"Gravitation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will or a lower grade of personality cannot overwhelm a greater one. Not ever! Lesser beings can only urge. The astrologers used to say that the stars incline, but they do not compel. The same can be said of psi—or of magnetism or gravitation or what you will. Schweeringen could not make the computer err when it had to err too egregiously. A greater psi ability was needed than he had. A greater psi power than was available would have been needed to make you give the dog ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... greatest of insults, but to illustrate our selfishness. Our patience will bear great crimes against others, but how it gives way under the slightest insult to ourselves. Now I am not going to denounce selfishness; I'd as soon think of denouncing gravitation. There is, in the best of us, an under-current of selfishness; indeed, selfishness and unselfishness are convertible terms; this is a higher kind of that, as the upper-current of the ocean is but the under-current risen ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... unbroken record of five years without having earned a penny. And yet they clung together, sharing each other's hatred and misery, being creatures of habit. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... "in free trade that which shall act on the moral world as the law of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and creed and language and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace... I believe that the desire and motive for large and mighty empires, for gigantic armies and mighty ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... repeatedly that I perfectly understood what I was writing' about - and only stopped me at two places: one was at a word too strong for what I had to describe, and the other at one too weak. The doctrine he allowed to be quite orthodox, concerning gravitation, refraction, reflection, optics, comets, magnitudes, distances, revolutions, etc., but made a discovery to me which, had I known sooner, would have overset me, and prevented my reading any part of my work: he said he had almost always had an aversion to poetry, which he regarded ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... been partially successful, but he knew from experiments made that the gas he had so far been able to manufacture would not answer. What he wanted was some element that could be mixed with the gas, to neutralize the attraction of gravitation, or downward ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... 182, it is stated, that Newton's proving, that, if a body revolved in an elliptical orbit with the sun as a focus, the force of gravitation toward the sun would always be in the inverse ratio of the square of its distance, "was equivalent to proving, that, if a body in space, free to move, received a single impulse, and at the same moment was attracted to a fixed centre by a force which diminished as the square ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... of the universe are bound by the universal law of cause and effect. The effect is visible or perceptible, while the cause is invisible or imperceptible. The falling of an apple from a tree is the effect of a certain invisible force called gravitation. Although the force cannot be perceived by the senses, its expression is visible. All perceptible phenomena are but the various expressions of different forces which act as invisible agents upon the subtle and imperceptible forms of matter. These invisible ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... had nearly ceased. This is a moral phenomenon that I have often had occasion to observe, and which, there is some reason to think, depends on a principle of attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of the philosophers, but which is as active in the immaterial, as is that of gravitation in the material world. Talents like his, so incessantly and unweariedly employed, produced the usual fruits. He grew richer hourly, and at the time of which I speak he was pretty generally known to the initiated ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... processes of the higher science remain above the mental reach of the unscientific classes, the conclusions of that science will not be generally accepted. The dimensions and weights of planets; the distances and the composition of stars; the law of gravitation; the signification of heat, light, and color; the nature of sound, and a host of other scientific discoveries, are familiar to thousands quite ignorant of the details of the methods by which such knowledge was obtained. Again we have evidence that every ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. From a deep conviction then that the excellence of writing, whether in prose or verse, consists ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... is to be added that ever-recurring invincible gravitation towards the Kaiser, and also towards Julich and Berg, by means of him,—well acted on by the Tobacco-Parliament for the space of those six weeks. During which, accordingly, almost from the first day after that Hotham Dinner of April 3d, the answer of the royal ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... of the kind that had ever passed between them. Yet neither showed surprise, nor did either change position. It was as though he had said that gravitation makes the apple fall, or that the earth was round, a thing they had both known for long, had become instinctively ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... shadow of guilt had been lifted from her, and that to her the world again was fair. She felt as the freed Psyche must feel when she drops the clay, and lo! the whole chrysalid world, which had hitherto hung as a clog at her foot, fast by the inexorable chain our blindness calls gravitation, has dropped from her with the clay, and the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... simply, it seemed, by the natural law of gravitation, without any engineering whatever, Mrs. Upjohn's guests had resolved themselves into two distinct parties, the elders all in the drawing-room, the younger ones in the parlor across the hall, too far off from Mr. Webb for their gay whispering to disturb that ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid. To seclude these persons from the rest of the world so that the dreaded spiritual danger shall neither reach them nor spread from them, is the object of the taboos which they have to observe. These ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... source of light and heat that is already under our control. There is no more doubt that all the warmth, illumination and mechanical power that we can use are within our reach, when we have learned how to take possession of them, than there is of gravitation. It is all waiting at the door, we have only to clap our hands and the potent spirit is ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... away like the pretty butterfly that she was, leaving Constance to wonder at the natural gravitation of plungers in the money market toward plungers in ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... suspense, undecided, whether or not to yield to the downward pressure. It was quite dark, and I thought it best to trust to his instinct and his recollections. This unpleasant struggle between animal force and the attraction of gravitation, in which the part I played was merely to contribute to the latter, lasted nearly a quarter of an hour longer, when the mules appeared to be suddenly relieved. They moved more briskly for a minute, and ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... country: dependent upon approaches through United States' territory: each Province enforcing its separate, and differing, tariffs, the one against the other, and others, through its separate Custom House; it was not matter of surprise to find a growing gravitation towards the United States, based, alike, on augmenting trade ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob. Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy. And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned. And there was autocracy again, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Newton saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'T is said (for I'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the Earth turned round In a most natural whirl, called "gravitation;" And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,[jt] Since Adam—with a fall—or with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... its vicarious service in influencing more youthful planets within its reach, that dead world might as well be loosed at once from its gravitation cable and be turned adrift into space. Its time has not yet come. It will not come until the great central sun of the system to which it belongs has passed laboriously through all his stages of stellar life and died out also. Then when ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... that he could swim. Twice, indeed, from his yacht, he had swum the Hellespont. And how about the animal instinct of self-preservation, strong even in despair? No matter! His soul's set purpose would subdue that. The law of gravitation that brings one to the surface? There his very skill in swimming would help him. He would swim under water, along the river-bed, swim till he found weeds to cling to, weird strong weeds that he would coil round him, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... (1642-1728), in his Principia (1687), settled permanently all discussions as to the Copernican theory by his wonderful mathematical studies. He demonstrated mathematically the motions of the planets and comets, proved Kepler's laws to be true, explained gravitation and the tides, made clear the nature of light, and reduced dynamics to a science. Of his work a recent ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... of justice. I am the servant of the people. If Wall Street can not stand the enforcement of law, so much the worse for the Street. It's no affair of mine. I didn't make the laws of the State any more than I made the law of gravitation. Nor did I write the Ten Commandments, but I have an abiding faith that they will stand when the last stone in the Stock Exchange building shall have crumbled into dust. I refuse to believe that the only way to save ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... tells the truth to all; and the sooner the better, unless the soul arraigned is utterly weak, or else belongs essentially to the criminal classes, which require almost a miracle to reverse their evil gravitation. Marian Vosburgh was neither weak nor criminal at heart. Thus far she had yielded thoughtlessly, inconsiderately, rather than deliberately, to the circumstances and traditions of her life. Her mother had been a belle and something of a coquette, and, having had her career, was in the ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... began to flap their hands, like young birds trying to fly; and Rollo said again, he wished, with all his heart, there was no gravitation; "for then," said he, "we should have strength ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... this glass of water. I hold it out at arm's length, so. If I did not hold it, it would drop to the floor and shatter into pieces. Thus I, by a human act, suspend the law of gravitation ... so God!—" There was huzzaing and applause. Several professors uneasily shifted the crossing of their knees ... one or two stared diplomatically at ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... are scarcely unconnected: but the Anglo-Saxon is not derived from the Latin; they are, each in its own language, genuine and independent forms. But it is curious to see what an attraction these distant cousins have for one another, let them only come within each other's sphere of gravitation. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... by connecting up a single phenomenon of a body falling a distance of a few feet on the earth with all similar phenomena, through the law of gravitation discovered the unity of the universe. Though Newton carried on important investigations in astronomy, studied the refraction of light through optic glasses, was president of the Royal Society, his chief ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Sir Isaac Newton was one of the six best educated men the world has seen. He was the first man to resolve light into its constituent elements. Voltaire says that when Newton discovered the Law of Gravitation he excited the envy ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... that despotism which poets have celebrated in the "Pied Piper of Hamelin," whose music drew like the power of gravitation,—drew soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women and boys, rats and mice; or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pallbearers dance around the bier. This is a power of many degrees, and requiring in the orator a great range ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... inconveniences and humiliates you by blowing off your hat in a street full of people. He had no quarrel with me. Neither would a boulder, falling on my head, have had. He fell upon me in accordance with the law by which he was moved—not of gravitation, like a detached stone, but of self-preservation. Of course this is giving it a rather wide interpretation. Strictly speaking, he had existed and could have existed without being married. Yet he told ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... supporting True, some deriding us. In the midst of all this, I read scientists' comments on Einstein's new unified-field theory, which had been printed about the time True appeared on the stands. A discussion by Lincoln Barnett, author of The Universe and Dr. Einstein, explained the basic premise—that gravitation and electromagnetic force are inseparable. As I read it, I thought of what Redell had said. If gravitation were a manifestation of electromagnetic force, was it possible that an advanced race had found a way—as unique as splitting the atom—to offset ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... the upper sanctuary know it and experience it. They "cry one to another." Theirs is no solitary strain—no isolated existence. Unlike the planets in the material firmament, shining distant and apart, they are rather clustering constellations, whose gravitation-law is unity and love, this binding them to one another, and all to God. Nay—with reverence we say it—may not the archetype of all friendship be found shadowed forth in what is higher still, those mystic ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... oracles of God, is to justify the suspicion that it is groundless and arbitrary, at best a matter of loyalty or good form. I shall present morality as a set of principles as inherent in conduct, as unmistakably valid there, as is gravitation in the heavens. I shall hope to make it appear that the saving grace of morality is directly operative in life; needing no proof from any adventitious source, because ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... servant, as honest as the daylight, dull enough at her books, but a good, plodding worker, if you marked out every step of the way for her beforehand. I do not think she would ever have discovered the laws of gravitation; but she might have jumped off a precipice to prove them, if she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... works without holiday for ever and searches every corner of the universe, what intellect can follow it to its fountains? And yet, shyer than gravitation, less to be counted on than the fluxions of sun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footsteps of Christianity amongst the political workings ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Anne, and by an unconscious gravitation went towards her and the other women, flinging a remark to John Loveday in passing. 'Ah, Loveday! I heard you were come; in short, I come o' purpose to see you. Glad to see you enjoying yourself ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... controlled and harmonized with the general interests of society, if statute or human law did not interfere with natural or divine law. Reliance on competition would ensure order, harmony and continuous progress in society, just as in the realm of matter the influence of gravitation has transformed by a long-continued development the original chaos into an orderly universe. Each individual acting in obedience to this law would be "led by an invisible hand to promote"[207] the well-being of society, even though he was conscious only of a selfish desire ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... his pocket?[68] There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not paper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the Day of Judgment become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the flat of the universe for the throne? There is no law, but only gravitation and congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting hail, and melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in which our worships were born. And there is no gospel, but only, whatever we've ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... any physical laws,—and then evaporating whence it came. This language is vague and figurative undoubtedly, but, I contend, appropriately so, for we have not yet a theory of life—we have not even a theory of the essential nature of gravitation; discoveries are waiting to be made in this region, and it is absurd to suppose that we are already in possession of all the data. We can wait; but meanwhile we need not pretend that because we do ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... a queer way of acting sometimes. The Wastrel—as we call him—cannot play when he's sober; hands too shaky. He can't play cards, either, when he's sober. Alcohol—would you believe it?—steadies his nerves and keens his brain: which is against the laws of gravitation, you might say. He has often told me that if he could play sober, he would go to ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... scared. The rats and mice no longer dared To show their thievish faces Outside their hiding-places, Thus shunning all pursuit; whereat Our crafty General Cat Contrived to hang himself, as dead, Beside the wall with downward head, Resisting gravitation's laws By clinging with his hinder claws To some small bit of string. The rats esteem'd the thing A judgment for some naughty deed, Some thievish snatch, Or ugly scratch; And thought their foe had got his meed By being hung indeed. ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... looked about me, I saw the flowers and detected their fragrance; I heard the hum of bees and the contented chirp of well-fed birds; I marveled at great butterflies flapping so slowly that it seemed as if they must have cheated gravitation in some subtle way to win such lightness and disregard of earth-pull. I heard no ugly murmur of long hours and low wages; the closest scrutiny revealed no strikes or internal clamorings about wrongs; and I unconsciously relaxed and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... that the Government, from the first, had soberly looked the danger in the face and frankly warned the country of the forthcoming sacrifices for the common cause and also for the strengthening of the mutual gravitation of the Slavonic races. He briefly referred to the Turkish defeat in the Caucasus as opening before the Russians a bright historical future on the shores of the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the far-reaching effects of Newton's discovery to seek a law which would coordinate facts in the moral world as the principle of gravitation had co-ordinated facts in the physical world, and in 1808 he claimed to have found the secret in what he called the law of Passional Attraction. [Footnote: Theorie des quatre mouvements et des destinees generales. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... cold as he watched the preparations for the ship's departure. Neon and nitrogen gas were being pumped under pressure into the outer shell, where a minute charge of leucon, the newly discovered element that helped to counteract gravitation, combined with them to provide the power that would lift the vessel above ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... strong drink. About most writers one could be permitted to have an opinion. But it was not thought that one could properly have an opinion about Shakspere, and, so far as we knew, no one had ever before subjected him to this indignity. One might as well have an opinion about Virtue or the law of gravitation. An opinion of any sort was impossible. One favorable would be puny, futile, immodestly patronizing. An unfavorable opinion had heretofore not been within realms of the ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... well executed. The beast's skull bashed in easily, being merely thin bones for a thin atmosphere and light gravitation. A push sent it over the ...
— Martians Never Die • Lucius Daniel
... houses and stables which will make it easy to entertain their friends, and depending for society on chosen guests rather than on the mob of millionaires who come together for social rivalry. But I do not fret myself about it. Society will stratify itself according to the laws of social gravitation. It will take a generation or two more, perhaps, to arrange the strata by precipitation and settlement, but we can always depend on one principle to govern the arrangement of the layers. People interested ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sculptor; "they give him warning of danger." It is a magnificent animal, a model of tireless vigor in all its parts; a creature made to hurl itself head-foremost down appalling gulfs of space, and poise itself at the bottom as jauntily as if gravitation were but a bugbear of timid imaginations. I find myself unconsciously speaking about these plaster models as if they were the living animals which they represent; but the more one studies Mr. Kemeys's works, the more instinct with redundant and breathing ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Pen; for that is preferable to staggering about the room with a partner who has no idea of the laws of gravitation." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the streets in London. Castle Campbell is unaltered; the window, of which the disjointed stone projects at an angle from the wall, and seems at the point of falling, has still found power to resist the laws of gravitation. Whoever built that tottering piece of masonry has been long in a forgotten grave, and yet what he has made seems to survive in spite of nature itself. The curious cleft called Kemp's Score, which gave the garrison access to the water in case of siege, is obviously natural, but ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Planet, which had seemed to be beside him, appeared to swing about, so that it was beneath him. He knew that it was a change merely in his sensations. He was feeling the gravitation of the new world. It was ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... to write a treatise on Karma and its practical working in detail, whereby the place and time of the next birth, its content and duration. are determined; and to do this the present commentator is in no wise fitted. But this much is clearly understood: that, through a kind of spiritual gravitation, the incarnating self is drawn to a home and life-circle which will give it scope and discipline; and its need of discipline is clearly conditioned by its character, its standing, ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... indefinite extent. Thus these principles conduct us to a unity in the genera of the forms of these orbits, and, proceeding farther, to a unity as regards the cause of the motions of the heavenly bodies—that is, gravitation. But we go on extending our conquests over nature, and endeavour to explain all seeming deviations from these rules, and even make additions to our system which no experience can ever substantiate—for example, the theory, in affinity with that of ellipses, of hyperbolic paths ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... with the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if by some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity makes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act which effected it into something closely akin to the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... musical young lady took us to conjugal pairs. It was very difficult to convey to us what this conjugal love was like. Was it Elective Affinity? I asked. Yes; something like that, but still not that. It was the spontaneous gravitation in the spheres, either to other, of the halves of the dual spirit dissociated on earth. Not at all—again in reply to me—like flirting in a corner. The two, when walking in the spheres, looked like one. This conjugal puzzle was too much for us. We "gave it up;" ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the top of his bent;—else could I omit that strange creature Woollett, who existed in trying the question, and bought litigations?—and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen—with what deliberation would ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... matter cannot obstruct the Ether, or vice versa; there is no perceivable friction between them, unless, as I shall presently suggest, we may find something akin to obstruction by Matter, not to Ether itself, but to its pressure, in the phenomenon of Gravitation. ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... to defy all laws of equilibrium. From between their stony knees trees sprang, like a jet under heavy pressure, and upheld others which upheld them. Natural towers, large scarps, cut perpendicularly, like a "curtain," inclined at an angle which the laws of gravitation could never have tolerated ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... supreme, and clinging hands that would hold back the pilgrim have to be disengaged. If a man realises God's hold on him, he feels all others relaxed. The magnetism of the divine command overcomes gravitation, and lifts him high above earth. The life of faith ever begins as that of 'the Father of the Faithful' began, with the solemn recognition of a divine will which separates. Further, Abram saw plainly what he had to leave, but not what he ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... the original system introduced in working the hammer. A method of self-acting was afterwards added. In 1843, I admitted steam above the piston, to aid gravitation. This was an important improvement. The self-acting arrangement was eventually done away with, and hand-gear again became all but universal. Sir John Anderson, in his admirable Report on the Vienna Exhibition of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... idea in writing; but he was the first to make an absolute demonstration of the truth. Newton was not the first man to know, or to say, that things near the earth tend to fall to the earth; but he was the first to formulate and prove the doctrine of universal gravitation. In the same way, all through history, we find that a few master minds have been able to group what had theretofore seemed unrelated phenomena, and deduce from them certain laws. In this way they substituted reasoning for speculation, fact for fancy, wisdom for opportunism, and became ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... is the dire necessity and "iron" law under which men groan? Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there be an "iron" law, it is that of gravitation; and if there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground. But what is all we really know, and can know, about the latter phenomenon? Simply, that, in all human experience, stones have fallen to the ground under these conditions; that we have not the smallest ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... canal is not rapid transit. So the people of Holland have plenty of precedent for moving at a moderate speed. There are no mountains in Holland, so water never runs; it may move, but the law of gravitation there only acts to keep things quiet. The Dutch never ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... "Henry VIII.," with a grand spectacle of a coronation, had been presented at the theatres, the armour of one of the kings of England having been brought from the Tower for the due accoutrement of the champion. And here we may note a curious gravitation of royal finery towards the theatre. Downes, in his "Roscius Anglicanus," describes Sir William Davenant's play of "Love and Honour," produced in 1662, as "richly cloathed, the king giving Mr. Betterton his coronation suit, in which he ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... probably have written with more force if he had been acquainted with various small details relating to the position and surroundings of many of the caves. The heavy cold air of winter sinks down into the glacieres, and the lighter warm air of summer cannot on ordinary principles of gravitation dislodge it, so that heat is very slowly spread in the caves; and even when some amount of heat does reach the ice, the latter melts but slowly, for ice absorbs 60 deg. C. of heat in melting; and thus, when ice is ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... of the means to the adventure and the experience itself are both plausible. There are a few minor discrepancies, but when the chief assumption is granted the deductions will all stand examination. The invention of cavorite, the substance that is impervious to the force—whatever it may be—of gravitation, as other substances are impervious to light, heat, sound or electricity, is not a priori impossible, nor is the theory that the moon is hollow, that the "Selenites" live below the surface, or that evolution has produced on our ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... circle of planets proper has been immensely increased, a new visitant to the central fire appearing every few years or even months. Newton connected the most distant points of the universe by the one principle of gravitation: the spectroscope unites them by identity of structure and composition. Improved instruments have detected the parallax of a number of the fixed stars, and traced motion in both solar and stellar systems ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... this way. When the first womb of things was pregnant with all the future, there would probably have been existent at any rate not more than one of the formulae which we now call natural laws. This one law, of course, would have been the law of gravitation. Here we may take our stand. It does not signify whether there ever was a time when gravitation was not,—i.e., if ever there was a time when matter, as we now know it, was not in existence;—for if there ever ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... 50.) "PROF. MOSSOTTI has recently shown, by a very able analysis, that there are strong grounds for believing that not only the molecular forces which unite the particles of material bodies depend on the electric fluid, but that even gravitation itself, which binds world to world, and sun to sun, can no longer be regarded as an ultimate principle, but the residual portion of a far more powerful force, generated by that energetic agent which ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... colorist does not love beautiful color better than the best colorist does, nor half so much. But he indulges in it to excess; he uses it in large masses, and unsubdued; and then it is a law of Nature, a law as universal as that of gravitation, that he shall not be able to enjoy it so much as if he had used it in less quantity. His eye is jaded and satiated, and the blue and red have life in them no more. He tries to paint them bluer and redder, in vain: all the blue has become grey, and gets greyer the more ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... that any considerable number of thoughtful people have come to look at life steadily and consistently as being shaped to this form, to the form of a series of births, growths and births. The most general truths are those last apprehended. The universal fact of gravitation, for example, which pervades all being, received its complete recognition scarcely two hundred years ago. And again children and savages live in air, breathe air, are saturated with air, die for five minutes' need of ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... world—the herrings of Scotland and the cod of the Baltic might defy us but for thee. What were wells and windlasses without thee? useless as corkscrews to empty bottles. Thou art the strong arm of the pulley and the crane. Gravitation itself, that universal tyrant, had bound all things to the earth but for thy opposition. The scaffolds were thine from which grew the Colosseum, and the Pyramids have arisen in thine arms. The kite of science, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... bed. I couldn't sleep an instant, my dear, if I thought that boy was in the upper berth; for I'd be sure of his tumbling out over you. Here, let me lay him down. [She lays the baby in the lower berth.] There! Now get in, Agnes—do, and leave me to my struggle with the attraction of gravitation. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... years of tuition in which I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson! When I left Harrow I was nearly at the top of the school, being a monitor, and, I think, the seventh boy. This position I achieved by gravitation upwards. I bear in mind well with how prodigal a hand prizes used to be showered about; but I never got a prize. From the first to the last there was nothing satisfactory in my school career,—except the way in which I licked the boy who had to be taken home ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... and immeasurable responsibility. It was so felt to be by the prime actors in it, though with greatly varying largeness of survey and depth of insight. In the system of American politics it created as vast a disturbance as would a mutation of the earth's axis, or the displacement of the solar gravitation, in our natural world. This great transaction filled the twenty years of Mr. Chase's mature manhood, say, from the age of thirty to that of fifty years. He must be awarded the full credit of having understood, resolved ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... opposition of theology to the first four of these men is well known; but the fact is not so widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that he "substituted gravitation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... was a white-painted ship. So low to the water was her hull, so delicate and slender, that the tall, sky-reaching spars and masts and the hugeness of the spread of canvas seemed preposterous and impossible, an insolent derision of the law of gravitation. It required effort to realize that that slim curve of hull inclosed and bore up from the sea's bottom five thousand tons of coal. And again, it seemed a miracle that the mites of men had conceived and constructed so stately ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... but one long chain of accidents, if by accident we understand all that falls out without our own intention or volition. We cannot control these accidents. There is a power above circumstance and accident that controls them, as gravitation controls the motions of material things. We can only turn them at our will, and make use of them, as the machinist turns the power of gravitation to serve ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... his supreme desire; and yet, if he stopped—were this possible—the whole wretched truth would be revealed. Each day he had been tormented with the feeling that something must be done, and yet nothing had been done. He had only sunk deeper and deeper, as with the resistless force of gravitation. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... is because we are close to the center of the earth, where the attraction of gravitation is very slight. But I've noticed that many queer things happen in ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... Plane of Ethereal Substance comes the Plane of Energy (A), which comprises the ordinary forms of Energy known to science, its seven sub-planes being, respectively, Heat; Light; Magnetism; Electricity, and Attraction (including Gravitation, Cohesion, Chemical Affinity, etc.) and several other forms of energy indicated by scientific experiments but not as yet named or classified. The Plane of Energy (B) comprises seven subplanes of higher forms of energy not as yet discovered by science, ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... of matter which causes particles to adhere, or cohere, to each other. It is known under a variety of terms, such as gravitation, chemical affinity, electro-magnetism ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... the first business of the enslaver of men to blunt, deaden, and destroy the central principle of human responsibility. Conscience is, to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is the basis of all trust and confidence; it is the pillar of all moral rectitude. Without it, suspicion would take the place of trust; vice would be more than a match for virtue; men would prey upon each other, like the wild beasts of the desert; ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... is amusing enough; but it is useless to stick tacks under the steam road-roller: the road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths down your mischievous little tacks and you too, indifferently. The huge interests of politics, trade, progress, override your passionate protest. "Shall gravitation cease when you go by?" I do not compare Colonel Roosevelt with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs against our famous contemporary, from the "Alone in Cubia" to the "Teddy-see," ever cost him, in a dozen years, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... a curious battle against fate, and, not only a struggle against adverse circumstances, but against gravitation. For, now that there was no forward impulse in the airship, she could not overcome the law that Sir Isaac Newton discovered, which law is as immutable as death. Nothing can remain aloft unless it is either lighter ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... girl who so desires may now learn something of these feeding laws in the same school that teaches her the law of gravitation or the rules for forming French plurals. Fortunately, also, the girls of to-day seem inclined to undertake such study. It is not too much to expect that the girl of the future will be able to set ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... splendor, and compels every creature to stand out in that light. There is no darkness in which man can hide himself, when he leaves this world of shadows. A false theory, therefore, respecting God, can no more protect a man from the reality, the actual matter of fact, than a false theory of gravitation will preserve a man from falling from a precipice into a bottomless abyss. Do you come to us with the theory that every human creature will be happy in another life, and that the doctrine of future misery is false? We tell ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... thousand feet," he told Barstowe, "and it must be more than a half-mile in length. Probably," he added, "it is a planetary fragment of some odd composition that is less responsive to gravitation than the materials with which we are familiar. You will find, Barstowe, that there is nothing about it that science will not be able to explain. That will be all ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... ourselves or the entire world that we consider great, still will there quicken within our soul the sense of the infinite, which is of the life-blood of virtue. What is an act of virtue that we should expect such mighty reward? It is within ourselves that reward must be found, for the law of gravitation will not swerve. They only who know not what goodness is are ever clamouring for the wage of goodness. Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is of itself always an act of happiness. It is the ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... fuel were obtained. The scheme was, however, abandoned from practical difficulties. It need hardly be said that ether vapor is very difficult to deal with, and although ether is light, the vapor is extremely heavy, and if there is any leakage, it goes down into the bilges by gravitation, and being mixed with air, unless due care is taken to prevent access to the flues, there would be a constant risk of a violent explosion. In fact, it was necessary to treat the engine room in the way in which a fiery colliery would be treated. The lighting, for instance, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... the sixteenth centuries, new guilds or schools sprang up in all the principal towns of Germany. After order had been restored by the first Hapsburg dynasty, the intellectual and literary activity of Germany retained its centre of gravitation in the middle classes. Rudolf von Hapsburg was not gifted with a poetical nature, and contemporaneous poets complain of his want of liberality. Attempts were made to revive the chivalrous poetry of the Crusades by Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von Wolkenstein in the beginning of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... chosen, and both are bad when they are basely chosen; but of the two, I repeat, it is restraint which characterizes the higher creature, and betters the lower creature: and, from the ministering of the archangel to the labour of the insect,—from the poising of the planets to the gravitation of a grain of dust,—the power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom. The Sun has no liberty—a dead leaf has much. The dust of which you are formed has no liberty. Its liberty will come—with ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... vagrant solids. We certainly do not think that we make any such approximation. But then our thoughts—in the case of people who do think about such topics—are so much under the control of the materialistic theory of nature that they hardly count for evidence. If Einstein's theory of gravitation has any truth in it, vagrant solids are of great importance in science. The whole boundary of a finite event may be looked on as a particular example of a vagrant solid as a locus. Its particular property of being ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... that the periodic time of each planet must be equal to that of the portion of the solar atmosphere of which it was formed at the era when it was thrown off, and combining the theorems of Huygens on the measure of centrifugal forces with Newton's law of gravitation, he establishes a simple equation between the time of the rotation of each zone or section of the solar atmosphere, and the distance of the corresponding planets. On applying this equation to the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... been incredibly thin and frail. Under normal gravitation, his life would have gone out like a blown match. Even at one-sixth G, it had cost him effort to rise and greet the guest. There had been a younger man, a mere stripling of seventy-odd; he had been worried, and excused himself at ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... ether may also be supposed to consist of two fluids, one of which attracts the needle, and the other repels it; and, perhaps, chemical affinities, and gravitation itself, may consist of two kinds of ether surrounding the particles of bodies, and may thence attract at one distance and repel at another; as appears when two insulated electrised balls are approached to each other, or when two small globules ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... whilst getting off. He gripped the handles and released the brake, standing on the left pedal and waving his right foot in the air. Then—these things take so long in the telling—he found the machine was falling over to the right. While he was deciding upon a plan of action, gravitation appears to have been busy. He was still irresolute when he found the machine on the ground, himself kneeling upon it, and a vague feeling in his mind that again Providence had dealt harshly with his shin. This happened when he was just ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Yorkshire and Lancashire and the chief Midland manufacturing counties the attraction of their own industrial centres acts more powerfully in their immediate neighbourhood than the magic of London itself. Thus, if we were to take the map of England and mark it so as to represent the gravitation towards cities, we should find that every remotest village was subject to a number of weaker or stronger, nearer or more distant, forces, which were helping to draw off its rising population into the eddy of city life. If we examined in detail a typical agricultural ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... a man, going through a wood, should be struck by a falling tree and pinned down beneath it. Suppose that another man, coming that way and finding him there, should, instead of hastening to give or to bring aid, begin to lecture on the law of gravitation, taking the ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... noble beings in helmets, all playing on immense trumpets; the twenty-four prancing steeds with manes, tails, and feathered heads tossing in the breeze; the clowns, the tumblers, the strong men, and the riders flying about in the air as if the laws of gravitation no longer existed. But, best of all, was the grand conglomeration of animals where the giraffe appears to stand on the elephant's back, the zebra to be jumping over the seal, the hippopotamus to be lunching off a couple of crocodiles, and lions ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... the conception of a simple reversal of my brother's weight, I think, saved us all from the padded cell. That made it so commonplace, such an everyday sort of thing, likely to happen to anybody. The ordinary phenomenon of gravitation is no whit more mysterious, in all truth, than that which we were now witnessing—but we are born ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... the seemingly empty pot, and gave him a long stroke across his chest. With the passage of the brush the living flesh disappeared from beneath. I covered his right leg, and he was a one-legged man defying all laws of gravitation. And so, stroke by stroke, member by member, I painted Lloyd Inwood into nothingness. It was a creepy experience, and I was glad when naught remained in sight but his burning black eyes, poised apparently ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... whom I would rank myself, combine both these elements of incompetence. Nature, that made me enthusiastically fond of fishing, gave me thumbs for fingers, short-sighted eyes, indolence, carelessness, and a temper which (usually sweet and angelic) is goaded to madness by the laws of matter and of gravitation. For example: when another man is caught up in a branch he disengages his fly; I jerk at it till something breaks. As for carelessness, in boyhood I fished, by preference, with doubtful gut and knots ill-tied; it made the risk greater, and increased ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... important than that of Neptune, the outermost known planet of the solar system. It was a rich reward to the watchers of the sky when this new planet swam into their ken. This discovery was hailed by astronomers as "the most conspicuous triumph of the theory of gravitation." Long after Copernicus even, the genius of philosophers was slow to grasp the full conception of a spherical earth and its relations with the heavenly bodies as presented by him. So it was also with the final acceptance of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... every pound weight of the motor represents so many foot pounds of energy used in its own propulsion; thus, if a motor weighed 660 pounds, and were traveling at the rate of 50 feet per minute, against gravitation, it would expend 33,000 foot pounds per minute in moving itself, and although this machine may give 2 horse power, with an efficiency of 90 per cent. it would, in the case of a boat or a tram-car, be termed a wasteful machine. Here we have an all-important factor ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... remark, that this evil was owing to another evil— namely, man's ignorance of, or indifference to, the duty of what we may term human communication? As surely as gravitation is an appointed law of God, so surely is it an appointed duty that men shall communicate their individual knowledge to each other, in order that the general knowledge of the species may advance and just in proportion to the fidelity with which men obey this duty—the care and ability with which ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the times of their revolutions about their primaries; and the discovery of the planet Uranus and two of its satellites, and of the sixth and seventh satellites of Saturn. His greatest work was his study of binary stars and the demonstration of his belief that the law of gravitation is universal in its application. His labors were invariably systematic, and were characterized by dogged, Teutonic perseverance. His discoveries were never purely accidental, but were made in accordance ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... which man is in reality chained down, like a slave of the soil. How was this to be accomplished? By exhibiting to us an image hovering in the air? But this would have been incompatible with the law of gravitation and with the earthly materials of which our bodies are framed. Frequently, what is praised in art as ideal is really nothing more. But this would give us nothing more than airy evanescent shadows incapable of making any durable impression on the mind. The Greeks, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... render them eminently successful. It is not permitted to all to be born, like Archimedes, when a science was to be created; nor, like Newton, to find the system of the world "without form and void;" and, by disclosing gravitation, to shed throughout that system the same irresistible radiance as that with which the Almighty Creator had illumined its material substance. It can happen to but few philosophers, and but at distant intervals, to snatch a science, like Dalton, from the chaos of indefinite ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... even more vividly recounted adventures than those which charmed so many boy readers in 'Pirate Island' and 'Congo Rovers.'... There is a thrilling adventure on the precipices of Mount Everest, when the ship floats off and providentially returns by force of gravitation."—Academy. ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... two distances differ from each other with respect to the ascent and descent, or fall, if you like. Are not all bodies inclined to obey the laws of gravitation unless they are held ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... held that the Bible is a self-evidencing book; God will take care of His Word if we ministers only take care to preach it. We are no more called upon to defend the Bible than we are to defend the law of gravitation. My beloved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester, has well said that if ministers, "instead of trying to prop the Cross of Christ, would simply point men to that Cross, more souls would be saved." The vast proportion of volumes of "Apologetics" are a waste of ink and paper. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... waste of labour and ingenuity on questions to which the human mind is altogether incompetent.'[182] The principles found by inductive observation are as independent of these speculations as Newton's theory of gravitation of an ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... shifts and wiles, look here! See one straightforward conscience put in pawn To win a world; see the obedient sphere By bravery's simple gravitation drawn! Shall we not heed the lesson taught of old, And by the Present's lips repeated still? In our own single manhood to be bold, Fortressed in conscience ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... one-sided statement of facts? Did not all the powers of the universe also combine to make it grow, if only it had valour and worth wherewith to grow? Did not the rains feed it, the very mortar in the wall give lime to its roots? Were not electricity, gravitation, and I know not what of chemical and mechanical forces, busy about the little plant, and every cell of it, kindly and patiently ready to help it, if it would only help itself? Surely this is true; true of every organic thing, animal and vegetable, and mineral, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... are, exemplifying the attraction of gravitation or some other long-winded theory of your scientific gentlemen," replied the skipper, who seemed to have got science on the brain this morning, being violently antagonistic to it, somehow or other. "Ah, Fosset, see, our anchor's come ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... instruments have reached the limit of perfection beyond which it is demonstrably impossible to improve them, or because (in the case of astronomy) we come into the presence of forces of which, unlike gravitation, we have no terrestrial experience? It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall not soon reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... gravitation, follows the same law on smaller spheres that it follows on the larger. Brother infects sister, and sister brother; parent child, and child parent; shopman shopmate. We often lament the contagious influence of evil, and it is right that we should; but it is an unthankful, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... conscience, and aspiration have sprung at any time, however remote, from the same stock as the orang and the chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of things,—a universal nebula, if you will,—in his secret soul he makes one exception—himself. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... of intellect will sometimes unexpectedly be broken up, "richer than all the tribe" of contemporaneous thoughts, that shall raise him to whom it occurs, to a rank among his species altogether different from any thing he had looked for. Newton was led to the doctrine of gravitation by the fall of an apple, as he indolently reclined under the tree on which it grew. "A verse may find him, who a sermon flies." Polemon, when intoxicated, entered the school of Xenocrates, and was so struck with ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... without any scientific knowledge, the further he travels the more obviously falls into confusion and absurdity; where he touches on some ideas having a certain resemblance to modern scientific discoveries, as the law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the quantitative basis of differences of quality, etc., these happy guesses are apt to lead more frequently wrong than right, because they are not kept in check by any experimental tests. But taken as a 'myth,' which is perhaps all that Plato intended, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... spend their keenness in vain against the 'anarch old' whose power lies in utter insensibility. It is fighting with a mist, and firing cannon-balls into a mudheap. As well rave against the force of gravitation, or complain that our gross bodies must be nourished by solid food. If, however, we should be rather grateful than otherwise to a man who is sanguine enough to believe that satire can be successful against stupidity, and that Grub Street, if it cannot be exterminated, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... This law has laid its heavy hand upon Great Britain, upon France, upon Germany, and now it has struck with full force into the isolated, provincial life of the United States. It is the law—immutable as the system of gravitation. While the present system of economic life exists, this law will continue to operate. Therefore the masters of American life have no alternative. If they would survive, they must dispose of ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... occurrence of 'spontaneous' and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of gravitation, or of inexplicable sounds, lights, and other occurrences in certain localities. These are just the things which Medicine Men, Mediums and classical Diviners have always pretended to provoke and produce by ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... produces results in striking contrast to the farce of materialization: the one produces the results of chastity and purity, the other the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of sensualism ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... true secret, he said, was this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming-top: he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his axis—perhaps he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the flies," that never improved in their pretended art, nor made any thing of it. The principle was now discovered; "and, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... to come; and when it does, he will have the heart and mind to fill it," said Jasper. "A soul that is true to what is best in life, becomes a power among men at last—it is spiritual gravitation. 'Tis current leads the river. ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... this was no "malice prepense" in me, for I solemnly believe that I was the best-natured boy in the world; but something was the matter with the attraction of cohesion, or the attraction of gravitation—with the general dispensation of matter around me—that, let me do what I would, things would fall down, and break, or be torn and damaged, if I only came near them; and my unluckiness in any matter seemed in exact proportion ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... said, which is initiated anywhere on the earth, is felt to the extremities of our solar system—every motion of the smallest particle of matter communicating its effect, however inappreciable, to the most distant planet, and as far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character. Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human action, the results of which at any specific period ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... terms, then, with which Logic is chiefly concerned, the names of Causes and Kinds, such as gravitation, diseases, social events, minerals, plants and animals, stand for some facts that are, or have been, known, and for a great many other similar ones that have not been, and never will be, known. The use of a general term depends ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the peaceful soul of Newton was employed by no business, and agitated by no passion, it was also chance that, drawing him under an apple tree, loosened some of the fruit from the branches, and gave that philosopher the first idea of his system on gravitation: it was really this incident that afterwards made him turn his thoughts to inquire whether the moon does not gravitate towards the earth with the same force as that with which bodies fall on its surface? It is then ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... paramount, admitting no rival—no competing affection. Though infinitely inferior in degree, it is the same impelling principle which leads His people still to link enjoyment with His service, and which makes consecration to Him of heart and life its own best recompense and reward. "There is a gravitation," says one whose life was the holy echo of his words, "in the moral as in the physical world. When love to God is habitually in the ascendant, or occupying the place of will, it gathers round it all the other desires of the soul as ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... hold more than an actual thimbleful, though they need not hold a pint, and should bear some relation to the laws of gravitation in their poise upon the saucer. They should have a smooth rim. A fluted edge is a most uncomfortable finish for a drinking vessel. The wafer-basket may be silver, china or ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... and for all. Economic society was conceived of as a number of freely competing units held in equilibrium by the force of competition, much as the material universe is held together by the attraction of gravitation. Any hindrance to this freedom of the individual to compete freely with all others, any artificial support or encouragement that gives him an advantage over others, is against his own real ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... is as much a fact as the law of gravitation, and it would be as suicidal to ignore the operation of the one as that of the other. Mournful complaint is as impotent as an infant crying against the fury of the wild wind. History has taught you that the path of moral progress has never taken a ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... Science advanced a great step at once. So in our own day was the planet Neptune discovered by the observation of certain facts which could not be squared with the facts previously observed unless the Law of Gravitation was to be corrected. The result in this case was not the discovery of a new Law but of a new Planet; and consequently a great confirmation of the old Law. But in each case and in every similar case the investigation of the newly observed fact proceeds on the assumption that Nature will be ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... Before applying any of these it is advisable to empty the limb of blood. This is best done after the manner suggested by Lister: the limb is held vertical for three or four minutes; the veins are thus emptied by gravitation, and they collapse, and as a physiological result of this the arteries reflexly contract, so that the quantity of blood entering the limb is reduced to a minimum. With the limb still elevated the tourniquet is ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... articulations, and exude from their pores a certain slimy sweat, of agony it may be,—anyhow, a slimy exudation comes from them, —and, simultaneously, and just as much in kind, degree, quality, everything, snails a, b, c repeat the process. Such is the law, constant as gravitation. Consequently, all that the operator has to concern himself about is, to understand that so many touches, with fluid of such intensity, to so many snails, and repeated so often, produce such and such an effect upon them, as, collectively considered, to convey, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the hideous fall; and the inevitable slight dizziness which the strongest head feels may make one doubt for a moment whether what is really the floor below may not be in reality a ceiling above, and whether one's sense of gravitation be not inverted in an extraordinary dream. At that distance human beings look no bigger than flies, and the canopy of the high altar might ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... perfect or complete be human mechanism, it can only move by the application of some power inherent in matter; did not an elastic spring expand itself after being coiled, the chronometer would be a dead and lifeless mass; did not fluids obey the force of gravitation, and currents in the atmosphere the expansive power of heat, the water-wheel and wind-mill would be useless; did not water form vapour at elevated temperatures, and condense when cooled, the still more powerful agency of steam would be wanting. Not only are machines ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... unceremoniously, and easily. Ethelberta had let him go a second time; yet on foregoing mornings and evenings, when contemplating the necessity of some such explanation, it had seemed that nothing less than Atlantean force could overpower their mutual gravitation towards each other. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... thankful to get her safely down to firm ground again. She turned her back upon the tower, as they crossed the grassy space to the majestic old Cathedral, saying that if she thought about it any more, she should become a disbeliever in the attraction of gravitation, which she had always been told all respectable people ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... equal rights be enjoyed by all. That barrier, too, must give way wherever erected, as sure as time outlasts and baffles every device of wrong-doing, and truth is stronger than falsehood, and the law of eternal justice is as reliable as the law of gravitation. Yes! the grand fundamental truths of the Declaration of Independence shall yet be reduced to practice in our land—that the human race are created free and equal; that government derives its just powers from ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... that a portion of the water in the soil is under the immediate influence of gravitation. For instance, a stone which, normally, is covered with hygroscopic water is dipped into water The hydroscopic water is not thereby affected, but as the stone is drawn out of the water a good part of the water runs ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... Hamersleben, 3d December, &c. (Putter, Historische Entwickelung der hautigen Staatsverfassung des Teutschen Reichs, Gottingen, 1788, ii. 384, 390).] And so certain doors are locked; and Friedrich Wilhelm's word, unalterable as gravitation, has gone forth. In this manner is the mad Catholic bull taken by the TAIL: keep fast hold, and apply your cudgel duly in that attitude, he will not gore ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... retirement of the angular female in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion—as they say in the Chamber of Deputies—on the part of the young fellow they call John. Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw—(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him). Our landlady to Benjamin Franklin, briskly,—Go to school right off, there's a good boy! Schoolmistress curious,—takes a quick glance at divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed; draws his shoulders back a little, as if a big ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... out of the way, whensoever they interfere in the least with the welfare of any human being. The drowning man is not to strike out for his life lest by keeping his head above water he interfere with the laws of gravitation. Not that the political economist, or any man, can be true to his own fallacy. He must needs try his hand at the synthetic method though he forbids it to the rest of the world: but the only deductive ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the longitude of the sun and moon were determined, and dials to measure time. Bailly thinks that thirty-one hundred and two years before Christ astronomy was cultivated in Siam which hardly yields in accuracy to that which modern science has built on the theory of universal gravitation. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... and the different stages of their growth in the egg,—this is all." Though this is by no means the limit of his claim so modestly expressed, yet that was a grand generalization, and, like the great doctrine of gravitation, and the demonstration by Cuvier of the existence of races of animals and plants on the globe anterior to those now existing, it proves to be of almost indefinite application, and, like those doctrines, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... nourish us again? What part of it, not being incombustible, has actually gone to flame and gas in the huge world-conflagration, and is now GASEOUS, mounting aloft; and will know no beneficence of gravitation, but mount, and roam upon the waste winds forever,—Nature so ordering it, in spite of any industry of Art? This is the universal question of afflicted mankind at present; and sure enough it will be long ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... heaven's chariots to take the heirs of God and the joint-heirs of the Lord Jesus Christ into His own presence. As He ascended so His redeemed ones will be taken up. Caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; all laws of gravitation are set aside, for it is the power of God, the same power which raised up the Lord Jesus from the dead and seated Him in glory, which will be displayed in behalf of His saints (Eph. i:19-23). Surely this is a divine and a wonderful revelation. ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... satellite's orbit. With the result that either it rushes on to certain destruction, or it passes beyond the limits of gravitation. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... possible, impossible, probable, etc. We spoke above of meanings. To meanings we give names, so that a single word comes to stand for meanings broad and significant, the result of much experience. Such words as "evolution" and "gravitation," single words though they are, represent a wide range of experiences and bring these experiences together and crystallize them into a single expression, which we use as ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle |
