"Indeterminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enthusiasm they may have condensed in another — a process curiously analogous to those irregular condensations and rarefactions of air which physicists have shown to be the conditions of producing an indeterminate sound. Many of my critics have seemed — if I may change the figure — to be forever conciliating the yet-unrisen ghosts of possible mistakes." Enough quotations have already been given from his lectures in Baltimore to show his enthusiasm for many of the periods and many of ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... having a struggle with herself. It showed plainly on the thin, anxious face. The lips compressed with determination, the eyes set, then wavered, and again the indeterminate lines of acquiescent subjection gained their accustomed ascendency. Back and forth assertion and complaisance fled and followed; only assertion was ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... challenging his opponent to choose the lot of an ecstatic oyster. As usual, good must be related to Intelligence; and the Dialogue gives a long disquisition upon the One and the Many, the Theory of Ideas, the Determinate and the Indeterminate. Good is a compound of Pleasure and Intelligence, the last predominating. Pleasure is the Indeterminate, requiring the Determinate (Knowledge) to regulate it. This is merely another expression for the doctrine of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... the Jason's-crew, who landed from the Argo-Mayflower, usually bearing a name thus significant, and manifesting, even at her age, traits of character justifying the compellation. What that age precisely was, could not always be known; indeed, a lady's age is generally among indeterminate things; and it has, very properly, come to be considered ungallant, if not impertinent, to be curious upon so delicate a subject. A man has no more right to know how many years a woman has, than how many skirts she wears; and, if he have any anxiety about the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... like them, to have been thinly occupied in Roman times; at any rate the structures actually unearthed consisted only of a roughly built foundation (25 feet diam.) of uncertain use, which there is no reason to call a temple, some other even more indeterminate foundations, and two bits of road. More interest may attach to three ditches (one for sewage) and the clay base of a rampart, which belong in some way to the northern defences of the place in various times. The full meaning of these will, however, not be discernible till complete plans are available ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... hares. He must have worked among machinery in early days, for before he stood still he always shouted to himself: "Stop the machine!" and before going on: "Full speed!" He had a huge black dog of indeterminate breed, called Arapka. When it ran too far ahead he used to shout to it: "Reverse action!" Sometimes he used to sing, and as he did so staggered violently, and often fell down (the wolf thought the wind blew him over), and shouted: "Run ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... daybreak. The great wall of pines and hemlocks that keep off the west wind from Stillwater stretches black and indeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull, metallic sound, like the guttural twang of a violin string, rises form the frog-invested swamp skirting the highway. Suddenly the birds stir in their nests over there in the woodland, and break into that wild jargoning chorus with which they ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... limping began again, and she asked him if he heard anything, and he at once agreed that somebody was walking round the bed. In his own room—I forget which—he twice saw the ghost, once in the shape of an indeterminate mist, once in the shape of a man, who came in by the door and vanished in the wall. Mrs. 'G.'[B] now appears on the scene, and slept in No. 1 (I think). She heard only the bangings, which she declares were indescribably loud. They were mostly ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... the production of the civilized man. The rest we have to ascribe to his world in general, of which his home is simply the first and most intimate aspect. In every developing citizen we have asserted there is a great mass of fluid and indeterminate possibility, and this sets and is shaped by the world about him as wax is shaped by a mould. It is rarely, of course, an absolutely exact and submissive cast that ensues; few men and women are without some capacity for question and criticism, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Her age is indeterminate; She is not a woman, yet She is no longer a child. It is hard to say even that She is grown up, just marriageable, a girl-child, so entirely is She refined above all humanity, beyond the world, so exquisitely ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... each other then and there, and never through life have swerved from that pledge! For some of the goodness which Rex believed in was there. Goodness is a large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future; is the germ prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was as aloof and taciturn a client as Rammer Spacelines ever had picked up. A lean, blond character of indeterminate age, with pale eyes, hard mouth. Why he had selected a bulky semifreighter like the Queen for a mineralogical survey jaunt to a lifeless little sun system far beyond the outposts of civilization ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... certainty of civil war, therefore, it was necessary to lay down the line of inheritance by a peremptory order; to cut off resolutely all rival claims; and in legislating upon a matter so vital, and hitherto so uncertain and indeterminate, to enforce the decision with the most stringent and exacting penalties. From the Heptarchy downwards English history furnished no fixed rule of inheritance, but only a series of precedents of uncertainty; and while at no previous time had the circumstances of the succession ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... articles for the Reno Gazette, dealing with psychology. I was particularly impressed with a fact which he made to stand out clearly above all others and which would vitally affect society as a whole if it were to be universally carried out. It is the substitution of an indeterminate sentence for the definite one which now prevails. "No judge can determine in advance when a prisoner is fit to return to the community," he says; and in the same way we release the inmates of an insane hospital as soon as we think them sufficiently recovered, he believes ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... and unnatural. Also, the elliptical oval is generally an unsatisfactory form, because it gives the idea of useless trouble in building it, though it occurs quaintly and pleasantly in the former windows of France: I believe it is also objectionable because it has an indeterminate, slippery look, like that of a bubble rising through a fluid. It, and all elongated forms, are still more objectionable placed horizontally, because this is the weakest position they can structurally have; that is to say, less light is admitted, with greater loss of strength to the building, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... moving in a dream, uplifted, cloud-enwrapped, made his way homeward. He walked all the long distance—that is, looking backward upon it, later, he thought he must have walked, but the half-hour was a blank to him, an indeterminate, a chaotic whirl of things ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... and that's what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming. Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don't laugh, that's just what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt all your habits here: I've grown fond of going to the public baths, would you ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wild and indiscriminating change was abroad. Meetings, petitions, and addresses were got up on every hand, advocating extensive alterations in our representative system, all of which, however vague and indeterminate in their respective conditions, tended to confer the elective rights on a much larger proportion of the people than had hitherto enjoyed them. Threats were even uttered that a refusal of these rights would lead to a general convulsion, in which the privileged ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Alvina's will was indeterminate, at this time. She was resolved not to marry. But her will, like a spring that is hitched somehow, did not fly direct against the doctor. She had sent in her resignation, as he suggested. But not that she might be free to marry him, but that she ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... said with dignity. "The man's hair is a medium brown—indeterminate brown." He glanced around the table at the heads of hair under the electric lights. "Something the color of Merrill's," and a director began stroking his ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... therefore, as much concerned in the guilt of its expense as colonial traffic. The amount of charge, therefore, although remaining to be deducted from the colonial head, may be left as a neutral indeterminate item. But the military expenses for Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, about L.80,000, cannot be for colonial account at all, because stations merely for carrying on foreign trade, against which chargeable, with the civil establishments as well, whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... an indeterminate interval, he found himself in the street. The air was cool after the fetid staleness of that room. He was still holding the Negro's hand. And above them the stars burned, remote and calm, like beacon ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... circular screen. Pale streaks of light glowed briefly as the sweep passed over them. There were milky dots everywhere. A soft light in the lower left hand corner of the screen cut an uncertain path across the grid, and two indeterminate splotches in the upper half of the scope flared ...
— The Circuit Riders • R. C. FitzPatrick
... the Poet drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, was arranging to have his ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... a wooden image of this being. It is rudely anthropomorphic, and is covered with fish-like scales. Its sex is indeterminate. He is supposed to ascend the river from the sea, kneeling on the back of ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... from which young students are eager to escape. And yet, when the laws of both schools are rightly obeyed, the most perfect discipline is that of the colourists; for they see and draw everything, while the chiaroscurists must leave much indeterminate in mystery, or invisible in gloom: and there are therefore many licentious and vulgar forms of art connected with the chiaroscuro school, both in painting and etching, which have no parallel among the colourists. But both schools, rightly ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... strong one, to protect trade in the event of war, and to secure a voice in overseas policy; the genuine fear of an attack by the Powers of the Entente, an attack to be provoked by British jealousy; and also that indeterminate ambition of any great Power which may be influencing the policy of statesmen even while they have not avowed it to themselves, and which, expressed by men less responsible and less discreet, becomes part of that "public opinion" of which policy ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... unable to determine its value, and that it would be a mistake to suppose we can do so, even in the lowest degree, by Mr. Spencer's test of inconceivability. Nevertheless, the fact that there is such a chance renders it in some indeterminate degree more probable that what we know as Force and Matter are identical with what we know as Mind, than that what we know as oxygen and hydrogen are identical with what we know as water. So that to this extent the essential doctrine of Materialism is "ruled out" in ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I was there until we could find ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... repudiation of such agreements is almost negligible. To plead the Statute of Frauds in an action for non-delivery or non-acceptance of goods under such informal agreements might be a defence in the law courts, but would not save the defendant from the indeterminate but effective penalties due to the feeling of his fellows that he was acting dishonourably. It is instructive to notice that in dealing with the question of industrial disputes, which are in many ways analogous to international, at least where they arise between organised bodies of employers ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... indeterminate sentence, allowing of parole when earned by continuous good conduct, and final release when ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... the big tea-room began to fill with its usual late afternoon crowd of patrons,—young, old and indeterminate in age. Women of maturely years, young misses from "finishing" schools, demimondaine, social "bounders" deluded by the glitter of their own jewelry and the thrill of their wasted money that they were climbing into New York ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... inconsequence and incoherence. All experience does not show that 'drowned bodies' require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the surface. Both science and experience show that the period of their rising is, and necessarily must be, indeterminate. If, moreover, a body has risen to the surface through firing of cannon, it will not 'sink again if let alone,' until decomposition has so far progressed as to permit the escape of the generated gas. But I wish to call your attention to the distinction which is made between 'drowned ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... eight, as, in a subsequent passage, the table of the khan is merely said to be higher than those of the rest who have the honour to dine along with him; the particular height, therefore, is left indeterminate in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... day in a boat; lovely weather and almost dead calm, only the most infinitesimal and indeterminate of oscillations moved us hither and thither; the sails were duly set, and flapped about idly overhead. Our boatman was a man of a delightful humour, who told us many tales of the sea, notably one of a doctor, who was an Englishman, and who seemed almost an epitome of vices—drunken, dishonest, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... asleep, than a figure none of them had noticed, yet all perhaps had vaguely felt, rose out of the little ditch this side of the laurel shrubberies, and advanced slowly towards the old Mill House. The shape was shadowy and indeterminate at first; it might have been a bush, a sheaf of straw, a clump of high-grown weeds, for birds fluttered just above it, and the swallows darted down without alarm. A shaggy thing, it seemed part of the ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... and she was both shocked and displeased. There were droppings of food all down the front of his coat; the mouth under the ragged ill-grown beard drooped sullenly; the forehead was lined and contracted; and on the lean temples the hair was a dusty indeterminate colour that might or might not have been called gray. The utter misery and self- abandonment of the man appealed to her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the wicked feeling that he was humbled and brought low ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... much varied specialisation, will, indeed, specialise those who have special gifts from a very early age, will have corners for Greek, Hebrew, Sanscrit, philology, archaeology, Christian theology, and so on, and so on; nevertheless, for that great mass of sound men of indeterminate all-round ability who are the intellectual and moral backbone of a nation, it is in scientific studies that their best training lies, studies most convenient to undertake and most readily applied in life. From either of the two groups of the sciences ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... sphere, polished and flawless. Inside it could be made out various objects—a circular bench arrangement on a wooden flooring, batteries that filled the cup between the floor and the bottom arc of the sphere, tall metal cylinders, a small searchlight set next to a mechanism that was indeterminate. At three equidistant points on the sides there were glass handles, as thick as a man's thigh, cast integral with the walls. On the top there ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... and support his wife than she would do so for him. They would be two friends, differing in kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves in a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as we have discussed it, is indeterminate between these alternatives. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... I had three hours' talk was Charles Dudley Warner, the humorous writer. I am not partial to American humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley Warner I always appreciated. In our talk I saw his serious side, for he was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State, on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories. He told me that he never talked in train: but during the three hours' journey to New York neither of us opened the books with which we had provided ourselves, and ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... in the forecross-trees, glass in hand, his eyes in every quarter, spying for an entrance, spying for signs of tenancy. But the isle continued to unfold itself in joints, and to run out in indeterminate capes, and still there was neither house nor man, nor the smoke of fire. Here a multitude of sea-birds soared and twinkled, and fished in the blue waters; and there, and for miles together, the fringe of cocoa-palm and pandanus extended desolate, and made desirable green bowers for ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... a year step between each of them, stood up to receive Lady Beach-Mandarin's invasion; an indeterminate baby sprawled regardless of its dignity on a rug. "Aah!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin, advancing in open order. "Come and be hugged, you dears! Come and be hugged!" Before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking little persons Mr. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... deeper this retrospective glance the less dogmatic the philosophy. A primordial constitution or tendency, however, must always remain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if we thought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin, we should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, a blank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actual experience presented. When, starting with the inevitable preformation and constitutional bias, we sought to build up a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Literature The American Newspaper Certain Diversities Of American Life The Pilgrim, And The American Of Today—[1892] Some Causes Of The Prevailing Discontent The Education Of The Negro The Indeterminate Sentence Literary Copyright The Relation Of Literature To Life Biographical Sketch By Thomas R. Lounsbury. The Relation Of Literature To Life "Equality" What Is Your Culture To Me? Modern Fiction Thoughts Suggested By Mr. Froude's "Progress" ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... disorderly but picturesque surroundings, his clothes dirty and almost in rags; an old jersey in place of a shirt, and over it two and sometimes three waistcoats of different shapes and sizes, all of one indeterminate earthy colour; and over these an ancient coat too big for the wearer. The thin hair, worn on the shoulders, was dust-colour mixed with grey, and to crown all there was a rusty rimless hat, shaped ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... him, a pleasant, indeterminate presence in the long journey she travelled from the printed page to the accompanying click of Ellen's needles. Sometimes at the opera she took on a gossamer tint from the singer's face, and longer ago than he could afford ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... After an indeterminate interval the four left the still, taking a bottle with them so that it might be had without delay, should they meet a snake or a hydrophobia skunk or some other venomous reptile. It was Casey who made the suggestion, and he became involved in difficulties when he attempted the word ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... text are fixed elements, this is not the case with the interpretations of theologians, and the results of geology. It is difficult to pronounce upon the exact relation of two quantities more or less indeterminate. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... forward. It was the same sort of reluctance that you feel when you start out to visit the dentist for a roaring tooth. The closer you get to the dentist's office the less inclined you are to finish the job. Then at some indeterminate point you cross the place of no return and from that moment you go ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... of the next day in smoking an indeterminate quantity of cigars in his study window, and so got through the hours till he could dress and go to the Hotel de Langeais. To anyone who had known the magnificent worth of the man, it would have been grievous to see him grown so small, so distrustful of himself; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was finished and below him lay the house and climbing woods,—woods that crept into the bosom of the hills, the closely growing trees tipped with tender greens melting into the softest of indeterminate greys as the breeze rippled through their tops like fingers across a harp. The darker line of moorland in the background, scant as ever of herbiage, had yet lost its menacing bareness and seemed touched with the faint colour of the earth beneath, almost pink in the generous sunshine. The ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inseparably connected with the limitation of our sensibility. That is to say, this conception contains the answer to the question: "Are there objects quite unconnected with, and independent of, our intuition?"—a question to which only an indeterminate answer can be given. That answer is: "Inasmuch as sensuous intuition does not apply to all things without distinction, there remains room for other and different objects." The existence of these problematical objects is therefore not absolutely ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... articles on education, and even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... interesting; strictly speaking, they do not write for the public at all, but only for their professional colleagues. The harmful men are the foolish rhapsodists who take advantage of the fact that the language of music is indeterminate and evanescent to talk about the art in such a way as to present themselves as persons of exquisite sensibilities rather than to direct attention to the real nature and beauty of music itself. To them I shall recur in a later chapter ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... which he enchained the dragon, the old serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and he bound him for a thousand years." The Evangelist here makes use of the term "a thousand years" to designate a period both very long and indeterminate, since we read, a little lower down, that the demon shall be unbound at the coming of Antichrist.[2] And "after a thousand years," says St. John, "Satan shall be unbound, and shall come out of his prison." Whence it happens, that in the time of ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... pomp, or the animated scenes which the chace presents; and he seems to have exhausted all the efforts of his genius, in the variety of incident and richness of execution, which these subjects are fitted to afford. From the confused and indeterminate expression, however, which the multitude of their objects exhibit, we turn with delight to those simpler scenes in which his mind seems to have reposed, after the fatigues which it had undergone: to the representation of a single incident, or the delineation of a ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... rolling his eyes and hugging his kaross around him because of the cold, and something in his anxious, indeterminate expression told me at once that he knew himself to be a man in terrible danger. Just behind him, dark and brooding, his arms folded on his breast, his eyes fixed upon the ground, looking, to my moved ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... consonant, which remains in Provencal but becomes e in French; Latin cantare becomes chantar in Provencal but chanter in French. But north and south of the boundary thus determined there was, in the absence of any great mountain range or definite geographical line of demarcation, an indeterminate zone, in which one dialect probably shaded off by easy gradations into ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... of her progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the arrears of the road; and she, poor thing! how little qualified ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Mammy's sway weakened was indeterminate. We boys after a while swapped places with Mammy, and made her the recipient of our small pedantries. I do not recollect, however, that we were ever cruel enough to throw her ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... affair it was, the world of Homer, with its indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances. The Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste over which years could be spent in endless wandering. On their mysterious shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples. The Great Sea, the Broad Sea, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... incongruous is kept out, while all that is essential to the matter in hand is hurried on with swifter progress than in real life; over the whole, viz., the situations and characters, a certain clearness and distinctness of appearance is thrown, which the vague and indeterminate outlines of reality seldom possess. Thus the form constitutes the poetic element of Comedy, while its prosaic principle lies in the matter, in the required assimilation ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Lance, after an indeterminate minute while he watched her, laid his hand lightly on her shoulder. "I'll see that dad takes it. And I'll give you a bill of sale that ought to shut the Black Rim mouths. I'm a Lorrigan and I'm not going to apologize for the blood that's in me, but I want you to know that if I ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... him only in symbolic words, designating him by some periphrasis: Pharaoh, "Pirui-Aui," the Double Palace, "Pruiti," the Sublime Porte, His Majesty,* the Sun of the two lands, Horus master of the palace, or, less ceremoniously, by the indeterminate ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... have been endowed by Mandit with two invisible companions and he is convinced that without their attendance he could not exist. These souls or spirits are not indwelling principles of life but are two separate indeterminate entities that differ only in two respects from the person whose associates they are. The first difference is that of size, for it is the general belief that they are a trifle smaller than their bodily associates. Besides being ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... fairy net-work of black roses. She would never wear plain black like most women of her age. She was one of the blue-eyed women who looks well in lavender. Her blue eyes, now looking at her son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms. A deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the color of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... such an expression as "full score," but would require the insertion of the particle "a," which cannot be, on account of the metre. And this is another great artifice of the Poet: by leaving the quantity of beating indeterminate, he gives every reader the liberty to administer it, in exact proportion to the sum of indignation which he may have conceived against his Hero; that by thus amply satisfying their resentment, they may be the more easily reconciled to ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... adaptation of the Iroquois word hiro, used to conclude a speech, and kou['e], an exclamation (Charlevoix). Hale gives as possible derivations ierokwa, the indeterminate form of the verb to smoke, signifying "they who smoke;" also the Cayuga form of bear, iakwai.[39] Mr. Hewitt[39] suggests the Algonkin words [-i]r[-i]n, true, or real; ako, snake; with the French termination ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... followed was broken presently by the sound of the old man's choking sobs, and the low, soothing tones of Natalie, murmuring against his ear. From the drawing-room came indeterminate scraps of Mrs. Wynyard's gay chatter, as she regaled Mrs. Rathbawne with the gossip gleaned in a round of calls. She herself was partly visible, drawing off her gloves before the fire. From the music-room beyond issued the chords of Dorothy's none-too-sure accompaniment, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... very vague and indeterminate in nature. Given three things, of which X includes what is in Y and Z, upon the face of the theory either X may have arisen by synthesis from Y and Z, or X and Z may owe their origin by analysis ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... bowed head. I only breathed deeply the faint scent of violets, her own particular fragrance enveloping my body, penetrating my very heart with an inconceivable intimacy, bringing me closer to her than the closest embrace, and yet so subtle that I sensed her existence in me only as a great, glowing, indeterminate tenderness, something like the evening light disclosing after the white passion of the day infinite depths in the colours of the sky and an unsuspected soul of peace in the protean forms of life. I had not known such quietness for months; ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... eyes were again the same blank windows whose scrutiny was so indeterminate. Burke let down the trap-door in the closet floor, and I paused a while to admire how cunningly it had been designed. Although knowing it to be there, I could discern no trace of the aperture. We then reentered ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... deal first with the tribes of that quarter of the globe. "The Negrito" (i.e., pigmy black) "type," says the authority whom I have just quoted, and to whom I shall have to be still further indebted,[A] "was first placed in South Asia, which it without doubt occupied alone during an indeterminate period. It is thence that its diverse representatives have radiated, and, some going east, some west, have given rise to the black populations of Melanesia and Africa. In particular, India and Indo-China first belonged to the blacks. Invasions and infiltrations of different ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... to hymn his excellences in an indeterminate, artificial manner, till the men came into the room, and conversation became general. Lord Manorwater made his way to Alice, thereby defeating Mr. Stocks, who tended in the same direction. "Come outside ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... third cavern. Breccia on the surface. Similar caverns in other parts of the country. At Buree. At Molong. Shattered state of the bones. Important discoveries by Professor Owen. Gigantic fossil kangaroos. Macropus atlas. Macropus titan. Macropus indeterminate. Genus Hypsiprymnus, new species, indeterminate. Genus Phalangista. Genus Phascolomys. Ph. mitchellii, a new species. New Genus Diprotodon. Dasyurus laniarius, a new species. General results of Professor Owen's researches. Age of the breccia considered. State of the caverns. Traces of inundation. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... world has in its career an intermediate period which may be called the epoch of life. Before the epoch of life begins there is in the given world no such form of existence. There is matter only. Then at a certain stage the epoch of life begins. The epoch of life continues for a vast indeterminate period. No doubt in some of the worlds an epoch of life has been provided ten times as great, possibly a thousand times as great, as in other planets. After the epoch of life begins only certain forms of existence are for a while possible. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... him that he was more anxious to make than to use a splendid army, and possibly his ideals of efficiency were too high for those early days. Yet "Little Mac" was idolized by his soldiers, with whom he fought and won bloody battles, and even the indeterminate ones are held in doubt as to his responsibility. Had Hooker obeyed his command, and crossed the bridge at Antietam and occupied the heights beyond, soldiers think to-day that Lee would have been crushed. Another fact was against him. The North was not ready to behold nor strong enough to endure ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... citizen afterwards. As a man, he has certain rights actual and potential (c. v., s. i., p. 244): these the State exists, not to create, for they are prior to it in the order of nature, but to determine them, where indeterminate, to sanction and to ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... good bishop Cumberland why Nineve was so called? and he will answer, from Schindler, that it was a compound of [472]Nin-Nau, [Hebrew: NIN NWH], a son inhabited. But is it credible, or indeed possible, for these cities to have been named from terms so vague, casual, and indeterminate; which seem to have so little relation to the places to which they are appropriated, or to any places at all? The history of the Chaldeans is of great consequence; and one would be glad to know their original. They are properly called Chasdim; and are, very ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... at them, it was true. They were huge and ran up for fifty or sixty feet without a bough. Moreover, it was probable that the god climbed better than we could. The Kalubi began to move inland in an indeterminate fashion, and I asked him where he ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... an indeterminate period in a blank fog for Orne, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a creche. Had to be. He could remember his sudden exposure on Heleb, the explosion—then nothing. Good old creche. It made him feel safe ...
— Operation Haystack • Frank Patrick Herbert
... answer. She gazed out of the window as if she was mildly impressed with a solicitude for the welfare of her garden. There flitted into her mind a wavering, indeterminate sort of notion that perhaps Lanigan was a better fellow than he used to be, and that if she should succeed in her great purpose it might not be necessary that he should go away. But still,—and here prudence stepped in front of kindliness,—if that child's ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... tragedy or novel? No rascals, no literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me monthly,—what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... soul? It must be. For it is less true of the Bostonian than of the ordinary business American, in whose life exhilaration and depression take the place of joy and suffering. The women's faces are more indeterminate, not very feminine; many of them wear those 'invisible' pince-nez which centre glitteringly about the bridge of the nose, and get from them a curious air of intelligence. Handsome people of both sexes are very common; beautiful, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... is interesting as being one of the few allusions to be found in the Zu-Vendi ritual to a vague divine essence independent of the material splendour of the orb they worship. 'Taia', the word used here, has a very indeterminate meaning, and signifies essence, vital principle, spirit, or ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... This is a vague, indeterminate term, which expresses an unknown principle of known effects that we feel in us. The word soul corresponds to the Latin anima, to the Greek pneuma, to the term of which all nations have made use to express what they did not understand ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... man leaned back, embracing one knee with both hands. They were nerveless, indeterminate hands, with long fingers, such as are in the habit of dropping things. Zora wondered how they supported his knee. For some time he stared into vacancy, his pale-blue eyes adream. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... imitates by his hand a motion which he describes, explains it by natural similitude; he that lays his hand on his breast, when he expresses pity, enforces his words by a customary allusion. But theology has few topicks to which action can be appropriated; that action which is vague and indeterminate will at last settle into habit, and habitual ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Besides they loved mountain air and scenery, and each step to the ridge of the pass they climbed was an advance in splendour. Peaks of ashen hue and pale dry red and pale sulphur pushed up, straight, forked, twisted, naked, striking their minds with an indeterminate ghostliness of Indian, so strange they were in shape and colouring. These sharp points were the first to greet them between the blue and green. A depression of the pass to the left gave sight of the points of black fir forest below, round the girths of the barren shafts. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... camp. The flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely within the circle or illumination. And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light, now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by mysterious thousands into the mass of night. We passed them. They looked up, squinting their eyes against the dazzle of the fire. The night closed ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... appearance. This dress would not please her nor that. The image of her charming oval face and well-set head ceased to satisfy her. Surely a woman's hair should be either positively blond or black, not this indeterminate brown, with warm lights in it? She feared her mouth was not small enough, the lips too full and curved for prettiness. She wished her eyes less given to change, under their dark lashes, from clear ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and talking over points in military law. A little after twelve o'clock, just as they began to think it was about time to turn in, they heard the most ghastly noise in the house. It wasn't a shriek, or a howl, or a yell, or anything they could put a name to. It was an indeterminate, inexplicable shiver and shudder of sound, which went wailing out of the window. The officer had been at Cold Harbor, but he felt himself getting colder this time. Eliphalet knew it was the ghost who haunted the house. As this weird sound died away, it was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... small resources; Barraca was unpopular but controlled the navy and part of the army. Given such conditions—with the added absurdity that the troops on both sides were most unwilling to face long-range rifle fire but would cheerfully hack each other to mince-meat with knives—and a tedious, indeterminate campaign is the certain outcome. De Sylva had said that local conflicts were usually "short and fierce." Applied to such upheavals as had taken place in the capital during recent years, the phrase was strictly accurate. He himself had been bundled out of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... in the western half of the heavens, while it added still more to the darkness which gloomed away to the eastward of us. But presently, down in the midst of the dusky blackness broad on our port quarter, I caught a glimpse of a small, indeterminate shape of still deeper blackness, then another, and another, and another, until I had counted ten of them; and concentrating my gaze intently upon them, I felt sure I could occasionally distinguish a small, evanescent, ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... believe it is different today? The sea does not change, and seamen are what they were if their ships are not those we admired many years ago in the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to see those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow the River, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to the Deptford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. What could they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... that same inn the usual nightly round of mediaeval revelry was going on. This ancient structure, indeterminate in age and style of architecture, was built upon uneven ground. To save expense and trouble, in the distant days of its inception, it had been built upon two levels, without the excavating for foundations. Time and the weather had warped and twisted the old wooden floors and ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... other texts of obscure and indeterminate meaning, which seem on this hypothesis to receive a profitable meaning; such as Our Lord's words in the Sermon on the Mount, "Verily, I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing;" and St. John's expression in the Apocalypse, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... tears, we are not moved through any excess of pleasure, but through an impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem or through the music, we obtain but brief and indeterminate glimpses: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Society proposes to work is to collect expert opinion on matters wherein our present use is indeterminate or unsatisfactory, and thus to arrive at a general understanding and consensus of opinion which might be relied on to ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... the door moved resolutely to the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown she looked almost girlish in spite of the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... magnificence of Nature was fitted to arrest the attention and to stimulate the imagination of a subtle, dreamy, and speculative people. The primitive doctrine of Creation was soon supplanted by the pagan theory of Emanation. The Indian Brahm is the first and only Substance, infinite, absolute, indeterminate Being, from which all is evolved, manifested, developed, and to which all returns and is reabsorbed. The Vedanta philosophy is based on this fundamental principle, and it has been well described as "the most rigorous system of Pantheism ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... from the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of age and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon, a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless photographs of her family and her wide connection, most prominent among them two—that of her ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... could hear the sound in the distance—the thunder of the captains of the storm and the shouting; but still so faint, so vague, so indeterminate and unearthly that it seemed like the sound in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... delicately clear, and nothing could have been more definite, more brilliant than the colour of the eyes and hair, or the whiteness—which was a beautiful and healthy whiteness—of her skin. Whereas everything about Mrs. Fountain was indeterminate; the features with their slight twist to the left; the complexion, once fair, and now reddened by years and ill-health; the hair, of a yellowish grey; the head and shoulders with their nervous infirmity. Only the eyes still possessed some purity of colour. Through ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
