagine, profits by all this factitious addition and becomes a person, visible and even very large, in flesh and bone, distinct from the object of cognition, and capable of living a ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... they seem to make the great end and aim of their lives,—without appearing to realize that it is the appetite, not the quality of the food, that makes the feast; that there can be no such thing as a feast, indeed, without a real not factitious appetite; and that there can be no real appetite without toil or some prolonged and vigorous exercise. Nero ransacked his whole kingdom, and expended millions for delicacies; and yet he never experienced, probably, one-half ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... and an exuberance of vitality which only years of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious. His ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... voice inspired the cashier with the factitious energy of a great crisis. The dreaded and decisive moment had come; he arose, and advanced toward ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... to divest himself as much as possible of his personal and national feelings, views, and prejudices, and to suffer himself to be transported into a world foreign to his habitual course of ideas. Human feelings, it is true, are the same every where; but we have more of the artificial and factitious in us than we are aware of. And in many cases, we hold, that it is not the worst part of us; for we are far from belonging to the class of advocates of mere nature. The reader, for instance, must not expect to find ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson

... seated; on another she had her feet; and the third held her reticule. Apologizing for the liberty, A—— asked leave to put the reticule on the second chair, and to take the third for her own use. This request was refused! The selfishness created by sophistication and a factitious state of things renders such acts quite frequent, for it is more my wish to offer you distinctive traits of character than exceptions. This case of selfishness might have been a little stronger than ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... obstinacy in identifying him with the imaginary types of his poems, and in judging him by a few eccentricities of early youth, as well as by various bold thoughts and expressions, had represented to themselves a factitious Byron, totally at variance with the real man. Calumnies, which unfortunately he passed over in disdainful silence, have circulated as acknowledged facts. Time has destroyed many, but it would not be correct ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... itself seems rather a necessary state of being, than an imposed law. No shade of sin or vanity has yet stolen over that bright innocence. No discord within has marred the loveliness without—no strife of the factitious world without has disturbed the harmony within. The comprehension of evil appears forever shut out, as if goodness had converted all things to itself; and all to the pure in heart must necessarily be pure. The impression produced is exactly that ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... been dearest to them, and which is as- sociated with the most romantic, the most heroic, the epic, the consolatory, period of their history, - this luckless manifesto, I say, appears to give the measure of the political wisdom of the excellent Henry V. It is the most factitious proposal ever addressed to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body. The story also reveals unsuspected depths of cunning in the wretched Cornelius, whose abject and intense hate acts like a subtle inspiration, pointing out an ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... extent—not much larger, say, than France and Germany combined—but she had a denser population. Given something vital to fight about, Ericson felt some hope that Gloria could hold her own. But the whole quarrel seemed to him so trivial and so factitious that he could not believe the reality of the story was before the world. He knew the men who were at the head of affairs in Gloria, and he had not the slightest faith in their national spirit. He sometimes doubted whether he had not made a mistake, when, having their ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy

... a short-sighted policy which gave to a man so constituted a factitious importance, and which made him for some years the most notorious personage in Upper Canada. The treatment he had received aroused popular sympathy on his behalf, and preparations were made to return him ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... early representations of our Lord. Practically they are no more authentic than the more or less plausible inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman Hunt; in spite of which they borrow a certain value, factitious perhaps but irresistible, from the mere fact that they are twelve or thirteen centuries less distant from the original. It is something that this was the way the people in the sixth century imagined Jesus to have looked; the image has suffered by so many the fewer accretions. The great purple-robed ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... the minister, with a cold thrill of instant recognition, but playing with a factitious uncertainty till he could catch his breath in the presence of the calamity. "Oh yes! How do you do?" he said; and then planting himself adventurously upon the commandment to love one's neighbour as one's-self, he added: "I'm ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... something factitious in this parade of enthusiasm for Douglas. "What most surprises one," wrote the correspondent of the New York Tribune, "is that these Congressmen, with beards and without; that verdant, flippant, smart detachment of Young America that has got into the House, propose ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds—just the sounds he wanted and nothing else—and think his thoughts and wish his wishes—and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal, factitious love ... just his own love for himself turned inside out—a l'envers—and reflected back on him as from a mirror ... un echo, un simulacre, quoi? pas autre chose!... It was not worth having! I was ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... he might, apparently, have been king. But he had no very poignant regret. Another of his numerous selves, he reflected, had committed suicide. That was the right idea: to keep sloughing them off, throwing overboard the unreal and factitious Gissings, paring them down until he discovered the genuine ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley

... granting him the happiest of all childhoods. Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining whatever substantial benefits in constitutional temperament and susceptibilities could be thence derived, although lacking, as Pope also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy heralding of this distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely against the assault, in any form, of pinching poverty, (as would be any one in tolerably comfortable circumstances,) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... first hours at Quebec, had bought at a bazaar of Indian wares the photograph of an Indian warrior in a splendor of factitious savage panoply. It was called "The Last of the Hurons," and the colonel now avenged himself for the curtness of M. Picot by styling him "The Next to ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... questions which arise are such as these:—"This voice of duty—whence comes it? and what would it have? May not conscience be a prejudice, the result of education and of habit? It has little power, it seems, for it is braved with impunity. Many say that it is a factitious power from which one comes at last to deliver one's self by resisting it. Am I not the dupe of an illusion? I am losing joys which others allow themselves. Barriers encompass me on every hand, for there are for me prohibited actions, unwholesome beauties, culpable feelings. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... most curious collection of engraving, and caricatures appertaining to our aerial mania. This precious discovery has been at once admired and ridiculed. Fortunately we have passed the period when the Mongolfiers sought to make factitious clouds with the vapour of water; and of the gas affecting electric properties, which they produced by the combustion of ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne

... or a transitory outcry—transitory though it be for years, local though from a Nation. Still more lamentable is his error who can believe that there is any thing of divine infallibility in the clamour of that small though loud portion of the community, ever governed by factitious influence, which, under the name of the PUBLIC, passes itself, upon the unthinking, for the PEOPLE. Towards the Public, the Writer hopes that he feels as much deference as it is entitled to: but to the People, philosophically characterised, and to the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... affairs of which he has control, is obliged to delegate the larger portion of them to his servants; selecting the lightest part for himself, he gratifies his pride by calling it also the noblest, though the distinction is factitious, there being no real difference, in point of honor or dignity, between them. Omnipotence needs no minister, and is not exhausted or wearied by the cares of a universe. Power in action is more truly sublime than power in repose; and surely it is not derogatory to divine energy to ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... rhetoric and declamation? There is, I dare say, something too much in that kind. What with criticizing style and correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the limbo of the factitious,—especially when the thing must be done at odd times, in any case, and, if at all, quickly. But if I have been obliged to write hurriedly, believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily. And believe me, too, though I have desired to succeed in putting vividly and forcibly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... blessed book, the people will see how Christianity has been corrupted. They will compare the archbishops and dignified clergy of the present degenerate days, with the plainness of our Saviour, and with the simplicity of the holy fishermen, and other of his disciples. Before this book the factitious institutions and gorgeous establishments of the modern priesthood will fade and die, like Jonah's gourd. The English Episcopacy never has, nor ever will, take deep root in the United States. It can never flourish in the American soil. Even the Roman Catholic religion is here a humble and ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse

... oppressed by terror: the last blows of the hammer seemed to strike painfully on every heart; it appeared as if each sad feeling, until now repressed, was about to replace that animation and gayety, which had been more factitious than sincere. The moment was decisive. It was necessary to strike an immediate blow, and to raise the spirits of the guests, for many pretty rosy faces began to grow pale, many scarlet ears became suddenly white; Ninny Moulin's were ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... his establishment his pride and pleasure were in the guidance of industry and the accomplishment of great works. But in the hands of the heirs of these men colossal fortunes become social nuisances waste labour breed luxury create unhappiness by propagating factitious wants too often engender vice and are injurious for the most part to real civilization. The most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in England by the ostentation of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... speak of the *factitious rights and wrongs*, supposed to be created by law. Of these there are many. Thus one mode of transacting a sale or transfer is in itself as good as another; and it might be plausibly maintained that, if the business be fairly and honorably conducted, it matters not whether the ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... spirit and a kindred strength. Above all you love—though you do not know it now—the BREADTH of a country life. In the fields of God's planting there is ROOM. No walls of brick and mortar cramp one; no factitious distinctions mould your habit. The involuntary reaches of the spirit tend toward the True and the Natural. The flowers, the clouds, and the fresh-smelling earth, all give width to your intent. The boy grows into manliness, instead of growing to be like men. He claims—with tears almost of brotherhood—his ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... was the most ancient of the religious corruptions, was, I have said, also the most generally diffused; and hence, even among nations which afterwards adopted the polytheistic creed of deified men and factitious gods, this ancient sun-worship is seen to be continually exerting its influences. Thus, among the Greeks, the most refined people that cultivated hero-worship, Hercules was the sun, and the mythologic fable of his ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... Socialist (haranguing the usual crowd of well-to-do loungers, and working himself up to the requisite white-heat of factitious fury). And what are these Capitalists? I'll tell yer. Jest a lot o' greedy gobblers and profit-mongering sharks, as eat up the smaller fry. And what are you? Why, you're the small fish as eat mud—and let yourselves be gobbled! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various

... When he saw that envelope, of a satiny shade of gray, and of peculiar shape, the Irishman involuntarily started, while the duke, having opened his letter and glanced over it, rose to his feet full of animation, on his cheeks the faint flush of factitious health which all the heat from the fire had failed to ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... unity is essentially detrimental to the general impression of the work, and the author has succeeded in throwing around its individual parts an interest which does not attach to it as a whole. The world to which the poet transports his readers is truly poetic; all the factitious wants of common life, its cold calculations and its imaginary distinctions, disappear; love and honor reign supreme, and the prompting of the one and the laws of the other are alone permitted to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... much more malignant, prevails in Europe against those who may see fit to entertain more liberal notions in politics than others of their class. In England, I have already told you, the system is so factitious, and has been so artfully constructed, by blending church and state, that it must be an uncommonly clever man who, in politics, can act vigorously on the golden rule of Christ, that of doing "unto others, as you would have others do unto you," and ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper

... which is touching, indeed, far too full of pathos, human in its exaggerated way, but no longer to be mistaken, by the least sensitive of hearers, for great or even fine literature. And the sentiment in it is not so much human as French, a factitious idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly with Paris. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman who sins and loves, and becomes regenerated by an unnatural kind of self-sacrifice, done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt impersonates perfectly ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... thirst, while a phantom all pale, and with its hair streaming, called to me "Courage!" from the brink in Seraphina's voice. As to Castro, he was going mad. He was simply going mad, as people go mad for want of food and drink. And yet he seemed to keep his strength. He was never still. It was a factitious strength, the restlessness of incipient insanity. Once, while I was trying to talk with him about our only hope—the peons—he gave me a look of such sombre distraction that I left off, intimidated, to wonder vaguely at this glimpse ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... who keeps himself haughtily aloof from the soldier and the trader, and walks sunward from the pariah, lest the polluting shadow fall on his holy person, has a more difficult and engrossing occupation than the woman of fashion, in a country where the distinctions of rank are so purely factitious as in ours. Miss Sandford's time was now her own; she was accountable to no supervisor. Her brother was a cipher. He did not venture to intrude upon her, except at seasons when she was at leisure, and in a humor to be bored by him. Perhaps she looked back regretfully, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... the strong Charioteer of Resolve thus lost his control over the wild team of fancy! Was this languor of the Will a signal of coming peril, the peril of slumber? So strangely vivid those fancies were, so brightly definite, as about to take visible form, to move with factitious life, to play some unholy drama upon the stage of dreams! "O Thou Fully Awakened!" he cried aloud, "help now thy humble disciple to obtain the blessed wakefulness of perfect contemplation! let him find force to fulfil his vow! suffer not Mara to prevail against him!" And he recited ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... was a naked room with a blanket for a curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is every where and at all times observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read 'Romeo and Juliet';—all is youth and spring;—youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies;—spring ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... have been almost solidly Democratic; but, except on the negro question, such unanimity among Southern whites has been, naturally, factitious; and by no means an unmixed good for the party. Apart from the "Solid South," the period after 1875 is characterized by two other party difficulties. The first was the attempt from 1878 to 1896 to "straddle" the silver issue;[7] the second, an attempt after ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... systems of science, is work for those minds which are capable of the most accurate and comprehensive views of the things to be taught. He that is capable of "originating and producing" truth, or true "ideas," if any but the Divine Being is so, has surely no need to be trained into such truth by any factitious scheme of education. In all that he thus originates, he is himself a Novum Organon of knowledge, and capable of teaching others, especially those officious men who would help him with their second-hand ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... spontaneous in any true sense of the word? This seems to be more factitious than usual. You seem to know a great deal about it; try it by the touchstone of subscriptions, a coarse but fairly trustworthy criterion, and there is scarcely the color of money in it. The delegates write from England that they are out ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... interpenetrate one another without being confounded one with another, between which no jealous barrier should be raised, and between which reciprocity of exchange should be encouraged by the suppression of factitious duties, which have existed ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... interest. For that, after all, is what is wanted in a poetical view of Nature; and that is what the poet, in proportion to his want of dramatic faculty, must draw from himself. He must—he does in these days—colour Nature with the records of his own mind, and bestow a factitious life and interest on her by making her reflect his own joy or sorrow. If he be out of humour, she must frown; if he sigh, she must roar; if he be—what he very seldom is—tolerably comfortable, the birds have liberty ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... was the outward factitious but, again, the inward; there was a certain prescribed mode of feeling and of thinking, of living and of dying. It was impossible to address a man without placing oneself at his orders, or a woman without casting oneself ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... pompous address, beginning "Gentleman and friend," and has been as formally accepted. By Philautus he is introduced to Lucilla, the chief female character of the book, a lady, if we are to believe the description of her "Lilly cheeks dyed with a Vermilion red," of startling if somewhat factitious beauty. To say that the plot now thickens would be to use too coarse a word; it becomes slightly tinged with incident, inasmuch as Euphues falls in love with Lucilla, the destined bride of Philautus. She reciprocates his passion, and the double fickleness of mistress and ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... three weeks, and Westervelt was both sad and furious. Her joyous companionship with Douglass, her work on his sane and wholesome drama, their discussions of what the stage should be and do unfitted her for the factitious ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... eight o'clock Edwin was walking down Trafalgar Road on his way to the shop. He had bathed, and drunk some tea, and under the stimulation he felt the factitious vivacity of excessive fatigue. Rain had fallen quietly and perseveringly during the night, and though the weather was now fine the streets were thick with black mire. Paintresses with their neat gloves and their dinner-baskets and their ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... Dartrey's, he can't forgive an injury. He bears a grudge against his country. You've heard Colney Durance abuse old England. It's three parts factitious-literary exercise. It 's milk beside the contempt of Dartrey's shrug. He thinks we're a dead people, if a people; "subsisting on our fat," as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... almost daily exchanging owners, and a considerable spirit of enterprise has been awakened within a year or two past. The prices of farms and improvements vary greatly, and are influenced much by factitious and local circumstances. From St. Clair county northward, they average probably from five to ten dollars per acre, and are rising in value. In some counties, farms will cost from 2 to 5 dollars per acre. A farm in Illinois, however, means a tract of land, much of it ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck

... method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly solved by external observation and history. In connection with each of them has been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimentalism, when circumstances ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... a sort of factitious pride in remaining beautiful so long, and when Annette appeared at her side with the freshness of her eighteen years, instead of suffering from this contrast, she was proud, on the contrary, of being able to command preference, in the ripe grace of her womanhood, over that ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant

... spring in the desert, a gush of the true feeling, which contrasts with the strained and factitious sentiment in his earlier rhetoric, and almost forces us to love the writer. Could Pope have preserved that higher mood, he would have held our affections as he often ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... positions are so openly arranged for effect, that the nearest approach is only conjecture, as the nearest approach to reality is only illusion. Courts and campaigns are not human life. Kings and ministers, in their court pageantry, are scarcely more entitled to the name of human beings. They are factitious forms, showy spectacles, glittering effigies. But strip off the state costume; stand beside them while they are unconscious of a spectator; enter into their minds; seize their motives; measure their impulses: it is only then that we discover their affinity to the family of man, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... day that passes over his head would remedy it. What is now wanting in muscular expression, is in a great measure supplied by his eye, which glows with animation, and intelligence, and at times SPEAKS the language of a soul really impassioned. Upon a close view, when apart from the factitious aids and incumbrances of stage-lights, costume, and paint, he must be a shallow-sighted physiognomist who would not at the first glance be struck by Master Payne's countenance. A more extraordinary mixture of softness and intelligence never were associated in a human ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... reasonable and {245} manful spirit, considering how the task of holding together a Ministry had been imposed on him and the temptation which it afforded for the attacks of irresponsible enemies, that he would not resign office on any side issue or question of purely factitious importance, and that he would hold his place unless defeated by a vote of want of confidence or a vote of censure. He challenged the leader of the Opposition to test the feeling of the House by a division on a question of ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... broadside; to adopt a better metaphor still, of a regimental and professional soldiery rather than of single volunteer champions. The Letters of Junius, which for some time past have been gradually dropping from their former somewhat undue pride of place (gained and kept as much by the factitious mystery of their origin as by anything else) to a station more justly warranted, are no doubt themselves pamphlets of a kind; but they are separated from pamphlets proper not less by their contents than by their form and continuity. The real difference ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... not yet the knowledge of mortar; which cannot be supposed of the Danes, who came hither in ships, and were not ignorant, certainly, of the arts of life. This proves, likewise, the stones not to be factitious; for they that could mould such durable masses, could do much more than make mortar, and could have continued the transverse from the upright part with the ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... all that was left by a man who was undoubtedly a man of genius, not a great poet, but a poet, one of the very few writers of our generation to whom that name can be applied in its most intimate sense. People will complain, probably, in his verses, of what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the factitious idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare moments) the factitious suggestions of riot. They will see only a literary affectation, where in truth there is as genuine a note of personal sincerity as in the more explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al

... some such menial office? To aught better, gentleman though I was, I had no qualifications entitling me to aspire. It was a sharp but wholesome lesson to my vanity and pride, to find myself, so soon as deprived of my factitious advantage of inherited wealth, less able to provide for my commonest wants than the fustian-coated mechanic and hob-nailed labourer, whom I had been wont to splash with my carriage-wheel and despise ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... well as to those who bore them, contemptuous of etiquette, and incapable of putting constraint upon his nature, he remained an "outsider," and refused to comply with a host of factitious or worldly obligations which he regarded as useless or disgusting. Thus even at Ajaccio he managed to escape the customary ceremonies of New ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... eloquent lawyer mispronounced a foreign word, saying, for instance, "factitious" instead of "fictitious," Pyotr Dmitritch brightened up at once and asked, "What? How? Factitious? What does that mean?" and then observed impressively: "Don't make use of words you do not understand." And the lawyer, finishing his speech, ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... republic—such is the end which they sought to attain. I doubt whether they have fully obtained it, although the South, I say it to our shame, has already succeeded in procuring friends and praisers among us. The factitious indignation will fall without doubt; but cotton remains: at the bottom, the South counts much more upon cotton than free trade to bring the Old World into her interests. On rushing into a mad enterprise, all the perils of which, enraged as it was, it could ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... have flung to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious silences; and under Gannett's she now detected a hum of speech to which her own thoughts made ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... Moreover, Marie was no longer in a position to oppose the pretensions of the Duc d'Epernon, even had she felt it expedient to do so; the unlimited confidence which she had reposed in him since the death of her royal consort having invested him with a factitious importance, by which he was enabled to secure a strong party in his favour upon every question in which he was personally interested. She had assigned to his use a suite of apartments in the Louvre, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... Slapman. "TRUTH, like that which animates every line of the 'Empyrean,' needs no factitious attractions. You have read the 'Empyrean?'"—turning to Wilkeson and Maltboy, who had stood hard by during this conversation, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... were of the essence of the Constitution. Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all factitious connections and confederacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's, and it was the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth. How sinister was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... though as yet ignorant how to act. Perhaps it was this want of being roused, that led him, it may be for distraction, again to the turf. It was a pursuit that seemed to him more real than the life of saloons, full of affectation, perverted ideas, and factitious passions. Whatever might be the impulse Egremont however was certainly not slightly interested in the Derby; and though by no means uninstructed in the mysteries of the turf, had felt such confidence in his information that, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... only accept the almanac and the rules of arithmetic. The interminable years of her marriage rolled back, and she was eighteen again, ingenuous and trustful, convinced that her versatile husband was unique among his sex. The fading of a short-lived and factitious passion, the descent of the unique male to the ordinary level of males, the births of her three girls and their rearing and training: all these things seemed as trifles to her, mere excrescences and depressions in the vast tableland of her monotonous and placid career. She had had ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett

... was arranged for, as we may say, by the close consensus of those who had absolutely to know their relation with him but as a delight and who wanted therefore to keep him, to the last point, true to himself. His complete curiosity and sociability might have made him, on these lines, factitious, if it had not happened that the people he so variously knew and the contacts he enjoyed were just of the kind to promote most his facility and vivacity and intelligence of life. They were all young together, allowing for three or four notable, by which I mean far from the least ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... conscious of it, was not at all sorry to please those whom she graciously called her friends. I confess that this seductive Lawton appeared to me a chef-d'oeuvre of Nature, and in recalling her image I am tempted to write a book against the finery, the factitious graces and the coquetry of many ladies whom the world admires." Segur says: "She was a nymph rather than a woman, and had the most graceful figure and beautiful form possible. Her eyes appeared to reflect as in a mirror ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... so deeply that his letters in which he recalled the past, and stirred up all the recollections of their love, their kisses, and their dreams, softened her in spite of herself, and came across her profound, incurable sadness, like a factitious light, the reflection of a bonfire, which, from a distance, illuminates a prison ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... for strength of individuality, when the occupations in which he formerly found a comfortable consciousness of being have lost their interest, his ambitions their glow, and his consolations their colour, when suffering has wasted away those upper strata of his factitious consciousness, and laid bare the lower, simpler, truer deeps, of which he has never known or has forgotten the existence, then there is a hope of his commencing ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... custom of poets and historians. Their emotions are factitious; they are diffuse in their descriptions; they pile up words for mere effect. Moses husbands his words, but is emphatic by repetition that he may arouse the reader's attention to the importance of the message and compel him to feel his own emotions instead of reading ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... traces and adores the hand of God in all natural objects! The doctrine, it is to be observed, which is expanded through many pages of the book on Original Sin, is not merely that men are legally guilty, as being devoid of 'true virtue,' though possessed of a certain factitious moral sense, but that they are actually for the most part detestably wicked. One illustration of his method may be sufficient. The vileness of man is proved by the remark (not peculiar to Edwards), ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... deities have returned within the bosoms of mankind. The poet must reopen the palaces—he must place courts of justice beneath the canopy of heaven—restore the gods, reproduce every extreme which the artificial frame of actual life has abolished—throw aside every factitious influence on the mind or condition of man which impedes the manifestation of his inward nature and primitive character, as the statuary rejects modern costume:—and of all external circumstances adopts nothing but what is palpable in the highest of forms—that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... the lecture platform Geographical habits Get away and find a place where he could despise himself Gossips were soon at work Grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless Grief that is too deep to find help in moan or groan or outcry Haughty humility Having no factitious weight of dignity to carry Imagination to help his memory Invariably advised to settle—no matter how, but settle Invariably allowed a half for shrinkage in his statements Is this your first visit? It had cost something to upholster these women Large amount of money necessary to make a small ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger

... picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells improvisation—an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process, facile as well as factitious. Albert Wolff must have thought these things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the painstaking Bonnat. Whistler shocked Ruskin when he confessed to having painted a nocturne in two days, but with a lifetime ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... are rebels against it. The rejection of one worship for another is never lost sight of. The jealousy of that other lover, for whom these words and images and refined ways of sentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a borrowed, perhaps factitious colour and heat. It is the mood of the cloister taking a new direction, and winning so a later space of life it ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... of Morton had hitherto retained Scotland in strict alliance with the queen, and had also restored domestic tranquility to that kingdom; but it was not to be expected, that the factitious and legal authority of a regent would long maintain itself in a country unacquainted with law and order; where even the natural dominion of hereditary princes so often met with opposition and control. The nobility began anew to break into factions; the people were disgusted with some instances ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... subjective existence as facts of consciousness, no less than their objective expression in the history of religion, demands explanation, and cannot be hastily set aside, as was thought in the last century in France, by the vulgar theory that the one is factitious, and the other the result of priestly contrivance. The writers are men whose characters and lives forbid the idea that their unbelief is intended as an excuse for licentiousness. Denying revealed religion, they cling the more tenaciously to the moral instincts: ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... Socrates. They are, so to speak, the variations of a musician improvising on a given theme. The theme is not without some authenticity; but in the execution, the imagination of the artist has given itself full scope. We are sensible of the factitious mode of procedure, of rhetoric, of gloss.[6] Let us add that the vocabulary of Jesus cannot be recognized in the portions of which we speak. The expression, "kingdom of God," which was so familiar to the Master,[7] occurs there but once.[8] On ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... taste?" she would ask. "Which one of your mistresses do I resemble? Am I beautiful, enough to make you forget that any one can believe in love? Have I a sufficiently careless air to suit you?" Then, in the midst of that factitious joy, she would turn her back and I could see her shudder until the flowers she had placed in her hair trembled. I threw myself at ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures was never got up ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... Vostre, open at the page which has an astrological figure on it; and an old Vitruvius, placed upon a quaint chest, displayed its masterly engravings of caryatides and telamones. This apparent disorder which only masked cunning arrangement, this factitious hazard which had placed the best objects in the most favourable light, would have increased my distrust of the place, but that the distrust which the mere name of Polizzi had already inspired could not have been increased by any ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... merit of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... my purpose was in cultivating this factitious despondency. None whatever. Blighted beings never have any purpose in life excepting to ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... but worthy brother of hers. It is only occasionally that we meet women with an inherent bias for politics; and those are not, as a rule, the highest type of the sex—it is only occasionally that they are so. The interest most women feel in politics is secondary, factitious, engrafted on them by the men nearest to them. Women are not abortive men; they are a distinct creation. The eye and the ear, though both belonging to the same body, are each, in a certain sense, a distinct creation. A body endowed with four ears might ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... both of them directly, or in the persons of their friends, had the natural effect of banishing any dejection which nearer and more pressing concerns would else have called forth. But, in the midst of this factitious animation, and the happiness which otherwise so undisguisedly possessed Maximilian at their unexpected reunion, it shocked Paulina to observe in her lover a degree of gravity almost amounting to sadness, which argued in a soldier of his gallantry some overpowering sense of danger. In ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... sovereignty of the states is hourly perceptible, easily understood, constantly active; and if the former is of recent creation, the latter is coeval with the people itself. The sovereignty of the Union is factitious, that of the states is natural, and derives its existence from its own simple influence, like the authority of a parent. The supreme power of the nation affects only a few of the chief interests of society; it represents ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... loneliness as his sole mausoleum! The solicitude about the grave, may be but the offspring of an overwrought sensibility; but human nature is made up of foibles and prejudices; and its best and tenderest affections are mingled with these factitious feelings. He who has sought renown about the world, and has reaped a full harvest of worldly favour, will find, after all, there is no love, no admiration, no applause, so sweet to the soul as that which springs up in his native place. It is there that he seeks to be ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... theatrical artists, that they are altogether unnatural existences, and produce—pardon the bull—artificial natures, which are misplaced anywhere but in their own unreal and make-believe sphere. They are the anomalous growth of our diseased civilizations, and, removed from their own factitious soil, flourish, I half believe, in none other. Do not laugh at me, but I really do think that creatures with the temperaments necessary for making good actors and actresses are unfit for anything else in life; and as for marrying and having children, I think crossing ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... American manners, that is very good," said Harry: "among our very best people we find a great deal of true simplicity; simplicity of the right sort; real, not factitious." ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... some right to it, after all, for I am a Jew. The only real nobles are Welshmen and Jews. You cannot call anything so ridiculously recent as the European upper classes a nobility. Now I go straight back to the creation of the world, like all my countrymen. The Hibernians get a factitious reputation for antiquity by saying that Eve married an Irishman after Adam died, and that is about as much claim as your European nobles have to respectability. Bah! I know ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford

... wonder of wonders, 'He emptied Himself.' We cannot enter here on the questions which gather round that phrase, and which give it a factitious importance in regard to present controversies. All that we would point out now is that while the Apostle distinctly treats the Incarnation as being a laying aside of what made the Word to be equal with God, he says nothing, on which an exact determination can be based, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Delft Haven by the illness of a child. They came over to Massachusetts Bay in another vessel, and thus escaped the onus of that brevet nobility under which the successors of the Mayflower Pilgrims have descended. Having no factitious weight of dignity to carry, the Montagues steadily improved their condition from the day they landed, and they were never more vigorous or prosperous than at the date of this narrative. With character compacted by the rigid Puritan discipline of more than two ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... the rest of the worshippers. In the New Testament they are never designated priests, [644:1] neither is their intervention between God and the sinner described as indispensable. But Catholicism invested them with a factitious consequence, representing them as inheriting peculiar rights and privileges by ecclesiastical descent from the apostles. According to Cyprian, "Christ says to the apostles, and thereby to all prelates ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... parasites—not timid parasites like ivy or like moss, but parasites which are trees self-grafted upon trees— dominate the primitive trunks, overwhelm them, usurp the place of their foliage, and fall back to the ground, forming factitious weeping-willows. You do not find here, as in the great forests of the North, the eternal monotony of birch and fir: this is the kingdom of infinite variety;—species the most diverse elbow each other, interlace, strangle and devour each other: all ranks and orders are confounded, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... this, both the young men involuntarily turned their eyes towards her, each thinking that a being so fair stood less in need than common of the factitious aid of ornaments. She was dressed in a dark French chintz, that her maid had fitted to her person in a manner that it would seem none but a French assistant can accomplish, setting off her falling shoulders, finely moulded bust, and slender-rounded waist, in a way to present a modest outline ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... its interior surfaces at a greater angle of incidence than 241/2 degrees; whereas an artificial gem of glass does not reflect any light from its hinder surface, unless that surface is inclined in an angle of 41 degrees. Hence the diamond reflects half as much more light as a factitious gem in similar circumstances; to which must be added its great transparency, and the excellent polish it is capable of. The diamond had nevertheless been placed at the head of crystals or precious stones by the mineralogists, till Bergman ranged ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... that were trying to choke them. Not far away, down by the Episcopal Church, men were playing tennis in flannels on the courts of yellow, hard-packed sand. The intense blue of an Italian sky lent a factitious transparency to the atmosphere, and the tiny irregular shadows that indicated the colossal architecture of New York seemed to float like bubbles in an azure bowl. Across the street, a vacant plot of land, neglected because of imperfect title, was cut diagonally by a ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... of a talus of coral fragments torn off by the violence of the waves, which talus might, in course of time, become high enough to bring its upper surface within the limits of coral growth, and in that manner provide a sort of factitious sea-bottom upon which the coral embryos might perch. If, on the other hand, the level of the sea were slowly and gradually lowered, it is clear that the parts of its bottom originally beyond the limit of coral growth, would gradually be brought within the required ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... large class, ultimately reaching 353 and breaking the record of the Edinburgh classes without having recourse to the factitious assistance proposed in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton

... ascendancy. The better security the law offered that the men at the top should be excellent, the less restraint would it need to put upon them when once in their places. Their eminence would indeed have been factitious and their station undeserved if they were not able to see and do what was requisite better than the community at large. An assembly has only the lights common to the majority of its members, far less, therefore, than its members ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... because homage is demanded to anticipated prejudices, selfishness of privilege, venerable institutions, pride of station, jealousy of the well-endowed, and the like:—if this be what is meant, we may well ask whether these factitious prerogatives, that would thus interfere to render feeble, partial, and slow, any projected exertion to rescue the nation from barbarism, turpitude, and danger, be not themselves among the most noxious things in the land, and the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... that urge the old medicament, Whose fusty vials have long dried impotent, Why prop ye meretricious things, Denounce the sane as vicious things, And call outworn factitious ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... period for a degree at Cambridge. No records of his college life have been preserved, and, as he went to London, it is wonderful that the next ten years of his life remain a blank. He joined the Royal Society in 1760, but contributed nothing until 1766, when he published his first paper on "Factitious Airs." Cavendish was a great mathematician, electrician, astronomer, meteorologist, and as a chemist he was equally learned and original. He lived at a time when science was to a large extent but blank empiricism; even the philosophy of combustion was ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... originally factitious, and devised for the purpose I have mentioned, is farther corroborated by the sudden appearance of Pichegru and other officers, who seemed brought expressly to protect the departure of the obnoxious trio, in case it should be ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... cases where the military was called out, the provocation was given by the white. And in both cases it was afterwards granted to be needless. Indeed, in the quelling of one of these factitious rebellions, the prisoners taken were two white men, and one of them ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... giving my voice for the latter. I do not wish to be moved, but growing where I was growing, There more truly to grow, to live where as yet I had languished. I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious, Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process; We are so prone to these things, with ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough

... being the custom of the rural districts among honourable young men who had drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had done, he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the consequences. For his own soothing he kept up a factitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself, he sometimes ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... combination, with raw Sienna, being also eligible for boats. For these and other mixed tints, however, Prussian blue saddened by black with a suspicion of green in it, is equally fitted, and is more permanent. Indeed, it would be perhaps justifiable to introduce such a compound, under the name say, of Factitious Indigo. ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... loving these spoiled brutes that filled the place which her children ought to have occupied, she only lisped out a pretty mixture of French and English nonsense, to please the men who flocked round her. The wife, mother, and human creature were all swallowed up by the factitious character which an improper education and the selfish ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... at hand the means of justification. Now that the contest is over, I have no doubt that a large residuum of tolerance for slavery, much larger than seemed possible for Englishmen before the Secession, is left behind; but also that this tolerance was in most instances factitious and occasional, and is cleared or clearing away, and will leave the British reprobation of slavery, in a little while, pretty nearly where it used to be of old. The orange has been squeezed: what use can the rind be of? It rests with the re-United States, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... of these ladies, their pride, their arrogance, excited in Jane's mind deep contempt. She could not but feel her own immeasurable superiority over them, and yet she perceived with indignation that the accident of birth invested them with a factitious dignity, which enabled them to look down upon her with condescension. A lady of noble birth, who had lost fortune and friends through the fraud and dissipation of those connected with her, came to board for a short time in her father's family. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... succeeded the Duke of Dorset as Viceroy in 1737, contributed by his private munificence and lavish hospitalities to throw a factitious popularity round his administration. No Dublin tradesman could find it in his heart to vote against the nominee of so liberal a nobleman, and the public opinion of Dublin was as yet the public opinion of Ireland. But the Patriot party, though unable to stem successfully the tide of corruption ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... cure. Is it impossible to realize a state of society, where all the energies of man shall be directed to the production of his solid happiness? Certainly, if this advantage (the object of all political speculation) be in any degree attainable, it is attainable only by a community which holds out no factitious incentives to the avarice and ambition of the few, and which is internally organized for the liberty, security, and comfort of the many. None must be entrusted with power (and money is the completest species of power) who do not stand pledged to use it exclusively for the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... dignity of revolution, in other words, of a rebellion too powerful to be crushed. The secret friends of the Secession treason in the Free States have done their best to bewilder the public mind and to give factitious prestige to a conspiracy against free government and civilization by talking about the right of revolution, as if it were some acknowledged principle of the Law of Nations. There is a right, and sometimes a duty, of rebellion, as there is also a right and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... February, 1855, the country had no fewer than four different Prime-ministers, a fact which was at once both the proof and the parent of weakness in every administration. Lord John Russell had attempted to procure a factitious support in the country by stimulating a fresh demand for parliamentary reform. A year or two before, he had provoked the dissatisfaction of the "Advanced Liberals," as they called themselves, by insisting on the finality ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... those who, by the artificial institutions of society, are discharged from this necessity, are placed in a critical and perilous situation. They are bound, if they would consult their own well-being, to contrive for themselves a factitious necessity, that may stand them in the place of that necessity which is imposed without appeal on the vast ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin



Words linked to "Factitious" :   artificial, unreal



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