"Comprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or assimilating power may be increased by presenting new ideas and methods in agreeable form. A full realization of the effect of this inertia of thought and habit makes the great efficiency of specialization more comprehensible. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... of the ring in her voice, or the sheer seriousness of the position, he did not feel resentment as when he lost her to Fiorsen. Love! A passion such as had overtaken her mother and himself! And this young man? A decent fellow, a good rider—comprehensible! Ah, if the course had only been clear! He put his hand on her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sense in which I use the terms which I employ, and, therefore, I am not greatly concerned to defend the abstract appropriateness of the terms themselves. And when Mr. Spencer maintains the only proper functions of Government to be those which are comprehensible under the description of "Negatively regulative control," I may suggest that the difference between such "Negative Administration" and "Administrative Nihilism," in the sense defined by me, is ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the methods of this wild mountaineering become clearly comprehensible as soon as we make ourselves acquainted with the rocks, and the kind of feet and muscles brought ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... to any one unacquainted with the position of the family, this fainting would have been unaccountable. To those who understood the mission of the man with the bag, and were moreover acquainted with the excitability of the nerves of Mr. Simon Tuggs, it was quite comprehensible. A long-pending lawsuit respecting the validity of a will, had been unexpectedly decided; and Mr. Joseph Tuggs was the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Pegasi and Hippogriffs, and of flying chariots, from that of Phaeton downwards to Astolfo's,[3] were evidently intended by their authors as mythical; not so, however, with Bishop Wilkins;—he boldly avers, for several reasons which he keeps to himself, and for others not very comprehensible to us, which he details "seriously and on good grounds," "that it is possible to make a flying chariot, in which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto it, as shall convey him through the air; and this perhaps might be made ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... grounds it became comprehensible to Thor that his father might raise the rent and still not be an instrument of oppression. It was consoling to him to perceive this. It helped to allay certain uncomfortable suspicions that had risen in his mind since coming home, and which ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... to fourteen hundred credits, while Alan watched; the fine points of the game became more comprehensible to him with each passing moment, and he longed to sit down at the table himself. That was impossible, he knew; this was a Class A parlor, and a rank beginner such ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... highly abstract studies, such as grammar, which should come quite late, are begun quite early. Political geography, dead and uninteresting to a child, and which should be an appendage of sociological studies, is commenced betimes; while physical geography, comprehensible and comparatively attractive to a child, is in great part passed over. Nearly every subject dealt with is arranged in abnormal order: definitions and rules and principles being put first, instead of being disclosed, as they are in the order of nature, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... in a previous chapter the German Government attaches so much importance to the control and manufacture of public opinion through the Press that it is drastic in the regulation of German newspapers. It is therefore comprehensible that it should strive to enlist to the fullest possible extent the Press of other countries. At least one paper in practically every neutral country is directly subsidised by the German Foreign Office, ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... sickening uneasiness as to what may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth," and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It is here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as "lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Kedgers, for instance," with the smile which, somehow, suggested Betty, "Kedgers and the Lilium Giganteum, Mrs. Welden and old Doby threaten to develop into quite necessary factors in the scheme of happiness. What Betty has felt is even more comprehensible than it ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... scarcely comprehensible. A man seems confessed a weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live out a life of work; he is evading a man's destiny in his cell. But what man's strength, blended with pathetic weakness, is implied ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... hieroglyphics. You can easily distinguish some of those signs to which you attach a sense, but you are too much inclined to be content with the vulgar and the literal, and you do not search enough for the ideal and the symbolic. And withal the world is comprehensible only as a symbol, and all you see in the universe is naught but an illuminated writing, which vulgar men spell without understanding it. Be afraid, my son, to imitate the universal bray in the style of the learned ones ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... Anders shouted a peaceful message, and there was much hallooing and gesticulation among the natives, but nothing comprehensible came of it. After a time Anders thought he recognised words of a dialect with which he was acquainted, and to his satisfaction found that they ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... democracy. It is not fine phrases about peace, liberty, and making the world safe for democracy that the world wants, but deeds. The peoples of the Allied countries justifiably desire to be reassured by plain, comprehensible statements, instead of long-drawn-out negotiations and the thick veil of secrecy ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... muscles, the heart, as well as the other glands of internal secretion stimulating the organism as a whole. Though the isolation in pure form of the substance or substances involved has never been scientifically achieved, their inference is entirely justified. It is indeed the only comprehensible mechanism conceivable that will fit all the known facts about the matter. And even though the assertions of Brown-Sequard were only the exaggerations of a semi-charlatan, it is certain that some day ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the richer, the timid dispiritment of the needy, all stood in lively remembrance before his fancy, which liked to go back into that first and only period of his freedom, though, perhaps, also of his beggarhood. In Freudenberger's school he had learned a natural, easy, and comprehensible arrangement of little groups, and a neat, dainty manner, in which wise it was no difficult task for him to represent such scenes with truth and grace. Thus we find these pictures of his, which, for the most part, are painted on small sheets, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... is quite comprehensible and correct; but if, as you are kind enough to inform us, the plunging of the medium into a trance produces perturbations of the spiritual ether, allow me to ask why (as is usually supposed to be the case in spiritualistic sances) these perturbations result in an activity ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... present to the child the precise step in knowledge which he waits for, and upon which he is able to raise himself with that glow of pleasurable activity which God gives to exertion directed to a comprehensible end. The feeblest mind is capable of assimilating knowledge with a satisfaction the same in kind as that which rewarded the maturest labors of Humboldt or Newton. There are sequences of facts every one of which, imparted in its natural order, brings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... was the trouble—other things had vanished. That deep filling of his lungs with spring, for instance. And the longing that went with it. That was it—the longing. He longed for the longing—if that is comprehensible. He longed vaguely for a longing that had been his, and which was gone. He never saw, now, a land that was as a golden pool beneath a turquoise dome; nor a boy in the wild oats watching a ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... the Nyland election. This explanation will perhaps be more comprehensible if the actual result of the polling in the Nyland division, so far as the first 25 candidates are concerned, is given in ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... find it very comprehensible that the Princess Ludovicka should gladly have him as consort. But we must not submit to it, but do everything to prevent it, for it is contrary to policy and reasons of state. And I think, too, such an union would not be for the Prince's welfare, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... representative of all that is careless and gay in prodigal youth, with its noble qualities but half in abeyance, and abounding spirit and humour and reckless fancy making its course of wild adventure comprehensible even to the gravest. Perhaps the licence of the Stewart blood carried the hapless northern prince into more dangerous adventures than the wild fun of Gadshill and Eastcheap. And Prince David's future had already been compromised by certain sordid treacheries about his marriage when he first ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... woman's pose in life were based largely on the figure of Vivie Warren in Mrs. Warren's Profession. She had seen Mrs. Warren's Profession furtively with Hetty Widgett from the gallery of a Stage Society performance one Monday afternoon. Most of it had been incomprehensible to her, or comprehensible in a way that checked further curiosity, but the figure of Vivien, hard, capable, successful, and bullying, and ordering about a veritable Teddy in the person of Frank Gardner, appealed to her. She saw herself in very much Vivie's ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... wander. From the other side of the bulkhead he could hear stirrings and a murmur of voices as the starboard watch grew aware that something had happened on deck. Conroy, with his oilskin coat half off, paused to listen for comprehensible words. The opening of the door behind him startled him, and he spun round to see Slade making a cautious ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... communicated to those outside in such a form as was possible for the uninitiated to understand. For instance the myths gave the old form, in order to communicate the content of the Mysteries in a way that was generally comprehensible. ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey; only now are they about to cross the boundaries of ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... politics are carefully avoided, and a pure morality, a simple theosophy, comprehensible to the meanest understanding, pervades these simple discourses. The consequence of this toleration and liberal spirit is that an union between the Lutheran and Calvinistic ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... have also seen (section 31) that, as soon as men began to realize that the mind is not material, the question of its presence in the body became a serious problem. If I say that a chair is in a room, I say what is comprehensible to every one. It is assumed that it is in a particular place in the room and is not in some other place. If, however, I say that the chair is, as a whole, in every part of the room at once, I seem to talk nonsense. This is what Plotinus and those who came after him said about the mind. ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... not because of any love for Germany, but because they hated England and believed that her defeat would be Ireland's opportunity. However short-sighted and stupid such a policy may be judged to be, it is quite comprehensible and should not be misrepresented. It is a remarkable fact that the Bolsheviki, while claiming to be the most radical and extreme internationalists, were in practice the most narrow nationalists. They were exactly as narrow in their nationalism ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... if I may so say, and discover the principles involved in some of her most secret operations. I propose, therefore, in the first place, to take some ordinary animal with which you are all familiar, and by easily comprehensible and obvious examples drawn from it, to show what are the kind of problems which living beings in general lay before us; and I shall then show you that the same problems are laid open to us by all kinds of living beings. But, first, let ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... potentialities of feeling, of suffering, perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on which Julia's sensibilities naturally declined to linger. She so fully understood her own reasons for leaving him that she disliked to think they were not as comprehensible to her husband. She was haunted, in her analytic moments, by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... man. It would have been very strange if he had not understood, for though Grant addressed him in English the word grod bawled so frequently into his ear was sufficiently comprehensible. ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it soon attains it, for clear thought easily finds its appropriate expression. A man who is capable of thinking can express himself at all times in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those writers who construct difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most certainly do not rightly know what it is they wish to say: they have only a dull consciousness of it, which is still struggling to put itself into thought; ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... that all the multifarious and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the continuance ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the details of this philological discovery, I will endeavor to make it as comprehensible as it can be made to those who are not critically acquainted with the construction of the Hebrew language; those who are will at once appreciate its peculiar character, and will excuse the explanatory details, of course unnecessary ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... rejected the definition given by Balthasar of the kingdom the king was coming to establish. A kingdom of souls, if not intolerable to his Sadducean faith, seemed to him but an abstraction drawn from the depths of a devotion too fond and dreamy. A kingdom of Judea, on the other hand, was more than comprehensible: such had been, and, if only for that reason, might be again. And it suited his pride to think of a new kingdom broader of domain, richer in power, and of a more unapproachable splendor than the old one; of a new king wiser and mightier than ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... in a bar,—would be more comprehensible for the performers, if instead of indicating them by a particular series of gestures, they were treated as though the one was composed of three and two in a bar, and the other composed of ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... by Toinon, somewhat to Brigit's surprise—for it would have been more like Joyselle to rush downstairs on hearing her motor stop, but the reason was soon plainly comprehensible, for Joyselle was playing. It was evidently earlier than they had expected her. Slipping off her cloak and with a finger to her lips, she went quietly upstairs and stood leaning against the side of ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... an uncanny intelligence had given Lad a more than tolerable understanding of the English language's simpler phrases. The term, "You're going with us in the car," was as comprehensible to him as to any child. He had heard it spoken, with few variations, a thousand times, in the past nine years. At once, on hearing the Master's command, he jumped down from the truck; trotted off to the car, a hundred ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... vigilant, and with that profound national feeling that an army of Englishmen was the finest fighting force in the world, combined with an inner conviction that of that army his kindred Highlanders were the most intrepid and leading cohort. This was a far more attractive and comprehensible personality than the other revealed in later days, of the Biblical pedant seeking to reconcile passing events with ancient Jewish prophecies, and to see in the most ordinary occurrences the workings of a resistless ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... not very comprehensible. There was no secret resolution of the members who applied for the three millions. It was Bonaparte who offered the money, which, however, he did not send; it was he who despatched Augereau; and he who wished for ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Lucy felt herself indeed in a mood not comprehensible to her. Her blood raced. She wanted to be furious with Slone, but somehow she could not wholly be so. There was something about him that made her feel small and thoughtless and selfish. Slone had hurt her pride. But the thing that she feared and resented ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... light of this knowledge the convulsive movements become a little more comprehensible. They are futile attempts to run away. They are ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... and emperor and for the rapid acceptance of his new theology hard to understand. The movement was essentially popular and national. It appealed to the pious-minded who desired a simplification of Christian dogma and a comprehensible method of salvation. It also appealed to the worldly minded who longed to seize ecclesiastical lands and revenues. Above all, it appealed to the patriots who were tired of foreign despotism and of abuses which they traced directly to the Roman Curia. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. But how any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. For, grant that an object from without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous with itself. Motion could ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... slow, blurred, awkward-seeming interruption. Its content was not comprehensible to Telzey at all, but in some unmistakable manner it ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... the plastic sheet in it. One of the boys, very composed, operated it. On request, he opened it up. There was nothing in the case but a few curiously shaped bits of metal. The thing was too simple to be comprehensible when one did not know the principle by ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... Politicals were by no means silent, and the amount of knowledge they possessed of border statistics was something marvellous. Did any step appear to the military sense advisable, there was a much better, though less comprehensible, political reason why it should not be undertaken. The oracle has spoken and the behest must be obeyed. An enemy in sight who became afterwards hostile, must not be kept at a distance; through political glasses they appear ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... the one impulse needed to crystallize these disconnected facts into one comprehensible whole. The connecting link was everywhere common descent, difference was due to the continual variation and divergence of their ancestors. The classification, which all were seeking, was really the ancestral ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... through his intermediate agents, one half of the annual amount of lumber felled for market, the sale of which was arranged with the neighboring forge owners by mutual agreement; the other half was disposed of by notarial act. This latter arrangement was clear and comprehensible; the price of sale and the amounts falling due were both clearly indicated in the deed. But it was quite different with the bargains made by the owner himself, which were often credited by notes payable at sight, mostly worded in confused terms, unintelligible ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... of time are done away with altogether. There is, in this particular, no greater contrast than Haydn and Sebastian Bach. Haydn generalizes the rhythms in order to attain the most telling and universally comprehensible effect possible; Bach individualizes them in order to get the most subtle result possible. Haydn and his age were satisfied, in the main, with the four-fourths and two-fourths, three-fourths and six-eighths rhythm; he simplified all conceivable rhythmic ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... 71,250 pyramidal cubic inches; but in order to make it appear to do so he has now struck a "mean" between the measurement of the interior of the vessel and some of the measurements of its exterior, in a way that was not easily comprehensible in his demonstration. But what other hollow vessel in the world, and with unequal walls too (see p. 233), had the capacity of its interior ever before attempted to be altered and rectified by any measurements of the size ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... enlighten, or rather it is but a child-name or nickname which our mind has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we call nothingness all that which escapes our senses or our reason and exists without our knowledge. The more that human thought rises and increases, the less comprehensible does nothingness become. In any case—and this is what matters here—if nothingness were possible, since it could not be anything whatever, it ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... companionship. The only human being with whom he ever came in contact was Said, the Egyptian; and Said, at best, was uncommunicative. A man of very limited intellect, Luke Soames had been at a loss for many days to reconcile Block A and its temporary occupants with any comprehensible scheme of things. Whereas some of the rooms would be laden with nauseating fumes, others would be free of these; the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... acting 'ab intra' as a new nature infused by grace, as the mind of Christ prompting to all obedience, is the Gospel. Yet what Luther says is likewise very true. Could we reduce the great spiritual truths or ideas of our faith to comprehensible conceptions, or (for the thing itself is impossible) fancy we had done so, we should ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hands in astonishment, where we are not yet familiarly acquainted with the developement of the elements of things, as where we are. What we have not yet mastered, we feel confidently persuaded that the investigators that come after us will reduce to rules not less obvious, familiar and comprehensible, than is to us the rising of the sun, or the progress of animal and vegetable life from the first bud and seed of existence to the last stage of decrepitude ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... heights of the earth: from the grain of sand on the sea-shore, to the gigantic crater, which, at the Lord's command, vomits fire out of its throat which has been closed for thousands of years: they all spoke with one voice which is not heard by the haughty, being only manifest and comprehensible to the humble. These were the words of Him who created them, be it in six days or in six thousand years, "A thousand years are but as ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... terms in the alleged relation. That it should be accepted as a matter of faith may be a defensible position, provided good cause is shown why it should be so accepted; but that it should be accepted as a matter of understanding—as a statement making the order of the universe comprehensible—is ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the processes which marked the transition of the United States from a peace to a war basis are comprehensible unless we remember that the President was constantly working to overcome the forces of decentralization, and also that the military programme was always on an emergency basis, shifting almost from week to week in accordance with developments ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... mind, the parrot becoming sanctified through the neighbourhood of the Holy Ghost, and the latter becoming more lifelike in her eyes, and more comprehensible. In all probability the Father had never chosen as messenger a dove, as the latter has no voice, but rather one of Loulou's ancestors. And Felicite said her prayers in front of the coloured picture, though from time to time she ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... character as indefinite. That all the phenomena of the world, the fixed order of events, the infinite variety of world-forms and names, all these are originated by this avidya, ajnana or maya is indeed hardly comprehensible. If it is indefinite nescience, how can all these well-defined forms of world-existence come out of it? It is said to exist only relatively, and to have only a temporary existence beside the permanent infinite reality. To take such a principle and to derive from it the mind, matter, and indeed everything ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Nature-forms and life-forms—the incarnation of the spirit. There is nothing real in the {183} universe but has its form, its "signature," its figure, its body-aspect: "There is not anything but has its soul and its body, and each soul is as it were an inner kernel, or seed, to a visible and comprehensible body,"[29] and, as we shall see, the supreme achievement of the universe is the visible appearance of the Word of God, the eternal Son, in flesh like ours—a visible realization in time of the eternal Heart of God. The ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Rabbi Jochanan explained many laws and rendered them comprehensible, when they seemed obscure or extraordinary. Rabbi Jochanan's view of piety corresponded with his teaching that Job's piety was not based on the love of God, but on the fear of God. To love God; to serve Him out of love and not out of fear; to study the law continually, and to have a ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Would she be lowered in the eyes of those whose influence and opinions had, heretofore, molded her life? The associations of years are not uprooted and cast aside in days or in months. Responsibilities engendered by the past environed her, full-grown, comprehensible, insistent; responsibilities which might be engendered by the future, lay in her mind a tiny germ in which the embryo life had scarcely begun to stir. The duty to the old life seemed to her plain and clear; a beaten track along which she might safely ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... into restless death-ridden dreaming; and so it was many nights, until the dawn that they fronted a swift river, black from its snowy banks, saw the rising pine hills opposite and were swept possibly by mistake into the center of comprehensible action—a picture lifted ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... marry him was another story. I had every reason to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned her bosom's lord. In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She regarded a second marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough, with her husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of course, were my conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... hundred tragedies, they would be timed by water-clocks, as they are said to have been at one period. The limit, however, set by the actual nature of the thing is this: the longer the story, consistently with its being comprehensible as a whole, the finer it is by reason of its magnitude. As a rough general formula, 'a length which allows of the hero passing by a series of probable or necessary stages from misfortune to happiness, or from happiness ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... million a year and having no suitable opening for emigration or settlement within its own territories; and we have conditions which explained and emphasized German naval construction. Both German ambition and German naval construction were therefore easily comprehensible. ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... Redskins, now, think it's a splendid country where the weather is always fine, the sun always shining, and the game plentiful. Then the men of the settlement seem to have but a hazy notion about its bein' a place of happiness, but they can't tell why or wherefore in a very comprehensible sort o' way, and, as far as I can see, they're in no hurry to get there. It seems in a muddle somehow, an' that's a thing that surprises me, for the works o' the Almighty—hereaway in the mountains—are plain and onderstandable, so as a child might read 'em; but man's brains don't seem to be such ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... with the poet's view of the artist can be paralleled. This is due in part, obviously, to the greater plasticity to ideas of his medium, but may it not be due also to the fact that all other arts demand an apprenticeship, during which the technique is mastered in a rational, comprehensible way? Whereas the poet is apt to forget that he has a technique at all, since he shares his tool, language, with men of all callings whatever. He feels himself, accordingly, to be dependent altogether upon a mysterious "visitation" ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... rank and file, was proof positive of something radically wrong, either in his disposition or his record. It was entirely comprehensible and fully in accordance with human nature and the merits of the case that a man should quit drinking when he quit the army, but that a man with the blot of an occasional spree on his escutcheon should enlist for any other cause than sheer desperation, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... man's activities infinitely more wonderful, and infinitely more comprehensible than is the conception that his activities may be accounted for by the existence of an unknown, unimaginable, and intangible ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... above all, and incomprehensible to any creature. Hence no likeness of Him was set up; to denote His invisibility. But there was something to represent his seat; since, to wit, the creature, which is beneath God, as the seat under the sitter, is comprehensible. Again in that higher world there are spiritual substances called angels. These are signified by the two cherubim, looking one towards the other, to show that they are at peace with one another, according to Job 25:2: "Who maketh peace in . ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... a symbol of morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is, the indeterminate idea of the suprasensible in us, can be indicated as the sole key to reveal this faculty, which remains unknown to us in its origin. Nothing but this principle can make that hidden faculty comprehensible." ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... new hands who flocked in with the spring, the line progressed slowly. This was quite comprehensible, and when I traveled over it afterward as a passenger I wondered how we had ever built it at all. Portions were hewn out of the solid rock, of a hardness that was often too much for our most carefully tempered drills; others were underpinned with timber against the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... de Vesc who answered. Charles had caught her hand in both his and held it pressed against his breast. It was clear that he did not understand, but the full meaning of the tragedy of death is not comprehensible in a single moment, nor was the girl's answer ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... to the strains of the voluptuous-waltz made vocal? The words mattered not; in Esquimaux they would have been as intelligible from the intonation with which she imbued every note, and the restricted but perfectly comprehensible gestures with which she emphasized the phrases of double meaning—one for the literary censors who had "passed" this corruption, the other for even the more obtuse ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... engagement is not for a definite period as it would be on a tour, and a curious difficulty arises through this arrangement, since the actress who has once been beautifully dressed has a natural and very comprehensible predilection thenceforward to continue to be so delightfully gowned. Her own opinion as to what a dress should cost almost invariably, after a London engagement, ceases to be on a level with what her yearly income should permit. Clothes assume ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... being no more comprehensible to me than his excoriation of an unknown individual, I could only stay silent and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... indeterminate but large portion of falsities, errors, and absurdities and which we are to commit to our little alembic, and distil as we may; not only from the absurdity of supposing that God has demanded our faith, for statements which are to be received only as they appear perfectly comprehensible by our reason;—or, in other words, only for what it is impossible that we should doubt or deny; not merely because the principle inevitably leaves man to construct the so-called revelation entirely ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... care for a woman whom he thinks to be bad is comprehensible; that he should wish to make her his wife is credible; that he should hope to lift her out of her condition is admirable; but that he should descend from his own high plane to stay on hers is despicably weak; while to drag down with him ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... while she threw off the shawl from her feet and the cushions that supported her shoulders, and got up and walked about the room, looking out upon the afternoon sunshine and the trees that were turning their shadows to the east. How she longed, with a fervour scarcely explainable, not at all comprehensible to most people, to leave the place, to open her wings in a ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... myself comprehensible, my dear sister-in-law. I am the worker of the miracle for which you are thanking Heaven; to me therefore belongs your gratitude. Heaven is rich enough not ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... cost me by far the greatest labour—labour which, I hope, will not remain uncompensated. The view there taken, which goes somewhat deeply into the subject, has two sides, The one relates to the objects of the pure understanding, and is intended to demonstrate and to render comprehensible the objective validity of its a priori conceptions; and it forms for this reason an essential part of the Critique. The other considers the pure understanding itself, its possibility and its powers of cognition—that ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... about. A new voice spoke now, not the tonelessly melodious voice, but the voice of an individual, yet a mental voice. It was perfectly clear, and perfectly comprehensible. "We have traveled far to find you, and now we have business of the utmost import. Ask these others to let us treat them, for we must do what we can in the least possible time. I will explain when all can understand. I am Zezdon Fentes, First Student ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... cultivated and philanthropic feelings which accompanied the skepticism of their remote founders, they based their denial of moral accountability—as narrow and vulgar minds naturally do—on a predestination, which is as insulting to GOD as to man, since it is consistently comprehensible only by supposing HIM a slave to destiny. Among such vassals to a worse than earthly tyranny, the man who as 'a Scottish servant regarded not his own life or that of any other save his master,' would find doctrines congenial enough to his grovelling nature. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and grew nervous and timid in manner. Mrs. Brewster-Smith, however, found this comprehensible enough, and one hot summer afternoon Genevieve went into George's office with her lovely head held high, her color quite gone, and her breath coming quickly with indignation. "George—I don't care what we do, or where we go! But ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... well written and printed, and its verbiage such as to be comprehensible to the workman no less than to the master. The careful and general perusal of a work of this nature cannot but be attended by beneficial results of a far-reaching nature, and we therefore heartily recommend the book to our readers. ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... learned in many quarters of London) towards a point which necessarily led me through Tottenham-court-road: I stopped nowhere, and walked fast: yet so it was that in Tottenham-court-road I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible), but overtook, Walking Stewart. Certainly, as the above writer alleges, there must have been three Walking Stewarts in London. He seemed no ways surprised at this himself, but explained to me that somewhere or other in the neighborhood of Tottenham-court-road there was a little theatre, at ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... more than a century of bitter debate about the nature and person of Christ, contented themselves with affirming the reality both of the human and divine in His nature, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed making clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so sought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But though their keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid upon it, they did, nevertheless, keep ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... undoubtedly much in primitive Christianity to appeal to this man, and Jesus' hard sayings to the rich and about the rich would have been entirely comprehensible to him. Yet the religion that is preached in our churches and practiced by our congregations, with its element of display and self-aggrandizement, its active proselytism, and its open contempt of all religions but its own, ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... philosophy made in Great Britain for many years. The present volume contains his Course of Lectures, forty-six in number, which he delivered as Professor of Metaphysics; and being intended for young students, they are, as compared with his other works, more comprehensible without being less comprehensive. The most conclusive proof of the excellence of these Lectures is to be found in their influence on the successive classes of students before whom they were pronounced. The universal testimony ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... [Mr. Noel] has at any rate given to the world the most credible and comprehensible portrait of the poet ever drawn with pen and ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... or interpreted by this rule; whereas, on the contrary, by following our own method, we can explain many questions of this nature, and discuss them on a sure basis, as we have already shown, by reason and example. (184) Those matters which are by their nature comprehensible we can easily explain, as has been pointed out, simply by means of ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... to procure his signature to a contract that his daughter, when of age, should be married to me, on this security money might be raised by us to any amount. Now, my good father, am I comprehensible? ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... with reference to harmony of time-values; that is, their metric condition, and their rhythmic arrangement, corroborate the natural laws already defined:—uniformity of fundamental pulse, uniform recurrence of accent, and sufficient regularity of rhythmic figure to insure a distinct and comprehensible total impression. This also may be verified in the time-values of Ex. 5. Scrutinize also, the melodic and rhythmic conditions of Exs. 1 and 2,—and the examples on later pages,—and endeavor to vindicate their classification as ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... particularly acute. He knew that to Tiger and Jack he himself seemed odd, both anatomically and in other ways. His fine gray fur and his four-fingered hands set him apart from them—he would never be mistaken for an Earthman, even in the densest fog. But these were comprehensible differences. His close attachment to Fuzzy was something else, and still seemed beyond ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... to her; the spiritual forces descended far enough to create a cultural illumination, but not far enough to create political stability. We have seen before that they touch the artistic creative planes, in their descent, before they reach the more material planes. So her position is perfectly comprehensible. The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere it was dead. Its forces, when they passed away through Ireland, were nearly exhausted; in no condition whatever to penetrate to the material plane and make political greatnesses and strengths. But they ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... have enumerated. It was Huxley who invented the term Agnosticism to describe the position of such of his contemporaries as were not inclined to deny that there was a great Power at work behind the phenomena of the Universe, but were not prepared to admit that this Power could be any degree comprehensible by us. The most systematic exponent of this view was Herbert Spencer. He allowed that we are obliged to refer the phenomenal world and its law and order to a First Cause. "And the First Cause," he said, ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... asked, what was meant by the watch-word of repeal of the union between Great Britain and Ireland. If those who used it meant a complete separation, or a species of Hibernian republic, their conduct was both comprehensible and consistent; but if, as they asserted, they only meant two separate independent legislatures, under the same monarch, the motion was inconsistent with the first principles of the science of government. After having shown this inconsistency ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not know; it all grows less comprehensible every moment. But whatever is true I cannot see that anything remains for us to do, but wait and watch the actions of these people; they are certain to betray themselves. We have been here together now longer than we should, and I must return ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... the power of even a mimic stage to afford to the young a magic space in which life may be lived in efflorescence, where manners may be courtly and elaborate without exciting ridicule, where the sequence of events is impressive and comprehensible. Order and beauty of life is what the adolescent youth craves above all else as the younger child indefatigably demands his story. "Is this where the most beautiful princess in the world lives?" asks a little girl peering into the door of the Hull-House Theater, or "Does Alice ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... of the simple, friendly eyed, north-country woman flashed across Esther's mental vision, obscuring the less comprehensible figure of her sister-in-law. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... how it contributes to gratify the ear. But as in other subjects, so in this, there are two methods of disquisition;—the one more copious and diffusive, and the other more concise, and, I might also add, more easy and comprehensible. In the former, the first question which would occur is, whether there is any such thing as prosaic number: some are of opinion there is not; because no fixed and certain rules have been yet assigned for it, as there long have ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... this power and glory got angry with men, and threatened them with scabs and sores, and plagues of lice and frogs? Can you suppose that such a creator would, after thousands of years of effort, have failed even now to make His repeated revelations comprehensible? Do you believe that He would be driven across the unimaginable gulfs of space, but of the transcendent glory of His myriad resplendent suns, to die on a cross, in order to win back to Him the love of the puny creatures on one puny planet in the marvellous universe ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... hand and foot and bowed down to and all that sort of thing. She has never been allowed to romp as a child, to choose her own companions and the rest of it. Therefore, she is bored with all the etcetras. The case is comprehensible and comprehensive: it needs the exercise of imagination stimulated by prescience, ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... birth, some by training, and some by fate, but I have never met an Englishman yet who hated Islam and its people as I have met Englishmen who hated some other faiths. Musalmani awadani, as the saying goes—where there are Mohammedans, there is a comprehensible civilisation. ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... was not in the least what one expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... I think I can give you a good idea, but whether I can contrive to draw for you anything like a comprehensible picture of the shape and nature of the Almannagja, the Hrafnagja, and the lava vale, called Thingvalla, that lies between them, I am doubtful. Before coming to Iceland I had read every account that had been ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... matter-of-fact tone, he began a story without decoration of verbiage—straightforward and tense in its simplicity. As the painter listened, he began to understand; the gall that had crept into this lad's blood before his weaning became comprehensible.... Killing Hollmans was not murder.... It was duty. He seemed to see the smoke- blackened cabin and the mother of the boy sitting, with drawn face, in dread of the hours. He felt the racking nerve-tension of a life in which the father ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... up her lips. "I understood you met him at the Grange, and you were only there for a few weeks once a year," she replied. "After all, that isn't a very great deal. It seems he fell in love with you, which is, perhaps, comprehensible. What I don't quite know the reason for is why you fell in ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... the rapid tread of horses' feet, and in another moment my father and Aleck cantered up to the door. Frisk was flourishing about in his usual style, and found me out in a moment, jumping up upon my shoulders, and licking my hands, and expressing in perfectly comprehensible language his regret that I had not been of the party, and his pleasure in seeing ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... consciousness, in order to establish the doctrine of liberty. "The philosophy which I profess," says he, "annihilates the theoretical problem—How is the scheme of liberty, or the scheme of necessity, to be rendered comprehensible?—by showing that both schemes are equally inconceivable; but it establishes liberty practically as a fact, by showing that it is either itself an immediate datum, or is involved in an immediate datum of consciousness."(55) We shall hereafter see, why the scheme of necessity always riveted the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... special psychology composed of joy and ecstasy—both elements which, in minds that are laden with all the influences of the East, produce a facile and dangerous excitement. On the other hand there survives in the Italian population the hatred against the Croatian supremacy, a hatred which is comprehensible but which in time must give place to other sentiments, rendering possible a fair coexistence of the two populations, whose aim should be common—the prosperity and development of Dalmatia, in the prosperity ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... himself with photography ... well, and that is enough! Seize him!" And now here was her Yashenka come back to her safe and sound! She did notice, it is true, that he appeared to have grown thin, and his face seemed to be sunken—that was comprehensible ... he had had no one to look after him. But she did not dare to question him concerning his trip. At dinner ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... beginning to take to it, although there is no wine harder to obtain here than claret. Nine-tenths of what one buys is adulterated. His knowledge of crus being naturally limited, the colonist likes to see on his wine a fine label, one which makes the quality of the wine easily comprehensible to him. Thus the most successful claret sold here is divided according to degrees of nastiness into five ranks, and you ask for So-and-So's No. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, irrespective of vintage or year. 'Bon ordinaire' is of course unobtainable, but you can get 'Chateau ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... must describe briefly the characteristics of the scenery, without which a part of my tale would be hardly comprehensible, while the remarkable effect produced by the coincidence, if I may so express myself, between the nature of the deed, and the nature of the place, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... state territories and the Roman domain. Vexed questions of boundaries might everywhere be raised, and the government of an Italian community would probably find as much difficulty as a private possessor in furnishing documentary evidence of title. The fears of the Latin communities are far more comprehensible, and it was probably in these centres that the Italian revolt against the proceedings of the commission chiefly originated. The interests of the Latins in this matter were almost precisely similar to those of the Romans: and this identity of view arose from a similarity of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... this fact one which the western mind should be unable to follow. Science proves the fact of consciousness existing in the atoms composing even what has been termed inanimate objects. How much more comprehensible to our understanding is the consciousness of an animate organism, even though this organism be not more complex than ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... the reader by attempting to describe in detail my plan of operations, for it involved a mathematical problem of some complexity, only interesting to and comprehensible by a mathematician. Suffice it to say that what I had undertaken to do was to make three separate sets of observations from as many chosen points, consisting of carefully observed compass bearings, ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... slave property, is evident from the variety of constructions put upon the statute in this case, and we trust, that at the next meeting of the Legislature there will be such amendments, as to make the law on this subject, perfectly clear and comprehensible to the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... pause and a little conversation, I called upon Lawrence Solomon to propose the toast of "The School." He was very amusing indeed. Most of his speech would not be very comprehensible to an outsider for it largely consisted of an ingenious dove-tailing of the sentences in the Latin and Greek Arnold. I shall never forget the lucid and precise enunciation with which he delivered the idiotic sentences in those works, more especially ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Alice's condition, as given by her maid, although hideously unlike the beautiful object they were meant to call up to her father's mind, were sufficiently expressive and comprehensible. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... Macpherson rather objected to being made the subject of an article—first of all, for the very comprehensible reason that such publicity would draw down upon her a host of visitors; and when I suggested that visitors probably meant funds, she added a second, and not quite so comprehensible an objection—that these funds themselves might alloy the element of Faith in which the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... perhaps inclined to laugh at the enthusiasm with which they are generally examined, and the rapturous strains in which the greatest critics have written of them. Not to all people is the enthusiasm of Lord Elgin comprehensible. Why not allow the fragments of the Parthenon to be ground into fine white mortar, and the busts of ancient heroes to be targets for the weapons of Turkish youths? are questions which a few utilitarians may be inclined to ask; and it would certainly ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... It is so full of naivete, cleverness, and grace." But her highest admiration was reserved for the Bishop of Chester's 'Exposition of the Gospel of St. Matthew.' "It is a very fine book indeed. Just the sort of one I like; which is just plain and comprehensible and full of truth and good feeling. It is not one of those learned books in which you have to cavil at almost every paragraph. Lehzen gave it me on the Sunday that I took the Sacrament." A few weeks previously she had been confirmed, and she described ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... expected that any idea we may form of the astral life will be incomplete, and inadequate to give a true conception what it is really like. Perhaps the most comprehensible of the subplanes is that which reproduces the physical landscape in astral matter. There the average man will begin his conscious astral career. If we think of the world as we know it here and then imagine all that is material to have vanished from it we shall gain some comprehension ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... swiftly emerging champion and lover is comprehensible to us of a later day—that, and the joy she feels in watching him impatiently submit to be armed. Even so might one of us watch and listen to and keep for ever in memory the stamp of the foot, the sound of the "ringing gauntlets"—reproduced ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... cities along the canals." Jarvis frowned, then resumed his narrative. "I thought the dream-beast and the silicon-monster were the strangest beings conceivable, but I was wrong. These creatures are still more alien, less understandable than either and far less comprehensible than Tweel, with whom friendship is possible, and even, by patience and concentration, ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... religion to think of their beauty, to take care of it, to correct without relaxation their parure of statues or arabesques. They are of the age. They have something human, which they mingle incessantly with the divine symbol under which they still produce. Hence, edifices comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to every imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand as nature. Between theocratic architecture and this there is the difference that lies between a sacred language and a vulgar language, between ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... "perfectly comprehensible in a man properly grateful for the many kindnesses received from the best families of merchants and other native gentlemen of independent means, who, barely saved by us from the excesses of the mob, seemed, to ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... I understand." Captain Pedolsky opened the pouch on his belt and took out the false palate and tongue-clicker without which no Terran could do more than mouth a crude and barely comprehensible pidgin-Ulleran. Stuffing the gadget into his mouth, he ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... from him scornfully and laid her hand upon my father's shoulder. Her very touch seemed to impart life to him. His words were not very coherent, but they were comprehensible. ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had it not ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... know whether or not I have made this theory very comprehensible, but it seems to me some such theory might explain the facts and at the same time do away with the difficulties. At all events no theory of telepathy which has been advanced to date can be said to be explanatory, when all the facts ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... varying degree, I hold all religions to be in a measure true. Least comprehensible to me are the Indian formulae, because they seem to stand not on common experience but on those intellectual assumptions my metaphysical analysis destroys. Transmigration of souls without a continuing memory is to my mind utter foolishness, the imagining of a race of ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... to his assistance the wonderful stone, "the gift of God," and peeping hastily through it, he sees an angel pointing somewhere towards a miraculous pair of spectacles!!! Yes, two polished pieces of crystal were the humble means by which the golden plates were to be rendered comprehensible. By the bye, the said spectacles are a heavy, ugly piece of workmanship of the last century; they are silver-mounted, and bear the maker's name, plainly engraved, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris. It was not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from the wars. And if she had been about to renounce her mission it would have been easily comprehensible. But no such thought was in her mind. Was it a movement of despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the arms in which she had suffered defeat should not be borne again?—or was it done in some gleam of higher revelation made to her that defeat, too, was a part of victory, and ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... thought of him, people in Iping, on the whole, agreed in disliking him. His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they surprised now and then, the headlong pace after nightfall that swept him upon them round quiet corners, the inhuman bludgeoning of all ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... have shown that a separation from her was within the range of possibilities, without any fault on his part, or any means on her part to avert the stroke. This condition of mind in Cary is easily comprehensible of him as a man and a soldier. Women credit men with craft and cunning in the ways of love. Such is not always the case. Oftentimes they are single-minded, and that very selfishness which is imputed to them ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... population, as the papers unanimously demanded, from readily comprehensible reasons, no one dared to do. The Empress' Government had to hold out for the existing state of things; nevertheless, in Paris,—certainly from about the 8th August,—people were under the impression that what had been ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... affections speak a far simpler and more natural language: and one remark is sufficient to illustrate this. Love, as it is represented in comedy, is absolutely unintelligible to the lower classes: in tragedy it first becomes perfectly comprehensible to them.] ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... selection sua sponte. It is the claim of Mr. Darwin that he professes to have discovered the existence and the modus operandi of this "natural selection," as he terms it; and, if he be right, the process is perfectly simple and comprehensible, and irresistibly deducible from very familiar but ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... are frequently amusing but rarely edifying, and this hatred of Bowring that possessed the soul of poor Borrow in his later years is of the same texture as the rest. We shall never know the facts, but the position is comprehensible enough. Let us turn to the extant correspondence[87] which, as far as we know, opened when Borrow paid what was probably his third visit to London ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Harlan was seated at a table in the cook shanty, he became aware of a shadow at the door; and he wheeled, to see Barbara Morgan looking in at him, her face flushed, a glow in her eyes that was entirely comprehensible to Harlan. ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... conveyance there, suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of mysterious spiriting away of property in that; and as nobody on the face of the earth could be more incapable of explaining any single item in the heap of confusion than the debtor himself, nothing comprehensible could be made of his case. To question him in detail, and endeavour to reconcile his answers; to closet him with accountants and sharp practitioners, learned in the wiles of insolvency and bankruptcy; ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... incognoscibility of the Deity is the same in each case. However, Philo was too thorough an Israelite and too much the child of his time to be content with this agnostic position. With the help of the Platonic and Stoic philosophy, he constructed an apprehensible, if not comprehensible, quasi-deity out of the Logos; while other more or less personified divine powers, or attributes, bridged over the interval between God and man; between the sacred existence, too pure to be called by any name which implied a conceivable quality, and ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... known what it is to have a daughter, and she was ignorant of the pleasant everyday amenities of a father's love. As there is undoubtedly such a thing as love at first sight, so must there be sympathy at first sight. For Jocelyn it was comprehensible—nay, it was most natural. This was Jack's father. In his manner, in everything about him, there were suggestions of Jack. This seemed to be a creature hewn, as it were, from the same material, moulded on the same lines, with ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... a single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures, substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. But whilst this plan secured continuity of treatment, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... these are sufficiently explained in the fragment of Simon's Great Revelation, preserved in the Philosophumena, and become entirely comprehensible to the student of the Kabalah who is learned in the emanations of the Sephirothal Tree. Mind and Thought are evidently Chokmah and Binah, and the three and seven Sephiroth are to be clearly recognized in the scheme of the Simonian ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... and unnatural about these great lakes. The sweet flow of a river, and the unfriendly restless vitality of the sea, men may know and love. And the little lakes we have in Europe are but as fresh-water streams that have married and settled down, alive and healthy and comprehensible. Rivers (except the Saguenay) are human. The sea, very properly, will not be allowed in heaven. It has no soul. It is unvintageable, cruel, treacherous, what you will. But, in the end—while we have it with us—it is all right; even though that all-rightness result but, as with France, from the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... was invited to ascend. There was an interpretation of Revelation far more removed from the apparent letter than that of Swedenborg. Here was reaffirmed (though for a widely different purpose) what the Romish Church has ever declared,—that the Scriptures, recording spiritual truth, cannot be comprehensible to the natural understanding,—that, while the Sacred Writings contain a natural letter, it can be translated into spiritual verity only by a few exceptional men. If this scheme of philosophy was an idealism, it nevertheless manifested itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of England is, on superficial examination, not very comprehensible. Of course, German industries and trade have lately made astounding progress, and the German navy is growing to a strength which commands respect. We are certainly a hindrance to the plans which England is prosecuting in Asiatic Turkey and Central ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... brethren, Herman and Verman, he expounded to them his building-plans and offered them shares and benefits in the institution he proposed to found. Acceptance was enthusiastic; straightway the assembly became a union of carpenters all of one mind, and ten days saw the shack not completed but comprehensible. Anybody could tell, by that time, that it was ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... scrap-book than for a volume intended to go into a student's library. Such adjuncts seem to us allowable only, if at all, somewhat as they were introduced by Blunt in his "Glossographia," to make terms of heraldry more easily comprehensible. They might be admitted to save trouble in describing geometrical figures, or in explaining certain of the more frequently occurring terms in architecture and mechanics, but beyond this they are childish. The publishers of Webster give us all the coats-of-arms of the States ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various |
