"Potency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... soul, and a spirit; there is a specific bodily, or material, form belonging to each metal; there is a metalline soul characteristic of this or that class of metals; there is a spirit, or inner immaterial potency, which is the ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... the factor has really changed its potency, then if a very dark individual from one end of the series is crossed to a wild rat and the second generation raised we should expect that the hooded F2 rats would all be dark like their dark grandparent. When Castle ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... almost all nations. In verse 18 there is a reference to the superstition that at dawn, when these jewels are exposed to the first rays of the sun, they emit a fine vapor which wafts abroad their subtle potency. The poem is in Spanish verse, and the original is said to have been written down by Don Fernando de Avila, governor of Tlalmanalco, from the mouth of Don Juan de Aguilar, governor of Cultepec, ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... arrived on the wings of the gale. Ere long Sergius was shivering in the recess of the door. For relief he counted the beads of his rosary, and there was scarcely a Saint in the calendar omitted from his recitals. If there was potency in prayers the angels were in the cistern ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... atrophied from disuse. And so, with his naked soul, he fronts the wilderness. It is a test, a measuring of strength, a proving of his essential pluck and resourcefulness and manhood, an assurance of man's highest potency, the ability to endure and to take care of himself. In just so far as he substitutes the ready-made of civilization for the wit-made of the forest, the pneumatic bed for the balsam boughs, in just so far is he relying on ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... what he would have done. His simple-minded view of things was disturbed, and his tendency to be forgiving kindly assisted to give potency to the appeal. He said, "I won't set you free, but I'll do this much," and he tore the paper from Peter's breast, saying, "You'll get off with some lie when the Rebs come." Then he turned and walked away, tearing up the death ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... illness to the consequences of the sabre-cut, and my recovery to the potency of the drugs he had exhibited. I attributed my illness in great measure to the constant contemplation of my early history, no longer checked by any regular employment; and my recovery in equal measure to the power of his kindness and sympathy, helping from within what could never have ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... effected it; for here stood the venerable edifice securely founded, bearing the moss of four hundred years upon it; and though wars, and change of dynasties, and religious change, had swept around it, with seemingly destructive potency, yet here had the lodging, the food, the monastic privileges of the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the altering mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to have struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... exaggerated. Gibberne is now working at the quantitative handling of his preparation, with especial reference to its distinctive effects upon different types of constitution. He then hopes to find a Retarder, with which to dilute its present rather excessive potency. The Retarder will, of course, have the reverse effect to the Accelerator; used alone it should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time, and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... did not understand that Redmond could only justify to Ireland the part which he was taking if he won, and that he and not they must be the judge of what Ireland would consider a defeat. In all probability, also, they overrated his power and that of the party which he led. They did not guess at the potency of new forces which only in these months began to make themselves felt, and which in the end, breaking loose from Redmond's control, undid his work. A new phase in Irish history had begun, of which Sir Edward Carson ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... convulsion, she turned away, as if she were sick, could feel dissolution setting-in in her body. For with her mind she was unable to attend to his words, he caught her, as it were, beneath all her defences, and destroyed her with some insidious occult potency. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... put all things allusively, using strange figures and metaphors. Yet, when one was used to him and to them, their potency seemed greater than polished speech ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... none the less true that when once the degree of civilization is such as to allow this highest type of character, distinguished by its meekness and kindness, to take root and thrive, its methods are incomparable in their potency. The Master knew full well that the time was not yet ripe,—that he brought not peace, but a sword. But he preached nevertheless that gospel of great joy which is by and by to be realized by toiling Humanity, and he announced ethical principles fit ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... not ours; they belong to gods and heroes. In music the superman is born into our feelings. Music does for the emotions what mythology and poetry do for the imagination and philosophy for the intellect—it brings us into touch with a more magnificent life, for which we have perhaps the potency, but not the opportunity here. And in doing this, music performs a great service; for, outside of love and war, life, which offers endless occasions for intense thought and action, provides ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... lost none of its power, for absence seemed to have gifted it with redoubled potency, the confirmation of that early hope to grace it with redoubled warmth. Sylvia let him keep her, feeling that he had earned that small reward for a year's endeavor, resolving to grant all now left her ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... all the faculties which imply permanent peace of mind and power of resisting the shocks of the world without disintegration. Much undoubtedly remains to be said. Wordsworth's teaching, profound and admirable as it may be, has not the potency to silence the scepticism which has gathered strength since his day, and assailed fundamental—or what to him seemed fundamental—tenets of his system. No one can yet say what transformation may pass upon the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... unconnected with which India is now meeting her problems to-day. How did these problems first dawn in the minds of some men who forecast themselves by half a century? How fared their hopes, how did their dreams become buried in oblivion? Where lies the secret of that potency which makes certain efforts apparently doomed to failure, rise renewed from beneath the smouldering ashes? Are these dead failures, so utterly unrelated to some great success that we may acclaim to day? When we look deeper we shall find ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... and there were no sweeter follies offering, I should like to write an essay on the books that have quite failed of achieving their original purposes, and are yet of respectable use and potency for other purposes. For example, the Book of Revelation. The obvious aim of the learned author of this work was to bring the early Christians into accord by telling them authoritatively what to expect and hope for; its actual effect during eighteen ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... of the nineteenth century, that the indictment is to be a substitute for the writ of error, and it is justified because a judge ought to be indicted who violates the sacred person of an embassador! What potency there must be in the recent amendment of the Constitution which has foisted the negro and set him upon the same platform as the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of Great Britain or of all the Russias to the United States of America, and made him as sacred as an embassador, and ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... was based upon the theory of supremacy of the artist, the potency of poetry, with its incidental corollaries of disregard for the Kantian ideal of Duty, and aversion to all Puritanism and Protestantism. "There is no great world but that of artists," he declared in the Athenaeum; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save sometimes than the wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays. ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... healing through the potency of the guru's picture, I had an influential spiritual vision. Sitting on my bed one morning, I ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Such is the potency of his art, that the amorous spectator is cured of his infirmity by perceiving the evil effects of passion, and he who enters the theatre under a load of sorrow departs from it with a serene countenance, as though he had drunk of that draught ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... can be perceived. From that primal Darkness arises Brahma (endued with the principle of Creation). Darkness is primeval and fraught with immortality. Brahma that arises from primeval Darkness develops (by its own potency) into the idea of the universe, and assumes the form of Purusha. Such Purusha is called Aniruddha. Divested of sex, it is called otherwise by the name of Pradhana (Supreme or Primary). That is also known by the name of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... an inflamed area of the cutaneous covering of the bosom—the first due, I think, to swallowing an overhot lemonade, the second to the constancy with which I resorted to foot bathing, while the third indubitably may be ascribed to the after effects of an oil of great potency and pronounced odour which Miss Waddleton with her own hands bestowed upon me and with which I anointed that particular portion of my anatomy at ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... in my thoughts, as a man of commanding presence, with keen, dark eyes set in a stern countenance; crisp, curling locks—such as Melinza's—but silvered lightly on the temples; an air of potency, of fire, as though his bold spirit defied the ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... is the best, which reduces within the narrowest limits the patronage to be exercised by the Executive authority. Every party out of power has discovered that in the patronage of the President there is a voice of greater potency than is heard elsewhere in the Government. This amendment places a limitation upon the power of the President. It confers upon a majority of the Senators from each section the power to recommend appointments to office, and this will be found in practice equivalent to the power ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... hold that all the power and potency of the universe was stored up in that primordial cell, and that all things have been worked out without any superintending agency other than the forces resident in matter. Every operation of God is ruled out, or deemed unnecessary. This is sometimes ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... top. Many were injured in the concussion; many tossed into the water; twenty perished. The survivors crept again on board their ship, as it now lay, and as it still remains, keel to the waves, a monument of the sea's potency. In still weather, under a cloudless sky, in those seasons when that ill-named ocean, the Pacific, suffers its vexed shores to rest, she lies high and dry, the spray scarce touching her—the hugest structure of man's hands within a circuit of a thousand miles—tossed up there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... determine. The true magician was a master over both the seen and the unseen world. His art could compel spirits or demons to obey him, however much against their will. It seems a question whether a spell of sufficient potency could not control Satan himself. The witch or wizard was a vulgar being, a mere slave of the Evil One, with no original power, very limited in derived power, and, it would appear, with no means of acting directly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... could be given to the non-slaveholding masses, while military qualities of supposed superiority would enable the Southern Confederacy to enter into a successful contest with the North for empire. The potency of 'King Cotton' was to be made the powerful agency with which the rest of the civilized world was to be dragooned into acquiescence. On this delusive dream was built the fabric of that mighty empire, whose history, from ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... voice his adherence to a bare defensive. The sea frontier, therefore, became mainly a line of defence, the utility of which primarily was, or should have been, to maintain communication with the outside world; to support commerce, which in turn should sustain the financial potency that determines the issues ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... the form of matter, however coarse—the refuse and dross of more valuable materials—is resolvable, by science, into elements too subtle for our vision, and yet possessed of such potency that they effect transmutations more surprising than the fables of magic. The points that spangle the still blue vault, and make night lovely to the untaught peasant, interpreted by science, expand into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... storm-tossed soul, seized by every breath of fear and tortured by every agony known to the forsaken. Have you no pity for me, Margaret? Drive no more shafts of anguish through my bruised and shattered heart, but gently administer in words of endearment the potency of your ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... to have strange health-giving qualities; and the water is drunk beneath the moon by old country folk for wasting and weakening complaints. Its strength and potency have no enmity to animal life, for the water-voles burrow in the banks and plunge with a splash in the stream; but it seems that no vegetable thing can grow within it, for the pool and channel are always ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... will. Belike, It was to be a talisman to me; And while I wore it on my neck in faith, It was to chain to me all my life long The volatile fortune, whose first pledge it was— Well, be it so! Henceforward a new fortune Must spring up for me; for the potency Of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... raise doubts in the mind of sufficient potency to destroy the tradition of centuries, and to prevent us from sharing the conviction of Milton, of Dryden, of Pope, and Johnson that Shakespeare was the author of Shakespeare's plays must be left for individual consideration. But, however destructive these doubts ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... were not all of equal potency. The angular houses, which are the first, the fourth, the seventh, and the tenth—lying east, north, west, and south—were first in power, whether for good or evil. The second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh houses were called succedents, as following ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... incrustation of stone at the end of a year. Hence, every year they construct banks of earth to the right and left, let in the water, and thus out of these incrustations make walls for their fields. This seems due to natural causes, since there is a juice having a coagulating potency like rennet underground in those spots and in that country. When this potency appears above ground mingled with spring water, the mixture cannot but be hardened by the heat of the sun and air, as ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... size had helped. Raft seemed to reduce the size of things, so that the seven mile strand and the vast islands and sea spaces no longer burdened her, and in some magical way whilst he reduced the proportions of his surroundings they increased his potency and significance. He was in his true setting, part of a vast picture without ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Then imagination, the magician, lovely in weal but terrible in woe, began to weave his spell, and visions arose of dear loved ones agonising beyond the prison walls, to whom my heart yearned through the dividing space with an intense passion that seemed as though its potency might almost annihilate our barriers. Alas! hearts yearn in vain. Nothing avails but strength, and what we cannot achieve the Fates never bestow. My cell walls stood cold and impassable around me, like sentinels of destiny, too vigilant for evasion and too strong for resistance. Brute force overmatches ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... broadly notched chimney sides, where fifty articles of negro pharmacy were kept—bunches of herbs, dried peppers, bladders of seeds, and bottles of every mystic potency. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... our own time, and must remind us of our daily inference from the affairs we see busy all about us. The drama of facts cannot be transplanted; it cannot be made in France or Germany and remade in America; it is localised in place and time, and has no potency beyond the bounds of its locality. But the drama of suggestion is unlimited in its possibilities of appeal; ideas are without date, and burst the bonds of locality and language. Americans may see the ancient Greek drama of Oedipus King played in modern ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... her, she was entitled to an easy mind. The best of everything tonight, in vindication of her still unimpaired beauty and potency. Shimmering brocade of her favourite red, and lace like fairy work; and then that magnificent satin-white breast and massive throat, and the stately head crowned with the famous five stars, whose flashing made the eye wink, and which yet were dimmed by the light of her dark eyes. She surveyed ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... unbounded, magnificent wilderness." Accustomed to camp life and scenes of exciting interest, the humdrum days at the old homestead became distasteful. The West was the hunter's paradise. The toil held beneath it the potency of harvests of extraordinary richness, and the soldier who had faced the disciplined battalions of Great Britain recked little of the prowling ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... FECHTER is only a new proof of the potency of yellow hair. It is the yellow hair of the British blonde, joined to that kindliness of disposition with which—like a personification of Charity—she "bareth all things," that makes her a thing of beauty in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... the female chiefly the interior system, constitution and the like. Where the parents are of the same breed, it appears that the proportions contributed by each are governed, in a large measure, by the condition of each in regard to age and vigor, or by virtue of individual potency or superiority of physical endowment. This potency or power of transmission, seems to be legitimately connected with high breeding, or the concentration of fixed qualities, obtained by continued descent for many generations from ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... rulers and public men and of nations, whereas the Ethics of Christ, which deal almost solely with individuals and His personal followers, will find more and more practical application as individualism, in its capacity of a moral factor, grows in potency. The domineering, self-assertive, so-called master-morality of Nietzsche, itself akin in some respects to Bushido, is, if I am not greatly mistaken, a passing phase or temporary reaction against what he terms, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... and his command. His career, hitherto has been dashing and brilliant, and but few rebel commanders had won a higher reputation throughout the South. He had been glorified by rebels in arms everywhere, but this last reckless adventure will doubtless rob his name of half its potency. The prestige of success is all powerful, while a failure is death to military reputation. It would now be a difficult matter to rally to his standard as many enthusiastic and promising young men, who infatuated and misguided, joined him during the period of his success. Many ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... same—time, education, social and economic development;—and yet a bloody war was necessary to destroy slavery and put its spirit temporarily to sleep. When the South and its friends are ready to propose a system of education which will recognize and teach the equality of all men before the law, the potency of education alone to settle the race problem will ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head, produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step, and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 'herb of grace' and was used for sprinkling holy water because in pre-Christian times it had been supposed to have effect against the powers of evil. The early Christians were thus just endeavouring to combine the old charm of rue with the new potency of ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... heaven I had your potency, And you were Isabel! should it then be thus? No; I would tell what 'twere to be a judge, ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... presence of evil in human nature, a true view of Christianity involves the conception of a latent spiritual element in man, a capacity for goodness to which his whole being points. Matter itself may be said not merely to exist for spirit, but to have within it already the potency of the higher forms of life; and just as nature is making towards humanity, and in humanity ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... house, with an introduction and a present from one of his sisters. There seems no reason to doubt that Shelley was then much attracted by the beautiful girl, smarting though he was at the time from his rupture with Harriet Grove; but Shakespeare has shown us that such a time is not exempt from the potency of love shafts. ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... lift our eyes and look out upon Nature in its present actually existing state, what we see in that instant is the whole achievement of the past, and it contains within it here and now the promise of all the future. All the past is in the present, and in it also is the potency of the future. The achievement fills us with admiration. The promise thrills us with hope. To that Spirit which has achieved this result, which actuates the process and ourselves with it, which determines the great event, which ensures the uniformity ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... leaping the hedge beyond which she at all events is a trespasser,—or in finer language, 'prolonging its gaze backwards beyond the boundary of experimental evidence,' or in still plainer terms, guessing, affirms that she discerns in matter the promise and potency of every form of life; or presently, in a devouter mood, looking on the budding glories of the spring, declines to profess the creed of Atheism. Learned criticism demonstrates the impossibility ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... discomforting than that of a noble death, I take it that Mr. Meredith was right to prefer his present ending to the alternative, inasmuch as the painfulness of that impression he wished to produce and the potency of that moral he chose to draw are immensely heightened and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... therefore, that, had none but political causes been at work, the seventeenth century would not have passed away without a fierce conflict between our Kings and their Parliaments. But other causes of perhaps greater potency contributed to produce the same effect. While the government of the Tudors was in its highest vigour an event took place which has coloured the destinies of all Christian nations, and in an especial manner the destinies of England. Twice during the middle ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be obtained from observation. We have here no problem which can be solved by mere mathematical meditation. Mathematics is no doubt a useful, indeed, an indispensable, instrument in the enquiry; but we must not attribute to mathematics a potency which it does not possess. In a case of this kind, all that mathematics can do is to interpret the results obtained by observation. The data from which Newton proceeded were the observed phenomena in the movement of the earth and the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... but pleasant suddenness. Just now I am speaking only of content and exhilaration; but I may soon see another side of the picture. The afternoon glides by like the morning; no churlish houses and chimney-pots hide the sun, and we see him describe his magnificent curve, while, with mysterious potency, he influences the wind. Dull! Why, on shore we should gaze out on the same streets or fields or trees; but here our residence is driven along like a flying cloud, and we gain a fresh view with every mile! I confess that I like sailing in populous waters, for indeed the lonely tropical seas ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... while she was actually no prettier than Caroline she was infinitely more vivid and compelling. Her face held an extraordinary potency; her bare arms and shoulders were more insistent than his sister's; there was about her a consciousness of the allurement of body, frankness in its employment. She made no effort to mask her feeling, which at present was one of complete ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... infra-red vision of the Vorkulians. Apparently the city was unprotected, having not even a wall. Outward from the low, rounded houses of the city's edge there reached a wide and verdant plain, which was separated from the jungle by a narrow moat of shimmering liquid—a liquid of such dire potency that across it, even those frightful growths could neither ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... small, weak and emaciated. But perhaps because it was small, weak and emaciated he changed his mind, and, drawing his chair closer to the bed, rested his head upon it. In this defenceless attitude the potency of his earlier potations surprised him. The room flickered and faded before his eyes, reappeared, faded again, went ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the storm of men: anon the sound of him waxes, softens; he rises into far-sounding melody of strength, triumphant, which subdues all hearts; his rude-seamed face, desolate fire-scathed, becomes fire-lit, and radiates: once again men feel, in these beggarly ages, what is the potency and omnipotency of man's word on the souls of men. "I will triumph or be torn in fragments," he was once heard to say. "Silence," he cries now, in strong word of command, in imperial consciousness of strength, "Silence, the thirty voices, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... expectation was left for himself and companions, than that they were to be retained as hopeless captives by their savage conquerors. Anxious to know the worst, and willing, in such an emergency, to try the potency of gold he overcame his reluctance to speak to Magua. Addressing himself to his former guide, who had now assumed the authority and manner of one who was to direct the future movements of the party, he said, in tones as friendly and confiding as ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... a mighty breath of patriotism, filled her heart to overflowing. It seemed as though she had heard it for the first time; had never before felt its potency. All the tragedy of war swept before her; all that inspiring, strange affection for country, kith and kin, suddenly ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the transmutative hypothesis," as Darwin's is said to be, (p. 252, Amer. reprint,) so happily that the prescription is repeated in the second (p. 259) and third (p. 271) dilutions, no doubt, on Hahnemann's famous principle, with an increase of potency at each dilution. Probably the supposed transmutation is per saltus. "Homoeopathic doses of transmutation," indeed! Well, if we really must swallow transmutation in some form or other, as this reviewer intimates, we might prefer the mild homoeopathic doses of Darwin's formula ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... faults. Indeed no man has more of the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of the poetic spirit of his time than George Herbert, but with this difference from the rest of Dr. Donne's school, that such is the indwelling potency that it causes even these to shine with a radiance such that we wish them still to burn and not be consumed. His muse is seldom other than graceful, even when her motions are grotesque, and he is always ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... many other customs relative to the naming of things are all founded on the same idea of the potency and mysticism inherent in a name, which may be found in the legends of the old Egyptians, wherein the power of the great king and god Ra depended on the fact that no one knew his real name, until Isis by stratagem got it from him; and forthwith ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... all legitimate successes; but they must work through material means, and are emphasized or nullified by the skill or rudeness exhibited in the device and fabrication of those means. The great contest now in progress has taught us afresh the potency of those material agencies through which patriotic zeal must act, and we shall hereafter lack all good excuse for not having the very best attainable system of producing, preserving, providing, and using whatever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Everything of a high order that had been done from the beginning, under great, devoted, far-seeing religious leaders, and by unknown millions who had fought for liberty, would have to be given up. Recognition of the potency of peaceful methods in government and industry; the contribution of the individual to his own progress and that of mankind; the gradual triumph of an ordered freedom over tyranny and anarchy; all the achievements, that ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings, folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As every ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... should be modified, and that in the indefinite series of possible determinations one alone should become real. One perception must spring up in it. That which, in the previous state of determinableness, was only an empty potency becomes now an active force, and receives contents; but, at the same time, as an active force it receives a limit, after having been, as a simple power, unlimited. Reality exists now, but the infinite has disappeared. To describe a figure in space, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... wives, widows, and daughters of men of this stamp—and not half their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier Ammianus Marcellinus describes it, has been told here—the news brought from Egypt worked with wondrous potency. ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... and respects rules and usages only fitfully, and with small attention to the possible effect of its disregard of them on the general welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say, "the mother"—since that is supposed to be, in this discussion, a term of peculiar potency—who tries to exert a good influence on public opinion on all these points, to teach the brotherhood of man as an economical as well as a moral and religious truth; to spread the belief that war between any two nations is a general calamity to the civilized world; that it is as unchristian and ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... of the senses sufficed to make of Helen Keller a woman of exceptional culture and a writer, who better than she proves the potency of that method of education which builds on the senses? If Helen Keller attained through exquisite natural gifts to an elevated conception of the world, who better than she proves that in the inmost self of man lies the spirit ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... at first sight seems to be wanting there. Ex forti dulcedo: and in the study of Michelangelo certainly it is enjoyable to detect, if we may, sweet savours amid the wonderful strength, the strangeness and potency of what he pours forth for us: with Raphael, conversely, something of a relief to find in the suavity of that so softly moving, tuneful existence, an assertion of strength. There was the promise of it, as you remember, in his very look as he saw himself at eighteen; and you know that the lesson, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the things for which we give thanks; when we rest in what we have, in what we can do, in what people think of us, in the thought of the friends we have at our back, or in anything whatever but the living, outgoing power of the self-alive—the one causing potency in the heart of our souls, and in every clothing of those souls, from nerve, muscle, and skin to atmosphere and farthest space. The living life is the one power, the only that can, and he who puts his trust or hope in anything else whatever is a worshipper of idols. He who does not believe ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... far from improbable that the ready coincidence of Jervis's views with those of Nelson, as to future possibilities, arose, partly indeed from professional bias and prepossession as to the potency of navies, but still more from the false reports, of which Bonaparte was an apt promoter, and which a commission of the allies in Genoa greedily swallowed and transmitted. The deterrent effect of their own fleet, "in being," seems not to have prevented either of them from believing that ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of a grain of oyster-shell. This is only the tenth degree of potency, but some of his disciples profess to have obtained palpable ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... rebellious, leaps the mingling blood Of countless warriors, high of soul and brave; And would'st thou quench their spirit 'neath the wave? Is Gray Cloud's life more dear to thee than thine? The village sleeps, unguarded is his tent, Thy knife is keen, and unto thee is lent A spell to-night of potency malign. Cradled in blissful dreams alone he lies, And he shall stray so deep in sleep's dominions, He would not waken though the rushing pinions Of his own Thunder-Bird should shake the sky. All freedom-loving spirits are with thee, Strike hard and fear not as thou would'st be free; Lest ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... direction: so that there is hardly anything so absurd or so mischievous that it may not, by means of these influences, be made to act on the human mind with all the authority of conscience. To doubt that the same potency might be given by the same means to the principle of utility, even if it had no foundation in human nature, would be flying in the ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... potency extended to those who married into the Ueberhell house was proved by its effect upon Frau Rosalie. As it had also once vanquished Frau Schimmel, they argued that the Court apothecary must have used other blood beside his own, for he certainly had never ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... dying, or pretending to die, obscurely—you never find authentic evidence of his decease. In other later times, at other courts, such an one reappears and runs the same course of luxury, marvel, and hidden potency. ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... period seems confusing to many earnest souls with its "New Thought," its "occultisms" and its "Lo here's" and "Lo there's." But through and beneath it all, may be heard a note of harmony, the promise and the potency of the triumph of ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... reckoned the entire benefit of his glorious person and work, so that we are accepted in the Beloved, and He is "made unto us ... Righteousness." But there is another sense in which faith is reckoned to us for righteousness, because it contains within itself the power and potency of the perfect life. It is the seed-germ from which is developed in due course the plant, the flower, the bud, the seed, and the reproduction of the plant in unending succession. God reckoned to Abraham all that his faith was capable of producing, which it did produce, and which ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... that the king's proclamation, on whose potency for quelling the risings of the rebellious colonists the tory authorities, at the commencement of the revolution, seemed to have greatly counted, did not annihilate their opponents, and, not seeing fit ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... him on; that the medicine furnished, is, as a rule, made of the cheapest of drugs, bought in large quantities from parties, whose reputation in the drug trade is not of the best; that the medicine has no special potency nor value, that it is in all likelihood a worthless mixture, which in the advertisements is given false and lying properties; that when they have got all the money out of the victim possible they will sell his letters to other nostrum venders. It is a sorry reflection ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... power and potency of the human word, we may perhaps dimly apprehend the potential magnitude of the Word of God, the Creative Fiat, when as a mighty dynamic force it first reverberated through space and commenced ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... there are some in England—Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge—which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... so pure have stooped from her decorous and noble manner of bearing! But was it decorous—was it? He hated himself for the idea that forced itself upon him, just for an instant—no more—and yet, while it was present, thrilled him with its old potency of attraction towards her image. And then this falsehood—how terrible must be some dread of shame to be revealed—for, after all, the provocation given by such a man as Leonards was, when excited by drinking, might, in all probability, be more than enough to justify any one who came forward to ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... spectacle of this mighty prince of distinguished appearance, humiliated and in tears before the nervous little man who humbly styled himself the "servant of the servants of God," has always been regarded as most completely typifying the power of the Church and the potency of her curses, against which even the most exalted of the earth found no weapon of defense ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the chief men appear as more thoroughly incarnate of the national traits; each outwardly a several Americanism. Here we have the massive potency of Daniel Webster,—on whose ponderous brow and fixed abashing eyes is set the despotism of intellect; Silas Wright,—a well-grown and cultivated specimen of the ordinary statesman; Henry Clay and Col. Fremont,—two halves of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... of their efficacy. All our subordinate acts of worship, so to call them, have their character and vitality as Christian acts of the worship of God because of the relation of the worshipper to God as a member of the Body of His Son. They are offered through the Son and derive their potency from their association with Him and His sacrifice. They reach God through the sacrifice ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... England of his time. But where Homer and Beowulf together differ from Tasso and Milton is in the way the surrounding folk-spirit contains the poet's mind. It would be a very idle piece of work, to choose between the potency of Homer's genius and of Milton's; but it is clear that the immediate circumstance of the poet's life presses much more insistently on the Iliad and the Odyssey than on Paradise Lost. It is the ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... intelligence is low, the supernatural sanction is a far more potent means of regulating conduct than any purely temporal authority. But, just in proportion as society advances, the other-world sanction loses its potency and increasing reliance must, therefore, be ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... the Goths' invading tide Wrecked Rome's potency and pride, Something wonderful has vanished, something exquisite has died; And in spite of modern fame And the lustre of its name, Even beautiful Lake Como can be ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... acclaimed America's greatest composer. If we try to substitute another name in its place, one of equal potency cannot ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... never been ten miles from home in his life before, lying sick on a bamboo couch in a private china closet of his own (where he is now perpetually writing autographs for inquisitive barbarians), ever began to doubt the potency of the Goddess of the Sea, whose counterfeit presentment, like a flowery monthly nurse, occupies the sailors' joss-house in the second gallery? Whether it is possible that the said Mandarin, or the artist of the ship, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... with this corroboration of it he grew so spiritless that he could offer no retort. He slid to a despondent sitting posture upon the door sill and gazed wretchedly upon the ground, while his companion went to replenish the licorice water at the hydrant—enfeebling the potency of the liquor no doubt, but making up for ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... a rather simple little soul under her casing of Parisian veneer, and was often innocently surprised at the potency of her own charm. That men, big men and wise men, were inclined to take her artful artlessness at its surface value was a continual revelation to her. Like Rachael, she had gone to bed the night before in a profoundly thoughtful frame of mind, a little apprehensive ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... its image to the eye, the eye, on the other hand, sends its image to the object, and no portion whatever of the object is lost in the images it throws off, for any reason either in the eye or the object. Therefore we may rather believe it to be the nature and potency of our luminous atmosphere which absorbs the images of the objects existing in it, than the nature of the objects, to send their images through the air. If the object opposite to the eye were to send its image to the eye, the eye would have to do the same to the object, whence it might ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... was taking shape in his mind, but it shows us that he felt sure enough of the truth of his belief to allow a stronger tinge of evolution to appear in the second edition. He has mentioned in the Autobiography that it was not until he read Malthus that he got a clear view of the potency of natural selection. This was in 1838—a year after he finished the first edition (it was not published until 1839), and five years before the second edition was written (1845). Thus the turning-point in the formation ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... to meet his mother-in-law and his wife, with their characteristic and congenial train. These were the instrumentalities with which Catharine and Marguerite hoped to bend the will of Henry and his friends to suit their purposes. Catharine had great confidence in the potency of the influence which these pliant maidens could wield, and they were all instructed in the part which they were to act. She was accustomed to call ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... no more, but as he saw everywhere lowering brows from window and doorway as they rode through the streets he had doubts whether the power of Van Artevelde's eloquence would have the magical potency he ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... proved to be a distilled beverage of extraordinary potency that instantly cleared the fog from Jason's brain, though it did leave a slight ringing in his ears. And the meat was a tenderly smoked joint, the best food he had tasted since leaving Darkhan. Taken together they restored his faith in life ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... drove, pack, brood, litter, school. Flow, pour, stream, gush, spout. Follow, pursue, chase. Follower, adherent, disciple, partisan, henchman. Fond, loving, doting, devoted, amorous, enamored. Force, strength, power, energy, vigor, might, potency, cogency, efficacy. Force, compulsion, coercion, constraint, restraint. Free, liberate, emancipate, manumit, release, disengage, disentangle, disembarrass, disencumber, extricate. Freshen, refresh, revive, renovate, renew. Friendly, amicable, companionable, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... at thirty, albeit he worked fourteen hours a day, slept eight, and consumed the remaining two at his meals. But through all those fruitful years of toil he had still found time to dream, and the spell of the redwoods had lost none of its potency. He was still checker-boarding the forested townships with his adverse holdings—the key-positions to the timber in back of beyond which some day should come to his hand. Also he had competition now: other sawmills dotted the bay shore; other ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... affectionate expressions of her attachment. Such expressions, coming from any woman, must have been rapturous and soothing in the extreme; but, when they flowed from a voice whose very sound was melody, they acted on the heart of Captain de Haldimar with a potency that was as irresistible as the love itself which ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... yet in truth we've had Strange thunders from the potency of song; Mingled indeed with what is sweet and strong, From majesty: but in clear truth the themes Are ugly clubs, the Poets Polyphemes Disturbing the grand sea. A drainless shower Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme of power; 'Tis might half ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... a deep and abiding faith, new at the time, in the power of education as a means of regenerating society. He had begun his work by trying to "teach beggars to live like men," and his belief in the potency of education in working this transformation, so touchingly expressed in his Leonard and Gertrude, never left him. He believed that each human being could be raised through the influence of education to the level of an intellectually free and morally independent life, and that every human being ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Now, when you are not thinking of it, the fragrance of the white pines is suddenly wafted to you by a slight, almost imperceptible breeze, which has begun to stir. Now the breeze is the softest sigh imaginable, yet with a spiritual potency, insomuch that it seems to penetrate, with its mild, ethereal coolness, through the outward clay, and breathe upon the spirit itself, which shivers with gentle delight. Now the breeze strengthens so much as to shake all the leaves, making them rustle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... faintly dawns, and lo! at last this fair universe burst into glorious light, clothed in surpassing loveliness, throbbing with love, tender sympathy and sublime aspiration, and all through the magic potency of blind matter and unconscious force, without an architect or guide. O, wondrous matter, ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... spite of the proverb, there are some extremes that never touch, and chief among them are those that concern religion. Religion, or rather, difference of religion, is a factor in every-day Irish life of infinitely more potency than it is, perhaps, in any other Christian country. The profundity of disagreement is such that in most books treating of Ireland, that are not deliberately sectarian, a system of water-tight compartments in such matters is carefully established. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... contact an electric pulsation seemed to pass through Cornelia's blood, imbuing it with a powerful ichor, alien to herself, yet whose potency was delicious to her. She fancied, also, that she herself went out in the same way to her companion, establishing a magnetic interchange of personalities, so that each felt and shared the other's thoughts ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... that gives hope, to know He is working with us; this it is that makes burdens bearable, to know that He is sympathetic and strong. This one in the midst explains suffering, inspires heroism, is the promise and the potency of all the possibilities ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... barbarous rite of human sacrifice was established at Jerusalem, and the worship of Jehovah became more intense and darker. The shadow of the Assyrian is upon Israel, and as generally happens in times of public anxiety, rites long disused are imagined to have a specially national character and a peculiar potency, and are fetched back from oblivion. The reform of Josiah (2 Kings xxii., xxiii.) was more thorough-going than that of Hezekiah. He made an end of all the unseemly worships his predecessor had encouraged ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... with, half as a young god to be wounded by. This rising of the star of love as it ascends into the heaven of youthful fancy, is revealed in the melodies Mozart has written for him. How shall we describe their potency? Who shall translate those curiously perfect words to which tone and rhythm have been indissolubly wedded? E pur mi piace languir cosi.... E se non ho chi m' oda, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a generation. To our children they are not evidently shams; they are powerful working suggestions. Human institutions are things of life, and whatever weed of falsity lies still rooted in the ground has the promise and potency of growth. It will tend perpetually, according to its nature, to recover its old influence over the imagination, the thoughts, and acts of ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... a pity that Nietzsche did not live to see the success of his teaching in England.... Britain may claim to have bred the Superman in the highest potency yet attained. He has made a clean sweep of the old British morality. He is coldly and unfeelingly inspired by a frightful craving for power, that wades through rivers of blood, and knows neither compunction nor pity. These are weaknesses which the Superman has conquered.—"GERMANUS," ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... attitude—for he recognizes that this master of his is a casket in which nature has deposited a treasure of extraordinary value, that he possesses a genius much superior to that of others. The loyal disciple is concerned that this genius should appear in its full potency and in undiminished radiance. To this end is the upward look, the appreciation and reverence, and to this end also the misgiving and the remonstrance when the great man deviates from the course which he ought to follow. The same attitude of loyalty we ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... arrogant, dost thou believe I boast for pride or pastime? forced to boast, Truth costs me more than falsehood e'er cost thee. Divested of that purple of the soul, That potency, that palm of wise ambition, Cast headlong by thy madness from that height, That only eminence 'twixt earth and heaven, Virtue, which some desert, but none despise, Whether thou art beheld again on earth, Whether a captive or a fugitive, Miner or galley-slave, ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... expected, considering her age and mine. Oh those last two days, that last Christmas Sunday! She was a true, pious, brave, and noble Mother to me; and it is now all over; and the Past has all become pale and sad and sacred;—and the all-devouring potency of Death, what we call Death, has never looked so strange, cruel and unspeakable to me. Nay not cruel altogether, let me say: huge, profound, unspeakable, that is the word.—You too have lost your good old Mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... believing" says Dr. Lightfoot, "that Lucian has drawn his picture, at least in part, from the known circumstances of Ignatius' history." [10:1] The bishop returns again and again to the parallelism between Ignatius and Peregrinus, and appears to think it furnishes an argument of singular potency in favour of the disputed Epistles. "Second only," says he, to certain other vouchers, which he produces, "stands this testimony." [11:1] From such a sample the judicious reader may form some idea of the conclusiveness ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... not show agglutination when the result of the examination of the 5 per cent. preparation is positive, according to the potency of the specific serum; and by the examination of a series of dilutions a quantitative comparison of the valency of specific sera from different sources, or of serum from the same animal at different periods during the course of ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... few days of his absence she had allowed herself the romantic joy of floating unchecked upon the tide of a girlish fancy, dreaming dreams after the approved fashion which is youth's, dancing lightly upon foamy crests, seeing only blue water and no rocks under her. Then, with the potency of the man's character removed with the removal of his physical being, she grew to see the shoals and to draw back from them, shuddering somewhat pleasurably. Now that he was again in San Juan and that her eyes had been held by his in the first meeting ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... to begin. There was a quick jingle as many leather belts were loosed, followed by a whistle, and—zpt! he received the accolade of narkhood. Again and again they came, and they stung and bit, and he could not move. They spat all about him. He swore crudely but sincerely, and if oaths have any potency his tormentors should have withered where they stood. Two and three at a time they came, for there were eleven of them—Flanagan having discreetly retired—and all were anxious to christen their nice new belts on the body of the hated nark; and they did so zealously, while Simon ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... champion of Bacchus. He had a little ebony whistle, which at the commencement of the orgies, he laid on the table, and whoever was the last able to blow it, everybody else being disabled by the potency of the bottle, was to carry off the whistle as a trophy of victory. The Dane produced credentials of his victories, without a single defeat, at the courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Moscow, Warsaw, and several of the petty ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham |
