"Potentiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the other noble Roman should not be accused of having joined it. Many noble Romans had no doubt joined besides those who had fallen fighting, or who had been executed in the dungeons. Accusations became very rife. One Vettius accused Caesar, the Praetor; but Caesar, with that potentiality which was peculiar to him, caused Vettius to be put into prison instead of going to prison himself. Many were convicted and banished; among them Porcius Laeca, Vargunteius, Servius Sulla, the brother of him of whom we are now speaking, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... sign-board to enter on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to repeat ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... ancient Christianity. He does believe that so long as life lasts, and he does not know of any limit to its duration, good and evil are realities, and those who do good, and are good, achieve life of increasingly higher and higher potentiality. If anything were gained in practical life by calling this "salvation," it would be right and wise to do so. But in fact it is disastrous, for it ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... The most important of men cannot stay; did the World's History depend on an hour, that hour is not to be given. Whereby, indeed, it comes that these same would-have-beens are mostly a vanity; and the World's History could never in the least be what it would, or might, or should, by any manner of potentiality, but simply ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... selfish crust over the hearts of his colleagues, as the warm lips and balmy breath of equatorial currents kiss away the jagged ledges of drifting icebergs. In his laborious life, that which is ordinarily denominated "love" had been so insignificant a factor, that he had never computed its potentiality; much less realized its tremendous importance in solving the problem of his social, financial, and professional success. Beauty had not allured, nor grace enthralled his fancy; and his betrothal was a mere incident in ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... some. I've seen that everything wears out, and that when a thing's worn out it's for good and all. I think it's reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for good and all, too. There isn't anything of us, as I look at it, except the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope, grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you've had them, that's the end of it; you've exhausted your capacity; you're used up, and so's your character,—that often ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... this bundle of words really explains anything, but that like other formulae of the kind, it prescinds from the question of ends and origins, by making a statement of what happens serve as a cause of what happens, and calling it a Law or a Tendency, or a Latent Potentiality—thus filling the gap which mere agnosticism creates in ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... substances which share their formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material aspect. Since God is one and only, his essentia and his esse must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true, of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are only "virtual," and made from the human point of view. In God all these ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him. To-night, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he knew that he might as well reach out his ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... possible in Adam became, according to their thought, actual realization in Jesus Christ—the form and type of man, the true Head of the race—and in spite of the havoc and spoiling, which sin had wrought, that original possibility, that divine potentiality, still reappears in every child, who comes now, as Adam did, made in the image of God, with the breath of God in him, and with creative freedom of will to settle his own destiny. Some of the Reformers whom I am here studying centre this image of God, this immense ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Liebers is an authority which never fails, never dies—an authority which willy-nilly we obey and in which we place unbounded trust. In any one of these Registers is a potentiality which can always worst the quibbles and quiddities of lawyers and ward off the miserable technicalities of the law. Any of them, when called upon, can go into court and dictate to the litigants and the attorneys, the jury and the judge. They are the deceased witnesses come to life. And ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... to establish a solid and well-directed public administration; her fiscal revenues, her trade, and the general capitalization of fortunes have reached in a few years an extraordinary development which demonstrates the potentiality of the country. Enjoying public peace, she is using every effort to maintain a policy of frank understanding and friendship with all nations, and sustains the principle of arbitration for the solution of all her international controversies, thus giving evident proof of the rectitude ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... instance, of course, are to be considered all cases of stigmata, both ancient and modern: and then the question is obvious enough: what limits can we place to the powers of the imagination? Has not the imagination the potentiality at least of performing any miracle, however marvelous, however incredible, according to our ordinary standards? As to the decoration of the story, that is a mingling which I venture to think somewhat ingenious of odds and ends of folk ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... If so, the modern savage (or his more gifted ancestors) would have other grounds for his theory of the wandering soul than any ground presented by normal occurrences, ordinary dreams, shadows, and so forth. Again, in human nature there would be (if such things occur) a potentiality of experiences other and stranger than materialism will admit as possible. It will (granting the facts) be impossible to aver that there is nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu. The soul will be not ce qu'un ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... Adam's seed. Country people were less interesting than these New Yorkers, because country people were more independent. New Yorkers never looked at each other, but they felt each other; the atoms of the great mass, though separated by never-closing spaces, were held together by an eternal potentiality. There was a sympathy in the mass of city-folk, unspoken and even unobserved by many, but mighty—it was much more wonderful than the simple, verbal friendship between Jake Zeigler and Mat Carrol, neighbors at Bill's ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... seen inside the nucleus all the machinery necessary to explain how the father hands over his qualities to his children. He insists, equally strongly, that this process is such that no father can hand to his child any qualities which he himself did not have at least in potentiality at his birth. Everything the individual acquires during his lifetime is his own possession, which he may use and develop to the utmost extent, but it dies with him. His children, born after he possesses it, can no more ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... health, and longevity is to be found, for the primitive germ or protoplasm of man cannot be distinguished from that of a quadruped or bird. It is the invisible and incalculable life element that contains the potentiality or possibility of existence as a quadruped or a man, as a virtuous or vicious, and as a long lived or short lived, being. The life element of the germ limits the destiny of the being. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... self-righteousness. It is a gleam of man's potentiality, that makes him truly sublime. There are many Scripture statements that make man pitifully little; but this is because of his present sinful condition. Bye and bye he will rise into his true condition, and then "The holy ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... notice. He would have to ask her later.) "On the other hand, just as the mere possession of functioning eyes does not automatically give one the ability to read, neither does the genetic inheritance of Guesser potentialities enable one to make accurate, useful Guesses. To make this potentiality into an ability requires years ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust ourselves to his condition. Our minds revolted. To us he was full of potentiality. We knew not what to expect of him next, what fearful thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do. Our experience warranted this state of mind, and we went about our work with anxiety ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Potentiality and actuality are correlative terms corresponding to matter and form. Matter is the potential, form is the actual. Whatever potentialities an object has it owes to its matter. Its actual essence is due to its form. A thing free from matter would be all that it is at once. It would not ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... birth the dawn of mind is as slow as it is wonderful. To begin with, there is in the ovum and early embryo no nervous system at all, and it develops very gradually from simple beginnings. Yet as mentality cannot come in from outside, we seem bound to conclude that the potentiality of it—whatever that means—resides in the individual from the very first. The particular kind of activity known to us as thinking, feeling, and willing is the most intimate part of our experience, known to us directly apart from our senses, and the possibility of that must ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... now are. The tourist sleeper, with its comfortable berths, its clean linen, its kitchen range, and its dusky attendant, restrained to an attitude of agreeable deference by his anticipation of a gratuity, was a grey atom of potentiality in the brain of an unknown genius. Even the colonist car, which has done noble service in later days in the peopling of the Prairie West, was only in the early stages of its evolution. The purpose of immigrant trains was to move people. ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... claims that this one is a something called Matter—self-existent—eternal—infinite—containing within itself the potentiality of Matter, Energy and Mind. Another school, closely allied to the materialists, claim that this One is a something called Energy, of which Matter and Mind are but modes of motion. The Idealists claim that ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... may be milk or venom to other minds; but, in either case, it is something which the producer has had the use of and can part with. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... object, an empty consciousness, in consequence, cannot be conceived; it would be a zero—a pure nothingness; it could not manifest itself. We might admit, in strictness, that such a consciousness might exist virtually as a power which is not exercised, a reserve, a potentiality, or a possibility of being; but we cannot comprehend that this power can realise or actualize itself. There is therefore no actual consciousness without ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... almost had a stroke trying to get me out of town. Now I knew why. She was caught in this thing and wanted to save me. Four days ago she had probably not fully realized the potentiality for evil of the invention, but by the time I showed up she ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham
... is a negation of power, and contrariwise the potentiality of existence is a power, as is obvious. If, then, that which necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings are more powerful than a being absolutely infinite, which is obviously absurd; therefore, either ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... constantly rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well enough from having tried to read him in days when I was willing to try reading any one. But I was meaning then to be rare every moment myself, and out of the riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a wealth of poetry which he had not actually enjoyed; and in this generous emotion ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... judge intelligently and to note those little signs that are, to the intelligent, the essentials, full of significance. She had concealed her amazement from Branch, but amazed she was, less at his news of Craig as a personage full of potentiality than at her own failure, through the inexcusable, manlike stupidity of personal pique, to discern the real man behind his mannerisms. "No wonder he has pushed so far, so fast," reflected she; for she appreciated that in a man ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... To speculate further on that subject would be futile. It never had existed, as far as he could see, except on paper, and there it remained, a mere potentiality. The single-handed disruption of it proved how utterly deprived it was of cohesion and organization. That one man, alone and in disguise, could have acquainted himself thoroughly with the whole proceeding, ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... archaic group—the most ancient of the terrestrial crust, and consisting (in Brazil) chiefly of gneiss, mica schists and granite, solidified into their present form by intense eruptive phenomena and dissolved—not by immersion in ocean waters, as some suppose, but by deluges of such potentiality as the human mind can ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... self-realisation; but what is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... office. In spite of himself he could not entirely take Bennett's point of view. Several of the men at Eureka headquarters looked interesting—he would like to know them—perhaps more than interesting, the potentiality of ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... path for every man, which being put into plain English—which is better—is just that by the death of Christ every man can, if he will, go to God, and live beside Him. And our faith is our personal laying hold of that great sacrifice and treading on that path. It turns the 'potentiality' into an actuality, the possibility into a fact. If we believe on Him who died on the cross for us all, then by that way we come to God, than which there is none other given ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... identical species, which have either full-sized and perfect wings, or mere rudiments of membrane, which not rarely lie under wing-covers firmly soldered together; and in these cases it is impossible to doubt, that the rudiments represent wings. Rudimentary organs sometimes retain their potentiality: this occasionally occurs with the mammae of male mammals, which have been known to become well developed and to secrete milk. So again in the udders of the genus Bos, there are normally four developed and two rudimentary teats; but the latter in our ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... better word is termed "personality;" something elusive and evasive, that cannot easily be defined or explained, but nevertheless remains the essential quality that distinguishes its possessor from every other human being. But while all may have the potentiality for some distinct and special attribute, unfortunately for by far the greater number this is never developed or expressed, and they pass through their uneventful, monotonous existence, without even realizing their capacity for ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... is divisible in fact is divisible in potentiality also; but not all quantities which are divisible in potentiality are divisible ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... you. Unanarchic, disciplined at all points, you might then, I should say, with supreme composure, let France, and the whole World at its back, try what they could do upon you and the unique little Island you are so lucky as to live in?—Foolish mortals: what Potentiality of Battle, think you (not against France only, but against Satanas and the Ministers of Chaos generally), would a poor Friedrich Wilhelm, not to speak of better, have got out of such a Possession, had it been his to put in drill! And drill is not of soldiers only; though perhaps ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... domesticity and an actual menace to the home life of America—these did not weight with him. There was only one question for him to settle: Was the ballot something which, in its demonstrated value or in its potentiality, would serve the best ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... sexual function alone for her support. So much is this the case, that even when she does not in any way perform this function there is still a curious tendency for the kudos of the function still to hang about her, and for her mere potentiality in the direction of a duty which she may never fulfil, to be confused in her own estimation and that of society with the actual fulfilment of that function. Under the mighty aegis of the woman who bears and rears offspring and in other directions labours greatly and actively for her race, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... widened until men began to feel that this Infinite Being was already in every one of them, and that it rested with themselves to remove the sensual obstructions and reveal him in their own lives. In every individual there was, they realised, the potentiality of Buddha—that is to ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... than their fellows, did not fail to perceive the material advantages to be reaped from a religious system, quite apart from the religion itself, in the power of union and its pecuniary potentiality. As a result thereof there came into existence, at the close of Spanish rule, the Philippine Independent Church, more popularly known as the Aglipayan Church. Some eight or nine years before the Philippine Rebellion ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... family is worthy of our careful study. It demands painstaking attention, both because of its immediate importance to human happiness and because of its potentiality for the future of society. The kind of home and the character of family life which will best serve the world and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or supposition. We are under the highest ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... mere pleasing of the ear, from its random, but multitudinous summonses of the efferent activity, which at its vague challenges stirs unceasingly in faintly tumultuous irrelevancy. In this way, music arouses aimlessly, but splendidly, the sheer, as yet unfulfilled, potentiality within us." (W. Copies, The Process of Human Experience, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... experience, as a practical measure to give men their chance, their own, in Greenstream. The cost to himself would be small—his money had faded from his conceptions, his necessities, as absolutely as though it had been fairy gold dissolved by the touch of a magic wand. He had never realized its potentiality; lately he had ignored it with the contempt of supreme indifference. Now an actual employment for ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... made may now be bought at a toy-shop for I suppose half a crown, and yet what a potentiality lay in that "glazed optic tube," as Milton called it. Away he went with it to Venice and showed it to the Signoria, to their great astonishment. "Many noblemen and senators," says Galileo, "though of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... devoid of all difference does not, of course, possess these two characteristics it follows that it is as devoid of intelligence as a pot may be.—Let it then be assumed that although a thing devoid of all distinction does not actually possess these characteristics, yet it has the potentiality of possessing them!—But if it possesses the attribute of potentiality, it is clear that you abandon your entire theory of a substance devoid of all distinction!—Let us then admit, on the authority of Scripture, that the universal substance ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... suppose that the Artificer was a free agent, and that he voluntarily, and in full view of the consequences, engineered the conjunction of atoms from which consciousness arose. He could have let it alone, he could have suffered life to remain an abortive, slumbering potentiality, like the fire in a piece of flint; yet he deliberately clashed the flint and steel and kindled the torch which was to be handed on, not only from generation to generation, but from species to species, through all the stages of a toilsome, slaughterous, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... potentiate mingling," that is, from the matter endowed with the potentiality of becoming informed by the vegetative ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... of the formal relationship an intimacy never developed, and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early cult as exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real affection is not present until a much later day. The potentiality of the gods always overshadowed their personality. But this was not all loss, for the absence of personality prevented the growth of those gross myths which are usually found among primitive peoples, for ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... man there are a multitude of others, equally gifted in some respect, but wanting that mysterious "Open Sesame" which would discover their hidden mental riches, arouse them from their accustomed inferiority to their best selves, and transform potentiality into accomplishment. So it comes about that most of us are gems that shine but to illumine the "dark unfathomed caves of ocean," flowers born ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... the origin of evil is more of a mystery to me now than when I wrote that essay! But I still think that we are fighting a real being, one whom {174} we can best describe as personal. His will, it seems to me, must be given to him by God. He has identified it with a hitherto unrealised potentiality for disobedience. In plain language, his will is free, and therefore capable of resisting God. I should like to have a talk with you some day about it. But, as you see, the problem is beyond me. ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... When we turn from even the best of these, in its best and highest embodiment, to the picture that is put before us in the Gospels, how small does it seem! We feel that they all fall short of their ideal, and that there is a greater promise and potentiality of perfection in the root than has ever yet ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... the truth that our theory depends essentially not upon action or talk, but upon the quality and rationale of thought. It is a question of Potentiality, rather than of Dynamics. It is the process of reasoning which concerns us, not its translation into conduct. A man may be a devoted supporter of Mrs. Grundy and yet be a Sulphite, if he has, in his own mind, reached an original conclusion that society needs her safeguards. ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue! A Mrs. Manning "dying game,"—alas, is not that the foiled potentiality of a kind of heroine too? Not a heroic Judith, not a mother of the Gracchi now, but a hideous murderess, fit to be the mother of hyenas! To such extent can potentialities be foiled. Education, kingship, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... tempered in the fires of war's Hell, sensed this tremendous potentiality of death as the tiny handful of white men galloped on and on behind Bara Miyan. Here the Legion was, hemmed and pent by countless hordes of fanatics whom any chance word or look, construed as a religious insult, might lash to fury. Five men remained outside. The rest were now as drops of water ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... painted the Devil hideous. But Satan is not such a fool. Champagne and Martinis do not taste like Gregory powder, nor was St. Anthony tempted by shrivelled hags. Paganism can be gay, and passion look like love. Moreover, still more truly, Christ could see the potentiality of virtue in Mary Magdalene and of strength in Simon called Peter. The conventional religious world ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... a combat unrelated to other incidents, the conception and the {p.056} execution of the attack were admirable; while in the matter of military dynamic energy, to whatever source that shown on the one side or the other may be attributed, the potentiality of the attacking force was demonstrated to be greater than that ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... itself, in a certain deep and true sense, more instinct with the mystery of existence than any definite image or any definite thought can possibly be. It seems to contain in it the potentiality of all thoughts, and to stream in upon us from some Platonic "beyond-world" where the high secret archetypes of all created forms ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... such things are!—and probably, so ran his thoughts, will always be. We are all acting. Each man or woman carries this potentiality of a double life—it is only a question ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exactly the influence of alcohol as a cause of crime will, from the nature of the case, never be possible; but this much is certain, that EVERY cause finds in it a strengthening contributary of considerable potentiality. ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... employers or by new ones. There will be much to be gained by an independent shop manned by non-union labor, and the danger of this makes a trade union more conservative than it would otherwise be. The chief potentiality in the case is that of the new and independent shop, and if the way is open for this to appear, the range of difference between the pay of favored laborers and that of others is greatly reduced. The ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... society, of a more or less supernatural kind, to be raised on the ruins of all present institutions. The poor were called, but the rich were called also, and perhaps even the heathen; for there was in all men, even in all nature (this is the one touch of speculative feeling in the gospel), a precious potentiality of goodness. All were essentially amiable, though accidentally wretched and depraved; and by the magic of a new faith and hope this soul of goodness in all living things might be freed from the hideous ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... persevered, and for evil in those who fell, and consequently those of the higher angels who remained steadfast became better than the others, and those who fell became worse. But man's is a rational nature, with which it is consistent to be sometimes in potentiality and sometimes in act: so that it is not necessarily borne wholly whithersoever it is borne, and where there are greater natural gifts there may be less effort, and vice versa. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... better signature for his books than 'Henry S. Knight,' and he decided to adopt it in his next work. Further, it had enormously quickened in him the sense of his mission in the world, of his duty to his colossal public, and his potentiality for good. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... if there is anything in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing. But again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and potentially nothing: for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a limitation. If the infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as incomplete and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic feature by which it can be distinguished from anything else ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... hence foreign to all the passivity and contingency of matter;[18] concludes from motion in the world that there must be a First Mover;[19] and asserts the actuality of the eternal as opposed to potentiality; but these arguments are so blended together, and take each one so much from the others, that I cannot be convinced that Aristotle had ever clearly ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... by and through the fellowship in living and worship, but through the ordained channels of grace known as the Sacraments. In accordance with the sacramental system, every material thing is proclaimed as possessing in varying degree sacramental potentiality, while seven great Sacraments were instituted to be, each after its own fashion, a special channel for the inflowing of the power of the Divine Actuality. Each is a symbol, just as so many other created things are, or may become, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the very last thing the powers that were contemplated even as a remote potentiality. For them the monarch in exile was dead; and the sooner his memory was buried the better. Accordingly, a police circular, issued on 26 May, prohibited conversations favourable to the ex-king, pictures of the ex-king, songs in honour of the ex-king, cheers for the ex-king. And, these regulations ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... history; and that these have been developed under conditions which were first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the providence of God. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the Guide and Educator of our race. As "the offspring of God," humanity is not a bare, indeterminate potentiality, but a living energy, an active reason, having definite qualities, and inheriting fundamental principles and necessary ideas which constitute it "the image and likeness of God." And though it has suffered a moral lapse, and, in the exercise of its freedom, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... act; and then his thoughts returned to Susan Brundon. Jasper Penny saw her blue gaze lifted to his face, the hesitating smile; he felt again the pervading influence of her delicate yet essentially unshrinking spirit. She would possess an enormous steadfastness of purpose, he decided; a potentiality of immovable self-sacrifice. Yet she was the gentlest person alive. An unusual and resplendent combination ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... wounded and do wound the heart, signify the innumerable individuals and species of things, in which shine the splendour of Divine Beauty, according to their degrees, and whence the affection for the good, well proposed and well apprehended warms us. The which through the causes of potentiality and actuality, of possibility and of effect, crucify and console, give the sense of sweetness and also make the bitter to be felt. But where the entire affection is all turned towards God, that is towards the Idea of Ideas, from the light of intelligible things, the mind becomes exalted ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... his subsequent poetic system, shoots in rapid succession waves of almost consuming energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest light and heat, swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time of sane and beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of the others is there the building-up of a fair verbal structure, a symmetrical piece of mechanism, whose last stone is implied and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the growth of culture are proofs to man of his superiority to the world of sense impressions. This denial of the sufficiency of the world of sense in the evolution of the human soul, on the one hand, and the affirmation of the potentiality of a higher world of spirit on the other hand, constitute the nucleus of the Christian religion. Its superiority consists in giving their rights to both worlds, and also in showing that they do not possess the same value. This essential nature of Christianity ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the potentiality of intellectual development and work which the countryman brings with him on his entry to town life is thwarted and depressed by the progressive physical enfeeblement. Most of the best and strongest intellectual work done in the towns ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... surface air intensely cooled over the continental and Barrier areas, and the edge of this cold region lapped by warmer air from the southern limits of Lockyer's cyclones. This would produce a condition of unstable equilibrium, with great potentiality for movement. Since, as we have found, volumes of cold air at different temperatures are very loath to mix, the condition could not be relieved by any gradual process, but continues until the stream is released by some minor cause, when, the ball once started, a huge disturbance ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... recognized a desperate earnestness. There was something he wanted at any cost, but he was going to be gentle with her. She had felt before the potentiality of his gentleness, and she doubted her power to resist it. She fanned up all the flame of anger that had swept her into the room. She reminded herself that the greatest gentleness might only be a blind; that there was nothing stronger than wanting something very much, and that ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... not speaking without book in this matter. Some of my best Officers to-day have been even such as they. There is an infinite potentiality of capacity lying latent in our Provincial Tap-rooms and the City Gin Palaces if you can but get them soundly saved, and even short of that, if you can place them in conditions where they would no longer be liable to be sucked back into their old disastrous habits, you may ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... I have said, little appreciation of the invisible or what does not appeal strongly to his senses; he cannot understand, for instance, that a small bag of chemical fertilizer, in the form of a grey, inoffensive powder, can contain as great a potentiality for the nutrition of crops as a cartload of evil-smelling material from the farmyard; nor is he aware that, in the case of the latter, he has to load and unload 90 pounds or thereabouts of worthless water in ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... of the temple, they could look out into the crowded streets, in which were packed untold numbers of pilgrims, all pressing towards the great square plaza in front of the temple. No guards were to be seen; the solemnity of the occasion was sufficient to keep order. But the terrific potentiality of that semi-fanatical host did not cause the doctor's ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... have not allowed them to penetrate enough into the soul, to think them very significant. The stimulation of fireworks, or of kaleidoscopic effects, seems to us trivial. But everything which has a varied content has a potentiality of form and also of meaning. The form will be enjoyed as soon as attention accustoms us to discriminate and recognize its variations; and meaning will accrue to it, when the various emotional values of these forms ally ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... shall find her method throughout. There is no curiosity in the Elemental kingdom, if I may so call the bodies of Air, Water, Earth, that are comparable in form to those of Minerals, Air and Water having no form at all, unless a potentiality to be form'd into Globules; and the clods and parcels of Earth are all irregular, whereas in Minerals she does begin to Geometrize, and practise, as 'twere, the first principles of Mechanicks, shaping them ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... Phidias or Michel Angelo choose, but ivory, bronze, basalt, marble. It is quite the same whether we seek expression or uses. The stream must be dammed before it will drive wheels; the steam compressed ere it will compel the piston. In fine, Potentiality combines with Hindrance to constitute active Power. Man, in order to obtain instrumentalities and uses, blends his will and intelligence with a force that vigorously seeks to pursue its own separate free course; and while this resists him, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the conception of Life as the sum-total of all its undistributed powers, being as yet none of these in particular, but all of them in potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies all our ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... within the next few months, Eight Regiments, an increase of, say, 16,000 men. It would appear he means to keep an eye on the practicalities withal; means to have a Fighting-Apparatus of the utmost potentiality, for one thing! Here ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that he who rejoiceth in his faith is, in so doing, in unity with the Highest. For true faith is the seed of light, and the seed of true light is in itself the potentiality of that which ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... highly developed brain, and good reproductive faculties are essential; because the first demand of evolution is plenty of material. It does not follow that our typical poor man is more of an animal, is less evolved, or has a smaller potentiality to evolve, because he has preserved better the animal faculties which lie at ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing. But, again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and potentially nothing; for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a limitation. If the Infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as incomplete, and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic feature by which it can be distinguished from ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... the air is charged with potentiality of new life, hardly dreamt of by our faith on its low stagnant levels. Here are heights to be stormed by faithful unself-seeking love. This way lies deliverance and new creation, and the breaking of prison bars and the turning of our captivity such as shall fill all ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... psychological differentiations present too many and constantly-shifting divergencies and re-divergences—exceptional branchings in one direction, and still more exceptional in another—to admit of any sufficiently potentiated potentiality for bridge timber. The arch to such a bridge would have to abut, according to Professor Tyndall, on a vital foundation at one end, and spring from undifferentiated sky-mist at ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice' (Lord Lucan's anecdote ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... opened, and in walked a man whose entire presence radiated strength, confidence and the potentiality of instant violence. Dark Kensington was tall and broad-shouldered, clad in dark-blue tunic and baggy trousers. His face was darkly tanned, strong, handsome. His hair was black as midnight. His eyes were startlingly pale in the ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... hear the blunt sound of the falling bull? Or when you read the line Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,[2] doesn't the sound of running horses strike your ears? But this effect, as I said, is uncommon, and hardly to be found in any other poet than Vergil. Thus the chief potentiality of sound, and the most common, lies in charming the ear. It is a slight beauty, yet it is of nature, and for this reason especially agreeable to all classes of people. For there is scarcely any ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... what we regard as the most finished works of nature or of man.** The faith which is born of knowledge, finds its object in an eternal order, bringing forth ceaseless change, through endless time, in endless space; the manifestations of the cosmic energy alternating between phases of potentiality and phases of explication. It may be that, as Kant suggests,*** every cosmic [9] magma predestined to evolve into a new world, has been the no less predestined end ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... moment," he replied. "Is it so with us? Do we not use signs and gestures as well as words? And what do we mean by 'silent converse,' when mind speaks to mind and soul to soul without the intervention of spoken language? We have the potentiality of telepathic intercommunication, but we have not yet developed it into a kinetic form as these people have done. Ah, when will men begin to appreciate ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... others. He took for the text of his lectures the treatise of Aristotle, "De Anima," and this gave him the opportunity of introducing and discussing the deepest questions—upon the Origin and Destiny of Humanity; The Soul, is it Matter or Spirit? Potentiality or Reality? Individual or Universal? Mortal or Eternal? Is Man alone gifted with Soul, or are all beings equally so? Bruno's system was in his mind complete and mature; he taught that everything in Nature has a soul, one universal mind, penetrates and moves all things; the world itself ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... his apartment, and in that time he had neither been in their house nor written. Linda had expected this; she was without the desire to see or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her; as a man, a potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was a piece with her memories, the triumphs of her young days. Without an actual knowledge of the moment of its accomplishment she had passed over the border of that land, leaving it complete and fair and radiant for her lingering view. Whether or not she had ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... among his pottering little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto fancied to be the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the lords of earth even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop: below, shod with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the potentiality of the armed heel. Instead of which — ! How fallen was his first fair hope of the world! And even when reconciled at last to the dynasty of the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested round the clangorous walls of Troy — some touch of an ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... essential perfection of the Absolute Good could not but be possible, that is, have a potential being, but never ought to have been actual, did nevertheless strive to be actual?—But this involved an impossibility; and it actualized only its own potentiality. ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... tore asunder Church and State; but left unhappy Colombia prone and bleeding. It externalized a mighty protest of enlightenment against Rome's dictates in temporal affairs. And, as has before happened when that irresistible potentiality, the people, has been stirred into action, the Church was disestablished, its property confiscated, and its ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... effort to find a satisfactory solution of the problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the day as it seeks enlightenment on the potentiality of the future life. The stage presents plays based on spiritualistic manifestations or upon supernatural healing or miraculous intervention. Many recent novels have either psychical phenomena for ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... speaking-tubes, and telegraph-dials that put him in communication with every man on the boat, each one of whom had his part to play at the proper moment, but not one of whom could see or know the result. The work to be done was in Metcalf's hands and brain, and, considering its potentiality, it was ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... nothing-into a word and a superstition." I cannot but feel that contemporary definitions of value that omit reference to hedonic differences e.g. that of Professor Brown (Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. II, p. 32): "Value is degree of adequacy of a potentiality to the realization of the effect by virtue of which it is a potentiality"-miss the real meaning of "value." We do, indeed, speak occasionally of x as having value as a means to y, when y is not good or a means to a good. But that seems to me a misuse of the word.] We ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Moslem morality which can be set over against a mountain of crimes; a considerable deposit of common sense. And the first fact of common sense is the common bond of men. There is indeed in the Moslem character also a deep and most dangerous potentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may be said later. Fanaticism sounds like the flat contrary of common sense; yet curiously enough they are both sides of the same thing. The fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because he does take ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... wealth and fashion as jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in few other words but la fatigue, there might surely come a cry from the vast mass of common humanity from the beginning—et nous? It is this potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole pressure of that love of love which is the youth ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... up to 1500 diameters has given birth to new sciences. But still higher magnification is demanded in unravelling the mystery of movements associated with the simplest type of life as seen in plants. Greatest potentiality in life is often latent; the gigantic banian tree grows out of a thing which is smaller than the mustard seed. Within the seed-coat the dormant life remains in safety, protected from dangers outside. The seeds may thus be subjected without harm to cold so intense as will ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... was to flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells |
