"Speculative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if there ever was a time in human history in which men were awaiting a hero, a Messiah, a redeemer, it is ours. No opinion is more foolish than the one that in our age there would be no room for a prophet. But he must not be a moralist preaching repentance, not a speculative builder of systems, not a man of lamentations and warnings, but ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Physics, George Louis Le Sage, who was then greatly interested in Professor Black's recent discoveries about latent heat and Professor Matthew Stewart's in astronomy, and was one of a group who gathered round Bonnet for discussions in speculative philosophy and morals, at which, it may be reasonably inferred, Smith would have also occasionally assisted. Le Sage seems to have met Smith first, however, and to have been in the habit of meeting him often afterwards, at the house of a high and distinguished French ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... that of the lizard as it is sometimes drawn. The two eyes indicate that the enlargement in which these were placed is the head, and the extended curved snout a beak. All else is incomprehensible to me, and my identification is therefore provisional and largely speculative. ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... rows of children filed out, every head turning for a last unpleasingly speculative look at the outlaw. Then Miss Spence closed the door into the cloakroom and that into the big hall, and came and sat at her desk, near Penrod. The tramping of feet outside, the shrill calls and shouting ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... consigned though they were socially to the lowest level. Fate's injustice was a strong bond between them. And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes towards ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... departure was determined. "James is one of the most generous of men, Pendennis, and I am proud to be put under an obligation to him, and to tell it too. I hired this house, as you are aware, of our speculative friend Mr. Sherrick, and am answerable for the payment of the rent till the expiry of the lease. James has taken the matter off my hands entirely. The place is greatly too large for him, but he says that he likes it, and intends to stay, and that his sister and niece shall ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... observe the effect of this statement. Willie having never heard of such things before, and having a thoughtful and speculative as well as waggish turn of mind, listened with open eyes and mouth and earnest attention, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... saved me was the glimpse of a cold, speculative gleam in my tormentor's eyes. It was the mere shadow of an expression, but it acted like cold water upon my hot thoughts. I divined, suddenly, that something more than sport was behind the captain's insults. He wanted me to blow up in a great rage, and attack him, or the ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... little company had reached the place where Leila and Vera had parked their cars. Leila now cast speculative eyes over the group. "Martha is missing. Ethel must have found her cousin, surely. If she did not find her she was to go back to the campus with us. I lost track of her after the train whistled in. Martha ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... disliked Mr. Arnault. He was a man of the world, reported wealthy, established in a large but not very conservative business. He had the name of being a little fast and speculative, but she was accustomed to that style of man. He was an open suitor who would take no rebuff, and had laughingly told her so. After his refusal, instead of going away in despondency or in a half-tragic mood, he had good-naturedly declared his intentions, and spent the remainder ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... theologians have been led by certain speculative difficulties to deny the necessity of actual grace in the state ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... yet, the thought of any attempt to withhold from her a knowledge of evil brought a sardonic smile to his lips. She had as yet everything to learn of the world about her. Could such learning be imparted to her free from error or hypothesis, and apart from the fiat of the speculative human mind? It must be; for he knew from experience that she would accept his teaching only as he presented every apparent fact, every object, every event, as a reflection in some degree of her immanent ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... should receive the public deposits, where they could be constantly secured from day to day under the immediate supervision of the Government. Besides, the only effect of such a discrimination would be to drive such banks to Georgetown, Alexandria, or some other speculative site outside the city or District. This city has just been consecrated to freedom by Congress, and it is hoped that, in commencing its new career, no discrimination will be made against it. Indeed, I think it would be wise, in order to insure the success here of the new system, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Because young people are particularly apt to indulge in reverie, and imaginative pleasures, and to neglect their plain and practical duties, the word romantic has come to signify weak, foolish, speculative, unpractical, unprincipled. In all these cases it would be much better to say weak, foolish, unpractical, unprincipled. The words are clearer. If in this sense, also, I put anything romantic before you, pray ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... shrinking back into a shell of chalky-faced self-sufficiency. He has said very little, and has eaten nothing, but had a sleep this afternoon for a couple of hours, out in the patio on a chaise-longue. It hurt him, I think, to find his own children look at him with such cold and speculative eyes. But he has changed shockingly since they last saw him. And they have so much to fill up their little lives. They haven't yet reached the age when life teaches them they'd better stick to what's given them, even though there's a ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... "A speculative country, that is true," said Planchet,—"a country that I know well. What sort of an affair, monsieur, without too ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... claims to have attained, is to come into union with the Infinite by a process which removes him altogether from contact with this world and from all possibility of action in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints and most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculative problems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongs to my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends upon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche, assume and require ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Absorbed in strange, half-morose, half-speculative fancies, I scarcely heard the close of the solemn service. I was roused by a delicate touch from my wife, and I woke, as it were, with a start, to hear the sonorous, crashing chords of the wedding-march in "Lohengrin" thundering ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... eliminate as far as is possible the temporal and the accidental; and in particular the especial appeal it may have to your own private craving—for each of us has his soft spot where the pen can pierce. On the contrary, if the highly speculative business of guessing the probable circulation of a novel ever becomes yours, then you must doubly emphasize the importance of these very qualities; search for them, analyze them out of the narrative, equate them with the tendencies ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... established his slovenly household gods in one of those dreary thoroughfares which speculative builders love to raise upon some miserable fragment of waste ground hanging to the skirts of a prosperous town. Brigsome's Terrace was, perhaps, one of the most dismal blocks of building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first mason plied his trowel and the first architect drew ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... confided the fact that he had put all his savings into the stock of the present company at its greatly depressed present value. The company was not paying dividends; he had bought at forty. His air of financial success, of shrewd speculative insight impressed them all. Miss M'Gann evidently knew all about this; she smiled as if the world ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... never taken advantage of my ownership of the Bassett Bank to use its money except within my reasonable credit as it would be estimated by any one else. Your own funds I have kept invested conservatively in gilt-edged securities wholly removed from speculative influences. I knew that if I didn't get the newspaper Thatcher would, so I made every possible turn to go in with him. I was fifty thousand dollars shy of what I needed to pay for my half, and after I had raked up all the money I could ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the expense of the public, I flattered myself that the spirit of improving arts and sciences, and of advancing useful and substantial learning, which so eminently distinguishes this age, and hath given rise to more speculative societies in Europe than I at present can recollect the names of—perhaps, indeed, than I or any other, besides their very near neighbors, ever heard mentioned—would assist in promoting so curious a work; a work begun with ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... trio allowed herself sidelong, speculative glances at the man's face. She had seen the furtive overhead glances; the steady avoidance of the loving observation of his womankind. She had known Hervey as well, and perhaps just a shade better than his mother and sister had; and long since, in his childish school-days, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... indebted to art; yet the prevailing notions of Citizen Frenchmen, perhaps, gave him a bias, when estimating an uncivilised people. He left Europe when the dreams of Rousseau were the toys of the speculative, and before they became the phantoms of the populace. His observations were, doubtlessly, correct; but his grouping is artistic, and not without illusion. In his work, the Tasmanian blacks appear in the most charming simplicity, harmless and content; an extraordinary ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... that she incites heresy in the rebellious mind of independent youth. She is so moral she makes one long for adventure. She would not listen to any questioning of old traditions, or any speculative philosophizing of a curious young mind, and she would be intolerant with any girl who showed an inclination to ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... reader will know now, without being told, that the speculative miner, in getting a "fire-assay" made of a piece of rock from his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the contrary. I have seen men hunt over a pile of nearly worthless quartz for an hour, and at last ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hand an amount of property. It is not yours you remember, for you are merely a steward. God requires that it be used to produce the greatest possible good. The greatest possible good, is the promotion of holiness in yourself and in others. Luxury, pride and vanity can lay no claim. Speculative knowledge, taste, and refinement must receive a due share of attention, but be kept in their place. Our real wants, of course, must be supplied. But what are our real wants—our wants, not our desires—our real wants, not those ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... reconciled to his sins, but not, so far as I can understand, of his being reconciled to God, and still less, reconciled to God through the death of His Son. The penetration of Kant saw from the first all that could be made of atonement on the basis of any such system. What it means to the speculative mind is that the new man bears the sin of the old. When the sinner repents and is converted, the weight of what he has done comes home to him; the new man in him—the Son of God in him—accepts the responsibility of the old man, and so he has peace with God. Many whose minds are ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... may be named after Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, Hamlet is the tragedy of reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of mind. He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' He is 'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a calculating consideration which aims ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... made him wish he were back in America. His metaphysical studies determined the direction which his observation of life should take. He became a remarkable anatomist of the constitution of human nature in the abstract, viewing the motives of men's actions from a speculative plane. He excels in sharp etchings which bring the outline of a character into bold prominence. He is happy in defining isolated traits and in throwing a new light on much used words. "Cleverness," he writes, "is a certain knack or aptitude at doing certain ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the multitude, persuade themselves that what so many have acknowledged must be true. But I call on those who boast their philosophical freedom of thought, and would fain tread in the steps of Hume and other inquirers of the like exalted and speculative genius, to follow up fairly and fully their own principles, and, throwing off the shackles of authority, to examine carefully the evidence of whatever is proposed to them, before ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... ladies, and the curious and speculative of the other sex in this city, just now, is the grand exposition of Lincoln dresses at the office of Mr. Brady, on Broadway, a few doors south of Houston street. The publicity given to the articles on exhibition and for sale has excited the public curiosity, ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... that play is not serious. Children are allowed to do just as they please. This is a mistake. Froebel has taught the true spirit and importance of play. Some people consider his explanations as being purely speculative, if not insane; but the great majority of those who have really studied ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... intensive values, interpretation of these variations is speculative. They indicate that the pairs of beats are combined in higher groups of four; that the differences of mean variation in the first interval are functions of an alternating major and minor accentuation, the former ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... only to look at you,' said prim admiringly. 'Oh Hazel, you do know how to dress beautifully.' Prim's eyes were wondering as well as admiring, and a trifle speculative also. ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... of actual politics with enthusiastic reveries—the hero of a thousand legends—a demigod in his ends and an impostor in his means—Pythagoras of Samos —conceived and partially executed the vast design of establishing a speculative wisdom and an occult religion as the keystone of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the mediaeval council of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part played in the matter by that great and human, though very pagan person, Martin Luther. Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred for the heresies of the German monk, for in speculative opinions Henry was wholly Catholic; and the two wrote against each other innumerable pages, largely consisting of terms of abuse, which were pretty well deserved on both sides. But Luther was not a Lutheran. He was a sign of the break-up of Catholicism; but he was not a builder of Protestantism. ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... or speculative in these sinister forebodings. The precise dates of the approaching catastrophes were alone uncertain. It was known, however, that they were very distant. Accordingly, neither the learned dissertations of men of science nor the animated ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... called out anathemas from the spiritual powers, and no one was permitted to traffic for fancy profit; if any sales were made, the first cost and actual value of improvements were all that was to be allowed. All speculative sales were made sub rosa. Exchanges are made and the records kept by the register."—Gunnison, "The Mormons" (1852), ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... nervousness, his sleeplessness, and the state of his heart. Then followed reproaches, such as he had never made before. They were sharp enough to make her weep, and true enough to put tragedy into her face. This tragedy she carried down to the breakfast table. It made Jack and Mrs. Hemingway speculative, and it worried Ned. They glanced to him for explanation, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... metallurgy, an art that was practiced from the earliest times, was during the speculative period of human culture, saturated with philosophy. Especially was this the case in Egypt, where metallurgy, as the source of royal riches and especially the methods of gold mining and extraction, were guarded as ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... pounds in the world to pay. The little he possessed beyond his salary was locked up, here and there, in speculative undertakings, where he couldn't touch it except at long notice. It was a crushing blow. He had need of steadying. Some men would have flown in such a plight to brandy. Montague Nevitt flew, instead, to the ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... as the savings remain in possession of their owners, these hazardous gamblings in speculative undertakings are almost the whole effect of an excess of accumulation over tested investment. Little effect is produced on the general trade of the country. The owners of the savings are too scattered and far from the market to change the majority of mercantile transactions. But ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... did it mean? Was Flora going to be taken to her father; or were these people, that woman and her horrible nephew, about to carry her off somewhere? Fyne couldn't tell. He doubted the last, Flora having now, he judged, no value, either positive or speculative. Though no great reader of character he did not credit the governess with humane intentions. He confessed to me naively that he was excited as if watching some action on the stage. Then the thought struck him that the girl might have had some money settled ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the ignoring of problems. She possessed a certain native insight which revealed many of the horrent inequalities of her pathway; but she found it so cruel and disenchanting a faculty, that blindness was infinitely preferable. She preferred repose to order, and mercy to justice. She was speculative, without being critical. She was continually wondering, but she never inquired. This world was the riddle; the next alone would be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... I sat in an office. He has been dictating letters, but he stops and stares out of the window. His eyes grow speculative. He says: ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... wrought by men of yesterday. Therefore neither lapse of time nor multiplicity of trials could ever quench in Athanasius the pure spirit of hope which glows in his youthful work. Slight as our sketch of it has been, it will be enough to show his combination of religious intensity with a speculative insight and a breadth of view reminding us of Origen. If he fails to reach the mystery of sinlessness in man, and is therefore not quite free from a Sabellianising view of the Lord's humanity as a mere vesture of his divinity, he at least rises far above the barren logic of the ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... have been obliged to change their dresses to go to supper. Many a chevalier d'industree and young military spendthrift has made his harvest here. Thousands were won and lost, and the ladies were generally the dupes of all those who were the constant speculative attendants. The Princease de Lamballe did not like play, but when it was necessary she did play, and won or lost to a limited extent; but the prescribed sum once exhausted or gained she left off. In set parties, such as those of whist, she never played except when one was wanted, often ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... pass to those which swell to crime in the solitary human heart,—from the bold and open evils that spring from ignorance and example, to track those that lie coiled in the entanglements of refining knowledge and speculative pride. Looking back at this distance of years, I can see as clearly as if mapped before me, the paths which led across the boundary of invention from "Paul Clifford" to "Eugene Aram." And, that last work ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tendencies of the modern scientific party, too vehement and unguarded in his denunciations of colleagues, too bitter against the new order of things which, to his horror, was introducing vivisection in the place of the old-fashioned natural history he loved, and speculative criticism instead ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... emphasis on the right of the contemporary majority to shape its own institutions prevented Marshall's constitutionalism from developing a privileged aristocracy. Marshall was finely loyal to principles accepted from others; Jefferson was speculative, experimental; the personalities of these two men did much to conserve essential values ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... method which he opposed to that system was not anything quite new. But the idea of Bacon had the most comprehensive tendency: it tended to free the thoughts and enquiries of men of science from the assumptions of a speculative theology which regulated their spiritual horizon. The most renowned adversaries of scholasticism he had to encounter in turn, because they covered things with a new web of words and theories which he could not accept. He thought to free men from the deceptive notions by ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... latter contains an equally good harbour in Port Victoria Mahe. The Seychelles are remarkably healthy islands—thirty in number—and Gordon recommended them as a good place for "a man with a little money to settle in." He also advanced the speculative and somewhat imaginative theory that in them was to be found the true site of the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... roads was intended for speculative purposes. Thus, there were instances in which a line occupying a given territory had antagonized its patrons by poor service, and extortionate charges. Thereupon another company would obtain a charter—which was then easily done—and build a competing ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... these two great systems, but still not more than 4000 feet above the level of the sea, and 1000 feet lower than the top of the western ridge we had already crossed; yet, instead of lofty snow-clad mountains appearing to verify the conjectures of the speculative, we had extensive plains, over which one may travel a month without seeing any thing higher than an ant-hill or a tree. I was not then aware that any one else had discovered the elevated trough form of the centre ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... or "the melted butter," or "that glass of sherry," which are recognized as the causes for so many morning reflections. This curious circumstance suggests an interesting source of inquiry for the speculative. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... when hundreds of adventurers were willing to pay L5 apiece for the twelve hours' passage from Nelson, high rates of insurance did not deter ship-owners. River floods joined the surf in making difficulties. Eligible town sections bought at speculative prices were sometimes washed out to sea, and a river now runs over the first site of the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... represents not the investments of the capital class but of small savings. It takes no account of the nickel mines, the copper mines, the smelters, the silver mines, the coal lands, the timber limits, the fisheries, the vast holdings of agricultural lands in the West held for speculative purposes—for all of which spot cash was paid down ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... the 'Reverend' W. Pepperell, an ex-dissenting minister, to a meeting of mine, who asked me 'whether it was true that I was a republican?' I replied to the effect that 'while as a matter of speculative opinion I thought that a country starting afresh—as France after Sedan—would in these days generally do better to adopt a republican form of government than a limited monarchy, yet that in a country possessing a constitutional monarchy it would be mere folly to attempt ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... were also in the vicinity. Edward Tighe, the head and brains of this concern, was a Boston Irishman, the son of an immigrant who had flourished and done well in that conservative city. He had come to Philadelphia to interest himself in the speculative life there. "Sure, it's a right good place for those of us who are awake," he told his friends, with a slight Irish accent, and he considered himself very much awake. He was a medium-tall man, not very ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... men—incurable romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a positive ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... The Instigator could be persuaded to leave the plough, and at one time his enthusiasm (and the engine) carried him out of sight, and those remaining at the starting-point grew speculative as to whether he would return before dark. However, a recommencement of drizzling rain apparently cooled his ardour, and restored him to the party. The nomads gladly turned their thoughts and coaches ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... were doing here. Bob stayed back and watched. He did not want to overtake them. The road-breaking outfit crossed the canal directly and headed south by east off into the desert. Bob stopped his machine on the plank bridge, and watched them pull away into the night. Then he gave a long, speculative whistle. ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... unwarrantable aggressions, the war then raging with the Indians. This charge lay at the door of Dunmore himself; and there is strong evidence that Dunmore personally fomented the war, ostensibly in support of Virginia's charter rights, but actually in order to further his own speculative designs." Dunmore's agent, Dr. Connolly, heading a party posing as Virginia militia, fired without provocation upon a delegation of Shawanoe chiefs assembled at Fort Pitt (January, 1774). Taking advantage of the alarming situation created by the conflict of the claims of Virginia and Pennsylvania, ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... demonstrated its practical value; many of the first lines were extremely profitable, and the hostility with which they had been first received soon changed to an enthusiasm which was just as unreasoning. The speculative craze which invariably follows a new discovery swept over the country in the thirties and the forties and manifested itself most unfortunately in the new Western States—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Here bonfires and public meetings whipped ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... to pay as fast as they could sell tracts to some purchasers, on which occasions they paid the surveying fee and obtained deeds for the portion they sold. In this way they have held millions of acres for speculative purposes, waiting for a rise in prices, without taxation, while the farmers in adjacent lands paid taxes." [Footnote: "Labor, Land and ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... neighborhood of Lake Titicaca; *14 a conclusion strongly confirmed by the imposing architectural remains which still endure, after the lapse of so many years, on its borders. Who this race were, and whence they came, may afford a tempting theme for inquiry to the speculative antiquarian. But it is a land of darkness that lies far beyond ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... divided into thirty chapters, is speculative, and devotes itself to the different kinds and relations of intervals, according to the different systems of theoreticians. The third book, in seven chapters, is a continuation of the subject of ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... the government a percentage on the mineral obtained. Those who found a good vein had permission to work it for forty yards square on condition that they carried the ore to a licensed smelter. This occasioned a new class of people to spring up in this speculative country, namely, finders, who would search all over the country for what they called a good prospect, that is, every appearance on the surface of a good vein of metal. This when found they would sell to others, who would ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... before long, and I got all these goods at a bargain, I have bought freely. Then I have not done badly with goods run in by French ships that managed to slip through the blockade, and which were laden with speculative cargoes of luxuries for the army. As we are almost the only European house open, and I was able to pay cash, I bought things up largely, and realized very good profits by supplying the native shops here and the ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... This is not to try, but merely a pretence of trying, one order of powers against another. That was folly. But Coleridge combated this idea in a manner so obscure, that nobody understood it. And leaving these speculative conundrums, in coming to the great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws, Coleridge did so little real work, that he left, as a res integra, to Dr. Alison, the capital argument that legal and adequate provision for the poor, whether impotent poor ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... or Rentowels) maintained his character with the common people, although he preached the practical fruits of Christian faith, as well as its abstract tenets, and was respected by the higher orders, notwithstanding he declined soothing their speculative errors by converting the pulpit of the gospel into a school of heathen morality. Perhaps it is owing to this mixture of faith and practice in his doctrine, that, although his memory has formed a sort of era in ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... that Benin and Portuguese cloths are sold at Egga by many of its inhabitants, so that it would appear that some kind of communication is kept up between the sea-coast and this place. The people are very speculative and enterprising, and numbers of them employ all their time solely in trading up and down the Niger. They live entirely in their canoes, over which they have a shed, that answers completely every purpose for which it is intended, so that, in their constant peregrinations, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... he would be able to exert a powerful influence over the Canadian clergy. Franklin and John Carroll became intimate and loving friends. It speaks well for both, that the free-thinking philosopher, and the Catholic priest could so recognize each other's virtues, as to forget their speculative differences in mutual regard. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Rast,"—favorite words with him. He liked to study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was like his own,—a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of love and hate and suffering, and over all (the peculiar identity of the man) a cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the passion and depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... of the Canaan Company, the Tigmores, can without doubt be made to pay from one hundred to five hundred per cent, on any investment within the first year. The Canaan Company will not have to depend upon shallow sheets of mineral against dead rock, as do many of the speculative enterprises of the mining section. The Canaan Company will not cut blind. It knows its field, it knows its chances, it knows its future'—and so on, and so on—how do ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... family in case of death, it is also a duty to combine saving with life-insurance. Both in investment of savings and in life-insurance, one should make sure that the institution or organization to which he intrusts his money is on a sound business basis. All speculative schemes should be strictly avoided. Any company or form of investment that offers to give back more than you put into it, plus a fair rate of interest on the money, is not a fit place for a man to trust the savings on which the future of himself and his family depends. Security, ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the Present Discontents and the Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights are the dawn of a splendid recovery. And they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... the village of Lauterbach appeared at the end of the valley, and very proud I felt as I surveyed the tall and handsome house of the late Christian Haas, my future abode, the centre of my property, real and speculative. I admired its situation by the long dusty road, its vast roof of grey shingle, the sheds and barns covering with their broad expanse the wagons, the carts, and the crops; behind, the poultry-yard, then the little garden, the orchard, the vineyards ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... had been pleased at getting a glimpse of it. In answer to my questions as to what he thought of the progress of the firm he said very little, except that all business was in an unsettled state, owing to the speculative spirit that had followed the long period of stagnation. As yet, my protege seemed to have been generally prudent, but it needed the experience of a tried business man to resist the temptations to make money by ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... now. Robert presented the note with a grave and courtly Virginia bow, then withdrew to a little distance and respectfully awaited her answer. Over at the Gordons' a group of ladies, old and young, watched the scene with curious and speculative eyes. Everybody knew that Miss Forrest had declined to see Dr. Bayard during her illness. Everybody had noted that, while the entire feminine element of the garrison flocked to inquire for Nellie in her ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... translation of father Lobo's travels into Abissinia, may be presumed to have led him to fix his opening scene in that country; while Rassela Christos, the general of sultan Sequed, mentioned in that work, may have suggested the name of his speculative prince. Rasselas was written in the evenings of a single week, and sent to the press, in portions, with the amiable view of defraying the funeral expenses of the author's aged mother, and discharging ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... links hang sometimes important results! Had it not been for Mark's transgressing in the matter of Tiny's milk we should never have learnt the circumstances which give to this simple relation of facts—valueless in itself—such interest, speculative and suggestive only, I am aware, as it may be ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... eyes to see Through labour daily in dim mystery, Like those who in dense theatre and hall, When fire breaks out or weight-strained rafters fall, Towards some egress struggle doubtfully; Though we through silent midnight may address The mind to many a speculative page, Yearning to solve our wrongs and wretchedness, Yet duty and wise passiveness are won,— (So it hath been and is from age to age)— Though we be blind, by doubting ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... language, he revolutionized his terms and filled them with new meaning. His emphasis is his own, and the traditional material affords merely the setting for his thought. He was not concerned with speculative questions about God, nor with abstract theories of his relationship to the soul and to the world. God's continual presence, his fatherly love, his transcendent righteousness, his mercy, his goodness, were the facts of immediate experience. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... the boy free her and Patricia remained silently looking out of the window. Christopher turned to pick up his book, and for the first time remembered Nevil was present and grew rather red. Nevil had watched them both with a speculative eye, for the moment an historian of the future rather than of the past. He said nothing, however, but having discoursed a while on the possibility of skating ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... fellows gave up this life of ours and buried themselves in a monastry, but as I listened to the priest I felt that if a man is feeling that the love of the one woman he craves can never be his, that, as an escape from the speculative eye of Mrs. Grundy, a cell might ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... inward support from above, by which all vicious inclinations are made subject; who love God sincerely, and prefer the real good of mankind universally to their own private interest,—though these, through the strength of education and tradition, may remain under some great speculative errors, it would be uncharitable to say that therefore God rejects them. The knowledge and goodness of Him who creates, supports, and gives understanding to all men are superior to the various states and circumstances of His creatures, which to us appear the most difficult. Idolatry indeed is wickedness; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dear down-country home, and his toilsome journey into the woods, arrival, and purchase, and poor, hard life of toil and deprivation: here was his all. He sketched the plaintiff as a well or ill-to-do gentleman, of a speculative turn of mind, whose eye coveted the rich bottom-lands of the defendant; and finding him helpless and poor, searched out the weak place in his title, hunted up obscure relatives, and procured for a song ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... this young man gratefully, because he was her only suitor. No one else had ever cared for her pale insignificance. She looked at her clouded image in the oblong glass that hung on the panel above her secretaire, and whose reflection made any idea of her own looks rather speculative than precise. It showed her a thoughtful face, too pale for beauty; yet she could but note the harmony of lines which recalled that Venetian type familiar to her eye in the Titians and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... atmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But [9] in the young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... taken, in the necessary interviews. They came of course - the interviews - and I explained what I was going to do at huge length, and stuck to my guns. I am glad to say the natives, with their usual (purely speculative) sense of justice highly approved the step after reflection. Meanwhile off went S. and I with the three CORPORA DELICTI; and a good job I went! Once, when our circus began to kick, we thought all was up; but we got them down all sound in wind and limb. I judged I was ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... startling a theory, but, on the other hand, such an explanation is precisely what should be expected from the other astronomer named. For Johann Kepler, or, as he was originally named, Johann von Kappel, was one of the most speculative astronomers of any age. He was forever theorizing, but such was the peculiar quality of his mind that his theories never satisfied him for long unless he could put them to the test of observation. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of the speculative understanding contemplating for contemplation's sake. This act has all the marks of happiness. It is the highest act of man's highest power. It is the most capable of continuance. It is fraught with pleasure, purest and highest in quality. It is of all acts the most self-sufficient ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Mammon! I am punished now for bowing the knee to him. Is there nothing left of your settlement? Fifty thousand dollars a year it secured to you, as we all thought. Only half the securities could be called speculative. The other half were gilt-edged. What has ...
— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw
... to take his oath of office as President. Arrived there he dismounted and fastened his steed to an elm-tree, since known as Jefferson's tree. He did this to signalise his disapprobation of royalty, and his preference for democratic equality. "Speculative" were the celebrated "Madison Papers." "Doctrine"—the Monroe doctrine declared that no foreign power should acquire additional dominion in America. "Unlucky" was correctly applied to John Quincy Adams's administration. See Barnes's U. S. His., p. 175. "Unwhipped"—Jackson ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... account, except some rival, who could only attack him on those practical subjects which were known to both. Independently of this, there was a good-natured collusion between them on those points which were beyond their knowledge, inasmuch as they were not practical but speculative, and by no means involved their character or personal interests. On the next Sunday, therefore, after Mat's establishment at Findrainore, you might see a circle of the peasantry assembled at the chapel door, perusing, with suitable reverence and admiration on their ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... be something which elevates and exalts us in our esteem, tinging our hearts with heroism and our souls with pride, in the love and attachment of some fair and beautiful girl, there is something equally humiliating in being the object of cold and speculative calculation to a match-making family: your character studied; your pursuits watched; your tastes conned over; your very temperament inquired into; surrounded by snares; environed by practised attentions; one eye fixed upon the registered testament of your relative, the other riveted upon ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... much in those parts, behind the sea islands; and she continued so employed throughout the war. I met her there as late as the last six months of it. But she was not reproduced, and remains to memory only; an incident of the speculative views and doubting progresses of the decade ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... came across Transylvania and caught the Austrians in the rear the defeat would almost offset that of the Russians in the west. Rumania's advent into the war is, however, still a matter of doubt, and any conclusions predicated on that assumption are entirely speculative. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... however, has arisen for either relinquishing or holding but loosely the associated conclusions respecting the constitution of the photosphere and its envelope. Widely speculative as seemed these suggested corollaries from the Nebular Hypothesis when set forth in 1858, and quite at variance with the beliefs then current, they proved to be not ill-founded. At the close of 1859, there came the discoveries of Kirchhoff, proving the existence of various metallic ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... act of the mind, which these new philosophers put forward as the solution of all human pursuits, rarely presents itself but to the speculative enquirer in his closet. The savage never dreams of it. The active man, engaged in the busy scenes of life, thinks little, and on rare occasions of himself, but much, and in a manner for ever, of the objects of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Upon this speculative transaction it is proper to make a few explanatory remarks. About 1750, East Tennessee was beginning to be settled by adventurous individuals, principally from western North Carolina, south-western Virginia, and occasionally ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... are two parts, the inquisition of causes and the production of effects; speculative and operative; natural science and natural prudence. Natural science is divided into physic and metaphysic. But since I have already defined a summary philosophy, and, again, a natural theology, both of which are commonly confounded with metaphysic, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... ready and able to carry it further as occasion requires, and should not allow the freedom of our discriminating faculty to be imprisoned by the swathes and bands of ordinary classification; as was the case with all early speculative inquirers, not excepting the Greeks, to whom it seldom occurred that what was called by one abstract name might, in reality, be several phenomena, or that there was a possibility of decomposing the facts of the universe into ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... time in the neighbourhood of Valladolid, in a state of embarrassment and obscurity. He devoted himself to intense study, having, while at the university of Salamanca, imbibed a taste for the secret sciences. He was enthusiastic and speculative; he went on from one branch of knowledge to another, until he became zealous in the search after ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... conception of a graduated, though irregularly branching, scale of being, which had arisen out of his profound study of plants and of the lower forms of animal life, Lamarck, whose general line of thought often closely resembles that of De Maillet, made a great advance upon the crude and merely speculative manner in which that writer deals with the question of the origin of living beings, by endeavouring to find physical causes competent to effect that change of one species into another, which De Maillet had only supposed to occur. And Lamarck conceived that he had found in Nature such ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... with speculative, dreamy eyes, till presently, as some thought swept through her, I saw those eyes blaze up, and the red blood pour to cheek and brow. Yes, the mighty Ayesha whose dead, slain for him, lay strewn by the thousand ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... to seek for repose beyond the seas. He there found himself exposed to aggression from a celebrated philosopher, Dr. Priestley. Although the subject of this discussion was confined to the investigation of some speculative opinions, published by the French writer in his work entitled The Ruins, the naturalist in this attack employed a degree of violence which added nothing to the force of his arguments, and an acrimony of expression ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... by Paley, whom he takes to be a conclusive reasoner. For himself he is content to show what needed little proof, that the so-called Christians of the day could act as if they had never heard of the New Testament. The Evangelical movement had in short no distinct relation to speculative movements. It took the old tradition for granted, and it need ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... master of those "shafts of gentle satire," for which all around him are his unconscious targets. His self-respect and self-doubt balance each other, until the latter outweighs the former, under the awful pressure of an unheard-of woe. Finally, he comes before us in that poetical, speculative period of life following the years of study and pleasure, and preceding those of executive leadership. Prince, gentleman, scholar, poet,—he is each, and all together, and attracts us ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Mr. Forbes was in town and that I had an appointment with him. As a matter of fact, no such inquiry came in, but as Miss Joyce, my secretary, knew that Mr. Forbes was in Europe, I was conscious for some months afterwards that Miss Joyce's eyes occasionally rested on me in a speculative and ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart |
