"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physical proof for every article of belief was as fantastic as to demand, let us say, a chemical proof of the beauty of a picture, or evidence in terms of light or sound for the moral character of a friend, or mathematical proof for the love of a mother for her child. This very elementary idea seems to have come like a thunderclap upon many who claimed the name of 'thinkers'; for it entirely destroyed a whole artillery of arguments ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... have been effaced. Swift ships and fast trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world's products are exchanged as never before and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and larger trade. Prices are fixed with mathematical precision by supply and demand. The world's selling prices are regulated by market and crop reports. We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time and with more ease than was ever dreamed of by the fathers. Isolation is no longer possible or ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... when seen from the north side) have been the admiration of ages of architects and the occasion of many a special pilgrimage in our own day. Pugin has sketched its western facade and its 'lancet windows;' and Prout has given us drawings of the spire, 'percee au jour'—perforated with such mathematical accuracy that, as we approach the tower, there is always one, or more, opening in view—as one star disappears, another shines out, as in the cathedral at Bourgos ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... averted: the Fitzgerald Contraction. Time aboard the great starships that lanced through the void was contracted; the nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to last only six weeks to the men on the ship, thanks to the strange mathematical effects of interstellar travel ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... were true, cousin," answered Montrose, "there is something convenient in commanding a soldier, upon whose motives and springs of action you can calculate to a mathematical certainty. A fine spirit like yours, my cousin, alive to a thousand sensations to which this man's is as impervious as his corslet,—it is for such that thy friend must feel, while he gives his advice." Then, suddenly changing his ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... it. It has disappeared; the open spots change place, the sombre folds advance and retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back, distends, and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? an oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute, not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o'clock. Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... that which I hold here. In three years I was able to save the two hundred dollars, which I sent to my uncle, and promised to remit the interest if he would tell me the age of the debt. He replied giving the information, and enclosing a receipt for the principal, with a very correct mathematical statement of the amount of interest if compounded annually, as was his legal right, but expressing his readiness to accept simple interest, and give ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... order of demerit and impossibility comes the chimney-pot hat, which is not lacking in character, but is ugly and ridiculous. Its one redeeming feature is the difficulty it presents to the draughtsman. It is mathematical, geometrical, with every curve known to science, as hard to represent correctly as a boat or a fiddle—more so; and the delight of successful achievement is proportionately great. Linley Sambourne alone, who was originally trained as an engineer, has been able to grapple with the chimney-pot ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... rationalists and pietists. The Church solves it in practice, by admitting the truths and the principles in the gross, and by dispensing them in detail as men can bear them. She admits the certainty of the mathematical method, and she uses the historical and critical method in establishing the documents of her own revelation and tradition. Deny this method, and her recognised arguments are destroyed. But the Church cannot and will not deny the validity of the methods upon ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... be; but to the geologist it appears worthy a volume, and speaks to him of strata may be a million of years old, of glacial attrition, of volcanic action, of chemical constituents, of mineralogical principles, and crystallogenic attraction, of mathematical laws and geometric angles, and of future geognostic changes. That is to say, the pebble contracts and expands, as it were, with the faculties and the prejudices of the person—of the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... alchymy became jests. Soon there was scarcely a county in which some of the Quorum did not smile contemptuously when an old woman was brought before them for riding on broomsticks or giving cattle the murrain. But it was in those noblest and most arduous departments of knowledge in which induction and mathematical demonstration cooperate for the discovery of truth, that the English genius won in that age the most memorable triumphs. John Wallis placed the whole system of statics on a new foundation. Edmund Halley investigated the properties of the atmosphere, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Ezekiel v. S, "This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations... round about her," this was not taken by the mediaeval monks, who were the chief geographers of the period, as a poetical statement, but as an exact mathematical law, which determined the form which all mediaeval maps took. Roughly speaking, of course, there was a certain amount of truth in the statement, since Jerusalem would be about the centre of the world ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... refreshment of this Cordial Malt Liquor, that often was accompany'd with a good Breakfast or Dinner besides, while several others that had greater Estates would seem generous by giving a Yeoman Man Neighbour, the Mathematical Treat of a look on the Spit, and a ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... an angular mathematical form, exactly true, but not beautiful. Woman seizes this form, and from the crucible of her warm love she moulds the truth into grace and beauty. For man's understanding deals in outermost truths. But the Lord has blessed woman with perceptive faculties above the sphere of man's ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... had long followed the Court, and passed there for a mathematical man, tho' he really knew little that way, being disgusted by the Court, came into England in Cromwell's time, and published a very wicked book, with a very strange title, The Leviathan. His main principles were, that all men acted under ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... index entries did not match the body of the text, irregularities in capitalization and hyphenation have not been corrected. Alternate spellings (e.g. Ogilvy vs. Ogilvie), possible errors in quoted passages (e.g. remembraance), and mathematical errors have not been changed ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... received by intuition, we have examples in what are called 'self-evident axioms,' and 'fundamental laws' or 'conditions of thought,' which no wise man has ever attempted to prove. Of the second, we have examples in the whole fabric of mathematical science, reared from its basis of axioms and definitions, as well as in every other necessary deduction from admitted premises. The third virtually includes any conclusion in science based on direct experiment, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... cipher or zero (which are so obviously the same as to need no remark), it is admitted on all hands to be derived from one or other of the Semitic languages, the Hebrew or the Arabic. It is customery with the mathematical historians to refer it to the Arabic, they being in general more conversant with it than with the Hebrew. The Arabic being a smaller hand than the Hebrew, a dot was used instead of the circle for marking the "place" ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... vaulting, and which still served its original purpose. A contemporaneous tower flanking the entrance contained the old spiral staircase leading to the upper rooms. I often lingered upon it in astonishment at the mathematical science shown in its design, and the mechanical perfection of its workmanship. What seemed to be a slender column round which the spiral vaulting turned was not really one, for each of the stone steps was so cut as to include a section ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... plain matter of fact; nature &c (principle) 5; truth, verity; gospel, gospel truth, God's honest truth; orthodoxy &c 983.1; authenticity; veracity &c 543; correctness, correctitude^. accuracy, exactitude; exactness, preciseness &c adj.; precision, delicacy; rigor, mathematical precision, punctuality; clockwork precision &c (regularity) 80; conformity to rule; nicety. orthology^; ipsissima verba [Lat.]; realism. plain truth, honest truth, sober truth, naked truth, unalloyed truth, unqualified truth, stern truth, exact truth, intrinsic ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... not say that there is not a wider point of view from which the distinction between law and morals becomes of secondary or no importance, as all mathematical distinctions vanish in presence of the infinite. But I do say that that distinction is of the first importance for the object which we are here to consider—a right study and mastery of the law as a business with well understood limits, a body of dogma enclosed within definite lines. I have ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... had ended at a commercial college, where he acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been so weak in his double letters as he presently ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... as well as impressions of sense; and one may well believe that a primitive and inexperienced consciousness would rather people the world with ghosts of its own terrors and passions than with projections of those luminous and mathematical concepts which as yet ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... sufficient intellect to comprehend his genius, or heart to feel for his temptations, formed with him one of those mere worldly marriages common in high life; and, finding that she could not reduce him to the mathematical proprieties and conventional rules of her own mode of life, suddenly, and without warning, abandoned him in the most ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... please God, a grand harvest shall be reaped—now we can look back and see how one brain has planned it all. One clear-eyed, far-seeing will gathered together these women of genius, who have been with us; one practical, mathematical brain made all estimates of expense, and accepted all risks of failure; one hospitable heart received a house full of guests, and induced others to be hospitable likewise; and one earnest, prayerful soul—and this the best of all—besought and entreated God's blessing upon the work. Need ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... manipulation defies description. Throughout the series of correlated institutions loans and deposits are multiplied in such an intricacy of duplication that only a few able experts, employed by the "System" because of their mathematical genius, are able to unravel the tangle to the extent of approximating the proportion the legitimate funds bear to those which have been created by the financial jugglery I ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... good dentist here, and every two or three years one ought to consult one. About seeing my children I must take my chance. One I shall have sent here; and I shall be very happy to see the legitimate one, when God pleases, which he perhaps will some day or other. As for my mathematical * * *, I am as ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... north by (per) a direct (directam) line." Now a direct line toward the north can be no other than a meridian line. Had it been merely a straight line of vague northerly direction which was meant, rectum, the usual expression for a mathematical straight line, would have been used instead of directam. It is, moreover, to be considered that the Romans had names both for the northeast and northwest points of the compass, and that the expression "versus ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... say: "Your father puts too high an estimate upon my play. I did my best to win, but—but I was a little nervous; I see, however, that you would have defeated me though I had been in my best form." Gwen gave him one of those short, searching looks, so peculiarly her own, which seem to read, with mathematical certainty, one's innermost thoughts,—and the poor fellow blushed to the tips of his ears. —But he was no boy, this Maitland, and betrayed no other sign of the tempest that was raging within him. His utterance remained as usual, deliberate ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... from the continent, and the very small materials which are required by superstition as a groundwork for her dark and mysterious stories, we shall not wonder at the result. The Arabic books which he brought along with him, the apparatus of his laboratory, his mathematical and astronomical instruments, the Oriental costume generally worn by the astrologers of the times, and the appearance of the white-haired and venerable sage, as he sat on the roof of his tower of Balwearie, observing the face of the heavens, and conversing with the stars, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... through which the railway passes from Derry to Omagh is one long stretch of beauty, fertility and careful tillage. Every field, whatever its shape, is cultivated up to the fence and into the corners with a mathematical nicety. The regular fields, the green separating ditches with their grassy covering, the hills cultivated to the very tops, and the trees growing here and there all over made a landscape that should delight the heart of a farmer. Whenever I come to careless husbandry, I will ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... region. It imitates nothing. It uses pure sound, and sound of the most wholly artificial kind—so artificial that the musical sounds of one race are unmusical, and therefore unintelligible, to another. Like architecture, music relies upon mathematical proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves no utility. It is the purest art of pleasure—the truest paradise and playground of the spirit. It has less power than painting, even less power than sculpture, to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... favourite doctrine which occurs so frequently in the earlier and more Socratic Dialogues, and gives a colour to all of them—that mankind only desire evil through ignorance; (6) the experiment of eliciting from the slave-boy the mathematical truth which is latent in him, and (7) the remark that he is all the better ...
— Meno • Plato
... said, 'now you've touched the vital question.' I was gratified at his recognition of the good order of my retirement. 'You see,' he went on, 'we have to look up the men's previous performances and work out the differences in their records with mathematical exactness. But there is something more than that. We have to know the men. You can't adjust the handicaps by rule of three. Anybody who has seen Jones run must have noticed that he's a bit downhearted. ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... victor is insulting his fallen foe. In each of the remaining pairs one gladiator is on the point of yielding to his adversary. There are thus three several moments of duel to the death, each illustrated by two couples. The mathematical distribution of these dreadful groups gives an effect of frozen passion; while the vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthusiasm for muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy with blood-fury in ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... as an astronomer and as an experimental physicist, was born at Pisa, in Italy, Feb. 18, 1564. His talents were most multifarious and remarkable; but his mathematical and mechanical genius was dominant from the first. As a child he constructed mechanical toys, and as a young man he made one of his most important discoveries, which was that of the pendulum as an agent ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... dislike to the marriage should it ever be, and her fear for Alick's unhappiness should he ask and be refused, the poor mother was in a state of confused feelings and contradictory wishes which did not agree with a nature like hers, given to mathematical certainties and averse to loose ends and frayed edges anywhere. As nothing more was to be got out of Leam at this moment, and as Mrs. Corfield knew that Alick would be impatient, they went into the drawing-room together, Leam carrying her basket of spring ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... the confidence of special revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it, has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think there can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematical arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He understands at last that they also are in the mirror, projected from his world ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... of the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife, because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded themselves everywhere, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... help that, sir. I have my duty to perform. Anybody can do those childish history and grammatical questions; it is the classical and mathematical lessons in which I wish you to excel. Now, once more. No, no, you must not refer to the book. 'In any right-angled triangle, the square of ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... as it aims at action, must not be spun out into the most subtile threads of metaphysic, unless a legal duty is in question; in which case meum and tuum must be accurately determined in the balance of justice, on the principle of equality of action and action, which requires something like mathematical proportion, but not in the case of a mere ethical duty. For in this case the question is not only to know what it is a duty to do (a thing which on account of the ends that all men naturally have can be easily decided), but the chief point is the inner principle ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... in the year 429 B.C., and died when he was eighty-two years old, on his birthday. He was a pupil of Socrates, the first and purest of moral philosophers. By the rare union of a brilliant imagination with a fondness for severe mathematical studies and profound metaphysical investigations; by extensive foreign travel; by familiar intercourse with the most enlightened men of his time, particularly Socrates, whose instructive conversations he attended ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... always admired her with a sort of reverence. He had been for years an earnest worker. He carried business plans and business principles into the work; he studied cause and effect, and calculated and expected certain results to follow certain causes, like a mathematical problem; not that he by any means forgot the power of faith, or in any sense attempted to do his work alone. He was a Christian who spent much time on his knees; but little Flossy brought so much of the childlike, unquestioning spirit into her work, ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... his instruments, and himself to make the well-known telescope, which, for its time, was a fine piece of workmanship. Leibnitz was fond of inventing machines: windmills and carriages to be moved without horses preoccupied his mind as much as mathematical and philosophical speculations. Linnaeus became a botanist while helping his father—a practical gardener—in his daily work. In short, with our great geniuses handicraft was no obstacle to abstract researches—it rather favored them. On the other hand, if the workers of old ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... this, because he had seen something of the other's mathematical powers. He was not a fool at figures himself, but Bethune could solve by a flash of genius problems that cost him laborious calculation. It was strange that such a man should be content to make a very modest use of ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... cradle, which he must have left at the appointed time with some impatience at too much rocking. As a student at the University, as a law student at Osgoode, as a barrister, as reporter on the Telegram, as an employee in the Toronto Assessment Department, he had always a sort of mathematical regard for the diligence that makes a man fit to stand before kings, and the sensation of a superbly ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... American Mathematical Society: Robert Simpson Woodward, president of the Carnegie Institution and an authority on astronomy, geography, and mathematical physics. Arthur Gordon Webster, professor of physics at Clark University and an authority on sound, its production ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... fascinating field of subatomic mirror numbers was just opening up; certainly not because a few sensational journalists were toying with dead-end notions. For that matter the newsplastics weren't either and quickly went back to the regular mathematical reportage ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... ofttimes impulsive, now looked as sober as a judge as he sat perched up in the conning tower, beyond which, at that depth, he could not see a thing. However, a shaded incandescent light dropped its rays over the surface of the compass by the aid of which Eph was steering with mathematical exactness. ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... circumstances of Hugo's youth, a boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... employed—for the first time in English literature, I think—the term Dramatic Lyric. This naturally appealed to Browning, and he gave the title in 1842 to his first published collection of short poems. At first blush "dramatic lyric" sounds like a contradiction in terms, like "non-mathematical algebra." Drama is the most objective branch of poetry, and the lyric the most subjective: but Browning was so intent upon the chronicling of all stages of life that he carried the methods of the drama into the lyric form, of which Meeting at Night may serve as an excellent example. ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... many decades," he said, "there have been a few who regarded the close analogies between magnetism and gravitational action as symptomatic of a concealed identity between them. Einstein's 'Field Theory' practically proves it on the mathematical side. Now it is obvious that if gravitation is a form of magnetism—and if so it belongs to another plane of magnetic forces than that which we know and use—then the objects on a planet must have the opposite polarity from that of the planet itself. Since the globe is itself a magnet, with ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... en rapport now with my surroundings, and was carried on a vast stream where I felt the buoyancy of His hand who made all the worlds. I realized the mathematical truth of their motions, so well known that astronomers compile tables of their positions through the years and the days, and the minutes of a day, with such precision that one coming along over the sea even five years later may, by their aid, find the standard ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... last day of Alston's visit Charmian and he understood why Claude's mathematical powers had been brought to bear on the question of its exact duration. Claude himself explained with ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... This done, he went below, and shaking his barometer several times, found it had begun to fall very fast. Taking down his coast-chart, he consulted it very studiously for nearly half an hour, laying off an angle with a pair of dividers and scale, with mathematical minuteness; after which he pricked his course along the surface to a given point. This was intended as ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... possible to the man who knows how and why. We develop and plan out your life according to your adaptions and inclinations—no guess work but cold, hard, mathematical facts. We show you how to control, manage, and handle humanity and make it your business to shape men's minds as ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... of the first volume of 'The Laws of Fesole' I have laid down the mathematical principles of rightly drawing maps;—principles which for many reasons it is well that my young readers should learn; the fundamental one being that you cannot flatten the skin of an orange without splitting it, and must not, if you draw countries on ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... that if this attractive Sovereign proposed to continue hostilities he must ere long, as Lincoln said of Jefferson Davis, "rob the cradle and the grave." Even Lord Kitchener displayed some interest in these mathematical exercises, and was not wholly unimpressed when figures established the gratifying fact that the German legions were a vanishing proposition. I was always in this matter graded in ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... happened, however, that the Romans erected a sundial which had been prepared for Catana situated four degrees farther to the south, and were guided by this for a whole century. Towards the end of this epoch we find several persons of quality taking an interest in mathematical studies. Manius Acilius Glabrio (consul in 563) attempted to check the confusion of the calendar by a law, which allowed the pontifical college to insert or omit intercalary months at discretion: if the measure failed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... may here refer to a curious mathematical calculation, by Dr. Thomas Young, to the effect, that if three words coincide in two different languages, it is ten to one they must be derived in both cases from some parent language, or introduced in some other manner. "Six words would give more," he says, "than seventeen hundred to one, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... instantaneous result seemed wonderful. After supper, at our request, he told us his history, and when we realized that this man had gained for himself all his knowledge, we looked on him as one coming from wonderland. It was hardly credible that he should have power to solve the most difficult mathematical problems, calculate eclipses, as well as do all that could be required in civil or hydraulic engineering, and that he had accomplished this by his own will, which, pushing aside all obstacles, fought for the supremacy of his brain life. His father desired him to have ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... Mendelssohn; "and people know so little of him. They either think of him as the composer of mathematical exercises in music, or else they confuse him with others of his family. He was Cantor of the St. Thomas School here in Leipzig, the perfect type of a true servant of our glorious art. He wrote incessantly, but the greatest of his works lay forgotten after his death; ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... the great development of the geometrical, mathematical, and allied sciences in the seventeenth century which completed the submergence of the Mediaeval and Renaissance attitude towards morals. There was no room for a biological conception of life in the seventeenth ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... and had inadvertently crept in. Shandean also is the black margin to pages 199-206, the line upside down (p.175), the twelve irregularly printed lines (p.331), inserted to indicate his efforts in writing with a burned hand, the lines of dashes and exclamation points, the mathematical, financial calculation of the worth of his book from various points of view, and the description of the maiden's walk (p.291). Sterne's mock-scientific method, as already noted, is observable again in the statement of the position of the dagger "at an angle ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... expounding Judaism as a form of truth. That being a Jew has always involved conforming to certain principles and modes of life is a truism. But these principles or observances by themselves constitute only the outward expression of Judaism. The mathematical formula which states the law of gravitation is not the same as the force of gravitation itself. It is conceivable that further experimentation might make it necessary to qualify the mathematical formula. But the force of gravitation will ever be the same as ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... ledgers, for the innocent amateur. We had actually got more pillow-cases than we were entitled to. All unwittingly, in my eagerness to placate Sister, I had published the mild chicanery in which she had indulged on behalf of her ward. The sergeant, growing grey in the solution of these abstruse mathematical and psychological mysteries, had suspected this Sister all along. He enlightened me. She had recently been transferred from another ward—and in her going had (against the rules) wafted with her a small selection of that ward's property.... ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... in all religions. Yet these few universal ideas are but the rudiments of ethics, and no more constitute an ethical system worthy of the name, than the four primary processes of arithmetic constitute a system of mathematical science. The future is to evolve the true ethics, and therewith the educational system that will bring the true ethics into ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... demonstrates, in other words, that the same Principles which generate, and the same Laws which regulate, the Phenomena of the Universe as a whole, fulfil the same functions in connection with the Phenomena of every one of its parts. The Mathematical, Psychological, or any other specific Domain is, therefore, an expression or embodiment of the same System of Principles and Laws, with reference to both Generals and Details, which is otherwise exhibited in Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry, and elsewhere universally; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on a production of five hundred thousand cars this would not reduce the income of the company by forty million dollars. Of course if one sold only five hundred thousand cars at the new price, the income would be reduced forty million dollars—which is an interesting mathematical calculation that has nothing whatsoever to do with business, because unless you reduce the price of an article the sales do not continuously increase and therefore the business has ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... Mathematical Speculations, and asserts the Importance of Virtue and Morality, thereby inaugurating an Age of Faith.—His Life and Death.—The schools originating from his Movement teach the Pursuit of Pleasure and Gratification ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure." See also Spectator, 477, for a pretty scheme of a garden laid out with "the beautiful wildness of nature." Gilbert West's Spenserian poem "Education," 1751 (see ante, p. 90) contains an attack, in six stanzas, upon the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Negro may lack that tenacious mental grasp which enables one to pursue a scientific or mathematical investigation through a series of years, he has that delicate, mental feeling which enables him to succeed in ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... the report of the Secretary of the Navy, in which the humiliating weakness of the present organization of his Department is exhibited and the startling abuses and waste of its present methods are exposed. The conviction is forced upon us with the certainty of mathematical demonstration that before we proceed further in the restoration of a Navy we need a thoroughly reorganized Navy Department. The fact that within seventeen years more than $75,000,000 have been spent in the construction, repair, equipment, and armament of vessels, and the further fact that instead ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... food economists, may I point out on behalf of our four-footed friends what admirable service they render the community by the destruction of flies? My Irish terrier, Patsy, spends half his time catching blue-bottles—indeed, my husband, who is of a mathematical turn, estimates that he accounts for several hundreds ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... Leavenworth, dated January 1st, 1898, the theory that such guns as these can be used offensively. The conditions of this assault were favorable, the morale of my men superb, and the use made of the guns followed the theory therein set forth with the exactness of a mathematical demonstration. The infantry and cavalry had been pounding away for two hours on these positions; in eight and one-half minutes after the Gatlings opened the works were ours. Inspired by the friendly rattle ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... square. He had no instruments of precision, so he had to depend on his eye. He had a good eye, an artistic eye, an eye for symmetry and beauty of form. His product received none of the harshness of mechanical and mathematical accuracy. The apparently rectangular blocks are not really rectangular. The apparently straight lines of the courses are not actually straight in the ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... certain tubes by which the vril fluid can be conducted towards the object it is meant to destroy, throughout a distance almost indefinite; at least I put it modestly when I say from 500 to 1000 miles. And their mathematical science as applied to such purpose is so nicely accurate, that on the report of some observer in an air-boat, any member of the vril department can estimate unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles, the height to which the projectile instrument should be raised, and the ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... no experienced sailor, but he had seen plenty of the last fog, and as he sat there growing anxious the following problem presented itself to him after the fashion of the mathematical studies at school, and based on the difficulty of making a way through what was little better than black darkness. Let A, B, and C represent the points of a triangle. If three parties start together from those points to reach a common centre, and travel ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... that he had met the Candy Girl at ten o'clock in the forenoon, and that he had bade her good-by in front of the Martha Putnam Hotel at four fifteen, leaving himself not one second to spare for reaching the railway station and by mathematical computation that meant that he had been with her for six hours and fifteen minutes; but as far as his sense of ecstasy was involved, that day was certainly no longer than an hour in length. He recalled that she took him to a private picture exhibit and that he was hopeful that her signature ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... consciousness, been solving the difficulties. This experience is by no means a peculiar one. Many scientific workers have borne testimony to a similar habit of the cerebrum. The late Sir W. Rowan Hamilton, the discoverer of the mathematical method known as that of the quaternions, states that his mind suddenly solved that problem after long work when he was thinking of something else. He says in one place: "Tomorrow will be the fifteenth birthday of the quaternions. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... the allowance of food to a soldier. It has now a more general sense, as when in the Great War people talk of the whole nation being put "on rations." Then again, as every child who is old enough to study mathematics knows, we use the Latin word itself, ratio, as a mathematical term. ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... studies of the place, and did not care about accurate classical scholarship, in which I was utterly wrong. I was clumsy at calculation, though I think I have, and always have had, a good head for mathematical principles; and I utterly loathed examinations, which seem to me to make learning ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... philosophy elements which are foreign to Descartes, and though fusing his otherwise mathematical and logical system with the warmth and fervour of mystical experience that is wholly lacking in the French philosopher, carried Cartesianism to its logical culmination, and has given the world one of the most impressive presentations that ever has been given ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... back in a ponderous pigtail, and her education at the Cluhir Convent School was still uncompleted. The fat, piebald pony that she was riding would have a sore back before she got home. Christian, perched wren-like on her ancient steed (but a wren placed with mathematical accuracy of directness with relation to the steed's ears), noted with disfavour the crooked seat, the heavy hand on the curb. Larry, hot and pink, with hat hanging by its guard, his fair hair looking like storm-tossed corn-stooks, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... came on in excellent order, their dingy lines sometimes bulging to the front, then occasionally bending rearwards,—now the left wing curving forward, and then the right swaying in an opposite direction. But these trifling deviations from mathematical lines were always quickly corrected, and the "dress" of their long fronts was really so good as to give evidence of continued and careful drill on the part of the men and much ability on that ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the notion that there is a mystic bond between wrong and punishment; on the other, that the infliction of pain is only a means to an end. Hegel, one of the great expounders of the former view, puts it, in his quasi mathematical form, that, wrong being the negation of right, punishment is the negation of that negation, or retribution. Thus the punishment must be equal, in the sense of proportionate to the crime, because its only function is to destroy it. Others, without this logical apparatus, are content to rely ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... the cry that they require all the finny inhabitants of our waters for their own sport. It is scarcely necessary to go as deeply into the subject as mathematical-minded Mudie did to show that Nature's lavishness in the production of life would make such a contention unreasonable. He demonstrated that if all the fishes hatched were to live their full term, in twenty-four years their production power would convert into fish ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... not, I am happy to tell you that I have got a vastly better appointment. Let me know when and where to meet you; or if you like, come to these lodgings of mine. I don't enter upon duties till end of October, and am at present revelling in mathematical freedom. There's a great deal ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... soporific vapors had the effect of those mathematical devices whereby restless people cipher themselves to sleep. His languid head fell to his breast. In another moment, he drooped half-lengthwise upon a chest, his ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the long-walkers whom the Memoir notes as among the chief influences of those days was Leslie Stephen's pupil Romer, the Admirable Crichton of that moment—oarsman, cricketer, and Trinity Hall's hope in the Mathematical Tripos. The future Lord Justice of Appeal was then reading for the Tripos, in which he was to be Senior Wrangler; and, according to Cambridge custom, took a certain amount of coaching as part of his work. Charles Dilke was one of those whom ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the experience of centuries and all the mathematical formulae that can be deduced therefrom night is bound to be followed by day. We have been whipped by the rebels, but it follows with arithmetical certainty that if we keep on fighting long enough we will whip them in time. Let x equal time ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Statistical Mechanics, developed with especial reference to the rational foundation of Thermodynamics. By J. WILLARD GIBBS, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Mathematical ...
— Mr. Edward Arnold's New and Popular Books, December, 1901 • Edward Arnold
... masked under traditional forms or no, was from the beginning a spirit of complete negation and led at last to the questioning not only of any human institutions, but of the very forms of thought and of the mathematical truths. (6) With all these of course we have had a universal mark—the ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... particular, but never wanted any spur to its own mechanical duty. It was never known to do a turn of work not legitimately its own, though mathematically exact in its proper office. But after I came here with my sister, a helpless cripple, we found out that the mathematical machine was a man, with a soft, beating heart. He was called upon to lift me from the carriage, and he did it as tenderly as a woman. He took me up as a mother lifts her child from the cradle, and I reposed passively ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... midlands. Now it seems to have progressed to the northern midlands. Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham may be selected as the triangle of counties that would fairly represent the centre of the movement. If the matter were to be determined with mathematical accuracy, the centre would need to be placed perhaps a little farther west, for Stafford, Cheshire, Bristol, and the remote Welsh Carnarvon all experienced witch alarms. In the north, York and Durham had ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... image of the place itself, as the spirit of the place, let him yield to such fancies, and follow them wherever they lead. For, though error on this side is very rare among us in these days, it is possible to check these finer thoughts by mathematical accuracies, so as materially to impair the imaginative faculty. I shall be able to explain this better after we have traced the actual operation of Turner's mind ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... there arose, in addition to the speculative theories already mentioned, other opinions which were derived from minds singularly free from mythical ideas; the world was considered as a concourse of independent atoms; its genesis thus became more conformable with abstract mathematical calculation, effected by this combination of simple bodies and the evolution of elements. This was what Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus undertook to teach, passing beyond the natural and ideal myths, in order to take their stand on the movement of isolated ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... battle between himself and his huge canvas raged in the Rue Tourlaque throughout the summer; for he obstinately insisted upon personally attending to all the technical calculations of his composition, and he failed to manage them, getting into constant muddles about the slightest deviation from mathematical accuracy, of which he had no experience. It made him indignant with himself. So he let it go, deciding to make what corrections might be necessary afterwards. He covered his canvas with a rush—in such a fever as to live all day on his steps, brandishing ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... are not wealthy. It was reserved exclusively for the purpose of receiving visitors. The furniture, though old, threadbare, and dilapidated, was kept scrupulously clean, and arranged symmetrically. There were a few books on the table, which were always placed with mathematical exactitude, and a set of chairs, so placed as to give one mysteriously the impression that they were not meant to be sat upon. There was also a grate, which never had a fire in it, and was never without a paper ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... truest sense of the word—had smilingly said after grace at breakfast that when he was a boy he used to take a great deal of interest in natural history, and that he presumed his pupils would feel much the same as he did, and would have no objection to setting aside their classical and mathematical studies for the morning and watching the entrance of the procession when it entered the town at ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... of a Kala added, make what is known as a Muhurta. Thirty Muhurtas make up one day and night. Thirty days and nights are called a month, and twelve months are called a year. Persons conversant with mathematical science say that a year is made up of two ayanas (dependent on sun's motion), viz., the northern and the southern. The sun makes the day and the night for the world of man. The night is for the sleep of all living creatures, and the day is for the doing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the sect of Epicurus, whose principles concerning the eternity of matter, the materiality of the soul, and the non-existence of a future state of rewards and punishments, he affects to maintain with a certainty equal to that of mathematical demonstration. Strongly prepossessed with the hypothetical doctrines of his master, and ignorant of the physical system of the universe, he endeavours to deduce from the phenomena of the material world conclusions ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... has laid its venue, and commenced its aerial castles. LAPLACE was the first to suggest the nebular hypothesis, which he did with great diffidence, not as a theory proved, or hardly likely, but as a mathematical possibility or illustration. His range of creation, moreover, was not so vast as that of our author, which assumes to compass the entire universe, but was limited to the evolution of the solar system. The mode in which this might ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... accessories in cooking. She knew to a minute the time when each article must go into and be withdrawn from her oven; and if she could only lie in her chamber and direct, she could guide an intelligent child through the processes with mathematical certainty. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... nearly the same thing as a "Society for the Improvement of Natural History." As time went on, and the various branches of human knowledge became more distinctly developed and separated from one another, it was found that some were much more susceptible of precise mathematical treatment than others. The publication of the "Principia" of Newton, which probably gave a greater stimulus to physical science than any work ever published before, or which is likely to be published hereafter, showed that precise mathematical methods ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... employed in this vocation at Frankford, in Pennsylvania, at Milestown, and at Bloomfield, in New Jersey. In preparing himself for the instruction of others, he essentially extended his own acquaintance with classical learning, and mathematical science; and by occasional employment as a land-surveyor, he somewhat improved his finances. In 1801, he accepted the appointment of teacher in a seminary in Kingsessing, on the river Schuylkill, about four miles from Philadelphia,—a situation which, though attended ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... get the range, which may be constantly shifting. The telescope-rifle is a field-piece possessing such precision and range as no other weapon can boast, and provided with an instrument which reduces the art of aiming to a point of mathematical certainty,—and all within such a compass of size and weight that every man of a company can manage one with nearly the rapidity and with ten times the efficiency of an ordinary musket. We submit the question, whether we can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... eating beans; the Hesiodic-Pythagorean [Greek: pros elion me omichein]; the vow of silence, like that taken by the Hindu muni; the doctrine of five elements (aether as fifth); above all, the so-called Pythagorean Theorem, developed in the mathematical Culvas[u]tras[29] of India; the irrrational number [square root symbol]2; then the whole character of the religious-philosophical fraternity, which is exactly analogous to the Indic orders of the time; and finally the mystic speculation, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... harder to associate defective human sympathy with his kind heart and large dramatic imagination, though that very imagination was an important factor in the case. It forbade the collective and mathematical estimate of human suffering, which is so much in favour with modern philanthropy, and so untrue a measure for the individual life; and he indirectly condemns it in 'Ferishtah's Fancies' in the parable of 'Bean ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... engaged at their game of astronomy," continued Mrs. Watkinson. "They have also a sort of geography cards, and a set of mathematical cards. It is a blessed discovery, the invention of these educationary games; so that even the play-time of children can be turned to account. And you have no idea, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... closing part of the game, the children are seated and the mathematical exercises are introduced. The director says: "Each child has one nose. How many noses, have the number tens? Again, each child has one body. How many bodies, have the number nines? Each child has two eyes. How many eyes, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... everything. It was strange that with her rough common sense she could not grasp this want. But the thought that Lambert required what she could never give—namely, the feminine tenderness which strong masculine natures love—never crossed her very clear and mathematical mind. ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... from a dislike to the present order of things, or from a wish to ingratiate himself in her favour. The argument of the Garde du Corps was espoused, but soberly, by one of the passengers who was a mathematical professor at one of the Lyceums; he was not by any means an Ultra, but he supported the Bourbons, with moderate, gentlemanly and I therefore believe sincere attachment. This professor seemed a well informed sort of man; he told me that he was acquainted with Sir James M., formerly recorder at ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... entirely upon the skill of the operators employed to operate it. But this does not reflect upon or diminish the ingenuity required for its invention. Speaking of the problem involved, Edison said some years later to Mr. Upton, his mathematical assistant, that "he always considered he was only working from one room to another. Thus he was not confused by the amount of wire ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... nearly the same moment: "To-morrow I will have a talk with her." Thus, by a strange sympathy, their hearts seemed to understand each other in spite of their separation. But what was an irresistible attraction in Clemence was only a determination resulting from almost a mathematical calculation on her lover's part. By the aid of this gift of second sight which intelligent men who are in love sometimes possess, he had followed, degree by degree, the variations of her heart, without her ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... Mill's works, I do not wish it to be supposed that this influence is to be measured by the extent to which his books form a part of the university curriculum. His "Logic" has no doubt become a standard examination-book at Oxford. At Cambridge the mathematical and classical triposes still retain their former prestige. The moral science tripos, though increasing in importance, still attracts a comparatively small number of students, and there is probably no other examination for which ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... manifestation of the complete principle is effected. According to Hegel, it is worked out through a series of historical institutions which embody the different factors in the Absolute. According to Froebel, the actuating force is the presentation of symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding to the essential traits of the Absolute. When these are presented to the child, the Whole, or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. A single example may indicate the method. Every one familiar with the kindergarten is acquainted with the circle in which the children gather. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... taken as that from which Prince Henry began to meditate further and far greater conquests. His aims, however, were directed to a point long beyond the range of the mere conquering soldier. He was especially learned, for that age of the world, being skilled in mathematical and geographical knowledge. And it may be noticed here that the greatest geographical discoveries have been made by men conversant with the book knowledge of their own time. A work, for instance, often seen in the hands of Columbus, which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the first century B.C. as possessing a regular plan and roads crossing at right angles. The actual remains of the site, explored in part by English and French archaeologists early in the nineteenth century, show some streets which run with mathematical straightness from north-east to south-west and others which run from north-west to south-east.[31] These streets might, indeed, date from the period when Sicyon was the chief town of the Roman province of Achaia, the period (that is) between the overthrow of Corinth in 146 B.C. and ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... shabby door which opens, it appeared, into an interior both splendid and austere. The scenic idea was magnificent when once you had embraced it—the dramatic form had a purity which made some others look ingloriously rough. It had the high dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical and architectural. It was full of the refreshment of calculation and construction, the incorruptibility of line and law. It was bare, but it was erect, it was poor, but it was noble; it reminded him of some sovereign ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... with him in all his undertakings, in all his sudden decisions. He gave himself up to every new idea with passionate enthusiasm. Yet, when he mounted the steps of Madame Hohlakov's house he felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. At that moment he saw fully, as a mathematical certainty, that this was his last hope, that if this broke down, nothing else was left him in the world, but to "rob and murder some one for the three thousand." It was half-past seven when ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he asserted. "I am manifestly flesh and blood, and in addition, I am the high King of Eubonia, and no less. Why, in disputing these facts you contest circumstances that are so well known hereabouts as to rank among mathematical certainties. And that makes you look foolish, as I tell you ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Englishmen. The well-known author of "Maxima and Minima," viz., the late Professor Ramachundra, was considered by no other than De Morgan, the famous mathematician, as an original genius of a remarkable order. A celebrated Cambridge Mathematician once told me that he set a problem for the Mathematical Tripos, basing it upon Ramachundra's "Maxima and Minima," and with the exception of a few that headed the list, none were able to solve the problem. In the late Toru Dutt, a young Bengali native Christian lady, ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... studious curiosity was awakened in Europe by different causes and more recent events; and, in the age of the crusades, they viewed with careless indifference the literature of the Greeks and Arabians. Some rudiments of mathematical and medicinal knowledge might be imparted in practice and in figures; necessity might produce some interpreters for the grosser business of merchants and soldiers; but the commerce of the Orientals had not diffused the study and knowledge of their languages in the schools of Europe. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... at Benares, and those at Delhi, Matra on the Jumna, and Oujein, were built by Jey-Sing, Rajah of Jayanagar, upwards of 200 years ago; his skill in mathematical science was so well known, that the Emperor Mahommed Shah employed him to reform the calendar. Mr. Hunter, in the "Asiatic Researches," gives a translation of the lucubrations of this really enlightened man, as contained in the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... looks round severely). And just as mathematical calculations have irrefutably proved the existence of imponderable ether which gives rise to the phenomena of light and electricity, so the successive investigations of the ingenious Hermann, of Schmidt, and of Joseph Schmatzhofen, have confirmed beyond a doubt the existence ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... pretend to deal with textile questions. We have to notice the remaining element of chemical economy as it involves a fundamental principle. The practice of washing residues or products of reaction free from reagents and soluble by-products involves a well-known mathematical law, under which the rate of purification is a function rather of the number of successive changes of washing liquid than of the volume of the latter. The ordinary practice of textile washings entirely ignores this principle, and ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. The work presumes a standard of education corresponding to that of a university matriculation examination, and, despite the shortness of the book, a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader. The author has spared himself no pains ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... indifferent or self-indulgent, and it certainly showed that he was without nervousness. He invariably roused himself, or his professor roused him, a half-hour before the papers should be handed in, and, as it were, by a mathematical calculation he had always done just enough to ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... "title" for orders, studies Divinity, or neglects it, at pleasure: and if he studies it, he studies it in his own way. He has read a little of heathen Ethics with great care; or he has trained himself to the exactness of mathematical inference. With the purest idiom of ancient Greece he has also made himself very familiar. He is besides a Master of Arts. What need to add that such an one is not therefore a Master of Divinity? possesses no qualification ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... into requisition in solving astronomical and geometrical problems. We ourselves are debtors to the ancient Egyptians for much of our mathematical knowledge, which has come to us from the banks of the Nile, through the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the routine of duty and suffering, until a merely intellectual flame burst out, white and cold, in her hitherto callous nature. A creature, so to speak, only half awake, or awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her books and tried to puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... for the mathematical studies of the following year, Alec went to the school again in the morning of most days, Mr Malison being well able to render him all the assistance he required. The first time he made his appearance at the door, a silence as of death ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... only identified it with chemistry itself, but had substituted its nomenclature, even in common conversation, for the far more philosophic language which the human race had abstracted from the laboratory of Nature. I may venture to prophecy that no future Beddoes will make it the corival of the mathematical sciences in demonstrative evidence. I think it a matter of doubt whether, during the period of its supposed infallibility, physiology derived more benefit from the extension, or injury from the misdirection, of its views. Enough of the latter is fresh in recollection to make it but an equivocal ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his whole face told the story of his success. Yes, he had it, notwithstanding it had cost him many hours of severest mental labor. Not only had he solved the problem, but, what was of infinitely greater importance to him, he had begun to develop mathematical powers which, under the inspiration of "I can and I will," he has continued to cultivate, until to-day he is professor of mathematics in one of our largest colleges, and one of the ablest mathematicians of his years ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... historian, had not the advantages of early education. He was no more than a free peasant, living on the marsh-farm in Friesland, which had been possessed by several generations of his ancestors; but at the age of two-and-twenty he put himself under mathematical tutorship at Hamburg, and then studied at Gottingen. He was invited to join a mission which the Danish government determined to send into Arabia; and the proposal, at first scarcely made in earnest to the half-educated young farmer, was accepted by him with eagerness. By a singular fatality, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... need there will be for those new fields? It is no paltry question of an outlet for the surplus products of a mere nation of seventy-five millions that confronts you. Your mathematical professors will tell you that, at the ratio of increase established in this Nation by the census returns for the century just closing, its population would amount during the next century to the bewildering ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... her thoughts would turn from these subjects and be absorbed in mathematical or metaphysical studies. "I have been following that treatise on Optics for a week, and never understood it till to-day," she once said to her husband. "I have found now that there has been a mistake in drawing the diagrams. I have corrected it, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... few pounds of cracked bones, a carrot, a turnip, an onion and a bunch of sweet herbs, covered deep with cold water, and set at one side of the range on washing-day, to simmer into soup stock, wastes neither time nor fuel and will be the base of more than one or two nourishing dinners; prove, by mathematical demonstration, that a mold of delicious blanc-mange or Spanish cream or simpler junket costs less and can be made in one-tenth of the time required for the leathery-skinned, sour or faint-hearted pie, without which "father'n the boys wouldn't relish ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... desisted, having already got into mathematical difficulties in counting from one hand ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English; and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not apply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was intolerable while he ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... and on this!—the one, refined, delicate, sensitive, fastidious, severe, never repeated; the other, thoughtless, vulgar, mathematical, common-sense, sensuous, reappearing ever with a stolid monotony. And such is the sentiment pervading all Roman Art. The conquerors took the letter from the Greeks, but never had the slightest feeling for its Ideal. But even this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... marvellous in our eyes," as his favourite Psalm cxix., the psalm des petites heures, the cxviii. of the Vulgate, says.* These, too, he counts now as but a variety of le neant and vanity of things. He no longer records, therefore, the mathematical apercus that may visit him; and in his scruples, his suspicions of' visible beauty, he interests us as precisely an inversion of what is called ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... discrepancies between population and food supply would appear, with the result that population would have to be cut down to food supply. Later Malthus saw how crude this statement of his theory was and abandoned any attempt at mathematical statement, presenting substantially the following theory: (1) Population is necessarily limited by food; (2) Population always increases where food increases and tends to increase faster than food; (3) The checks that keep population down to food supply may be classified as positive ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... mathematical house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... and wished that she were not so cantankerous. The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... stated that "for the languages and belles-lettres, he had no taste." Next to this, the literature of elegance and refinement, the philosophy of the closet and drawing-room, with which his contemporaries are imbued, glided over his intellect as over a hard rock. None but mathematical truths and positive notions about geography and history found their way into his mind and deeply impressed it. Everything else, as with his predecessors of the fifteenth century, comes to him through the original, direct action of his faculties in contact with men and things, through his prompt ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to the window, and praying fervently for the girl's conversion to christianity, all from a tender and pious emotion of her gentle heart: as notwithstanding their caresses, no man is more firmly persuaded of a mathematical truth than they are of mine, and my maid's living in a state of certain and eternal reprobation—ma fanno veramente vergogna a noi altri[Footnote: But they really shame even us.], say they, quite in the spirit of the old Romans, who thought all ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... reason, this early attachment seems to have been a source of poignant discomfort to him. It clung to him after he took a final leave of school in the autumn of 1747, and went to reside with his brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon. Here he continued his mathematical studies and his practice in surveying, disturbed at times by recurrences of his unlucky passion. Though by no means of a poetical temperament, the waste pages of his journal betray several attempts to pour forth his amorous sorrows in verse. They are mere common-place rhymes, such as lovers ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... essay on Plato Emerson says, "I am sorry to see him after so many fine thoughts throwing a little mathematical dust in our eyes." Does he partially expose here a peculiarity in his literary procedure? Other people do not read Plato for his fine thoughts, though there are many such, but for the charm of his discourse and his beautiful exposition of Greek Philosophy. ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... productions. Then are torches lighted, and two by two the long train of torch-bearers defiles through the silent midnight streets to the sound of solemn music, and passing by the dark cemetery of the real dead, bear through 'Tutor's Lane' the coffin of their mathematical ancestor. They climb the hill beyond, and commit him to the flames, invoking Pluto, in Latin prayer, and chanting a final dirge, while the flare of torches, the fearful grotesqueness of each uncouth disguised wight, and the dark ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... name of the man who wrote these books was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, but every one knows him better as Lewis Carroll. He was a staid and learned mathematician, who wrote valuable books on most difficult mathematical subjects; for instance, he wrote a Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, and it is not a joke, though the name may sound like one to a person who has read Alice in Wonderland. However, there was one subject in which this grave lecturer on mathematics was more interested than he was in his own lectures, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... chapter I have taken the mathematical or map gradient and not the engineer's gradient. The latter is generally used, I understand, to measure the gradients of roads, ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... an acuter phase in a fortnight or so, when Nicholas began to resume his mathematical studies. There lies just opposite the O'Beirnes' front door a low turf bank, gently sloping, and mostly clothed with short, fine grass, but liable to be cut into brown squares, if sods are wanted for roofing a shed, or for spreading a green layer of scraws under new thatch. This had ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... let's be mathematical," he replied, pinching the lobe of her ear, which he had proclaimed to be entrancingly pretty. "I can't add; tell me the day we have to leave, and on ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... noticed a monument of another sort, and of later date,—a tribute to one of the most gallant and genial of men, in whom it was fully demonstrated that "the bravest are the tenderest." It was a pyramidal pile, about eight feet high, of carefully selected stones, laid without mortar, but with mathematical precision; and on one stone near the top was scratched a name dear ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... yet so limited the field of expression that it becomes equivalent to the aesthetic; for not even all of free expression is art. The most important divergent type is science. Science also is expression,—an embodiment in words, diagrams, mathematical symbols, chemical formula, or other such media, of thoughts meant to portray the objects of human experience. Scientific expressions have, of course, a practical function; concepts are "plans of action" or servants of plans, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... attention of the reader, and, speaking for myself, I am free to confess that I have seldom been able to feel any absorbing interest in characters who figure merely as the M. or N. of the baptismal service. I shall therefore assign fictitious names to persons and places, and I cannot even pretend to mathematical exactness as to one or two minor details. In reporting conversations, for instance, I do not profess to reproduce the ipsissima verba of the speakers, but merely to give the effect and purport of their discourses. I have, however, been at some pains to be accurate, and I think ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... system of mathematical reasoning, John. Your method is well enough for the building of a fortress or calculating the range of a gun. But it won't do for the actions of men. You allow nothing for feeling, sentiment, association, propinquity, ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler |
