"Irreducible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran though life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with growing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the Government and incited by Kruzhevan and Pronin, would be let loose to enact the scenes that took place in Kishinev and Homel before the Russo-Japanese war, and in hundreds of towns after it. The difficulties in the way of securing an education were increased. Russia did not believe in an "irreducible minimum" where the rights of her Jews were concerned. Under Nicholas II the number of Jewish women admitted to medical schools was put at three per cent of the total number of students; the newly-established School for Engineers in Moscow ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... bank account down to the irreducible minimum and borrowed on his securities up to the insurmountable maximum. It was a bad time for his children to tap him. But here they were—Jno. P., Jerry, and Julia—all very unctuous over the home-coming, and yet all of them evidently cherishing ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Mail. This also had been carefully prearranged; and Raffles's only fear had been lest it might be held over despite his explicit instructions, and so drive me to the doctor for an explanation of his telegram. But the adverse chances had been weeded out and weeded out to the irreducible minimum of risk. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... is interesting to note that in his latest work Haeckel regards sensation (or unconscious sentience) as an ultimate and irreducible attribute of substance, like matter (or extension) and force ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... expect me to be satisfied with it?—I insist on the franchise, because it symbolizes full citizenship. I won't aim at anything less than that. Women must be taught to keep their eyes on that, as the irreducible minimum of ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... factors, such as signs (not intentional or perceptible) by the experimenter to the subject experimented with; a certain amount of falsification in interpretation of results on the part of the experimenters, etc.... But the irreducible residue of the facts is, in my opinion, still enormous as compared with the little that could perhaps be eliminated by these means from the discussion. Therefore, in the absence of anything better for the moment, and subject to further information, I hold to the hypothesis of a psychic automatism ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... intelligent boy from the south of Scotland, who boarded with two elderly ladies of the place, and attended the subscription school; and the acknowledged leader of the band, who, belonging to the permanent irreducible staff of the establishment, was never off duty. We used to be very happy, and not altogether irrational, in these little skeleton parties. My new friend was a gentle, tasteful boy, fond of poetry, and a writer of soft, simple verses in the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Jane Eyre,' or a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Wuthering Heights.' It would not ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... or hernias that require notice, not all of which, however, produce serious symptoms or results. Abdominal hernias, or ruptures, are divided into reducible, irreducible, and strangulated, according to condition; and into inguinal, scrotal, ventral, umbilical, and diaphragmatic, according to their situation. A hernia is reducible when the displaced organ can be returned to its natural location. It consists ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... have already let your rupture become permanently irreducible the probabilities are that the Cluthe Truss can entirely free you from the clutches of rupture, just as it ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... they have to make fixed annual contributions to the Central Exchequer. These contributions are in no case to be subject to increase in the future, but on the contrary to be reduced gradually and to cease at the earliest possible moment compatible with the irreducible requirements of the Government of India. The Act of 1919, it is true, transfers to the Indian Legislature no direct or complete statutory control over revenue and expenditure, and powers are still vested in the Government of India to override the Assembly ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... objections greater than those who should enquire concerning perhaps any other poet. In the formation of his verse, and the lifting up of a rude language, more than Dante himself, a creator! What wonder, then, if he should sometimes make mistakes, and that some inconsistencies remain at last irreducible? If the method undertaken draws the irreducible cases into a narrower and a narrower compass, that sufficiently justifies the theory of the method against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... may believe the solemn affidavits of priests and bishops, backed up by the Holy See. Why should he not come? we may also ask the Protestants. His second coming is an article of their faith; it is plainly taught in the New Testament, and was recently propounded by Mr. Spurgeon as part of the irreducible minimum of the Christian faith. That he will come, then, may be taken for granted; and what better opportunity could be desired than the present? Surely the faithful, all over Europe—ay, and in America, to say nothing of Asia, Africa, and Australia—will cry like one man, "Come Lord Jesus, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... night the irreducible nine hours were severely mutilated by the sudden and by no means noiseless incursion of a pyjama- clad figure into Waldo's room at an hour midway between ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... in writing it took more time and trouble to get a thing short than long. He said it was the same in painting. It was harder not to paint a detail than to paint it, easier to put in all that one can see than to judge what may go without saying, omit it and range the irreducible minima in due order of precedence. Hence we all lean ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... how this or that nerve fiber of a Cirriped [sea animals with hair-like legs, including the barnacles and acorn shells] ends; to establish by experiment the line of demarcation between intellect and instinct; to prove, by comparing facts in the zoological progression, whether human reason be an irreducible faculty or not: all this ought surely to take precedence of the number of joints in a Crustacean's antenna. These enormous questions would need an army of workers; and we have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusk and the Zoophytes [plant-like sea animals, including ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... of this must turn to my book on The Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments. There I have written purely as an archaeologist, who belongs to no theological school, and consequently readers of the work must see in it merely the irreducible minimum of confidence in the historical trustworthiness of the Old Testament, with which oriental archaeology can be satisfied. But it is obvious that this irreducible minimum is a good deal less than what a fair-minded historian will admit. The archaeological ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... rivers, as the Amazon itself, do not appear to be of this hue merely because they are "muddy." On the contrary, they derive their colour, or most of it, from some impalpable substance held in a state of irreducible solution. This is proved from the fact, that even when these waters enter a reservoir, and the earthy matter is allowed to settle, they still retain the same tinge of yellowish olive. There are some white rivers, as the Rio Branco, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... alleviate world famine and suffering. Aid to veterans will continue at peak level. The world situation is such that large military expenditures are required. Interest on the public debt and certain other costs are irreducible. For these reasons I have had to practice stringent economy in preparing the budget; and I hope that the Congress will cooperate in this ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... everywhere, and before the end of the thirteenth century, the most splendid Gothic buildings were begun or completed. With the end of the thirteenth century Gothic architecture began to decline, lured by the "fascination of the statical tour de force, the craving to bring down to an irreducible minimum the amount of material that would suffice to the stability ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... Moehrlein, Ph. D., was a professor of the languages and religions of India. A man of great gravity of countenance and of impressive port, he was popularly reputed to have a complete knowledge of the occult learning of the adepts of India, that nebulous and mysterious philosophy which irreducible to the laws of nature as recognized by Occidentals, is by them pronounced either magic and feared as such, or ridiculed and despised as pretentious mummery and deluding prestidigitation. There was ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... about whom you knew everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothing whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt—which latter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner so irreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with a mantle which was yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feigned unconsciousness; I doubt whether she knew that men could be amiable in a different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing her husband ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... survey of the Moroccan past, account must first of all be taken of the factor which, from the beginning of recorded events, has conditioned the whole history of North Africa: the existence, from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, of a mysterious irreducible indigenous race with which every successive foreign rule, from Carthage to France, has had to reckon, and which has but imperfectly and partially assimilated the language, the religion, and the culture that successive civilizations have ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... beyond access, ominous and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a flash, taken on a name—a name on which our friend seized as he asked himself if he weren't perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pagan. This description—he quite jumped at it—had a sound that gratified his mental ear, so that of a sudden he had already adopted it. Pagan—yes, that was, wasn't it? what Chad WOULD logically be. It was what ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... jealousies, was a fear of loss of liberties, state and individual, through encroachment of the central power. The instrument, drawn with this fear uppermost, was designed to limit the National Government to "the irreducible minimum of functions absolutely needed for the national welfare."[1] To this end the powers granted were specifically enumerated. All other powers were by express enactment[2] "reserved to the States ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... believe that, as it exists in us, it has emerged from that background, we cannot see it emerge; it is an ultimate fact, and is assumed in all that we can ever regard as its physical antecedents and presuppositions. In the same way, the moral consciousness is an ultimate fact, and irreducible. The physical theory of evolution must not be allowed to mislead us here, and in particular it must not be allowed to discredit the conception of moral responsibility for sin which is embodied in the story of the Fall. Each of us individually has risen ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... himself in person or by counsel. This would provide a check on the Attorney-General (who might be as bigoted as any of the municipal aldermen who are so much dreaded by the actor-managers) without enabling the Committee to abuse its powers for party, class, or sectarian ends beyond that irreducible minimum of abuse which a popular jury would endorse, for which ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... "of what forces is he the product?" If these questions can be satisfactorily answered, then society is better enabled to arm herself against his invasion, in fact having successfully diagnosed his case she may be led on to discover the means whereby criminals may be reduced to their irreducible minimum, both as regards number and as regards their capacity for ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... gift, Mark Gertler's conviction and conscience would suffice to make him a painter of the first magnitude. Unfortunately, his artistic gift, one inclines to suppose, is precisely that irreducible minimum without which an artist cannot exist. That is his weakness. His strength is that he exploits that minimum uncompromisingly to its utmost possibility. Gertler is one who will never say an idle word in paint, no matter how charming ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... experience. But then he passes at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's apprehension. That prospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, inconsistent, contemptible, lache, full of contradiction, with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks out with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. It is the world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, the casual forces of which have by no means spent themselves. Yes! this world we see, of ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... a tile-roofed building with latticed windows. A front-yard well, twenty-five feet across, was used, Mr. Desai said, for watering stock; near-by stood a revolving cement wheel for threshing rice. Each of our small bedrooms proved to contain only the irreducible minimum-a bed, handmade of rope. The whitewashed kitchen boasted a faucet in one corner and a fire pit for cooking in another. Simple Arcadian sounds reached our ears-the cries of crows and sparrows, the lowing of cattle, and the rap of chisels ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... to attempt to decide anything for them that can well be left undecided. They intend only that these children shall have the freedom and power necessary to direct society as they think best. The few principles I have mentioned are perhaps the most important of those they believe to be the irreducible minimum needed ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... appreciates or weighs, and at least in principle one is free. If the empire of woman is to continue, love must remain a fascination, an enchantment; once her mystery is gone, her power is gone also. So love must appear indivisible, irreducible, superior to all analysis, if it is to retain those aspects of infinitude, of the supernatural and the miraculous, which constitute its beauty. Most people hold cheaply whatever they understand, and bow ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... gone by the board is the old idea of the atoms as the indivisible and irreducible minima of the material universe. For not only do all the radioactive substances give off particles of helium gas positively electrified, but all bodies, no matter what their composition, can by suitable treatment, such as exposing them to ultra-violet light, or raising them to incandescence, ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... newspaper raised a shout of jubilation. "The whole sea was as if swept clean at one blow"—by the announcement of the intensified "blockade" of the first of February. So the German scribe. But again the facts shoot up, hard and irreducible, through the sea of comment. While the German newspapers were shouting to each other, the sea was so far from being "swept clean," that twelve thousand ships had actually passed in and out of British ports in the first eighteen days of the ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the entire group of questions centring about illicit affection between men and women, are quite other questions which are not considered here. Such problems must always remain distinct from those of commercialized vice, as must the treatment of an irreducible minimum of prostitution, which will doubtless long exist, quite as society still retains an irreducible minimum of murders. This volume does not deal with the probable future of prostitution, and gives only such historical background as is necessary to understand ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... And the irreducible minimum has yet to be reached. For many years my exacting personal needs demanded the luxury of coffee. Pure and unadulterated, I quaffed it freely, and (being no politician) neither did it enhance my wisdom nor enable me to see through anything with half-shut eyes. Yet ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... discovered the true order of the solar system; but the order itself has been there from the morning of time. Newton discovered the force of gravity, but that force has been in the natural situation since creation. Chemists have been able to make out sixty-five or sixty-six irreducible elements; but while chemistry is young, the elements are everlasting. Electricity is the discovery of yesterday, and yet it has been at play in man's environment from the foundation of the world. The continuity of life, from the lowest forms of it up to man, has been a fact from the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... of men, not of subhuman beings, if it be not just the various spiritual activities which exist among the former and which are supposed not to exist, or to exist only in a rudimentary degree, among the latter? Sociality, then, far from being an original, simple, irreducible conception, is very complex and complicated. This could be proved by the impossibility, generally recognized, of enunciating a single sociological law, properly so-called. Those that are improperly called by that name are revealed as either empirical historical observations, or spiritual laws, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... of the law of atrophy through disuse.—The virgin birth and the corporeal resurrection of Jesus, the two miracles still insisted on as the irreducible minimum, affected by this law.—The vital truths of the incarnation and immortality independent of these miracles.—These truths now placed on higher ground in a truer conception of the supernatural.—The true supernatural is the spiritual, not the miraculous.—Scepticism ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... unbefitting; unbecoming; illtimed, unseasonable, mal a propos [Fr.], inadmissible; inapposite &c (irrelevant) 10. uncongenial; ill-assorted, ill-sorted; mismatched, misjoined^, misplaced, misclassified; unaccommodating, irreducible, incommensurable, uncommensurable^; unsympathetic. out of character, out of keeping, out of proportion, out of joint, out of tune, out of place, out of season, out of its element; at odds with, at variance with. Adv. in defiance, in contempt, in spite of; discordantly &c adj.; a tort ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... hands, absolutely requiring precedence. Not the least imperative of one's conditions was thus that one should have really, should have finely and (given one's scale) concisely treated one's subject, in spite of there being so much of the confounded irreducible quantity still to treat. If I spoke just now, however, of the "exasperated" charm of supreme difficulty, that is because the challenge of economic representation so easily becomes, in any of the arts, intensely interesting to meet. To put all that is possible of one's ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... such real conflicts, irreducible to any intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one. No philosophy should pretend ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... he feels that he is an exile, from what country he does not know, disinherited, of what he does not know, sad in the depths of his soul; between him and the men who surround him have come suddenly irreducible, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... the Conference of Lambeth, 1888, formulated the famous "Quadrilateral" whereby the Scriptures as Rule of Faith, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, the two sacraments of Baptism and of Eucharist, and the Episcopacy or apostolic succession, are "as the irreducible minimum on which they would open ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... of the faculties and impulses—of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses, solely through ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... blood had left her face. She felt it ebbing away from her heart, flowing out of her as if from all her severed arteries, till it seemed as though nothing were left of life in her but one point of irreducible pain. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... obstinate and irreducible of all pictorial representations is the obvious one of the material universe with our physical body as the centre of it. But even this is not complete. In fact it is extremely far from complete, directly we think closely ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... but momentary and spontaneous reposition always results; while a fixed luxation does not reduce spontaneously but remains luxated until reposition is effected by proper manipulation and treatment. Fixed luxation may be of such character as to be practically irreducible because of extensive damage done to ligaments or cartilage. Where a complete luxation of the metacarpophalangeal joint exists, it is probable that in most cases sufficient injury to collateral and capsular ligaments has been done to render complete ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... also the language of games, of pastimes, of tourneys, and of chivalry. In some cases no compromise took place, neither the French nor the Anglo-Saxon word would give way and die, and they have both come down to us, alive and irreducible: act and deed; captive and thrall; chief and head, &c.[402] It is a trace of the Conquest, like the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... stated that "Quality, not quantity," is the right motto for women in matters of dress. For all that, we trust that the irreducible ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... in our thoughts of Him. The conviction must pass into feeling, and thence into life, but it must underlie all real discipleship. Doctrine is not Christianity, but it is the foundation of Christianity. The Apostolic confession here is the 'irreducible minimum' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... little human nature will upset a very great body of statistics. Furthermore, in most human affairs results are produced by a multiplicity of causes; and though statistics may throw light on three quarters of all the causes that are potent in any given case, yet the other quarter which are irreducible to definite statement may wholly alter the result. If you are using statistics in your argument, therefore, as evidence of some large and complex fact, you should usually justify them to some extent by showing that there are no counteracting forces ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... economy is practised and all the new schemes which are being proposed involving expenditure of money are carefully scrutinised to see whether the expenditure is such as the country ought to undertake in view of its financial obligations. As the Debt service will be practically constant and irreducible unless revenue largely exceeds the total annual expenditure, which is very improbable, it is clear that a strong effort must be made to reduce this expenditure and also, so far as possible, to increase the State revenue. Unless ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... a system of reciprocal re-ordination, a "merger" of church property and parsons, an "irreducible minimum" of credal insistencies these, and others even more ingeniously compromising, are the well-meaning schemes that are put forward, and in the process one point after another is surrendered, as a quid pro ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... them the white-winged flock of clippers that lived in the boisterous uncertain life of the winds, skimming big fortunes out of the foam of the sea. In a world that pared down the profits to an irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count its disengaged tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean charters were snapped up by cable three months in advance, there were no chances of fortune for an individual wandering haphazard with a little bark—hardly indeed ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... matters which lie very far back, concerning the lands of several thousand years ago, it is very generally held that they are the proper and peculiar province of specialists, dry-as-dusts, and persons with an irreducible minimum of human nature. It is thought that knowledge concerning them, not the blank ignorance regarding them that almost everywhere obtains, is a thing of which to be rather ashamed, a detrimental possession; in a word, that ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... engines. On the ground they were quite helpless. In the air they were unbelievably clumsy. They were actually balanced and steered by vanes in the blasts of their jets, and they combined the absolute maximum of sheer thrust with the irreducible minimum of flyability. ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... could be done once for all, and he worked the results out simply under an organised kinetic government. But what seems to be merely an addition to the difficulty may in the end turn out to be a simplification, just as the introduction of a fresh term to an intricate irreducible mathematical expression will at times bring it ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... that Lord Crawleigh had spirited Barbara away from the danger of a mesalliance. But, in wrestling with the necessary evils of life, Eric was finding, as others had done before him, that Gerald Deganway was the irreducible minimum; it was of greater importance that for three months no one would have cause to gossip about them; and by that time even the Warings could not reasonably hope for tidings ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... last the day to start west. In spite of warnings, we found that our irreducible minimum of luggage filled five wardrobe-trunks. In vain we went over our lists and cast out such bulky things as extra handkerchiefs and silk socks and fancy neckties and toilet-silver. We started with all five. It was boiling hot; the sun ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of course contains it. But Criticism is nothing which is not the sheer projection of a body. The artist turns Self into a universal Form: but the critic reduces Form to Self. Criticism is to the artist the intrusion, in a form irreducible to art, of the body of the world. What can he do but interpose ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... good, some evil, some indifferent. True, some Indian prophets projected an idea of One Eternal Being including all such veiled Principalities and Powers. But their Pantheism was necessarily conditioned by their ignorance of natural phenomena. In fact, an irreducible inconsistency marred their view of the world. For while their Pantheism should have taught them to think of a universal life or energy as working within all things, their theological habit of mind bound them to the incongruous ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... of this kind I suppose I am bound to justify it, and I do not shrink from the task. I say that all thinking starts with an assumption of some kind, and exact thought requires that that assumption shall be the simplest possible, the irreducible minimum beneath which we cannot get. Now when we start thinking about existence as a whole and ourselves in particular, we are compelled to assume the infinite, the finite, and the activity of the former within the latter. In other ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... process, was probably a very gradual growth, there is no reason to suppose that words developed in any other way then they do at present. An erroneous notion of the development of language has become widely spread through the adoption of the metaphorical term "roots" for the irreducible elements of human speech. Men never talked in roots; they talked in words. Many words of kindred meaning have a part in common, and a root is nothing but that common part stripped of all additions. In some cases it is obvious that one word is derived from another by ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered. Even the too fortunate Valence—all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too fortunate—will for ever ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... more than the irreducible minimum of injustice to Sir Edward Grey, proceed to tell the story of the diplomatic negotiations as they will appear to the Congress which, I am assuming, will settle the terms on which Europe is to live more ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... the letters into his pocket, and followed his luggage up to his room, which was a perfect example of its kind, containing the irreducible minimum of furniture an hotel guest could require, and having, as its sole wall decoration, a notice imploring you to switch out the electric light when you did not actually require it. He was disappointed, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... in its regained governance. The new Charley was as dead as the old had been of late, and this clarifying moment left the grim impression behind that the old law was not obsolete. He felt that in the abandonment of her indignation she had mercilessly told the truth; and the irreducible quality of mind in him which in the old days made for justice, approved. There was a new element now, however—that conscience which never possessed him fully until the day he saw Rosalie go travelling over the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... people. Mrs. Catt urged each State to hold a similar State school to be followed by others in every election district, to carry the message to every woman that good citizens not only register and vote but know how to do so and why they do it; to set a standard of good citizenship with an "irreducible minimum" of qualifications below which no person can fall and lay claim to the title good citizen. It was planned to give certificates of endorsement to those who passed 75 per cent. in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... The metaphysician that we each carry unconsciously within us, and the presence of which is explained, as we shall see later on, by the very place that man occupies amongst the living beings, has its fixed requirements, its ready-made explanations, its irreducible propositions: all unite in denying concrete duration. Change must be reducible to an arrangement or rearrangement of parts; the irreversibility of time must be an appearance relative to our ignorance; the impossibility of turning ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... our North and West. After we have been at it for some time, we evolve a method of our own. The basis of that method is to do without; to GO LIGHT. At first even the best of us will carry too much plunder, but ten years of philosophy and rainstorms, trails and trials, will bring us to an irreducible minimum. A party of three will get along with two pack horses, say; or, on a harder trip, each will carry the necessities on his own back. To take just as little as is consistent with comfort is to play the ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... us in his own rapid way a summary statement, abbreviated to the very bone, and reduced to the barest elements, of what he meant by the Gospel. What was the irreducible minimum? The facts of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as you will find written in the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. So, then, to begin with, the Gospel is not a statement ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... mechanical if they can be calculated and predicted, being a combination of the more minute and widespread processes which they contain. The only question therefore is: Do processes such as nutrition and reproduction arise by a combination of such events as the fall of apples? Or are they irreducible events, and units of mechanism by themselves? That is the dilemma as it appears in science. Both possibilities will always remain open, because however far mechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... same quantity of mystery will ever enwrap the world, since it is the quality of the world, as of mystery, to be infinite. But honest human thought will seek above all to determine what are the veritable irreducible mysteries. It will endeavour to strip them of all that does not belong to them, that is not truly theirs, of the additions made by our errors, our fears, and our falsehoods. And as the artificial mysteries vanish, so will the ocean of veritable mystery stretch out further and further: ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... direct and bitter war with the Right Social Revolutionists. This party, owing to the clumsy electoral democratic machinery, received a majority in the Constituent Assembly, reflecting the pre-October epoch of the revolution. The result was a contradiction which was absolutely irreducible within the limits of formal democracy. And only political pedants who do not take into account the revolutionary logic of class relations, can, in the face of the post-October situation, deliver futile lectures to the proletariat on the ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky |
