"Primordial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did not take an active part in the affairs of the lodges or in human affairs, but were exclusively occupied with the mystical science of the order: with questions of the threefold designation of God, the three primordial elements—sulphur, mercury, and salt—or the meaning of the square and all the various figures of the temple of Solomon. Pierre respected this class of Brothers to which the elder ones chiefly belonged, including, Pierre thought, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the series of good things, he probably thought of it only in opposition to the Manifold, and wished to point out that it is from the One that the Good is to be derived. He appears, however, (see De Nat. Deor. i. 13,) to have attributed vital activity to the primordial unity, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... all Thales thought that water was the primordial substance of all things. Heraclitus of Ephesus, surnamed by the Greeks [Greek: skoteinos] on account of the obscurity of his writings, thought that it was fire. Democritus and his follower Epicurus thought ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... had just discussed had been uncommon in all respects; Maitland's scheme of courses and his specification as to details had roused the admiration of the Primordial's chef and put him on his mettle. He had outdone himself in his efforts to do justice to Mr. Maitland's genius; and the Primordial in its deadly conservatism remains to this day one of the very few places in New York where good, sound ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... its essence unknowable, is "the fountain-head of all beings, and the norm of all actions. But it is not only the formative principle of the universe; it also seems to be primordial matter: chaotic in its composition, born prior to Heaven and earth, noiseless, formless, standing alone in its solitude, and not changing, universal in its activity, and unrelaxing, without being ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... that Chesterton would heartily approve of my approximation of Sirius and Stentor, of Capella and Cothurnia—the universe balanced. My attention was drawn from the atom Gonium—whose brave little spirit was striving to keep his foursome one—a primordial struggle toward unity of self and division of labor; my consciousness climbed the microscope tube and came to rest upon a slim glass of amber liquid on my laboratory table: a servant had brought a cocktail, for it was New Year's Eve. (Now the thought came that there were a number ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... organized matter than we can readily admit" (p. 317); and in another place he claims that "we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... report "All Clear." Simple, is it not, to go on patrol from a line you cannot see towards another line you also cannot see ... sometimes you lost touch with the others and gazed round into the blackness with that primordial fear of the unknown inspired by the night. Lost! God, it nearly unmans you. With fast-thumping heart you hear the approach of guttural Hun voices ... DOWN and QUIET. At last calm thinking points out that yon burning house is in your own lines. Make for it and all is well. ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... into that of speculative thought. An ever-recurring topic was that of the origin of the human race. It was Agassiz's declared belief that man had sprung not from a common stock, but from various centres, and that the original circumscription of these primordial groups of the human family corresponded in a large and general way with the distribution of animals and their combination into faunae. * (* See "Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and their Relation to the Different Types of Man" included in Nott & Gliddon's "Types of ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... down to the primordial being Isana, to whom multitudes make offerings, and who is adored by the multitude; who is the true incorruptible one, Brahma, perceptible, imperceptible, eternal; who is both a non-existing and an existing-non-existing being; who is the universe and also distinct from the existing and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... plants are but indifferently preserved; nor can we expect that organisms so ancient should exhibit any very close resemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide rocks and skerries of our coasts at the present time. We do detect, however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least a noticeable likeness to families familiar to the modern algaeologist. The cord-like plant, Chorda filum, known to our children as "dead men's ropes," from its proving fatal at times to the too adventurous ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... 611 B.C., an astronomer and geographer, following Thales chronologically, wrote a book on "Nature," the first written on the subject in the philosophy of Greece. He held that all things arose from the "infinite," a primordial chaos in which was an internal energy. From a universal mixture things arose by separation, the parts once formed remaining unchanged. The earth was cylindrical in shape, suspended in the air in the centre of the universe, and the stars and planets revolved around ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... to be able to give a clear explication and complete enumeration of all the ideas of reason, and of the necessary and universal principles or axioms which are grounded on these ideas. This is still the grand desideratum of metaphysical science. Its achievement will give us a primordial logic, which shall be as exact in its procedure and as certain in its conclusions as the mathematical sciences. Meantime, it may be affirmed that philosophic analysis, in the person of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Cousin, has succeeded in disengaging such a priori ideas, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. She vanished round the corner. His effort was Titanic. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... men have experienced this primordial tristia post coitus; but this great moral pain, very serious in its significance and depth, passes very rapidly, remaining, however, with the majority for a long time—sometimes for all life—in the form of wearisomeness and awkwardness after certain moments. In a short while Kolya ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... out all that He is. In order to manifest even to Himself the possibilities of His being God must limit that being. There is no other way in which the fullest self-realisation can be attained. Thus we get two modes of God,—the infinite, perfect, unconditioned, primordial being; and the finite, imperfect, conditioned, and limited being of which we are ourselves expressions. And yet these two are one, and the former is the guarantee that the latter shall not fail in the purpose for which it became limited. Thus to the question, Why a finite universe? ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... of the most ancient and popular of the numerous names of Vishnu. The word has been derived in several ways, and may mean he who moved on the (primordial) waters, or he who pervades or influences men ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... who are trying to study God's big out-of-doors and must content themselves with stingy little parks. It's the love of Nature that takes them to the parks, and compared with this they have a poor substitute. This is the world as God made it, with all its primordial beauty. We're fortunate that circumstances placed us here, Thomas, and we should be ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... fuller details. "In the primordial state of the world, the rudimental universe, submerged in water, reposed on the bosom of the Eternal. Brahma, the architect of the world, poised on a Lotus-leaf, floated upon the waters, and all that he was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the primordial antagonism of the two substances, the God of Light and the God of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light, which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... for revision, and the foundations for reform were laid in a report by Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (November 1853), prepared for Mr. Gladstone at his request, recommending two propositions, so familiarised to us to-day as to seem like primordial elements of the British constitution. One was, that access to the public service should be through the door of a competitive examination; the other, that for conducting these examinations a central board ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the form assumed at this period is gradually evolved from rudimentary elements present even in the earliest years of life. Sexuality is not absent in the child, it is merely different, being unorganized and imperfectly adapted to its later functions. All this primordial mass of pleasurable activities enumerated above, undergoes profound modifications as the result of growth and education. One part only becomes selected and differentiated so as to form the adult ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... incorporated into our common life. It is easier to state these hopes than to formulate the line of motives, which I believe to constitute the trend of the subjective pressure toward the Settlement. There is something primordial about these motives, but I am perhaps overbold in designating them as a great desire to share the race life. We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most noteworthy case of this, eleven ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... into a clearing in the woods down by the river. The spot was about a mile below the wagon bridge, where the pines grew black and ragged—a touch of the primordial in the midst of a younger growth. It was noon; a time when the plainsman knew he would find the wood-cutter at leisure, taking his midday meal, or lazing over a pipe. Nor ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... in darkness, face down in the mire, And prayed that darkness might become my pall; The rabble rout roared round me like some quire Of filthy animals primordial; My heart seemed like a toad eternally Prisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he; Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing, And life some beldam's dotard gossiping. Then, Lady, I bethought me of thy sway, And hoped again, rose up this prayer to wing— Send me a ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... strongly marked is the national character. This is exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia, and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain, and Scandinavia; and of islands like England and Japan. Today we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... defeated? We know that in many of the states there are Bills of Rights, which are considered to have equal authority with their constitutions. Some, indeed, regard them as settling the principles of primordial law, which the constitution itself cannot countervail. These, then, may also be appealed to for the purpose of proving the unconstitutionality of a state law; and in the inferences which ingenuity, or even stupidity, may draw from such broad and indefinite principles, the clearest ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... her memory by her notes, "you should begin by 'hating and despising the ideals of the average man'! You should create your own Truth—your own Morality. Obey only your primordial instincts—the ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... into the shock of mane, and the rough hair of the horse saved him. The gradient he was on lowered again, and then—"Whup!" said Ugh-lomi astonished, and the slant was the other way up. But Ugh-lomi was a thousand generations nearer the primordial than man: no monkey could have held on better. And the lion had been training the horse for countless generations against the tactics of rolling and rearing back. But he kicked like a master, and buck-jumped ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... allude to a few of the most important. In Scandinavia occurs a well-developed series of Cambrian deposits, representing both the lower and upper parts of the formation. In Bohemia, the Upper Cambrian, in particular, is largely developed, and constitutes the so-called "Primordial zone" of Barrande. Lastly, in North America, whilst the Lower Cambrian is only imperfectly developed, or is represented by the Huronian, the Upper Cambrian formation has a wide extension, containing fossils similar in character to ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Goodness, any more than beauty (despite Keats' famous assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, and strengthening ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... number." Seeing that analogy as strongly suggests a further step in the same direction, while he protests that "analogy may be a deceitful guide," yet he follows its inexorable leading to the inference that "probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... contemplated under an aspect which—such is our intellectual distance from those times—it is not very easy to delineate in modern language. Nature signified the physical world regarded as the result of some primordial element or law. The oldest Greek philosophers had been accustomed to explain the fabric of creation as the manifestation of some single principle which they variously asserted to be movement, force, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... with beady eyes under lowering and bushy brows, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, sullen-mouthed. He was heavy-jawed, bull-necked, and the short, straight hair of the head seemed to her frightened eyes the stiff bristles on a hog's back. Here were coarseness and brutishness—a thing savage, primordial, ferocious. He was swarthy to blackness, and his body was covered with a hairy growth that matted like a dog's on his chest and shoulders. He was deep-chested, thick-legged, large-muscled, but unshapely. His muscles were knots, and he was ...
— The Game • Jack London
... a necessary note of an infinite harmony? To fancy that the law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without me. I should not exist without it." To see, in short, only the divine ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial impulse of ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... here regarding the homogeneousness of matter, or the idea that the various elements are composed of primordial units which are themselves alike, mere duplicates of each other. If this should prove to be really the case, as seems to be quite likely in the light of the facts given above, would it not be a veritable triumph ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... susceptible. Science, or the investigation of the phenomena of existence (in opposition to philosophy, the investigation of the phenomena of being), has proved nature to be so orderly and self-sufficient, and inquiry as to the origin of the primordial atom so unproductive and quixotic, as to make it convenient and indeed reasonable to accept nature as a self-existing fact, and to let all the rest—if rest there be—go. From this point of view, God and a future life retire into the background; not as finally disproved,—because denial, like affirmation, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... embodiment of his manifold ideas, ceased in the end to enslave, though they still captivated Carlyle's mind; and he turns from him to the thinkers who deal with God's geometry, and penetrate into the abysses of being,—to primordial Kant, and his behemoth brother, Fichte. Nor does Hegel, or Schelling, or Schlegel, or Novalis escape his pursuit, but he hunts them all down, and takes what is needful to him, out of them, as his trophy. Schiller is his king of singers, although ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the khan emptied itself behind us in a long string, jingling and clanging with horse and camel bells. But they turned northward to pass through the famed Circassian Gates, whereas we followed the plain that paralleled the mountain range—our mules' feet hidden by eight inches of primordial ooze. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... insists that man as a physical being is clearly of the same order as the gorilla and ape; and he does not shrink from accepting the possibility that they all may have sprung by successive stages or 'leaps' from the same primordial form. His concluding words are, that 'so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive periods of life—sensation, instinct, the intelligence of the higher mammalia, bordering ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... successfully, in order to build up an imperishable system of Christian teleology, it is necessary that you should thoroughly acquaint yourself with the 'natural sciences,' with dynamics, and all the so-called 'inherent forces of nature,' or what Humboldt terms 'primordial necessity.' This apotheosis of dirt, by such men as Moleschott, Buchner, and Voght, is the real Antaeus which, though continually over-thrown, springs from mother earth with renewed vigor, and after a little while some Hercules of science will lift ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... poetry, but with the madness of dissertation. Everybody is not only informed that the Jackats defeated the Magnats on the banks of the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to any abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, not by the hopes and fears of the soul, but grows by accumulation of the dull details of prose. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... odor as of primordial slime subtly intruded upon the sensory nerves of the visitor. The place breathed out decay; the decay of humanity, of cleanliness, of the honest decencies of life turned foul. Something lethal exhaled from that dim doorway. There was a stab of pestilence, reaching for ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal—that all are equally "lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or forms ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no further limit to be set to the power of nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organized forms from one primordial type (et l'on n'auroit pas tort de supposer, que d'un seul etre elle a su tirer avec le temps ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... the southern slope, they have not accustomed themselves to the use of flour, sugar and others of the simplest luxuries of civilization, and their food is almost wholly flesh, fish and berries. They live in the crude, primordial fashion of their forefathers. To aid them in their hunt they have adopted the breech-loading rifle and muzzle-loading shotgun, but the bow and arrow has still its place with them and they were depending wholly upon this crude weapon for ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... star-systems, and absolutely evanescent compared with eternity. We have no more reason for rejecting the belief in a Creator because our earth or the solar system is found to have developed to its present condition from an embryonic primordial state, than we have had ever since men first found that animals and trees are developed from the germ. The region of development is larger, the period of development lasts longer, but neither the one nor the other is infinite; and being finite, both one and the other ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... and careless calm, too, seemed to him only the rest of a spinning top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant coquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape and sea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, its primordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank, exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and, above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, its overcrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... This liberty has no need of Political Economy to shine with the luster of evidence; nothing can prevail against it. We can prove that it is as fecund as it is respectable; but if the science of wealth should endeavor to demonstrate the contrary, the primordial bases of society, liberty, property and the family would not be less sacred nor less necessary, for they are the right of humanity. They could not be put aside, even under pretext of any mechanism which would claim to produce more.(45) These sovereign principles of economy flow from the moral law, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... maintained silence on a doctrine which, along with that of Karma, form the two main columns of the Hindu temple; for the Brahman as well as for the Buddhist—who is only a member of a powerful offshoot of Hinduism—these two laws rule throughout the whole Universe, from the primordial kingdoms up to the gods, including man; and the principal, nay, the only goal of human life is Moksha—salvation, in Christian terminology—liberation ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... waters of Sugarland Run in times of freshets. Occasionally when there is high water in the river the waters pass up the present channel of the run to the old channel, and then follow that to the river again. This old channel enters the river immediately west of the primordial range of rocks, that impinge so closely upon the river from here to Georgetown, forming as they do that series of falls known as Seneca Falls, the Great, and the Little Falls, making altogether a fall of 188 feet in less ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... fanciful to assume that the Liverpool Cabinet, in their ameliorating career, was directed by any desire to recur to the primordial tenets of the Tory party. That was not an epoch when statesmen cared to prosecute the investigation of principles. It was a period of happy and enlightened practice. A profounder policy is the offspring of a time like the present, when the original postulates of institutions are called in ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... words; but this function did not disappear till a very much later time. The question, "Who will be my judge?" has no meaning now, since the State has appropriated for its bureaucracy the organization of justice; but it was of primordial importance in medieval times, the more so as self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. It must also be remarked that the translation of the Saxon and Danish "guild-bretheren," or "brodre," by the Latin convivii must also have ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... been traversed from west to east and they had crossed the fierce bosom of Unaga's plateau. The reality of it was no better and only little worse than had been anticipated. It had been a journey of hills, everlasting hills, and interminable primordial forests, with dreary breaks of open plains. Each season had brought its own troubles, with always lying ahead the deadly anticipation of the winter yet ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... In such tepid slime primordial life began, and in it even in these latter days the far beginning of superior things may be discovered actively pursuing their craft and purpose in the order of the universe. Worms are abundant, and among them certain genera which ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... and to our imagination: you judge us as overexcited and disordered; if so, it is your fault. For this reason, we curse and scoff at your world and reject your pretended truths which, for us, are lies, including those elementary and primordial verities which you declare are evident to common sense, and on which you base your laws, your institutions, your society, your philosophy, your ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... man?—a creature without inspiration, Gross of form and feature, dull of inclination? Or was his primordial self a something higher? Fresh from test and ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... again, Despite what sceptics say; for sound it is Will summon us before that final bar To give account of deeds done in the flesh. The spirit cannot thus be summoned, Since entity it hath not sound can strike. Let sceptics rave! I see no difficulty That He, who from primordial atoms formed A human frame, can from the dust awake it Once again, marshal the scattered molecules And make immortal, as was Adam. This body lives! Or else no deep delight Of quiring angels harping golden strings; No voice of Him who calls His ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... one of the primordial mores. It dates from the earliest known existence of man on earth. It may reasonably be believed to be a custom which all peoples have practiced.[1039] Only on the pastoral stage has it ceased, where the flesh of beasts was common and abundant.[1040] ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... tribe are irrecognisable. By various influences, such as, for example, differences in food and climate, and domestication, a species may be split into varieties, or breeds, all of which, however, retain the more important characteristics of the primordial type. There appears to be no limit to the varieties of dogs, yet one can perceive by a glance that there is no specific difference between the huge Mont St. Bernard dog and the diminutive poodle, or between ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... belongs. If we could trace that chicken back through all its ancestry, we would discover at different periods in the history of life upon the globe (about 100 million years, according to Haeckel) exactly the stages of development we found in the life history of the chick, and arrive at last at a primordial cell. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... him a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views, expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself, render these dogmas necessarily ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... traditions, with more than five hundred years of prescriptive standing; this principle which prevailed by usage and acceptance among all modern peoples long before it was embodied in legal form; this primordial deliverance of the spiritual life of the Germanic nations is the substantial fact which our modern society has now finally embodied in Article 20 of the Constitution and so has constituted a norm for the guidance of all later law-givers, in other words: "Science and its ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... midst of a controversy respecting the mode of government of the world, whether it be by incessant divine intervention, or by the operation of primordial and unchangeable law. The intellectual movement of Christendom has reached that point which Arabism had attained to in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and doctrines which were then discussed are presenting themselves again for review; such are ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... on their incomes—a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens to come among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken residence, and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the primordial houses, a family from some neighboring district may be adopted, but in the eyes of the aboriginal race they are ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... propitious to the Caesars who make their glory consist in the sinister brilliancy of battles and in the increase of their territorial domains. These same institutions give voice and vote in the direction of public affairs to the multitudes, whose primordial interest is ever peace, the sparing of their own blood, so unfruitfully shed in ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... touches only the accumulative power of natural selection, which I look at as by far the most important element in the production of new forms. The laws governing the incipient or primordial variation (unimportant except as the groundwork for selection to act on, in which respect it is all important), I shall discuss under several heads, but I can come, as you may well believe, only to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... confirmed, another good example will be furnished; for such portions of substance as bound these vacant spaces are subject to influences unlike those to which other portions of the substance are subject. If then we can most clearly trace this law of modification in these primordial processes, as well as in those more complex but analogous ones exhibited in the early changes of an ovum, we have strong reason for thinking that the law ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... singleness of mind Withdrawn from cares; lest these my gifts, arranged For thee with eager service, thou disdain Before thou comprehendest: since for thee I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky, And the primordial germs of things unfold, Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies And fosters all, and whither she resolves Each in the end when each is overthrown. This ultimate stock we have devised to name Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things, Or primal bodies, as primal ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... remote blackness. Like reddish monoliths they reared themselves in a receding file, silence about their feet, their crests far aloft moaning under the wind. In the encroaching darkness they showed like the pillars of a temple reared by some primordial race of giants, their foliage a roof that seemed to touch the low sky. He knew where he was now—the Calaveras Big Trees. The house was the old hotel, once a point of pilgrimage, long since fallen from popularity and left to gradual decay. In summer a few travelers found their way there, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... perpetuated by the neighbouring "Monte Saraceno." The costume, on the other hand, may have come over from Greece; it is figured on Tanagra statuettes and worn by modern Greek shepherds. By Sardinians, too. ... It may well be a primordial form of clothing ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... example, it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type." So with use and disuse and transmission of acquired characteristics generally—once show that a single structure or instinct is due to habit in preceding generations, and we can impose no limit on the results achievable by accumulation in this respect, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... from this universal root-principle, Mula-prakriti or undifferentiated primeval cosmic matter, which evolves out of itself consciousness and mind, and is generally called "Prakriti" and amulam mulam, "the rootless root," and Aryakta, the "unevolved evolver," &c.? This primordial tattwa or "eternally existing 'that,'" the unknown essence, is said to produce as a first producer, 1, Buddhi— "intellect"—whether we apply the latter to the 6th macrocosmic or microcosmic principle. This first produced produces in its turn (or is the source of) Ahankara, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... whole nature of existing things which thou hast made Cannot contain Thee, the primordial nature, For Thou fillest it, and yet remainest more than it; O Logos of God, living and holding all in the hollow of Thy hand, Although as true flesh Thou art circumscribed, And dwellest, mystically, in faithful souls, Establishing for Thyself an immortal habitation, ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... within her as she caught that phrase. That knot also would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial as chipped flint. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... giant creature was almost over me. I remember looking up at it and thinking in a queer sort of a way—perhaps it was some ancestral memory—that I was a little ape-like child about to be slain by a primordial elephant, thrice as big as any that now inhabit the earth. Then something appeared to happen which I only repeat to show how at such moments absurd and impossible things seem real ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... throw a stone at it. This is a survival of primeval man, who must take every chance to get his dinner. So, when Penrod and Sam drove the hapless Whitey up the alley, they were really responding to an impulse thousands and thousands of years old—an impulse founded upon the primordial observation that whatever runs is likely to prove edible. Penrod and Sam were not "bad"; they were never that. They were something that was not their fault; ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... these changes of animal form, and innumerable others, which may be collected from the books of natural history; we cannot but be convinced, that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs, included one within another, like ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... deal of the cave man about him. The heavy, slouching shoulders, the glare of savagery, the long, hairy arms, all had their primordial suggestion. Given a club and a stone ax, he might have been set back thousands of years with ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... strange spell over Grosvenor. He too recognized, even at the distance, the power of St. Luc's personality, and Tandakora, looming, immense, in the firelight, was like some monster out of an earlier, primordial world. Warriors and soldiers asleep were scattered before the fires, and, at the edge of the forest, walked the sentinels. It was an alert and formidable camp, and the young Englishman felt that he and his comrades were grazing ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and acts, that God who is the first source of the universe, himself uncreate, the supreme lord of unfading glory: who is the highest cause of the mind, who is space and the wind, who is the cause of all the luminous bodies (in the firmament), who is the creator of the rain, and the supreme, primordial substance of the earth, who is the object of adoration, with the gods, the Danavas, the Yakshas, and human beings; who is the supreme Brahma that is seen by Yogins and the refuge of those acquainted with Shastras, who is the creator of all mobile and immobile creatures, and their destroyer also; ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... masses which these particles have brought into existence by their condensation. But we have thereby achieved only a single step. The primitive movement of rotation of the nebula is not connected with the simple attraction of the particles. This movement seems to imply the action of a primordial impulsive force. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... twinkling animal eyes, his high cheek bones, his flat nose, his thick and slobbery lips, his straggling, fierce mustache and eyebrows, his grotesque long-tailed cutaway coat. So to him, too, this primitive man reaching dully from primordial chaos, the great moment had yielded ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... spirits smiled, "The conversation," they added, "refers to the primordial scheme and cannot be divulged before the proper season; but, when the time comes, mind do not forget us two, and you will readily be able to escape from the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... leads equally, following back a sequence of events, to seemingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world with invisible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... form is primordial, original, the simplest of all; it is a nascent moment or first attempt. It appears first of all in dreaming—an embryonic, unstable and uncoordinated manifestation of the creative imagination—a transition-stage between passive reproduction and organized ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... ceasing, energy borrowed from the sun, and on the other hand to expend it, in a discontinuous and explosive way, in movements of locomotion. Even to-day, perhaps, a chlorophyl-bearing Infusorian such as the Euglena may symbolize this primordial tendency of life, though in a mean form, incapable of evolving. Is the divergent development of the two kingdoms related to what one may call the oblivion of each kingdom as regards one of the two halves of the programme? ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... It was already floating along in a nebulous superheated form capable of condensation by the loss of heat, but in particular capable of growth and development by the fall of surrounding matter upon the forming globe. We must remember that in the primordial state the elements of a planet, as for instance our earth, were mixed together and held in a state of tenuity ranging all the way from solid to highly vaporized forms, and that these elements subsequently and by slow adjustment got themselves into ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... a diagram done in fire upon a long scroll of the abyss. And he (Redwood) was standing on a planet before a sort of black platform lecturing about the new sort of growth that was now possible, to the More than Royal Institution of Primordial Forces—forces which had always previously, even in the growth of races, empires, planetary systems, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... to the air's embrace, Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom: Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure To cut its one confided thought clean out Of all the world. But marble!—'neath my tools More pliable than jelly—as it were Some clear primordial creature dug from depths In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself. And whence all baser substance may be worked; Refine it off to air, you may—condense it Down to the diamond;—is not metal there, When o'er the sudden ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... been a sensational clash between the two men for the benefit of the beautiful young girl who, Gladwin strove to acknowledge, was the helpless pawn of circumstances. But the refinements of blood rob the physical man of his savage resources and impose a serious hamper upon his primordial impulses. ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that—questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this—namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly. You are a bad and dangerous person, and stand ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Reincarnation to his inner circle of students and adherents, at least so many authorities claim. He taught that there existed a fundamental principle called "Tao," which is held to have been identical with the "primordial reason," a manifestation of which was the "Teh," or the creative activity of the universe. From the union and action of the "Tao" and the "Teh" proceeded the universe, including the human soul, which he taught was ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to bring about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though they were the universal Good ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... in its primordial simplicity it may be small, the whole world dares not deal with (one embodying) it as a minister. If a feudal prince or the king could guard and hold it, all would spontaneously ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... beginnings of mundane life) is a theory which the evolutionist must accept, and which can frighten none aware of the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous—nay, infinite—spiritual significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from system to system, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... data in intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our critical task is to return to them through a regressive analysis, the goal of which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to our primordial intuition. The latter already constitutes a thought, a preconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which is action itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question here of restricting ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire of war. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... of characeae, mosses and liverworts, and vascular cryptogams, where in special structures produced by cell-divisions there arise single primordial cells, which divide into two portions, of which the upper portion dissolves or becomes mucilaginous, while the lower contracts and rearranges itself to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... emphasis; his body grew less and less clumsy, more and more leonine. It has taken centuries and centuries to make the white man what he is to-day; yet, a single year of misfortune may throw him back into the primordial. For it is far easier to retrograde than to go forward, easier to let the world go by than to march along with it. Had he been less interested in Elsa and more concerned about his rehabilitation, self-analysis would have astonished Warrington. The blunt speech, the ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... only, were, as the reader knows, transferred to Canada by Imperial sanction at the same time. It is not the author's intention, therefore, to cumber his pages with trite or irrelevant matter; yet certain transactions which preceded this primordial and greatest treaty of all not unfittingly may be set forth, though in the briefest way, as a pardonable introduction ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... starts are those which it has received from its ancestors plus its individuality. The fact that the sexual cells are formed from the early formed cells of the new organism which represent all of the qualities of the fertilized ovum or primordial cell, renders it unlikely that the new offspring will contain qualities which the parents have acquired. The question of the inheritance of characteristics which the parents have acquired as the result of the action of environment upon them is one which is still actively investigated ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... true, in the upper Cambrian beds. In the lower they have all but disappeared. Whether their traces have been obliterated by heat and pressure, and chemical action, during long ages; or whether, in these lower beds, we are actually reaching that "Primordial Zone" conceived of by M. Barrande, namely, rocks which existed before living things had begun to people this planet, is a question not yet answered. I believe the former theory to be the true one. ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... to the existence of things, and, consequently, primitive and anterior to every other law: so that all those which man has received, are only imitations of it, and their perfection is ascertained by the resemblance they bear to this primordial model. ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... enjoyment? Why did God make man under such conditions? Or at least how are we to reconcile His having done so with His attribute of goodness? To this question there are many replies but no answer, the former being merely attempts to explain the chronic effects of the primordial ethical ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... chemistry; Wundt of a 'psychic synthesis,' which might develop properties not contained in the elements; and such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Barratt, and Clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which, in the absence of souls, selves, or other principles of unity, primordial units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing themselves together in successive stages of compounding and re-compounding, and thus engendering our higher and more complex states of mind. The ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... on their heads—melancholy forms or phantoms in the dusky air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... economy of time that the real advance of modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist. With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising, self-admiring,' where should we be if certain—for the most part, uncertain and forgotten—men of genius had not invented the primordial processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. To talk of the 'invention' of the steam-engine, for example, is an absurdity. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... universal causes, for instance in this plant, and in that animal, as in particular causes. Fourthly, they are in the seeds produced from animals and plants. And these again are compared to further particular effects, as the primordial universal causes to the first ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of the process of aggregation, more especially in dark red leaves, the contents of the cells often present a different appearance, as if the layer of protoplasm (primordial utricle) which lines the cells had separated itself and shrunk from the walls; an irregularly shaped purple bag being thus formed. Other fluids, besides a solution of the carbonate, for instance an infusion of raw ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward the ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the rival gods, Ahriman and Ormuzd, evolved themselves out of primordial matter and then through the long ages created their attendant hierarchies of angels. The philosophers of India anticipated in some respects our modern evolutionary theory. Brahma is thought of as self-existent and eternal. ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... they are rights which are practically valid for you only in the will of the sovereign. Whether they are in their nature primordial or prescriptive rights, makes no difference as to this point. The will of the sovereign is the only effectual guarantee of the natural rights of individuals, and the only source of their political rights. The sovereign recognizes the former, confers the latter, and secures both. There is not a particle ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness; that they neither feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution of the primordial living substance should have taken place only along the plant line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of vegetable life, as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though certainly widely different from the present flora, in the evolution ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... scientific world, very unequally, upon the origin of the existing diversity of the plants and animals which surround us. One assumes that the actual kinds are primordial; the other, that they are derivative. One, that all kinds originated supernaturally and directly as such, and have continued unchanged in the order of Nature; the other, that the present kinds appeared in some sort of genealogical connection with other and earlier kinds, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... The spontaneous variations of plants and animals are the very mainspring of his machine; but he tells us he knows nothing of the laws governing them; nor has he any information about the creation of the primordial forms, nor about the date of beginning, or rate of progress.[15] All which are necessary to be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again, when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, he takes refuge in confessions of ignorance. When ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... incapacity, the basal excellence and the basal fault, it is possible to define that whole affair of which morality is the constructive phase: the attempt of life to establish itself in the midst of primordial lifelessness, to avert dissolution and death, and to extend and amplify ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the All-One, from which there is no logical deduction of the individual. And in Spinoza's system the individual does not exist except as a modality. But the existence of the individual is one of the primordial truths of the human mind, the foremost fact of consciousness. With this, therefore, Leibnitz begins, and arrives, by logical induction, to the Absolute and Supreme. Spinoza ends where he begins, in pantheism; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... was christened Arthur, and life became dignified, significant, and, at length, centered. Merlin and Olive resigned themselves to a somewhat secondary place in their own cosmos; but what they lost in personality they regained in a sort of primordial pride. The country house did not come, but a month in an Asbury Park boarding-house each summer filled the gap; and during Merlin's two weeks' holiday this excursion assumed the air of a really merry jaunt—especially when, with the baby asleep in a wide ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... darkness raged the death from which he had snatched her by a miracle. Beyond—a million miles away—the world whose claim had loosened on them was going through its routine of lies and love, of hypocrisies and heroisms. But here were just they two, flung back to the primordial type by the fierce battle for existence that had encompassed them—Adam and Eve in the garden, one to one, all else forgot, all other ties and obligations for the moment obliterated. Had they not struggled, heart beating against heart, with the breath of death icing ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... show how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive. You can't speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals; nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilised being who is now calmly discoursing about ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an elemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces, blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside the wisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chance to get their own again ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... subdivision, and is apparently the primordial and simplest condition of the class. My observations will be best given by taking a few special cases. When the shoot of a Hop (Humulus lupulus) rises from the ground, the two or three first-formed joints or internodes are straight and remain stationary; but the next- formed, whilst very young, ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... Chiefly by the Elbe himself, since he got to be a River, and became cosmic and personal; ceasing to be a mere watery chaos of Lakes and Deluges hereabouts. For the Sandstone was of various degrees of hardness; tenacious as marble some parts of it, soft almost as sand other parts. And the primordial diluviums and world-old torrents, great and small, rushing down from the Bohemian Highlands, from the Saxon Metal Mountains, with such storming, gurgling and swashing, have swept away the soft parts, and left the hard standing in this chaotic manner, and bequeathed it all ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... find footing on surer ground by following the process which exalts the dragon of the folk tale into the symbol of evil and primordial chaos. The Babylonian Creation Myth, for instance, can be shown to be a localized and glorified legend in which the hero and his tribe are displaced by the war god and his fellow deities whose welfare depends on his prowess. Merodach kills the dragon, Tiamat, as the heroes of Eur-Asian ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... that perhaps such a description represents only or principally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the same characteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether it be a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgments which direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is in permanence of direction, because our past remains ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... influence on Theism would be that of supplying a scientific demonstration of the substantial identity of Force and Matter, and so of supplying a still more valid basis for the theory as to the natural genesis of matter from a single primordial substance, in the manner sketched out in Chapter IV. For the argument adduced by Professor Flint, that as the manner in which the vorticial motion of a ring is originated has not as yet been suggested, therefore its origination must have been due to a "Divine impulse," is an argument which ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... always geotropic, and plumules or shoots almost always apogeotropic. If then any cause, such as an increased flow of sap or the presence of mycelium, disturbs the constitution of a lateral shoot or of a secondary radicle, it is apt to revert to its primordial state; and it becomes either apogeotropic or geotropic, as the case may be, and consequently grows either vertically upwards or downwards. It is ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... great art, an art highly developed only in explorers and newspaper reporters of the first order—adaptability; of being able to cast aside instantly the conventions of civilization and let down the bars to the primordial, the instinctive, and the natural. Thus the Cutty who stepped out beside Kitty into the drizzle was not the Cutty she had admitted into the apartment. She did not recognize this remarkable transition until later; and then she discovered that Cutty, the suave and ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... much rather believe that which I hold to be the correct explanation, viz. that He has given to a certain fundamental and primordial medium, certain qualities and properties, by, and through which are originated and perpetuated, all the motions of the heavenly bodies already existent in the universe, or that are ever likely to be ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... sarcode of the zoologist, must be, if not identical, yet in a high degree analogous substances. Hence, from this point of view, the difference between animals and plants consists in this; that, in the latter, the contractile substance, as a primordial utricle, is enclosed within an inert cellulose membrane, which permits it only to exhibit an internal motion, expressed by the phenomena of rotation and circulation, while, in the former, it is not so enclosed. The protoplasm ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... indicate that it is not prominent and also that it can hardly be considered a distinct type of monotheistic Buddhism. The idea that the five Dhyani-Buddhas are emanations or manifestations of a single primordial Buddha-spirit is a natural development of Mahayanist ideas, but no definite statement of it earlier than the Kalacakra literature is forthcoming, though many earlier works point towards it.[292] In modern Nepal the chief temple of the Adi-Buddha is on the hill of Svayambhu (the self-existent) ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... scrap-iron—heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there was no sublimity there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds to immensity, but the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnormal." ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... education tells, no doubt; but the size of the primordial mass of manhood tells still more. In a quaint book of Reminiscences recently published from the pen of a notable minister of the last generation in the Highlands of Scotland, Mr. Sage of Resolis, there is a criticism recorded, which was passed by a parishioner ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... forgotten; but it was something about a flock of meteors which hit the earth every twelve billion years, and that it was now all over for another such interim, and everybody could sleep soundly with the consciousness of having assisted at a spectacle never before beheld except by a primordial protoplasmic cell. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... moaned in the blackness to her right, eliciting delicious thrills that crept along her spine. The hair at the back of her head seemed to stand erect—yet she was unafraid. The muscles bequeathed her by some primordial ancestor reacted instinctively to the presence of an ancient enemy—that was all. The woman moved slowly and deliberately toward the wood. Again the lion moaned; this time nearer. She sought a low-hanging branch and finding it swung easily ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of my whelpage. I was twenty, and she a mad, wanton creature, wonderful and unmoral and filled with life to the brim. My blood pounds hot even now as I conjure her up. The ungarmented beast, my dear Dane, the great primordial ungarmented beast, mighty to procreate, indomitable in battle, invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered the globe with his sword and pillowed his ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... for places to deposit their eggs; but that both sexes should not have inherited the change in form and colour when it would have been beneficial to both can only be explained, I think, on the supposition that the females had a choice of mates and preferred those that retained the primordial appearance of the group. This view is supported by the fact that many of the males of the mimetic Leptalides have the upper half of the lower wing of a pure white, whilst all the rest of the wings is barred and spotted with black, red, and yellow, like the species ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... survival of the fittest, it appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law; through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life, the "descent of man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the anthropoid ape, and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had devised, or could determine, a code of morality in which certain things were eternal by right, and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... and there, beside the fragrant hedge, if you will, with the green sward for benches, and the canopy of heaven for dome, she was honored in Ireland, even as she had been honored ages before in Greece, in Palestine, and by our primordial Celtic ancestors themselves. The hedge-schoolmaster conducted the rites, and the air resounded with the sonorous hexameters of Virgil and the musical ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... lines swept down upon me and bore me back into the drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged myself to the door of ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... wherever it was found; she cleft it from the rocks; she gleaned it among ruins. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics. The wise men of Europe sought the best government in a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; America went behind these names to extract from them the vital elements of social forms, and blend them harmoniously ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case;—so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... should gladly have pitted my strength and wit against the savage and primordial world in which I found myself. I could have lived in seclusion within some rocky cave until I had found the means to outfit myself with the crude weapons of the Stone Age, and then set out in search of her whose image had now become the constant companion of my waking hours, and the central and ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is like the primordial chaos, a concentrated tumult of undetermined possibilities. The germs of infinite adventure and result are floating around you like a snow-storm. You do not know what may arise in a moment and colour all your future. Out of this mass may suddenly start something marvellous, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... whole matter lies in a nutshell. Suppose that hundreds of millions of years ago there existed upon this earth a single primordial form of the very lowest life, or suppose that three or four such primordial forms existed. Change of climate, of food, of any of the circumstances which surrounded any member of this first and lowest class ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... store, that was little to him except that Victor was now punished even beyond his, Jean's, hopes. He knew that the trader was ruined. For the rest it would be as it always was in the wild. The valley would simply go back to its primordial condition. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... to look at the nurses and babies; they imparted to the scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. "Yes," he said at last, "I suppose I am." And then, in answer to his companion's inquiries, he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It was an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which it will ...
— The American • Henry James
... understood by physicians; and they are making noble efforts to spread this understanding among the people. Their efforts are gravely hindered by two obstacles; one the professional tradition known as "the medical secret," the other the universal prevalence of that primordial superstition—the sex tabu. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... think, one result of this consolidation of the West into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... origin and phenomena, not only of our own planet, but other planets, of the stars, and the sun. New light is thrown on the source of the sun's heat; we can make more than guesses as to its probable age. The great question to-day is: is there one primordial substance from which all the varying forms of matter ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... Glaudot thought. Incredible power. All the power to control worlds, to carve worlds from primordial slime, almost, for yourself. Here was far more power than any man in the galaxy had ever been offered. Was it ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... horse, the ox, the elephant, the bird, could speak, they would confess, that, at the bottom of their nature, their instincts, their sensations, their obtuse intelligence, assisted by organs less perfect than ours, there is a clouded, secret sentiment of this existence of a superior and primordial Being, from whom all emanates, and to whom all returns,—a shadow of the divinity upon their being, a distant approach to the conception of that idea, which fills the worlds, and for which alone the worlds have been made,—the ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... sisters. And what applies to the minor groups called genera applies also, going farther into the past, to all larger groups as well, so that in the last analysis, all existing creatures being really the evolved and modified descendants of one primordial type, it may be said that all animate creation is but a single kind. In this broadened view the details of classification ceased to have the importance once ascribed to them, and the quibblings of the classifiers seem amusing rather than serious. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... further apart, rotate more slowly on their axes, and assume the shapes they have now. In cooling down, new chemical compounds, and probably elements would be formed, since the so-called elements are perhaps mere combinations of a primordial substance which have been produced at various temperatures. The heavier elements, such as platinum, gold, and iron, would sink towards the core; and the lighter, such as carbon, silicon, oxygen, nitrogen, ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... can see it all. The desert, the mountains, all wild, primordial, untamed. How I should have loved to have been with you. Then, perhaps, I should have got ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... invoke their rights of French citizenship in the grand manner. The Frenchman knows it all; he regrets that such creatures should be his own compatriots—regrets, maybe, that he is not possessed of the same primordial pushfulness and insensibility; and shrugs ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... and technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion. This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the market. He got up and stood before the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing said: ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods; he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all the time I had not even thought of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The crowd is more partisan ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... nations, parties or individuals, get licked in the same way. They outrage some one's self-respect, and then the old primordial ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis |
