"Complexity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Number One's bungalow with an animal-like patience, if with a very human complexity of purpose. This was the second morning of such watching. The first one had not been rewarded by success. Well, strictly speaking, there was ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... New York sufficed to prove the superiority of our own artisans in such labor-saving contrivances as suited the conditions of the country. The foreign implements and machines were more cumbrous in both complexity and weight of parts than ours. In the finer departments of manufacture, the Gobelin tapestry, the French glass, porcelain and silks, the broadcloths of England and Prussia, and a host of other such articles, could expect no rivalry ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... would have gone gallivanting off with one man to whom she was not married to the bedside, thousands of miles away, of another man to whom she was also not married. Such simplicity of mental processes surpassed any complexity ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... they could lay hands on. Several women wore their furs, as an easier way of saving them, and children carried their dolls. Their state of mind was elemental. * * * The refinements of sentiment and all complexity were forgotten; they indulged in nothing so futile as complaint, nor even conversation. And the sense of the common calamity sustained them, no doubt, de-individualized them ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... consisting in the passive "being impressed by beauty" which unscientific aestheticians imagined as analogous to "being impressed by sensuous qualities," by hot or cold or sweet or sour, is in reality a combination of higher activities, second in complexity and intensity only to ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... thought, could have kept them straight. They were absurdly simple. But out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile, elementary innocence, Jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion, of intricate complexity. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... attention to the American section if I keep on giving pages to this section. But in spite of their great merit, the work of Kallstenius, Schultzberg, Carlberg, and Osslund will have to go with only meager reference. Osslund's pictures are somewhat startling at first, owing to a complexity of technical treatment. He does not seem to be working in the right medium, for I believe his Japanesque landscapes could be far more sympathetically presented in watercolour. Of the group comprising his work, his "Waterfall", "Summer Evening", and "Evening on Angermann Land" are very ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... of the organization. The brain of man, which exceeds that of all other animals in complexity of organization and fulness of development, is, at one early period, only "a simple fold of nervous matter, with difficulty distinguishable into three parts, while a little tail-like prolongation towards the hinder parts, and which had been ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... continues to work with the European Union and Kosovo's local provisional government to accelerate economic growth, lower unemployment, and attract foreign investment to help Kosovo integrate into regional economic structures. The complexity of Serbia and Montenegro political relationships, slow progress in privatization, legal uncertainty over property rights, scarcity of foreign-investment and a substantial foreign trade deficit are holding back the economy. ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... not a great while to wait. The scrip and staff of a New Mexican traveller of Pedrillo's kind is of no great bulk or complexity. It takes but a short time to prepare it. A few tortillas and frijoles, a head or two of chile Colorado, half a dozen onions, and a bunch of tasojo—jerked beef. Having collected these comestibles, and filled his xuaje, or water gourd, Pedrillo reports himself ready ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... panacea. By the very act of proclaiming the omnipotence of natural selection, Weismann found he was forced to the admission that: "as a rule we cannot furnish the proof that a definite adaptation has originated through natural selection," in other words: We know nothing in reality of the complexity of causes which has produced the given phenomenon. So we may on the contrary, with Spencer, speak of the "Impotence ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... an amazing rental, one of the more desirable places which was to let on account of the purpose of its owners to spend the summer abroad. It was one of the newer houses, large and commodious; yet its facilities were severely taxed by the Anderson establishment, which fairly bristled with complexity. Horses by the score, vehicles manifold, a steam yacht, and three automobiles were the more striking symbols of a manifest design to curry favor by force of ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... afraid of his machine—there was excellent reason for every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types—and he never attempted steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang term ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the reasons for the importance of the art that strives "to bring the invisible full into play" (l. 150). It may be rough-hewn and faulty; but it is greater and grander than Greek art because of its greater range, variety, and complexity, and because it reaches beyond any possible present perfection ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... conceive its beginning any more than we can conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all the characters ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... open sideways, and never up and down—I am enumerating propositions which are as exact as anything in Euclid. How then has this notion of the inexactness of Biological science come about? I believe from two causes: first, because in consequence of the great complexity of the science and the multitude of interfering conditions, we are very often only enabled to predict approximately what will occur under given circumstances; and secondly, because, on account of the comparative youth of the Physiological sciences, a great many of their laws are still ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... an individual body. Next, spikes or spines jut out from the lattice, partly for additional protection, partly to keep the little body afloat at the surface of the sea. In this way we get a bewildering variety and increasing complexity of forms, ascending in four divergent lines from the naked ancestral type to the extreme grace and intricacy of the Calocyclas monumentum or the Lychnaspis miranda. These, however, are rare specimens in the 4000 species of Radiolaria. ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... causes in which they are themselves contestants, ruling by delegation, and, to sanction their theft or their insolence, always having on their lips the name of the king, who is obliged to let them do as they please.—In short, the machine, through its complexity, irregularity, and dimensions, escapes from his grasp. A Frederick II. who rises at four o'clock in the morning, a Napoleon who dictates half the night in his bath, and who works eighteen hours a day, would scarcely ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... moment. The listener's grasp becomes more difficult, until there is at best a mystic maze, a sweet chaos, without a clear melodic thought. It cannot be maintained that the perception of the modern audience has kept pace with the complexity of scores. Yet there is no gainsaying an alluring beauty of these waves of sound rising to fervent height in the main melody that is expressive of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... and attaches itself to a shell or wooden pier by means of suckers, and remains for the rest of its life fixed. Instead of going on and developing into a fishlike creature, it loses its notochord, its special sense organs, and other organs; it loses its complexity and high organization, and becomes a "mere rooted bag with a double neck," ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... seems to you that it can be most successfully attended to in schools, then consider whether the introduction of it, and of all the other branches having equal claims, will, or will not give to the common schools too great a complexity. Consider whether it will succeed in the hands of ordinary teachers. Consider whether it will require so much time and effort, as will draw off, in any considerable degree, the attention of the teacher from the more essential parts of his duty. All will admit that it is highly important that ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... stage is ever to recuperate it must go back to the young Schiller, the young Goethe—the author of "Goetz"—and ever again to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing! There you will find set down principles of dramatic art which are adapted to the rich complexity of life in all its fullness, and which are potent to ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... inadequate. Music is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which we receive from contemplating a mathematical process of great complexity is altogether different from that of music. Highly complex as are the mathematical relations of the vibrations which convey musical tones from the instrument to the ear the final result of those relations, the impression on the rods of Corti's organ in the Cochlea, are as purely physiological ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... this universe of ours—space and all it contains—is a thing of five dimensions, a continuum we have never begun to contemplate in its true complexity and immensity. There are three of its dimensions with which we are familiar. Our normal senses perceive and understand them—length, breadth and thickness. The fourth dimension, time, or, more properly, the time-space interval, we have only recently understood. And this fifth dimension, ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... at the same time in trying to avoid the persons who are struggling to track him down and corkscrew from him the amount of his indebtedness to them! The dodges and subterfuges to which each is obliged to resort, increase in complexity and number with the advance of the season, until at the close of the month, the national activity is at fever heat. For if a debt is not secured then, it will go over till a new year, and no one knows ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... complicated relation of the several parts to the whole. Not many years ago a very few men and boys could edit, print and distribute the most important of newspapers, where now hundreds are necessary parts in a tremendous complexity. But even to-day, of the nearly 18,000 publications in the United States, more than 11,000 are of that class which, in all their departments, are operated by from two to four or five persons, and which furnish scant remuneration even for these. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... religion. I find in the scheme of conversion and salvation as it is presented by many Christian sects, a very exact statement of the mental processes I am trying to express. In these systems this discontent with the complexity of life upon which religion is based, is called the conviction of sin, and it is the first phase in the process of conversion—of finding salvation. It leads through distress and confusion to illumination, to the act of faith ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... of a planet like Marduk would have to be something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the Sword-Worlds. Maybe this Goldberg-ocracy of theirs had been forced upon them by the sheer complexity of the population ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms. He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity. Now, as I explain in the introduction, I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view. And I have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason: that just as ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the sense of shame, of rapture, and of horror at this stepping into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling by inappropriate words. But later too, and the next day and the third day, she still found no words in which she could express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that was in ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Golden Bough are now in possession of facts which it would take a very long time to explain. They see that side by side with agricultural economics is agricultural religion, of great rudeness and barbarity, of considerable complexity, and bearing the stamp of immense antiquity. The same villagers who were the observers of those rules of economics which are thought to be due to Roman origin were also observers of ritual and usages which are ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... diagnosis of almost any condition that may be classed under the head of "hip lameness" is not easy except in cases where the cause is obvious, as in wounds of the musculature and certain fractures. To the complexity which the gait of the quadruped contributes, because of its being four-legged, there is added the complicated manner of articulation of the bones of the hind leg. This involves the hip in the manner of diagnostic problems and because of the inaccessibility of ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... physiognomy. Several attempts may be noted in modern philosophy, which confirm the view here exposed. Space and time, far from being very simple and primitive functions, are shown to be intellectual constructions of great complexity. And further, even in some of those who do not altogether deny to space and time the quality of forming or of categories and functions, one may observe the attempt to unify and to understand them in a different manner from that ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... to give the primitive mountain waters that were the start of all the streams a more prominent place in the new flow onwards, it is unlikely that much can come of any attempt to leave the turbulent waters, go backwards, and start again; they can only flow onwards. To speak more plainly, the complexity of modern art influences may make it necessary to call attention to the primitive principles of expression that should never be lost sight of in any work, but hardly justifies the attitude of those anarchists in art who would flout the heritage of culture ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on everybody. It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow. And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule. Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord. As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly the same direct ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... religious custom and belief in Europe is a matter of such vast complexity that I cannot in a book of this kind attempt more than the roughest outline of the probable origins of the observances, purely pagan or half-Christianized, clustering round Christmas. It is difficult, in the present ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... of strengthening his grip upon the complexity of life. Statistics help. This method is neither so conclusive as the devotees say, nor so bad as the people who are awed by it would like to believe. Voting, as Gabriel Tarde points out, is our most conspicuous ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... actions and sufferings of an exceptional kind, so that the real nature of humanity and the world may stand forth in the picture in the clearest and most forcible lines; and yet no high degree of interest may be excited in the course of events by the continued progress of the action, or by the complexity and unexpected solution of the plot. The immortal masterpieces of Shakespeare contain little that excites interest; the action does not go forward in one straight line, but falters, as in Hamlet, all through the play; or else it spreads out in breadth, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... well. The whole place was meaningless. It was the meaninglessness that seemed to leap out upon me wherever I turned my eyes. The fireplace astounded me. It was a mass of pillars and super-structures and carvings, increasing in complexity from within outwards, until it attained the appearance of an ornate temple in the centre of which burned a little coal. It was grotesque. On the topmost ledges of this monstrous absurdity stood two vases. They ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... easily wrecked as the soul. As mechanisms go up toward complexity, delicacy increases. The fragile vase is ruined by a single tap. A chance blow destroys the statue. A bit of sand ruins the delicate mechanism. But the soul is even more sensitive to injury. It is marred by a word or a look. Men are responsible for the ruin they work ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... (elementary education) comprised on the part of the United States the exhibit of public education as organized in 34 States and Territories, in 6 cities (presented as separate units), and in 15 foreign countries. In number, extent, and complexity these exhibits surpassed all previous collections of the kind; the separate entries ran up into the thousands, representing for the most part such important collections as the exhibits of cities, counties, and groups of rural schools, all ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... of right arrangement in sentences, which we have traced in its application to the leading divisions of them, equally determines the proper order of their minor divisions. In every sentence of any complexity the complement to the subject contains several clauses, and that to the predicate several others; and these may be arranged in greater or less conformity to the law of easy apprehension. Of course ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... have to contemplate social phenomena as susceptible of prevision, like all other classes, within the limits of exactness compatible with their higher complexity. Comprehending the three characteristics of political science which we have been examining, prevision of social phenomena supposes, first, that we have abandoned the region of metaphysical idealities, to assume the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... passionately attract the Norwegian poet. His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case, in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity. But there are curious traces in Ibsen's correspondence of the difficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forming a concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn to the theme, and when it was too late to recede, he found himself ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... concerning the earliest layers of rocks in which good fossils are found abundantly is the complexity of the life. With the exception of the backboned animals, every important branch of the animal kingdom is represented, and it is just possible that we have even earlier forms of the vertebrates themselves. This, to the evolutionist, is ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the law of evidence has wisely said: 'In criminal cases, the statement made by the accused is of essential importance in some points of view. Such is the complexity of human affairs, and so infinite the combinations of circumstances, that the true hypothesis which is capable of explaining and reuniting all the apparently conflicting circumstances of the case, may escape the acutest penetration: but the prisoner, so far as he alone is concerned, can always ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Sultan, because he had not undivided sway over the consciences of his people.[10] In this boyish essay we may perhaps discern the fundamental reason of his later failures. He never completely understood religion, or the enthusiasm which it can evoke; neither did he ever fully realize the complexity of human nature, the many-sidedness of social life, and the limitations that beset the action even of the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... importance if it were true. Our second reason is that it cannot be shown to be true. You cannot measure the relative difficulty of diverse systems of government. Governments are things of far too great complexity for precise quantification of this sort. Will anybody, for example, read through the second volume of the excellent work of M. Leroy-Beaulieu on the Empire of the Czars (1882), and then be prepared to maintain that democracy ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... of saponin is admirably adapted for the nutrition of the plant, and it is associated with the corresponding complexity of the morphological elements of the plant's organs. According to M. Perrey,[44] it seems that the power of a plant to direct the distribution of its carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to form complex glucosides is indicative of its higher functions ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and deductions, which by habit become of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... knowing that we profit only by the experience for which we ourselves have paid. No one will, of course, pretend that such a reconciliation of the facts of sin with the axiom or intuition of Divine all-goodness is other than incomplete; we merely urge that, having regard to the magnitude and the complexity of the subject it could not be otherwise. A theory, without accounting for all the facts, may be true so far as it goes, correctly indicating the way which, if we could pursue it further, would lead us into more and fuller truth. No doubt, when that which is perfect is come, that ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... eroico, opens with a bold, heroic theme in spread chords, followed by a quieter subject. The music goes triumphantly on with increasing brilliance, complexity and heroic ardour. At length a great final version of the heroic theme is heard, Maestoso, and soon we come to the dramatic moment of the whole sonata. At the very height of exaltation we are overwhelmed ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... goodness of his fellows—and with all these serious elements, an element of humour mobile as flame, which assumed a variety of forms, now pure fun, now mischievous banter, now blistering scorn—humour in all its shapes, carelessly exercised on himself and his readers—with all this variety, complexity, riot, and contradiction almost of intellectual forces within, Montaigne wrote his bewildering Essays—with the exception of Rabelais, the greatest Modern Frenchman—the creator of a distinct literary form, and to whom, down even to our own day, even in point of subject-matter, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... recesses of his waistcloth admittedly melts the austerity of the superficial of both sexes. But can you, beneath the undeceptive light of day, turn a sere and unattractive hag into the substantial image of a young and beguiling maiden, and by a further complexity into a fruitful fig-tree; or induce a serpent so far to forsake its natural instincts as to poise on the extremity of its tail and hold a charm ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... concurring agencies have been unknown or overlooked, the conclusions of ratiocination must be verified; that is, it must be explained why they do not, or shown that they do, accord with observed cases of at least equal complexity, and (which is the most effectual test) that the empirical laws and uniformities, if any, arrived at by direct observation, can be deduced from and so accounted for by them, as, e.g. Kepler's laws of the celestial motions ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... the Press is to have learnt quite a lot about the methods of popular thought. And among other things I see now much better than I did why patent medicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community we are far too impatient of detail and complexity, we want overmuch to simplify, we clamour for panaceas, we are ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... lesson plan to its uses.—It is, of course, evident that lesson plans can be made of all degrees of complexity and completeness. With a little practice the teacher can easily decide the kind of plan that best suits himself and his particular grade of work. On the one hand, the plan should not be so detailed as to become burdensome to follow in the lesson hour. On the other ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... committees of privileges, in the House of Lords; appeals to the High Court of Parliament, from all the superior courts, both of law and equity, in the United Kingdom, involving questions of the greatest possible nicety and complexity—and that, too, in the law of Scotland, both mercantile and conveyancing, so dissimilar to that prevailing in other parts of the kingdom; appeals before the Privy Council, from the judicial decisions of courts in every quarter of the globe where British possessions exist, and administering ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... closely studied and committed to memory, as we commit to memory the letters of the alphabet, but with the difference that whereas the alphabet consists of but twenty-six simple letters, Chinese caligraphy contains almost a hundred thousand characters of extreme complexity. ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... in a modern play their number is just as great as suits playwright's convenience or his capacity. The impression then of a Greek play is that it is a somewhat thin performance compared with the vivacity and complexity of the great Elizabethans. The plot, where it exists, seems very narrow in Attic drama; it could hardly be otherwise in a society which was content with a repeated discussion of a rather close cycle of heroic legends. Yet here, too, ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... faculty of judgment; others attribute it to feeling or impulse, and make it a sense of pleasure or pain; others again associate it more closely with the will, and regard its function to be legislative or imperative. These differences of opinion reveal the complexity of the nature of conscience. The fact is, that it belongs to all these departments—the intellectual, emotional, and volitional—and ought to be regarded not as a single faculty distinct from the particular decisions, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... quite apart from anything that they may mean or represent, are expressive of moods—the colors of a painting have a stimmung, so have tones and words, when rhythmically composed. The simplest aesthetic experiences, like the beauty of single musical tones or colors, are of no greater complexity; yet almost all works of art contain further elements; for as a rule the sensations do not exist for their own sakes alone, but possess a function, to represent things. The colors of a landscape painting are not only interesting to us as beautiful colors, but as symbols of a landscape; ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... roof, and these were all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with fine copper and silver arabesques of amazing complexity. Every minutest architectural detail had been carved out of the solid gold dyke that had formed the city; nothing had been added to fill out any portion. The imagination was staggered at thought of the infinite skill and labor required for such ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... declared, was more pleasing to the eye than the ordinary man, and the life of the ordinary dog more to be envied than that of the ordinary man. Knowledge only lifted us above the animal to be more buffeted by a complexity of desires. The greatest thing in the world was self, and even the roots of our goodness burrowed down into the depths where the ego was considering its own comfort either in this world or the next. The proud man for whom the universe ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... stress the sacred obligation of the teacher; we may discuss in detail mechanical processes involved in lesson preparation; we may analyze child nature in all of its complexity; but after all we come back to the Personality of the Teacher as the great outstanding factor in pedagogical success. That something in the ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... and execrations—that I saw reflected from every countenance agonies only inferior to my own? He that would form a lively idea of the regions of the damned, need only to witness, for six hours, a scene to which I was confined for many months. Not for one hour could I withdraw myself from this complexity of horrors, or take refuge in the calmness of meditation. Air, exercise, series, contrast, those grand enliveners of the human frame, I was for ever debarred from, by the inexorable tyranny under which I was fallen. Nor did I find the solitude of my nightly dungeon less insupportable. Its only ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... is an instance of a tendency against which we are required to be perpetually on our guard. The final aim of all science and of all philosophy is to find some unity or unities that shall co-ordinate the immense complexity of the world in which we live. Now there is one and only one legitimate way of attaining this aim, and that is by patient, persevering study of the facts. But the facts turn out to be so numerous, so multifarious, ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... any rate, had ceased to expect much affection in his wife for him; but he thought she was sensible, and equal to any complexity of circumstances, or even to disaster. He thought this, not on any positive evidence; but he concluded, somewhat absurdly, that her coldness meant common sense and capacity for facing trouble courageously and with deliberation. He had now to find out his mistake, and to learn that the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... about life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock. We were furiously ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... physiologist, and the economist, of the subtle, complicated structure of the breathing, energetic, restless world of men; I say, let him take in and master the vastness of the view thus afforded him of Nature, its infinite complexity, its awful comprehensiveness, and its diversified yet harmonious colouring; and then, when he has for years drank in and fed upon this vision, let him turn round to peruse the inspired records, or listen to the authoritative ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... be noticed that as forms take on more complexity, and as organs develop new and more complex functions, psychos becomes less simple in its manifestations, and more complex in its relations to the internal and external ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... plant food; for ordinary plants are entirely unable to make use of it. Part of the nitrogen eaten by the animal is stored up in its body, and thus the body of the animal, after it has died, contains these nitrogen compounds of high complexity. But plants are not able to use these compounds. A plant can not be fed upon muscle tissue, nor upon fats, nor bones, for these are compounds so complex that the simple plant is unable to use them at all. So far, then, in the food cycle the compounds taken from ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work—a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a humming top that ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... but little from the want of classical apparatus of the Inquisition At no time of the world's history have men been at a loss how to inflict mental and bodily anguish upon their fellow-creatures. This aptitude came to them in the growing complexity of their passions and the early refinement of their ingenuity. But it may safely be said that primeval man did not go to the trouble of inventing tortures. He was indolent and pure of heart. He brained his neighbour ferociously with a stone axe from necessity and without ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... comprehending the complexity of her feelings. Ditmar had not apologized or feigned an altruism for which she would indeed have despised him. The ruthlessness of his laugh—the laugh of the red-blooded man who makes laws that he himself may be lawless ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the question is of a complexity beyond the powers of ordinary conception. I well remember that when, familiar only with equations of algebra, I first looked into a book on mechanics, I was struck by the complexity of the formulae. But this was nothing ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... doubt that, taking the Irish nation as a whole, we find in it features which are visible in no other European nation; and that, taking Europe as a whole, in all its complexity of habits, manners, tendencies, and ways of life, we have a picture wholly distinct from that of the Irish people. England has striven during the last eight hundred years to shape it and make it the creature of her thought, and England ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... than that of the war, will test our national fibre. The problems we face are in extent, in character, in complexity greater than at any other period of history. The strain will be greater, for the conflict is being lifted to a higher plane, that of ideas. And ideas are the supreme realities, the dynamic forces that rule the world, the fulcrum that shifts ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... metal-work seems to have been strong, and Onatas, whose name is closely connected with Aegina, and who is contemporary with the presumably later portion of this monument, was above all a worker in bronze. Here again, in this lurking spirit of metal-work, we have a new element of complexity in the character of these precious remains. And then, to compass the whole work in our imagination, we must conceive yet another element in the conjoint effect; metal being actually mingled with the marble, brought ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Harley, of New York, of decidedly archaeological character "The Triumph of the Field" and "Abundance." They are most serious pieces of work, possibly too serious, and they are in great danger of remaining caviar to the masses on account of the complexity of their symbolism and the intellectual character of their motives. Their setting is most attractive, amongst groups ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... is increasing rapidly. The observers of the total eclipse in August, 1905, were surprised to find that it began twenty seconds before the predicted time. The mathematical problems involved in correcting this error are of such complexity that it is only now and then that a mathematician turns up anywhere in the world who is both able and bold enough to ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... way, the stars from which the solar system was receding would seem to be approaching each other. If the stars, instead of being quite at rest, as just supposed, had motions proper to themselves, then we should have a double complexity. They would still appear to an observer in the solar system to have motions, and part of these motions would be truly proper to the stars, and part would be due to the advance of the sun ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... ever, and with that assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of Indians who claimed both a share ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... most important in its influence on music, Mozart crowned his twenty-fifth year. The score is still a picture to the musician. It exhibits consummate knowledge of the theatre, displayed in an opera of the first magnitude and complexity; which unites to a great orchestra the effects of a double chorus on the stage and behind the scenes; and introduces marches, processions, and dances, to various accompaniments in the orchestra, behind the scenes, or under the stage. This model opera, in which Mozart rises on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... be explained by the complexity of the brain—though this complexity is the condition of faculty, as a rule—insects such as ants, bees, and spiders, whose brains are nothing but simple nerve ganglia, display prodigies of foresight, architectural ability and social qualities; whilst along with these dwarfs of the animal kingdom, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... intricacies of taxation and estimates of appropriation beyond the average mind? He may see a New England town meeting in a single day dispose of scores of items and, with each settled to a nicety, vote away fifty thousand dollars. He fears state legislation, by reason of its complexity, would prove a puzzle to the ordinary voter? Why, then, are the more vexatious subjects so often shifted by the ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... Cornal, "here's the makings of a hero." And he beamed almost with affection on Gilian, now in a stupor at the complexity his day's ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... Holland had for about twenty years formed part of the territory which the dukes of Burgundy had succeeded in uniting under their dominion—that complexity of lands, half French in population, like Burgundy, Artois, Hainault, Namur; half Dutch like Flanders, Brabant, Zealand, Holland. The appellation 'Holland' was, as yet, strictly limited to the county of that name (the present provinces ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... (his ebauche) to man, the range of forms from the simple to the complex. Even though not a comparative anatomist like Cuvier, he made use of the latter's discoveries, and could understand and appreciate the gradually increasing complexity of forms; and, unlike Cuvier, realize that they were blood relations, and not separate, piece-meal creations. Animal life, so immeasurably higher than vegetable forms, with its highly complex physiological functions and ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... one point. I am perfectly certain he had something else in his pocket besides a badge. And I am perfectly certain that under certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, and shot me dead between the gay bookstall and the crowded trams. And that is the last touch to the complexity; for though in that country it often seems that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence of that citizen of Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with the fullness and depth of the mystery of America. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... impeding and mischievous. Half the world believes that the Englishman is born illogical. As a matter of fact, I am inclined to believe that the English care more even than the French for simplicity; but the constitution is not logical. The complexity we tolerate is that which has grown up. Any new complexity, as such, is detestable to the English mind. Let anyone try to advocate a plan of suffrage reform at all out of the way, and see how ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... forms of plants allied to Begonia and Melastoma, continually attract the attention in this region. Filling in the spaces between the trees and larger plants, on every trunk and stump and branch, are hosts of Orchids, Ferns and Lycopods, which wave and hang and intertwine in ever-varying complexity. At about 5,000 feet I first saw horsetails (Equisetum), very like our own species. At 6,000 feet, raspberries abound, and thence to the summit of the mountain there are three species of eatable Rubus. At 7,000 feet Cypresses appear, and the forest trees become reduced in size, and more ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... The unceasing complexity of life's accumulations has created a great principle for energy expression—it is termed sublimation—and in popular parlance represents the spiritual striving of mankind towards the perfecting of a relation with the world of reality—the environment—which ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the particular rites, dramas, and symbols used in their teaching. They taught faith in the unity and spirituality of God, the sovereign authority of the moral law, heroic purity of soul, austere discipline of character, and the hope of a life beyond the tomb. Thus in ages of darkness, of complexity, of conflicting peoples, tongues, and faiths, these great orders toiled in behalf of friendship, bringing men together under a banner of faith, and training them for a nobler moral life. Tender and tolerant of all faiths, they formed an all-embracing moral ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... inference and laughed as if at a great joke. Kells shook his head doubtfully, as if Cleve's transparent speech only added to the complexity. And Cleve turned away, as if in an instant he had forgotten ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... little girl, on looking at an illustration of Little Brother and Sister, remarked, "If my Sister would turn into a fawn I would cry." When the animals are terrifying, the transformation contains horror for the child. This, together with the length and complexity of the story, would move Beauty and the Beast up into the second grade where the same transformation becomes an element of pleasure. A simple tale of transformation, such as The Little Lamb and the Little Fish, in which Gretchen becomes a lamb and Peterkin a little fish, is interesting ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... shepherd is heard in the land. Sannazzaro's "Arcadia" was the inspiration of Sir Philip Sidney's. It was a natural outburst of the time and it conveys perfectly the spirit of Italian imaginative thought in a period almost baffling in the complexity of ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... this means that N1 is the son of M1, for example, but at the same time the father of O1, who is likewise the son of M1; in the same way O1 is the brother of N4, who is the brother of N1; but O1 is not the brother of N1. The extraordinary complexity of the relations that would arise is at once obvious, and it seems clear that relationship terms could never come into existence under such circumstances unless they implied something beyond mere relationship and denoted rights and duties[148]. ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... this declaration to Strasburg with the utmost expedition, from whence it was transmitted by telegraph to Paris. The Emperor, surprised but not disconcerted by this intelligence, received it at St. Cloud on the 11th of April, and two hours after he was on the road to Germany. The complexity of affairs in which he was then involved seemed to give a new impulse to his activity. When he reached the army neither his troops nor his Guard had been able to come up, and under those circumstances he placed himself at the head ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... at once that a power is at work in whose presence he and the palm-tree are alike little children. In other words, he is intelligent enough to believe in God; and the Moslem, the man of the desert, is intelligent enough to believe in God. But his belief is lacking in that humane complexity that comes from comparison. The man looking at the palm-tree does realise the simple fact that God made it; while the man looking at the lamp-post in a large modern city can be persuaded by a hundred sophistical circumlocutions that he made it himself. But the man in the desert cannot compare ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... their eyes and souls were filled with the utter stillness and repose of its external aspects; its features became rigid and fixed, and were settled to an everlasting and immutable calm; the vibrating grace of its lines departed, and their ever-varying complexity became simplified, and assumed the straightness and stiffness of Death. So the straight line, the natural expression of eternal repose, in contradistinction to the wavy line, which represents the animal movements of Life, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... life.[34] According to the latter writer, "the Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics; it has no mythology, no epic poetry, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts, no civil life; everywhere it shows absence of complexity; absence of combination; an exclusive sentiment of unity."[35] It is not very easy to reconcile these two views, and not very satisfactory to regard a race as "characterised by negatives." Agreement should consist in positive features, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... overtax Man's limited political capacity disastrously. But we have now reached the stage of international organization. Man's political capacity and magnanimity are clearly beaten by the vastness and complexity of the problems forced on him. And it is at this anxious moment that he finds, when he looks upward for a mightier mind to help him, that the heavens are empty. He will presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... interest in the gothic and the picturesque and in chinoiserie, sentimentality, enthusiasm—all these activities made England a highly volatile country. Some changes were truly dynamic, others just fads. But to someone living in the period, who dared to look around him, the complexity of the present and the uncertainty of the future must have ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... backward, a shot-loaded quirt raised admonishingly to the chin of Subrosa who walked stiff-legged and reluctant, his white-lashed, blue eyes rolling fearsomely, his nostrils belling in loud snorts of protest. A complexity of emotions stirred Subrosa. Afraid to lunge forward, hating to walk circumspectly, eager for the race yet dreading the discipline of rein and whip, Subrosa yielded perforce to the inevitable. As his heels flicked over the low doorsill he swung round and landed one final ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... kingdom. This privilege must be accorded to it, not only because man does in point of fact soar far above all other animals, and has been lifted to the position of "lord of creation"; but also because the vertebrate organism far surpasses all the other animal-stems in size, in complexity of structure, and in the advanced character of its functions. From the point of view of both anatomy and physiology, the vertebrate stem outstrips all ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... sin, an abomination,—that to him was the first, the last, the whole truth of the matter. He had little education, and he had not in the least a judicial or an open mind. It was to him clear and certain that the blacks were in every way the equal of the whites. Of the complexity of human society; of the vital necessity of a political bond uniting communities, and of the inevitable imperfections and compromises which are the price of an established social order; of the process of evolution by which humanity ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... of greater complexity, in which the only way to win is by sacrificing the extra pawn, I shall treat of end-games in which positional advantages ensure the victory although the pawns are equal. Here we shall find simple cases in which pawn manoeuvres bring about the win, and more ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... cords, because the vibrations of these are considered the determining factor of vocal pitch. Sir Morell Mackenzie, however, in describing the muscles of the larynx in a passage couched in untechnical language, unconsciously gives a hint of another purpose for which the complexity of muscles in the larynx may exist. After speaking of the "innumerable little fingers of the muscles which move the vocal cords," he continues: "These fingers (which prosaic anatomists call fibres), besides being almost countless in number, are arranged in so intricate a manner that ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... theory to defend it, but simply to show what complicated hypotheses one is inevitably led to consider, the moment one looks at the facts in their complexity and turns one's back on the naive alternative of "revelation or imposture," which is as far as either spiritist thought or ordinary scientist thought goes. The phenomena are endlessly complex in their ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... all the difficulties which its realization required and all the impossibilities of perfecting the thing hastily. The Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants' Delegates played in this respect an important role. It did all it could to explain to the peasants the complexity of the problem in order to prevent them from attempting anything anarchistic, or to attempt a disorganized recovery of lands which could end only with the further enrichment of peasants ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself. You see, then, how it is that the aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... advantageous position which he had then taken up on its behalf. The pressure of the Hofmeyr mediation increased the difficulty of this task by driving President Krueger into a series of franchise proposals of the utmost complexity. The danger was that Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues in the Cabinet, in their earnest desire to avoid war, might recognise some illusory measures of reform as satisfactory, and then, after further consideration, finding them to be worthless, be driven by their previous ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... said that the complexity of the individual during adolescence is due to the fact that at this time the brain and the whole body become at last awakened to their manifold capacities, and that the child now is not only capable of doing everything that a human being can do, but feels the impulse to do everything. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... amusing history of impostures, there is no more diverting chapter than that which deals with literary frauds. None contains a more grotesque revelation of the smallness and the complexity of human nature, and none—not even the records of the Tichborne trial, nor of general elections—displays more pleasantly the depths of mortal credulity. The literary forger is usually a clever man, and it is necessary for ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... confusion of ideas. Bear in mind that the "invisible universe" into which energy is constantly passing is simply the luminiferous ether, which our authors, to suit the requirements of their hypothesis, have gratuitously endowed with a complexity and variety of structure analogous to that of the visible world of matter. Their language is not always quite so precise as one could desire, for while they sometimes speak of the ether itself as the "unseen universe," they sometimes allude to a primordial medium ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... overlying strata in the form of dikes, or it may be blown forth into the air through volcanoes. Involved in mountain-folding, after being more or less changed in the manner described, the beds may become tangled together like the rumpled leaves of a book, or even with the complexity of snarled thread. All these changes of condition makes it difficult for the geologist to unravel the succession of strata so that he may know the true order of the rocks, and read from them the story of the successive geological periods. This task, though incomplete, has by the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... he again stood on the edge and looked out to sea and for the moment the simplicity instead of the complexity of life visible and invisible, was written on the face of the deep. He stood bareheaded and read the message thankfully and went back to the house ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... them in fancy through that fairy scene of mystic wonderland. We knew how the great elms and the poplars and the birches clinging to the snowy sides interlaced their bare boughs into a network of bewildering complexity, and how the cedars and balsams and spruces stood in the bottom, their dark boughs weighted down with heavy white mantles of snow, and how every stump and fallen log and rotting stick was made a thing of beauty by the snow that had fallen so gently on them in that quiet spot. And we could ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... standard of comfort rose, as the complexity of the mechanism of living increased, life in the country had become more and more costly, or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar and squire, the extinction of the general practitioner by the city specialist; had robbed the village of ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... equation in these cases gives results which agree with observed facts; and it would seem that this circumstance, in connection doubtless with the complexity of these compound trains, led him to the too hasty conclusion that the formula would hold true in all cases; although we are still left to wonder at his overlooking the fact that in these very cases the "absolute" and the "relative" ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... early ages, as the minds of the Judges were in general less conversant in the affairs of the world, as the sphere of their jurisdiction was less extensive, and as the matters which came before them were of less variety and complexity, the rule being in general right, not so much inconvenience on the whole was found from a literal adherence to it as might have arisen from an endeavor towards a liberal and equitable departure, for which further experience, and a more continued cultivation of equity as a science, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... degree of complexity are extremely rare in Norway, where human nature, as everything else, is of the large-lettered, easily legible type; and even Tharald Ormgrass, who, in spite of his good opinion of himself, was not an acute observer, had a lively sense of the ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to be sufficient for the law courts and the purposes of daily life, which, being full of hurry and the pressure of business, can only tolerate compromise, or conventional rendering of intricate phenomena. When facts of extreme complexity have to be daily and hourly dealt with by people whose time is money, they must be simplified, and treated much as a painter treats them, drawing them in squarely, seizing the more important features, and neglecting all that does not assert itself ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... combine, and by cooperation raise their efforts against nature to a higher power. This latter method is industrial organization. The crisis which produces it is constantly renewed, and men are forced to raise the organization to greater complexity and more comprehensive power, without limit. Interests are the relations of action and reaction between the individual and the life conditions, through which relations the evolution of the individual is produced. That evolution, so long as it goes on prosperously, is well living, and it ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... towns and cities were more and more specializing in some one or more industries, leaving the great majority of their needs to be supplied from elsewhere; and the whole process was based on the growing complexity of civilization, on the multiplying number of implements required to do the work ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... his responsibility in the matter of life. He had crushed and injured this other human being, his wife, to whom he had come nearest, just as a dirty hand might soil and crumple a fine fabric. But she no longer reproached him, if she ever had; she understood the sad complexity of a fate that had brought into the hand the fabric to be tarnished. And what she could accept, others must, the world must, to whom the Prestons are ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... woman of whom I have just spoken particularly excites my fancy, and leads me to attempt divinations of her past, until I find myself evolving a story which is not only of vast complexity, but has got painted into it merely the colours of my own hopes and aspirations. It is a story necessarily illusory, necessarily bound to make life seem even worse than before. Yet it is a grievous ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... variety of plants, exhibiting a wonderful multiplicity of forms, colors, sizes, and degrees of complexity of structure, but algologists consider them to belong to three orders: 1. Red spored Algae, called Rhodosporeae or florideae. 2. The dark or black spored Algae, or Melanosporeae or Fucoideae. 3. The green ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... distinguished the vendors under consideration was their identification with the customer. The size and internal complexity of the company also was an important factor. POB was looking at large companies that had substantial resources. In the end, the process generated for Yale two competitive proposals, with Xerox's the clear winner. WATERS ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... regarded in the eyes of Heaven (and, still worse, the county of Bucks) as sin. However, a trifling formality at a registry-office can rectify this and nobody need be any the wiser. This at least is Marden's attitude, always free from any suspicion of complexity. But his wife (if that is the word for her), being of a more subtle nature, determines to make profit out of the situation. She points out to him that she is at present the widow Tellworthy and that she must be wooed all over again, and can only be won on her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... when he was most at ease with the world, and the world was giving him every opportunity. She was very young, as unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her character—a character of much complexity and stoical strength—was little more known to herself than it was to others. She saw Dick Boyce through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him, and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... But it was not so ordered by Providence. At that time the world was not in the stage of development when this particular direction of intellect could have been favored. The development of the physical sciences, with their infinite multiplicity and complexity, required more centuries of observation, collection and collation of facts, deductions from known phenomena, than the ancients had had to work with; while the more ethereal realms of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and religion, though needing keen study of Nature and of man, depended ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... and it obviates the necessity for their numerous exceptions, and the embarrassment arising from other constructions of the infinitive not noticed in them. Why then is the simplest solution imaginable still so frequently rejected for so much complexity and inconsistency? Or how can the more common rule in question be suitable for a child, if its applicability depends on a relation between the two verbs, which the preposition to sometimes expresses, and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... misunderstandings were equally His agents. They might not be more aware of the fact than I; but this in no way disqualified them as His trusted subordinates given a free hand. Their work with me and mine with them, whatever its nature, wrought one of the infinite number of blends going to make up the vast complexity of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... indeed constrained, on such an occasion as this to ask what were the qualities which enabled a man called comparatively late in life to new duties of unexampled complexity—what were the qualities which in practice proved him so admirably fitted to the task, and have given him an enduring and illustrious record among the rulers and governors of the nations? I should be disposed to assign the first place to what sounds a ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... his nephew spoke, was a sight to behold; for the conflicting emotions aroused produced a complexity of expression that is ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... regard Fiesco's inconsistency as an artistic complexity of motive going to show that Schiller had progressed in the knowledge of life and become aware that human heroism is apt to be more or less mixed with base alloy. One writer[45] thinks it shows "how intelligently he had studied the Italian ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... "Subject the complexity of life to a thought harmonious and clear, a constant mark of the Latin genus, for a group of trees as well as an entire nation, an entire religion—Catholicism. It is the contrary in the races ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... harmonise with these constantly repeated assertions that Christ has done all for us, and that we have nothing to do, and can do nothing? To answer this question, we have to remember that that scriptural expression, 'salvation,' is used with considerable width and complexity of signification. It sometimes means the whole of the process, from the beginning to the end, by which we are delivered from sin in all its aspects, and are set safe and stable at the right hand of God. It sometimes means one or other of three different parts of that process—either deliverance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods (mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up his moods against his mind. His cry of vanitas vanitatum is itself only a harmless ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract principle of Prof. Harnack which interests me most, and in following it I have the same complexity of inquiry, but the same simplicity of result. Comparing the professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man need not keep a promise he has made. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is organized functionally in accordance with those higher laws of life, which control all the relations of the spiritual and material worlds,—all interaction between mind and matter. These primal laws are easily comprehended, and their application to the brain removes all the perplexing complexity ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... her mother that change centered, from her that it came. It was a web, a complexity of airy filaments that met her scrutiny. Here hovered her mother's smile, here her thoughtful, observant silences. There Sir Basil's letter; Felkin's departure; all the blurred medley of the times when she had talked to Jack and Mary and her mother had listened. A dimness, a haze, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... make as many simple traps as they can think of and arrange them in the order of their complexity, they will be able after a few months to work out a fairly complete series in the ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... undergraduate before his Little-Go, the London University medical student before his Preliminary Scientific Examination, are simply doing the belated work of this second stage. And there is, I doubt not, a similar vague complexity in America. But through the fog something very like the boundary line here placed about fourteen is again and again made out; not only the general requirements for efficient education, but the trend of present tendency seems to be towards ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... things, and in itself conditioned and necessitated, now presented itself to me in such clearness that I could see nothing either in nature or in life in which it was not made manifest, although varying greatly according to its several manifestations, in complexity and in gradation. Just at this time those great discoveries of the French and English philosophers became generally known through which the great manifold external world was seen to form a comprehensive outer unity. And ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... smart raps bestowed upon the Teutonic offender, he is warned against the error of thinking that "provided he can make himself understood, the historian has the right to use a faulty, low, careless, or clogged style.... Seeing the extreme complexity of the phenomena he must endeavour to describe, he has not the privilege of writing badly. But he ought always to write well, and not to bedizen his prose with ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... interments. And, to a series of questions ending with the word "sister," and answers ending with the word "sister," the prodigious travail incident to the funeral was gradually and successfully accomplished. Dress and the repast exceeded all other matters in complexity and difficulty. But on the morning of the funeral Aunt Harriet had the satisfaction of beholding her younger sister the centre of a tremendous cocoon of crape, whose slightest pleat was perfect. Aunt Harriet seemed to welcome her then, like a veteran, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Rosella's complexity, of her extreme sensitiveness, could have conceived "Patroclus," nor could she herself hope to complete it successfully at any other period of her life. Any earlier she would have been too immature to adapt herself to its demands; any later she would ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... her perfectly sincere intention of making the proposed request, mingling—in that strange complexity of motives which is found so much oftener in a woman's mind than in a man's—with her jealous distrust of the impression which Magdalen ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... sensual thought and fancy when thinking of them, and putting in place of these elements ideal love, self-sacrifice, knightly devotion—Sunday-school Garden-of-Eden pictures with a mediaeval, romantic coloring. These day-dreams were always sexual, involving situations of extreme complexity and monumental silliness. Masturbation was always continued and usually with increased frequency. The end of these periods was always abrupt and much like awaking from a dream in which the dreamer has been behaving in a manner to arouse his own disgust. They were followed by feelings of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... illustrative experiment, and the more familiar they are to the student, the more thoroughly is he likely to acquire the idea which it is meant to illustrate. The educational value of such experiments is often inversely proportional to the complexity of the apparatus. The student who uses home-made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust, and which he dares ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... weight should be applied or a nut loosened. With the civil engineer, more properly so called (if anything can be proper with this awkward coinage), the obligation starts with the beginning. He is always the practical man. The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of nature, are always before him. He has to deal with the unpredictable, with those forces (in Smeaton's phrase) that 'are subject to no calculation'; and still he must predict, still ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them come the men of the Renaissance schools, headed by Duerer, who, less careful of the beauty and refinement of the line, delight in its vigor, accuracy, and complexity. And the essential difference between these men and the moderns is that these central masters cut their line for the most part with a single furrow, giving it depth by force of hand or wrist, and retouching, not in the furrow itself, but with others beside ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... exist among physical phenomena, that is, as fixed relations among variable forces. Human society has in it another element than mechanical causation or physical necessity, namely, the psychic factor, and this so increases the complexity of social phenomena that it is doubtful if we can formulate any such hard and fixed laws of social phenomena as of physical phenomena. This is not saying, however, that social phenomena cannot be understood and ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... broke ve dish to get it out. Good-bye. Vis is where I live." And he clattered up the steps and vanished, hoop and all, through the front doorway, leaving the stranger to marvel at the precocity of western children and at the complexity of their vocabularies. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... followed, bringing in its train such extensive changes in labor and in the conditions surrounding home and child life, has since completely altered the face of the earlier educational problem. What was simple once has since become complex, and the complexity has increased with time. Once the ability to read and write and cipher distinguished the educated man from the uneducated; to-day the man or woman who knows only these simple arts is an uneducated person, hardly fit to cope with the struggle for existence ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... represents a certain number of molecules, and is found to occupy two volumes in a compound of the solid with another solid, the number of molecules in one volume is reduced to one half. This I have shown to be the case in a number of compounds, and the decrease of the specific gravity with increase of the complexity of composition appears to be a general law, as may be concluded from the very low specific gravity of the most highly organized compounds, for instance the fatty bodies, the molecules of which, being composed of very many ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... and eyes see little. Considering its complexity, the fineness and delicacy of its mechanism, the results attainable by the human eye seem far from adequate to the expenditure put upon it. We have flattered ourselves by inventing proverbs of comparison in matter ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the purchasers and consumers of the products, who are deprived of the usual supply of goods, more or less essential to their welfare or even to their existence. With the increasing division of labor and complexity of industrial organization more and more kinds of business have, in a greater and greater degree, become "affected with a public interest." The public becomes an unwilling party, therefore, ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... to think anything out in London; and, no doubt, Ralph wouldn't come at Christmas, and she would take long walks into the heart of the country, and decide this question and all the others that puzzled her. Meanwhile, she thought, drawing her feet up on to the fender, life was full of complexity; life was a thing one must love to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... harm an artist less than a seeming transparency; to be shrouded in mist may mean remaining long misunderstood, but those who wish to understand will at least be thorough in their search for the truth. It is not always realised how depth and complexity may exist in a work of clear design and strong contrasts—in the obvious genius of some great Italian of the Renaissance as much as in the troubled heart of a Rembrandt and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... a series of vases having flaring rims, the treatment otherwise being uniform with the preceding. We notice in these vessels a decided tendency towards complexity of outline. Three examples, shown in Fig. 79, have a two storied character, the upper part possibly being the outgrowth of the collar ornament seen in so many cases. The large specimen in the center ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... second state, we are occupied with the idea of what we really are, without regard to the opinion of anybody, but guided strictly by the abstract law of right. In the first state, we are embarrassed by the complexity of our wishes and aims. We wish to please everybody, and we strive to ascertain what will be agreeable to the various tastes of those with whom we converse. Thus we have no constant landmark, no unvarying compass to guide us on our way; and we are ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler |
