"Variability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... difficulty disappears. If music, taking for its raw material the various modifications of voice which are the physiological results of excited feelings, intensifies, combines, and complicates them—if it exaggerates the loudness, the resonance, the pitch, the intervals, and the variability, which, in virtue of an organic law, are the characteristics of passionate speech—if, by carrying out these further, more consistently, more unitedly, and more sustainedly, it produces an idealised language of emotion; then its power over us becomes ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... buys—chiefly as a stick wherewith to beat the Gold Standard. He shows, very easily and truly, that it is absurd to suppose that the value of the monetary gold standard is invariable. Thereby he is only beating a dead horse, for no such argument is nowadays put forward. The variability of the gold standard of value is acknowledged, whenever a fluctuation in the general level of commodity prices is recorded. But gold is the basis of our credit system, and of those of all the economically civilised countries of ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... purposes than I could find 'verbatim' in his book—as I apprehend it, I say, it is, that all the phenomena of organic nature, past and present, result from, or are caused by, the inter-action of those properties of organic matter, which we have called ATAVISM and VARIABILITY, with the CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE; or, in other words,—given the existence of organic matter, its tendency to transmit its properties, and its tendency occasionally to vary; and, lastly, given the conditions of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... black race in Micronesia and Polynesia; in his opinion we have here to do with a single race. The color of the Polynesians may be out and out from natural causes different, "their entire physical appearance indicates the greatest variability." Herein the whole question of the domain of variation is sprung with imperfect satisfaction on the part of those travelers who give their attention more to transitions than to types. Among these are not a few who have returned from the South Sea with the conviction ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... criticism, in which Sivori is compared with Spohr, may be interesting: "Spohr is of colossal stature, and looks more like an ancient Roman than a Brunswicker; Sivori is the antithesis of Spohr in stature. Spohr has the severe phlegmatic Teutonic aspect; Sivori has the flashing Italian eye and variability of feature. Spohr stands firm and still; Sivori's body is all on the swing, he tears the notes, as it were, from his instrument. Spohr's refinement and polish have been the characteristics of his playing; in Sivori it is wild energy—the soul in arms—the determination to be up ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... dispositions, of their instinctive bent and external impulse, all animals of the same species resemble each other; thus, the hunter who knows the red-deer in his father's forest, may know in every forest on earth how the stag will behave in any given case. The better a genus is fitted for variability in the conformation of its individuals, the higher is the rank it is entitled to hold in the graduated series of creatures capable of development; and it is precisely that wonderful many-sidedness of his inner life, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... prevented him from executing his designs, for he knew the youth and character of his wife, and he felt sure that if he were absent she would not be able to control herself; and he considered also the mutability and variability of the feminine character, and that the young gallants were accustomed to pass in front of his house to see his wife, even when he was at home,—whence he imagined that in his absence they might come closer, and ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... her head and laughed. She had charming white teeth—small and sharp and with enough irregularity to carry out her general suggestion of variability. "Yes, I shall like that, when it comes," she said; "But the chances are against it ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... chapter of the same work we read: "It has been seen in the last chapter that amongst organic beings in a state of nature there is some individual variability. * * * But the mere existence of individual variability and of some few well-marked varieties, though necessary as a foundation of the work, helps us but little in understanding how species arise in nature. How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... founded on the memory of past events, on foresight, reason and imagination, with exactly similar actions instinctively performed by the lower animals; in this latter case the capacity of performing such actions has been gained, step by step, through the variability of the mental organs and natural selection, without any conscious intelligence on the part of the animal during each successive generation. No doubt, as Mr. Wallace has argued, much of the intelligent work done by man is due to imitation and not to reason; but there is this great difference ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the normal woman (height, weight, brain, nervous system, hair, senses, physiognomy, and intellectual and moral manifestations), the authors arrived at the conclusion that the physical, anatomical, physiological, functional, and sensory characters of the female show a lower degree of variability than ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... mathematical deduction.[1] Some of the most remarkable anticipations of modern science were made by Cardan. He believed that inorganic matter was animated, and that all nature was a progressive evolution. Thus his statement that all animals were originally worms implies the indefinite variability of species, just as his remark that inferior metals were unsuccessful attempts of nature to produce gold, might seem to foreshadow the idea of the transmutation of metals under the influence of radioactivity. It must be remembered that ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... are directly known only as the contents of a consciousness, cui objecta sunt, subjects only as centers of relation, as the scene or foundation of a representative content, cui subjecta sunt: outside my thoughts body does not exist as body, nor I myself as soul). (2) The variability of the objects of perception. (3) Sensationalism—all specific differences in consciousness must be conceived as differences in degree, all higher mental processes and states, including thought, as the perceptions and experiences, transformed ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... cotton dress of a forget-me-not blue which suits her pale colouring. She looked quite pretty. When I told her so she blushed like a girl. I was glad to see her in gay humour again. Of late months she has been subject to moodiness, emotional variability, which has somewhat ruffled the smooth surface of our companionship. But to-day there has been no trace of "temperament." She has shown herself the pleasant, witty Judith she knows I like her to be, with a touch of coquetry thrown in on her own account. She even spoke amiably of Carlotta. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will. He is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other—a creature of incalculable variability. We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free-will instinct shall have been adjusted, when perfect under ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... traditional view that variability in mental traits becomes more marked during adolescence is here contradicted, as far as intelligence is concerned, for the distribution of I Q's is practically the same at each age from 5 to 14. For example, 6-year-olds differ from one another fully ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... time at which the change of life occurs in women, as we shall have occasion hereafter to show, is also subject to variation; and it is a matter of common observation with mothers, that the period of teething is sometimes strangely hurried or delayed. A certain degree of variability, therefore, being frequently observed, and entirely compatible with health, in the various other natural processes, why should that of pregnancy form an exception, and be invariably fixed in its duration? And observation upon the lower animals affords most convincing evidence that ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... different chemical substances, which are consumed. The number of them to be seen on different nights is exceedingly variable; sometimes not more [Page 121] than five or six an hour, and sometimes so many that a man cannot count those appearing in a small section of sky. This variability is found to be periodic. There are everywhere in space little meteoric masses of matter, from the weight of a grain to a ton, and from the density of gas to rock. The earth meets 7,500,000 little bodies every day—there ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren |
