"Mathematically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... none of these estimates take account of the many complex factors which interfere with such direct and simple calculations, Mr. Lowell then proceeds to enunciate them, and work out mathematically the ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... for men is a black suit, black gloves and tie of grosgrain or taffeta silk, and a black band upon his hat. The tailor adjusts this hat band with scrupulous nicety to the depth of his affliction. It is deepest for a wife; it diminishes mathematically through the gamut of parents, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... promise I required and gave me his hand. On the next day, I gave him my directions, the first article of which demanded that he should at once get himself weighed, so that the result might be made mathematically. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... to let us go; because we are the only ones who are thoroughly familiar with her theory," Rodebush insisted. "I said, and still say, that I think it is safe. I can't prove it, however, except mathematically; because she's altogether too full of too many new and untried mechanisms, too many extrapolations beyond all existing or possible data. Theoretically, she is sound, but you know that theory can ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... the play, if they were quoted to him, would be puzzled to assign to the speakers. Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically possible. Can he find, again, any signs of character by which to distinguish the speeches of Ross and Angus in Act I. scenes ii. and iii., or to determine that Malcolm must have spoken I. iv. 2-11? Most of this writing, we may almost say, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the cooking operations. Eight penknives prodded the sausages so often that it was a wonder they were not all chopped to pieces before they were done. At last the connoisseurs declared they were brown enough, and they were carefully and mathematically halved and ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... said. "Nevertheless, it isn't mathematically exact proof, because the equinox needn't fall precisely ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... combination with Salome and the daughters of Lot couldn't disturb his confidence in them or in himself. And—in my opinion—he paints that way, too." And he went away laughing and swinging his athletic shoulders and twirling his cane, his hat not mathematically straight on ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... which sacrifices to the senses of one individual man, and the judgment that is narrowed by the one man's senses, the weal of the whole,—in order that the wisdom of the State, which puts at the mercy of the arbitrary will and passions of the one, the weal of the many, might be mathematically exhibited,—might be set down in figures and diagrams. For this is that Poet who represents this method of inquiry and investigation, as it were, to the eye. This is that same Poet, too, who surprises elsewhere a queen in her swooning passion of grief, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... swift, apparently careless, nay, to the painter himself almost unconscious. Great painters are so organized that they do their best work without effort: but analyze the touches afterwards, and you will find the structure and depth of the colour laid mathematically demonstrable to be of literally infinite fineness, the last touches passing away at their edges by untraceable gradation. The very essence of a master's work may thus be removed by a picture- ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... away with five of his fellow creatures in order to secure a certain number of millions, it means that he is convinced that this proceeding will positively and mathematically insure his entering into possession of the millions. In short, when a man does away with a millionaire and his four successive heirs, it means that he himself is the millionaire's fifth heir. The man will ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... in force by the energy with which it is expressed; it strikes where the brain sends it, by a law as mathematically exact as the law that determines the course of a shell from a mortar. The amount of impression it makes is not to be determined so exactly. Sometimes, in an impressible nature, the idea works havoc, but there are, no less, natures so robustly protected, that this ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... motion, which, acting on the softer sandstone beneath, had begun hollowing it out, as if by the chisel of an engraver. This strange operation had gone on for years, until a bowl a dozen feet across and half as deep had been formed. It was almost mathematically round, very smooth and with a tapering shape to the bottom that made the resemblance to an enormous ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... the point of view of philosophy, however, the discovery that a question is unanswerable is as complete an answer as any that could possibly be obtained. And from the point of view of physics, where no empirical means of distinction can be found, there can be no empirical objection to the mathematically simplest assumption, which is that ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... know that I have ever seen an entirely satisfactory statement of what constitutes a call to the ministry. Probably it is one of those things of the Spirit which cannot be mathematically defined. The variety of the calls in Scripture warns us against laying down any scheme to which the experience of every one must conform. It is the same as with the commencement of the spiritual life, where also the work of the Spirit of God ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... may be taken only of like things. It is possible to average the figures 3, 4, and 8 by adding them together and dividing by 3. The average is 5. Such a process is mathematically correct, because all of the units comprising the 3, 4, and 8 are exactly alike. One of the premises of mathematics is that all units are alike, hence they may ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... the theory of music to an extremely fine point, having many curious scales, some of them with twenty-four divisions in an octave. Twenty-two was the usual number. The pitch of each note in every mode was accurately calculated mathematically, and the frets of the vina located thereby, according to very old theoretical works by one Soma, written in Sanskrit at least as early as 1500 B.C. When this work first became known to Europeans, its elaboration led it to be regarded as a purely theoretical fancy piece, and it was thought to be ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... contemporary with Trajan and Hadrian, and obtained some reputation as a critic and grammarian.[14493] About the same time flourished Marinus, the writer on geography, who was a Tyrian by birth, and "the first author who substituted maps, mathematically constructed according to latitude and longitude, for the itinerary charts" of his predecessors.[14494] Ptolemy of Pelusium based his great work entirely upon that of Marinus, who is believed to have utilised the geographical and hydrographical accumulations of the old ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... no way you can beat the game in the long run if you keep at it," he answered simply. "It is mathematically impossible. Consider. We are Croesuses—we hire players to stake money for us on every possible number at every coup. How do we come out? If there are no '0' or '00,' we come out after each coup precisely where we started—we are paying our own money back and forth among ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... edge kept its shape, there was too much atmosphere between it and the observed object for successful study. Our recent telescopes have, therefore, concave plate-glass mirrors, twenty metres in diameter, like those used for converging the sun's rays in solar engines, but with curves more mathematically exact, which collect an immense amount of light and focus it on a sensitive plate or on the eye of the observer, whose back is turned to the object he is studying. An electrical field also plays an important part, the electricity being as great an aid to light ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... certain articles belonging to his Majesty: Cross of Merit, Gold Key, printed OEUVRE DE POESIES and Writings (SKRIPTUREN) of his Majesty's; in short, various articles,—the specification of which is somewhat indistinct. In Fredersdorf's writing, all this; not so mathematically luminous and indisputable as in Eichel's it would have been. Freytag put questions, and there passed several Letters between Fredersdorf and him; but it was always uncomfortably hazy to Freytag, and he never understood or guessed ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... which can hardly fail to be instructive and suggestive. The faults so frequently charged against that "dear defunct" in our own tongue, the three-volume novel—the faults of long-windedness, of otiose padding, of unnecessary episodes, etc., are almost mechanically or mathematically impossible in the nouvelle. The long book provides pastime in its literal sense, and if it is not obvious in the other the accustomed reader, unless outraged by some extraordinary dulness or silences, goes on, partly like the Pickwickian ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... main purpose, too, was to lay down a rule of duty, almost mathematically ascertainable, and not to be disturbed by any sentimentalism, mysticism, or rhetorical foppery. If, in the attempt to free his hearers from such elements, he ran the risk of reducing morality to a lower level, and made it appear as unamiable as sound morality can appear, it must be admitted that ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... led to the roof of the warehouse. Stationing the master's mate as a mark, he laid off five paces at right angles with the first line from the party-wall. It was as dark as Egypt, and the scuttle could not be seen; but the operator had located it mathematically, and was confident as to its position. Flint was planted under the opening, with the shoes of both at ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... every victory they gained, carried them farther from their base, and required an increase of force to protect their communications; while every retreat of the enemy brought him nearer to his resources, and it is mathematically certain that he would soon have reached the point on that line where he would have been the superior power. Nothing but the results of the Tennessee campaign prevented Lee from recruiting his army and extorted from him his sword ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... Twenty-three years later, in 1887, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, of the University of Bonn, published the results of his experiments in producing these waves by means of oscillating currents of electricity. His investigations confirmed what Clerk Maxwell had proved mathematically. Thereafter progress was rapid, and during the closing years of the nineteenth century the problem of subduing the waves to the service of man was attacked and solved. In 1889 Professor Oliver Lodge was measuring electrical radiation. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... appeared, but the air remained cool. Fields of maguey in mathematically straight lines stretched up and away out of sight over broad rolling ridges. I had put off the experience of tasting the product until I should reach Apam, the center of the pulque industry. At that station an old woman sold me a sort of flower-pot full of the stuff at two cents. I expected ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it includes the whole of life in a single indivisible embrace. This life common to all the living undoubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the organism ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... haste, and hurried into the hall. He opened the front door for her, and they stood together for a moment on the dustless door-mat, mathematically laid upon verandah boards as white ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... opinions. This is well brought out in a passage contained in one of the reports of the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia. "... Cost of living is such an unstandardized subject that a mathematically accurate determination is impossible. In each conference there are as many different opinions as there are members. In general, the employers want a wage sufficient to maintain existing standards of living in the industry, while the employees contend that the standard of living should ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... our hands, and the fifth remaining diminishes week by week. Our mobility and efficiency increase. There is not the slightest ground for Mr. Methuen's lament about the condition of the Army. It is far fitter than when it began. It is mathematically certain that a very few months must see the last commando hunted down. Meanwhile civil life is gaining strength once more. Already the Orange River Colony pays its own way, and the Transvaal is within measurable distance of doing the same. Industries are waking up, and on the Rand the roar ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and broke into curls all around her face; Isabel's was in perfect order, with every wave mathematically exact. Juliet's face was tanned and rosy; Isabel's pale and cool. Juliet's hands were rough and her finger-tips square; Isabel's were white and tapering, with perfectly manicured nails. And their gowns—there was no possible comparison there. Both were in white, but Romeo discovered ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... forms one of the cornerstones of Interpretation. A skilled artist will always strive to analyze and interpret the intentions of the author. If one to whom is confided the vocal part of a composer's work were to limit himself to a mathematically correct reproduction of the written notes only, instead of searching below the surface for the author's meaning, his performance would merely resemble the accurate execution of a solfeggio by a conscientious ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... the mathematically convenient properties of abstract logical spaces cannot be either known to belong or known not to belong to the space of physics. Such are all the properties connected with continuity. For to know that actual space has these properties would require an infinite exactness of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... indescribable look of uninhabitableness which results from a thorough house-cleaning. Everything, even in the irregular hall, looked angular and uncomfortable; chairs were set square to tables; tables were set at mathematically precise angles; blinds were all drawn down exactly four inches from the tops of the windows; and all the books ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... its round. We have just shut behind us and doubly locked the door by which we entered, and we know that we are alone, rigorously alone, although this place is so vast, with its endless, communicating halls, its high vestibules and great flights of stairs; mathematically alone, one might say, for this palace that we are in is one quite out of the ordinary, and all its outlets were closed and sealed at nightfall. Every night indeed the doors are sealed, on account of the priceless relics that are collected here. So we shall not meet with any living being in these ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... all know the 'Muffin Man;' therefore it follows, mathematically, I believe, that we must all know each other. I think we'll try a sitting-down game next. I'll give you all something. Desire, you can tell them what to do with it, and Miss Ashburne ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... occurrence of panelled compartments, and the partial change of form in the arches, especially of doorways and windows, which in the latter part of the fifteenth century were often obtusely pointed and mathematically described from four centres, instead of two, as in the more simple pointed arch, and which from the period when this arch began to be prevalent was called the TUDOR arch, together with a great profusion of minute ornament, mostly of a description not before ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... it, but one cannot lay much stress on that. Regarding the mental aspects alone, the balance is largely against suicide; looking at the physical aspects, suicide is well nigh impossible. Putting the two together, the case against suicide is all but mathematically complete. The answer, then, to our first question, Did the deceased commit suicide? is, that he ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... of Roman land-surveying, the 'iugerum', was a rectangular space of 120 by 240 Roman feet—in English feet a tiny trifle less—and it seems to follow that 'insulae' were often laid out with definite reference to the 'iugerum'. The divisions may not have always been mathematically correct; our available plans are seldom good enough to let us judge of that,[62] and we do not know whether we ought to count the surface of the streets with the measurement of the 'insulae'. But the general practice seems clear, and ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... which scattered the storm, leaving only the gentle patter of a summer shower. The critics applauded; but society applied its lorgnette to its eye and discovered that, in his excitement, Arlt had neglected to make sure that his tie was mathematically straight. The patter died away into silence. Then the wind veered again and the storm broke out afresh, mingled with cries ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... it the major third became a larger interval than our modern one, and the minor third smaller. Thus thirds did not sound well together, in fact were dissonances, the only intervals which did harmonize being the fourth, fifth, and octave. This system of mathematically dividing tones into equal parts held good up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when Zarlino, who died in 1590, invented the system in use at the present time, called the tempered scale, which, however, did not come into general use until ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... charming Dutch maiden was dusting, and occasionally stopping to restore some slightly disarranged article to its mathematically neat position. In her blue Dutch cap, her blue delft gown, and white kerchief, she seemed to have danced down out of the past to strike the one note of vivid life in all ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... very soul of honour in fact. He had so much natural shrewdness, that his conversation was always worth listening to, although he was apt to start by assuming entirely false premisses, which he considered as incontrovertible as if they had been mathematically proved; but, given the correctness of his premisses, nobody could bring more natural wit and sense to bear upon ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... simply monstrous in invention, Swift in invention submits himself loyally to law. Give Swift his world of Liliput and Brobdingnag respectively, and all, after that, is quite natural and probable. The reduction or the exaggeration is made upon a mathematically calculated scale. For such verisimilitude Rabelais cares not a straw. His various inventions are recklessly independent one of another. A characteristic of Swift thus is scrupulous conformity to whimsical law. Rabelais ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... an acceleration chair, a safety belt across his middle, was Space Commander Kevin O'Brine, an Irishman out of Dublin. He was short, as compact as a deto-rocket, and obviously unfriendly. He had a mathematically square jaw, a lopsided nose, green eyes, and sandy hair. He spoke with a pronounced ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the criticism which will at once be passed on what I now advance. Local representation through choice by numerical majorities within given confines, geographically and mathematically fixed, is a system so rooted and intrenched in the convictions and traditions of the American community that even to question its wisdom evinces a lack of political common-sense. It in fact resembles nothing so much as the attempt to whistle down a strongly ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... mathematically, proves the direction of his former desires. Karma does not punish or reward, ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... walls, brown tiles, or thatched roof having an old-fashioned, rustic effect. One might suppose earthquakes were common from this habit of living on the ground floor. The dryness of the climate doubtless obviates risk of damp. Much more graceful are the little orchards of these homesteads than the mathematically planted cider apples seen here in all stages of growth. Even the blossoms of such trees later on cannot compare with the glory of an orchard, in the old acceptance of the word, having reached maturity in the natural way. Certain portions of rural ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... isn't all material? Suppose that every atom of the universe does affect every other atom, and that the accumulated effect of past action holds the stars in their courses, and that if we knew what all the past was we should be able to foretell the future, because it would be mathematically calculable—what of it? That does not prove your case, man! Can't you see that in free will another element enters—the spiritual, if you please, that is not amenable to atomic action past or present?" Amos smiled deprecatingly and added sadly: "Got that last ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... mathematically inclined, wanted to know why they wouldn't look at it through their twelve horrid little eyes, and Judy laughed and came down from the table, after expressing a wicked wish that the little Digby-Smiths might all tumble over the dress-circle rail before the curtain rose. Meg shut her book with ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... of which I should judge that to mathematically set forth the knowledge of any person, it would be necessary to draw that slightly paradoxical figure popularly described as a triangular square with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... lines, or hollow squares, you call it reason. When wild geese in flight take the form of a letter V you say instinct. When the homogeneous atoms of a mineral, moving freely in solution, arrange themselves into shapes mathematically perfect, or particles of frozen moisture into the symmetrical and beautiful forms of snowflakes, you have nothing to say. You have not even invented a name to ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... gracious in the human character. The fact is strange, but the fact is there; and being there, we must face it and explain it. Of course, the Apostles use the word grace in a far deeper and loftier meaning; raise it, mathematically speaking, to a far higher power. There is no need to remind you of that. But why did they choose and use the word at all—a word whose old meaning every heathen knew—unless for some innate fitness in it to express something in the character of God? To tell men that there was in ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... of cultivation, like a vast carpet of an irregular tesselated pattern, and varied in the color by a thousand hues of brown and green. Here and there vast forests extend, where countless thousands of trees, though ancient and venerable in form, stand in rows, mathematically arranged, as they were planted centuries ago. These are royal demesnes, and hunting grounds, and parks connected with the country palaces of the kings or the chateaux of the ancient nobility. The cultivators of the soil live, not, as in America, in little farm-houses built along ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... key in his pocket he descended through the underwood on the side of the slope opposite to that trodden by Lady Constantine, and crossed the field in a line mathematically straight, and in a manner that left no traces, by keeping in the same furrow all the way on tiptoe. In a few minutes he reached a little dell, which occurred quite unexpectedly on the other side of the field-fence, and descended to a venerable thatched ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... exuberance of his passion, took to exaggerating the scientific principles whereby, from the three primitive colours, yellow, red, and blue, one derives the three secondary ones, orange, green, and violet, and, further, a whole series of complementary and similar hues, whose composites are obtained mathematically from one another. Thus science entered into painting, there was a method for logical observation already. One only had to take the predominating hue of a picture, and note the complementary or similar colours, to establish experimentally what variations would occur; for ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... upon this branch of Economics was marred by an attempt to treat it purely mathematically, that is to reduce qualitative to quantitative differences—an impossibility. Among recent writers, Professor Patten, of Pennsylvania University, has made by far the most important contributions towards a systematic treatment ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... hooks-and-eyes with such fingers, so I called Rosine and bribed her to help me. Rosine liked a bribe, so she did her best, smoothed and plaited my hair as well as a coiffeur would have done, placed the lace collar mathematically straight, tied the neck-ribbon accurately— in short, did her work like the neat-handed Phillis she could be when she those. Having given me my handkerchief and gloves, she took the candle and lighted me down-stairs. After all, I had forgotten my shawl; she ran back to ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... dining saloon she found small wars in progress. About a hundred and fifty people were trying to sit down in a hundred seats. The stewards looked harassed as they explained that there was another meal-time half an hour after the first. Knollys was trying, with impassive dignity, to prove mathematically to an old lady that by waiting until six o'clock for her tea to-day and automatically shifting all her meal-times on half an hour she was losing nothing; and, after all, it would all be the same whether she had her tea at five or six or seven a hundred years hence. But ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... assessments must be increased. By constant additions of young members, this rise of cost may be retarded. But when these members grow older, a still larger addition of young members is required to keep down the average, and the mathematically inevitable result is an increasing rate of assessment. This keeps young men from entering, and finally results in failure or in some form of "reorganization" that drives out the older members. The assessment plan carries with it the seeds ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the point or ground ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... p. 215.—These hints on Polar Surveying fell on willing ears. Members of the afterguard who were not mathematically trained plunged into the very practical study of how to work out observations. Writing home on October 26, 1911, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Zealand, while in Australia a Labour Party has led in the reforms and now rules the country, should not blind us to the farmers' influence. The very terms of the graduated land tax and the value of the farms chosen for exemption show mathematically the influence, not alone of the small, but even the middle-sized farmers. Estates of less than $25,000 in value are exempt, and those valued at less than $50,000 are to be taxed less than one per cent. Such farms, as a rule, ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... him," said Warner. "That rebel cousin of yours has luck. He also has skill. Let x equal luck and y skill. Now x plus y equals the combination of luck and skill, which is safety. That proves to me mathematically that he is unharmed and that he is riding northward—to defeat, ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... us, however, at present, neither the morality nor the present mental excentricity of the capitalist is so material as the possibility of his acquiring flexibility under pressure, for it would seem to be almost mathematically demonstrable that he will, in the near future, be subjected to a pressure under which he must develop flexibility ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... drawing an escapement, leaving the pupil to work and reason out the principles involved in the action. In the plan we have adopted we propose to induct the reader into the why and how, and point out to him the rules and methods of analysis of the problem, so that he can, if required, calculate mathematically exactly how many grains of force the fork exerts on the jewel pin, and also how much (or, rather, what percentage) of the motive power is lost in various "power leaks," like "drop" and lost motion. In the present case the mechanical result we desire to obtain is to cause our lever ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... enemy picked off the German pilots before the machines were over the tree tops. Here was a mixture of native savagery and efficiency, plus the lynching spirit, plus the pre-revolutionary American spirit and against which, with unequal numbers and complete surprise, no mathematically trained European force had ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... perfectly that he combines the properties of a lump of ice and a red-hot coal," he observed. "Catherine has made it thoroughly clear, and you have told me so till I am sick of it. You needn't tell me again; I am perfectly satisfied. He will never give us a penny; I regard that as mathematically proved." ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... ladies his design for the work with which he had been haunted; they smiled and promised him their assistance. The youngest, with an air of gaiety suggested one of the first chapters of the undertaking, by saying that she would take upon herself to prove mathematically that women who are entirely virtuous were ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... part, however small it be, in the magnificent pageant of life and work, for he has not been sent into it 'on chance.' Inasmuch as if there is chance in one thing there must be chance in another, and the solar system is too mathematically designed to be a haphazard arrangement. With all our cleverness, our logic, our geometrical skill, we can do nothing so exact! As part of the solar system, you and I have our trifling business to enact, Monsignor,—and to enact it properly, and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... again of the "Birth of the Virgin" in S. Maria Novella? There is something irritating in pure common sense imported into art, and Ghirlandajo's masterpieces are the apotheosis of that quality. How correct, how judicious, how sagacious, how mathematically ordered! we exclaim; but we gaze without emotion, and we turn away without regret. It does not vex us to read how Ghirlandajo used to scold his prentices for neglecting trivial orders that would fill his ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... "Adam out of Eden." In this he undertakes to show how Adam, under the embarrassing circumstance of being shut out of Paradise, may increase the product of a farm from two hundred pounds to two thousand pounds a year by the rearing of rabbits on furze and broom! It is all mathematically computed; there is nothing to disappoint in the figures; but I suspect there might be in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... is science? Science is the consensus of opinion of scientific men, and history has shown that it is slow to accept a truth. Science sneered at Newton for twenty years. Science proved mathematically that an iron ship could not swim, and science declared that a steamship ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had planned the details of the new method of advance and relay parties. This method, given a fixed surface over which to travel, could be mathematically demonstrated, and it has proved to be the most effective way to carry on ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... army, he was advancing to certain destruction, and it must have been equally clear to Kutuzov that by accepting battle and risking the loss of a quarter of his army he would certainly lose Moscow. For Kutuzov this was mathematically clear, as it is that if when playing draughts I have one man less and go on exchanging, I shall certainly lose, and therefore should not exchange. When my opponent has sixteen men and I have fourteen, I am only one eighth weaker than he, but when I have exchanged thirteen more men he will ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... thirty-two letters in apparent disorder. There are words consisting of consonants only, as nrrlls; others, on the other hand, in which vowels predominate, as for instance the fifth, uneeief, or the last but one, oseibo. Now this arrangement has evidently not been premeditated; it has arisen mathematically in obedience to the unknown law which has ruled in the succession of these letters. It appears to me a certainty that the original sentence was written in a proper manner, and afterwards distorted ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then, is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet written any full ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... mathematically invariable it is not, and could not be expected to be: because the period of a year is too short to include all the possible combinations of partial causes, while it is, at the same time, sufficiently long to make it probable that in some years at least, of every series, there will ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that, they were mathematically safe. Mathematically safe they would be if—and only if—they depended upon the laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... rock of which it had formerly been composed had, by some mighty force of nature, been split into innumerable fissures and fragments, both perpendicularly and horizontally, and was almost mathematically divided into pieces or squares, or unequal cubes, simply placed upon one another, like masons' work without mortar. The lower strata of these divisions were large, the upper tapered to pieces not much larger than a brick, at least they seemed ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... "How mathematically exact you are!" she gibed. "To-morrow it will be a year, three months, and twelve days; and the day after to-morrow—mercy me! I should go mad if I had to think back and count up that way every day. But I asked you what you had ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... a word you say, or hear, without a chill somewhere deep inside. Not even me and I know a man can survive ionic weapons. I know because I did once. Weapons so powerful I'm one of the last men alive who saw them in action. Mathematically the big ones could wipe out a Galaxy. I saw a small one destroy a star in ten seconds. I watched Saltario for a long time. It seemed a long time, anyway. It was probably twenty seconds. I was wondering if he ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas
... this could hope to escape instant marriage. Here were features so mathematically flawless that they became practically featureless; here was bodily balance so ideal that the ultimate standards of Greek perfection seemed lop-sided in comparison. No, there could be no doubt about it; this young man was certainly required for the purpose of scientific propagation; ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... this has been done, we can estimate the effect which the irregularities produce on the observations, and finally, we succeed in purging the observations from the grosser errors by which they are contaminated. We thus obtain results which are not indeed mathematically accurate, but are nevertheless close approximations to those which would be obtained by a perfect observer using an ideal instrument of geometrical accuracy, standing on an earth of absolute rigidity, and viewing the heavens without the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... imagined that any thing but an abstract and ideal scheme for benefiting Bressant was actuating her in her intercourse with him. She proposed to educate him in pure beliefs and true aspirations; to show him that there was more in life than can be mathematically proved. But that she could derive other than an immaterial and impersonal enjoyment ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... me silly! Mathematically speaking the thing is possible; but humanly speaking it is ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... sound of the syllables, as they first came to my ears years ago in a university lecture. There is that of possibility in being positively thigmotactic which makes one dread the necessity of exposing and limiting its meaning, of digging down to its mathematically accurate roots. It could never be called a flower of speech: it is an over-ripe fruit rather: heavy-stoned, thin-fleshed—an essentially practical term. It is eminently suited to its purpose, and so ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... life-peerage limit, and then stopping suddenly. But in politics we must not trouble ourselves with exceedingly exceptional accidents; it is quite difficult enough to count on and provide for the regular and plain probabilities. To speak mathematically, we may easily miss the permanent course of the political curve if we engross our minds with its ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... physiologists speak of this phenomenon under the heading of the Weber-Fechner law, after the two physiologists who gave it prominence. James pokes a good deal of fun at the "law," which is expressed mathematically. Perhaps the mathematics should have been eliminated as too "scientific" for our present attainment, but it does remain true that it is not the ACTUAL stimulus increase that is important in sensation or perception, but the RELATIVE stimulus ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... duration, just as warmth does, which may be of high or low temperature; diffused over a greater or less extent of body; and that, for a shorter or a longer time. On this assumption pleasure is every bit as mathematically measurable as is warmth, the whole difficulty being due to its subjective and therefore inaccessible nature. Simple in statement, this theory proves in application infinitely complex, and indeed on closer inspection breaks up into a mere verbal ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... of the development and establishment of fixed forms of combination and sequence among those types of sensory stimulation which arouse in us the pleasurable experience of rhythm. The artistic rhythm form cannot be defined as constituted of periods which are 'chronometrically proportionate,' or mathematically simple. It is not such in virtue of any physical relations which may obtain among its constituents, though it may be dependent on such conditions in consequence of the subordination to physical laws of the organic activities of the human individual. ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... As we plodded on, the faint cry of a wild-goose caused us to squat down suddenly behind a neighbouring bush, from which retreat we gazed round to see where our friends were. Another cry from behind attracted our attention; and far away on the horizon we saw a large flock of geese flying in a mathematically correct triangle. Now, although far out of shot, and almost out of sight, we did not despair of getting one of these birds; for, by imitating their cry, there was a possibility of attracting them towards us. ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... satiety! And the time of probation, during which the two worked out their future fate, was as a grain of sand as compared with the countless universes in space in all eternity—a relation which reduces the span of man's lifetime to almost absolutely NOTHING, mathematically considered. Think of this—is ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... therefore in that province of thought which concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not fettered by the laws of harmony, but only by those of discord. The truly virtuous man, remarks Aristotle, never has occasion to practise self-denial. Hence, mathematically, "the theory of the intellectual action involves the recognition of a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn."[105-1] True freedom, real being, is only possible when law as such is inexistent. Only the lawless makes the law. When the idea of the laws of order ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Anyway, Skinny broke into the argument and said that he could prove mathematically that antigravity was possible, and Stinky said suure he could, and Skinny said sure he could, and Stinky said suuure he could, like that. Honestly, is that any way to argue? I mean it sounds like two people agreeing, ...
— We Didn't Do Anything Wrong, Hardly • Roger Kuykendall
... Francais. But the boulevards were almost the only broad streets. Those interminable, straight avenues which even the brilliancy and movement of Paris can hardly make anything but tiresome, had not yet been cut. The streets were narrow and shady; most of them not very long, nor mathematically straight, but keeping a general direction and widening here and there into a little square before a church door, or curving to follow an irregularity of the ground. Such streets were not in accordance with the taste of the age and caused progressive ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... made against proportional systems of voting is that they do not secure the exact representation of all the electors in a country. Thus the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems, whilst admitting that the new method would generally produce more accurate results, mathematically at least, than the existing method, qualified their statement by saying that their success "in producing in Parliament the 'scale map of the country,' which they held up as the ideal, can be only partial"; and in another paragraph ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... conquered after by a few of Caesar's legions, and by a horde of Bourguignons, and lastly by a horde of Sicamores, under one Clodovic, had previously subjugated the whole world, and given their names and laws to Asia, seems to me to be very strange: the thing is not mathematically impossible, and if it be demonstrated, I give way; it would be very uncivil to refuse to the Velches what one accords ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... mathematical calculations we are accustomed to argue as if such substances as air, water, or metal, which appear to our senses uniform and continuous, were strictly and mathematically ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... evening, I entered the warehouse of Hop Sing. There was that deliciously commingled mysterious foreign odor that I had so often noticed; there was the old array of uncouth-looking objects, the long procession of jars and crockery, the same singular blending of the grotesque and the mathematically neat and exact, the same endless suggestions of frivolity and fragility, the same want of harmony in colors, that were each, in themselves, beautiful and rare. Kites in the shape of enormous dragons and gigantic butterflies; kites so ingeniously arranged as to utter at intervals, when facing the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... pursuing such a route can avoid running foul of some of the Polynesian groups. But it must be remembered that the distances which are so concisely depicted to our eyes upon the map, are yet vast in reality, while so mathematically exact are the rules of navigation, and so well known are the prevailing currents, that a steamship may make the voyage from Honolulu to Auckland, a distance of four thousand miles, without sighting land. When Magellan, the Portuguese ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... no use of the substance of intellectual revelations, but must be guided by observed facts and by the conclusions logically and mathematically uniting them"—a passage which is quoted with approval by Professor Reichel, and would seem to be endorsed by the silence concerning the religious side of the question which is observed by most ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which may happen to the most honest people; either relatives or near friends, which is certainly more unusual. He lived alone in his house in Saville Row, whither none penetrated. A single domestic sufficed to serve him. He breakfasted and dined at the club, at hours mathematically fixed, in the same room, at the same table, never taking his meals with other members, much less bringing a guest with him; and went home at exactly midnight, only to retire at once to bed. He never ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... He argues that you may just as well keep the temperature at seventy-two, and wait a fortnight for your chickens. I am certain there's a fallacy in the system somewhere, because we never seem to get as far as the chickens. But Ukridge says his theory is mathematically sound ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... Good. It is the individual's own action which brings his punishment, or reward. If this fundamental principle could be investigated by responsible scientists, unhampered by theological influences, and with no prejudice as to the idea's being regarded as a mere culte, its exactness could perhaps be mathematically proved beyond a cavilling doubt. Possibly then the doctrine might be allowed to be taught in the public schools, to the everlasting benefit of ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... nobody any more. Eighteenth-century economists argued in favor of stimulating population in order to make wages low, and thereby win in international competition. They never had a compunction or a doubt about this argument. No wonder it has been asserted that all truth, except that which is mathematically demonstrable, is only a function of the age. When the earth is underpopulated and there is an economic demand for men, democracy is inevitable. That state of things cannot be permanent. Therefore democracy ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... seashore and the Shimba Hills, in which we had been hunting. A road ten feet wide and innocent of wheels ran with obstinate directness up and down the slight contours and through the bushes and cocoanut groves that lay in its path. So mathematically straight was it that only when perspective closed it in, or when it dropped over the summit of a little rise, did the eye lose the effect of its interminability. The country through which this road led was various—open bushy veld with sparse trees, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White |
