"Simplification" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a simplification of the collection of the King's duty on tobacco, the cost of that collection can be reduced even to five per cent., or a million and a half, instead of twenty-five millions; the price to the consumer will be reduced from three ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... have anticipated the form it was about to take. This revelation, too, will be as unexpected as it will be new—it will come in the night as a thief; the 'quo modo' I can not even attempt to guess, except that it will take the form of some vast simplification of the myriad and ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to TI and this change has been almost universally adopted by teachers of sight-singing in this country. The more elaborate tonic-sol-fa spelling of the diatonic syllables (DOH, LAH, etc.), has not, however, been favorably received in this country and the tendency seems to be toward still further simplification rather than toward elaboration. It is probable that further changes in both spelling and pronunciation will be made in the near future, one such change that seems especially desirable being some other syllable than RE for the second tone of the ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... sixty thousand words, though one may develop a theory adequately, one cannot pretend to develop it exhaustively. My book is a simplification. I have tried to make a generalisation about the nature of art that shall be at once true, coherent, and comprehensible. I have sought a theory which should explain the whole of my aesthetic experience ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... time, the closing days of February, the Judiciary Committee was fairly swamped with important measures. The Railroad Regulation bills, the Initiative Amendment, the measures providing for the simplification of methods of criminal procedure and other bills of scarcely less importance were pending before that committee. Prompt action on the Local Option bill was out of the question. And, although a majority of the committee favored the passage of the bill, the minority which was against it took ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... sense begins in self-simplification. The feeling, willing, seeing self is to move from the various and the analytic to the simple and the synthetic: a sentence which may cause hard breathing and mopping of the brows on the part of the practical man. Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... the generation of powers, the rules for multiplication and division of simple quantities, but he does not treat of the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of compound quantities. He then proceeds to discuss various artifices for the simplification of equations, giving methods which are still in common use. In the body of the work he displays considerable ingenuity in reducing his problems to simple equations, which admit either of direct solution, or fall into the class known as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... might be a privilege, was a privilege with a penalty attached. But the tables made such things easy; half the Baden world lived by the tables. Roderick tried them and found that at first they smoothed his path delightfully. This simplification of matters, however, was only momentary, for he soon perceived that to seem to have money, and to have it in fact, exposed a good-looking young man to peculiar liabilities. At this point of his friend's narrative, Rowland was reminded ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... held dearer; generally he felt as if he had turned from them with a high, altruistic aim. The practical expression of his life was that it was enough to provide well for his family; to have cultivated tastes, and to gratify them to the extent of his means; to be rather distinguished, even in the simplification of his desires. He believed, and his wife believed, that if the time ever came when he really wished to make a sacrifice to the fulfilment of the aspirations so long postponed, she would be ready to join with heart ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... browns and reds, greens and blues endowing its characters with glowing fervour, while Krishna and the cowgirls, with their sharp robust forms and great intent eyes, display a brusque vitality and an eager rapturous vigour. A certain simplification of structure—each picture possessing one or more rectangular compartments—enhances this effect while the addition of swirling trees studded with flowers imbues each wild encounter with a surging vegetative rhythm. Krishna is no longer the tepid well-groomed youth of Mughal tradition, ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... political reforms are needed no registration reform worth having, but principle of adult suffrage of all grown men and women carries simplification ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... suecessfully by the employment of signs; because in these cases the signs themselves accurately represent the abstractness of the relations. Such sciences deal only with relations, and not with objects; hence greater simplification ensures greater accuracy. But no sooner do we quit this sphere of abstractions to enter that of concrete things, than the use of symbols becomes a source of weakness. Vigorous and effective minds habitually deal with concrete images. This is notably the case with poets and great literates. Their ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... however, seen a wonderful change. The difficulties had been mostly those of methods of work, and with the ninth decade of the century these methods were simplified by Robert Koch. This simplification of method for the first time placed this line of investigation within the reach of scientists who did not have the genius of Pasteur. It was now possible to get pure cultures easily, and to obtain with ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... his children of the best medical attention and education, one may eliminate those invidious sources of expense which benefit neither the children nor anyone else,—overdressing, for instance. A simplification of life would not only enable superior people to have larger families, but would often be an advantage to the ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... for their demands, needless to say, very few cottages were built. With the advent of the Local Government Act and the extension of the franchise, the labourer was now able to insist on a speeding-up of building operations. But the Labourers' Act needed many amendments, a simplification and cheapening of procedure, an extension of taxing powers, an enlargement of the allotment up to an acre and, where the existing abode of the labourers was insanitary, an undeniable claim to a new home. Moderate ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... redemption have to be found by taxation, and so the borrowing process merely postpones taxation from the war period to the peace period. During the war period taxation can be raised comparatively easily owing to the patriotic stimulus and the simplification of the industrial problem which is provided by the Government's insatiable demand for commodities. When the days of peace return, however, there will be very grave disturbance and dislocation in industry, and it will have once more to face the problem of providing goods, not for a Government ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... collision worked as a sort of transformation scene,—the interior of a signal-box changes into the site of a fatal accident—creates much enthusiasm, but the winsome if vindictive WILLARD still remains the centre of attraction. In the last Act a good deal of gunpowder is burned advantageously to the simplification of the issue. It is scarcely necessary to say that, when the Curtain falls, what remains of Virtue is triumphant, and all that is left of Vice is on the road to justly merited punishment. The Pointsman is likely to remain on the line of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... state of things when H. A. Lorentz entered upon the scene. He brought theory into harmony with experience by means of a wonderful simplification of theoretical principles. He achieved this, the most important advance in the theory of electricity since Maxwell, by taking from ether its mechanical, and from matter its electromagnetic qualities. As in empty space, so too in the interior of material bodies, ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... If you are in love with repose, here is your occasion: change with me. I am too blind to read, hence no reading; I am too weak to walk, hence no walking; I am not allowed to speak, hence no talking; but the great simplification has yet to be named; for, if this goes on, I shall soon have nothing to eat - and hence, O Hallelujah! hence no eating. The offer is a fair one: I have not sold myself to the devil, for I could never find him. I am married, but so are you. I sometimes write ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mind has always sought order and simplification of the external world; in chemistry the fruitful classifications were Dobereiner's Triads (1829), Newland's law of octaves (1865), and Mendeleev's periodic law (1869). The chart expressing this periodic law seemed to indicate the maximum extent of the elements and gave good hints "where ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... says Erasmus, is overloaded with human constitutions and opinions and scholastic dogmas, and overburdened with the tyrannical authority of orders, and because of all this the strength of gospel doctrine is flagging. Faith requires simplification, he argued. What would the Turks say of our scholasticism? Colet wrote to him one day: 'There is no end to books and science. Let us, therefore, leave all roundabout roads and go by a short ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... philosophical and constructive problem could be done once for all, and he worked the results out simply under an organised kinetic government. But what seems to be merely an addition to the difficulty may in the end turn out to be a simplification, just as the introduction of a fresh term to an intricate irreducible mathematical expression will at times bring it ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... empire, but eating and drinking, and especially eating, are always cropping up; one is perpetually being reminded of them in one way or another, and it is significant that when the Cistercian revival began, one of the chief reforms aimed at was the rigorous simplification of the meals and the curtailing the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... He had, "as he deserved, the reputation of being the best nisi prius lawyer in the state."(4) After watching the gifted but ill-prepared young attorney during several years, observing the power he had of simplification and convincingness in statement, taking the measure of his scrupulous honesty—these were ever Lincoln's strong cards as a lawyer—Logan made him the surprising offer of a junior partnership, which was instantly accepted. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... judged, and the philosophic partisans of theology would perhaps have been wiser to keep clear of pretensions to prove their master thesis. They might have been content to keep it as an emotional creation, an imaginative hypothesis, a noble simplification of the chimeras of the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... to work completely to reorganize the church. The anxiety for simplification and complete uniformity shows itself in the reckless way that it dealt with this most venerable institution of France, the customs of which were hallowed not only by age, but by religious veneration. The one hundred and thirty-four ancient bishoprics, some of which dated back ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... supporting diverse physical conditions, may have led to a similar result. With some groups the tendency seems to have been almost continuously to greater and greater specialisation, while with others a tendency to simplification and degradation has resulted in such plants as the grasses ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... chapter is headed "Degradation and Simplification of the Animal Chain as we proceed downwards from the most complex to the ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries, and in the succeeding one, perhaps, by proper simplification and reduction to tables, furnish their ready and daily aid to the artist and ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... a prominent part in the discussions on that measure, his time being fully occupied with the financial and fiscal policy, but he put forth the weight of his influence in favour of the Bill. His principal efforts, during his tenure of office, were directed to the simplification and amendment of the Customs Act, and to an ineffectual attempt to negotiate a commercial treaty with France. After the dissolution in 1831 he was re-elected for Dover. He was, however, also elected—without any canvass or solicitation ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... these editors print everything they possibly can in large capital letters. But they do this, not because it is startling, but because it is soothing. To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell. The nursery ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... myself, "this appears to be a very elegant sort of sketch-club, with evening dress and all the society appurtenances. What did Yakoff Petrovitch mean by telling me that a plain street gown was the proper thing to wear? This enforced 'simplification' is rather trying to the feminine nerves; but I will not beat ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... neighbour's. Yet history should be rather an examination of facts than an examination of conscience. And historically Richelieu's policies had had quite something to say in the creation of Prussia; the conscript armies of the French Revolution had first made Europe into an armed camp. It was an undue simplification to insist exclusively on The Crimes ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... could alone establish and maintain it as an international first meridian, was deprived of its original characteristic by the geographer Delisle, who, to simplify the figures, placed it at 20 degrees in round numbers west of Paris. This unfortunate simplification abandoned entirely the principle of impersonality. It was no longer then an independent meridian; it was the meridian of Paris disguised. The consequences were soon felt. The meridian of Ferro, which has subsequently been considered ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... political. They lie far deeper than the national squabbles of the day. A thousand years hence those national results may matter little, but the religious result will rule the world. That religious result is the reform of the decadent Christianity of to-day, its simplification, its purification, and its reinforcement by the facts of spirit communion and the clear knowledge of what lies beyond the exit-door of death. The shock of the war was meant to rouse us to mental and moral earnestness, to give us the courage to tear away venerable shams, and to force ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... presented that at first sight it appears scarcely possible to make it the basis of practical study. But on further examination it will be seen that by applying the usual analytical method the whole subject is susceptible of much simplification. We must in short attempt to reach some system of classification; that is, we must see if it is not possible to group the variations into some well-founded categories. With a subject so complex and intangible ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... there may be associations and fraternities for research in pure science; associations for the teaching and simplification of languages; associations for promoting and watching education; associations for the discussion of political problems and the determination of right policies. In all these ways men may multiply their use by union. Only when associations seek to control things of belief, to dictate formulae, restrict ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly, hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the material universe, all is ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... inconsequent words and contradictory actions? Nothing less remote than the true cause will serve, nothing else is firmly rooted in reality. Is that man expressing what he feels or is he paying out what he thinks he is expected to feel? Have I pushed simplification as far as it will go? Are there no trappings, no overtones, nothing but what is essential to express my vision of reality? And, above all, is my vision absolutely sharp and sure? These were the questions ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... L'humanite d'abord materielle et grossiere, ne pouvait dans les langues encore toutes concretes, exprimer la pensee abstraite, qu'en la realisant, en lui donnant un corps, une personalite humaine, un nom propre. Le meme besoin do simplification, si naturel a la faiblesse, fit aussi designer une collection d'individus par un nom d'homme. Cet homme mythique, ce fils de la pensee populaire, exprima a la fois le peuple et l'idee du peuple. Romulus c'etait la force, et le peuple de la force; Juda, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... ideal world of the great philosophers, which it reconstructs from its central point, and to prepare him for the study (which, of course, even the best exposition cannot replace) of the works of the thinkers themselves. Its excessive simplification of problems is not of great moment in the first introduction to a system [English translation of vol. iii. book 2 (1st ed.), A Commentary on Kant's Critick of the Pure Reason, by J.P. Mahaffy, London, 1866; vol. i. part 1 and part 2, book 1, Descartes and his School, by J, P. Gordy, New ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... Continuing their simplification of the laws of association, these older psychologists showed that resemblance and contrast belonged together, since to be similar things must have something in common, and to be contrasted also two things must have something in common. You ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... I have tried to disengage the various elements of the craft, one from another, and to look at them separately; and this has involved much rude simplification of matters that are by no means simple. I have chosen a novel for the sake of some particular aspect, and I have disregarded all else in it; I could but seek for the book which seemed to display that aspect most plainly, and keep it in view from that one ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... agricultural, mining, energy, tourism, and manufacturing sectors. Detailed governmental control of economic affairs has gradually lessened over the past decade with increasing privatization of trade and commerce, simplification of the tax structure, and a cautious approach to debt. Real growth has averaged 4.5% in 1991-96, and inflation has been moderate. Growth in tourism and increased trade have been key elements in this solid record. Agricultural production accounted for a major portion of growth ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... have disappeared for a considerable time from the church music is not at all remarkable, for in the first steps toward regulating the liturgy simplification was a prime requisite. Thus in the centuries before Gregory the plain chant gained complete ascendancy in the church and under him it acquired a systematization which had in it ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... repeatedly and habitually before we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and, suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... human thought, due to the innate power of reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise simplification. Let us try to trace in this historic fact the classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism succeeds ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... all. Eyes without lenses like those possessed by some animals, undoubtedly give only a consciousness of diffused light, without the possibility of boundaries or divisions in the field of view. The abstraction of colour from form is therefore by no means an artificial one, since, by a simplification of the organ of sense, one may ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... gifts to civilisation; its weakness is self-evident, and was what made the unity of Greece impossible. [253] It is this centrifugal tendency which Plato is desirous to cure, by maintaining, over against it, the Dorian influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in society, in culture, in the very physical nature of man. An enemy everywhere to variegation, to what is cunning or "myriad-minded," he sets himself, in mythology, in music, in poetry, in every kind of art, to enforce the ideal of a sort ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... subject of ventilation in general, a great misunderstanding exists. Be it far from me to say anything that will cause either my readers or his chickens to sleep less in the fresh air, yet for the love of truth and for the simplification of the problem of incubation, the real facts about ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... Queen was fond of suggesting amendments in the wording of dispatches relating to India, whilst not altering their sense. My brother tells me that the alterations suggested by the Queen were invariably in the direction of simplification. The Queen had a knack of stripping away unnecessary verbiage and reducing a sentence to its simplest form, in which ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... though he had little sympathy with Utopian speculations, was attracted by the idea of the simplification of society, and met Rousseau so far as to declare that the happiest state was a mean between savage and ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... imprisonment at home or abroad, accompanied with hard labour, or periods of solitary confinement, is the sole threat of any moment which the law holds out against offenders; and it becomes, therefore, of infinite importance to establish an effective prison discipline. We look upon this simplification of our penal operations as an advantage; and we are by no means disposed to favour those inventive gentlemen who would devise new punishments, or revive old ones, for the purpose, it would seem, of having a variety ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... have formed of it. The particular experience that we started with has now been widened so as to embrace all possible impressions or images that sentient beings have formed or may form of the house in question. This first simplification of experience is at the bottom of a large number of elements of speech, the so-called proper nouns or names of single individuals or objects. It is, essentially, the type of simplification which underlies, or forms ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... in me at first to see his reward so meagre, his conquest so mean; but the simplification effected had a charm that I finally felt; it was a forcing-house for the three or four other fine miscarriages to which his scheme was evidently condemned. I limited him to three or four, having had my sharp impression, in spite of the perpetual broad ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... the Homeric poem, because he wished to show how simple its construction really was, apart from the episodes. It is impossible, by any process of reduction and simplification, to get rid of the duality in Beowulf. It has many episodes, quite consistent with a general unity of action, but there is something more than episodes, there is a sequel. It is as if to the Odyssey there had been added some later books telling in full of the old age ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... once a simplification and expansion of Josephus and the Talmud, stories simply told, faithful presentation of the virtues, and not infrequently the vices, of characters sometimes legendary, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... simplification of accounts enables the Minister to perform some capital tricks of financial sleight of hand. Supposing, for instance, the Government wants half a million of scudi for some mysterious purpose, nothing is easier than ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... we to construct a formula for an event? The imperative need of simplification causes us to combine under a single name an enormous mass of minute facts which are perceived in the lump, and between which we vaguely feel that there is a connection (a battle, a war, a reform). The ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... reproduce realistic details. To a certain extent these reforms also operate to simplify stage settings and hence to make a little more possible the quick transitions and the play of viewpoint which I regard as one of the glories of the Elizabethan drama. This simplification, however, is very far from a return to the absolute simplicity of the Elizabethan setting. Moreover, it is doubtful whether the temper of the modern audience is favorable to a great change in this direction. We live in an age of realistic detail and we must yield to the current, while using it, so ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Puritans, moreover, were of two classes. One was a moderate but influential "low-church" group within the "high" State Church, possessed of no desire to separate Church and State, but earnestly insistent on a simplification of the Church ceremonial, the elimination of a number of the vestiges of the old Romish-Church ritual, and particularly the introduction of more preaching into the service. The other class constituted a much more radical group, and had become deeply imbued with Calvinistic thinking. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... diverse economy, with important agricultural, mining, tourism, and manufacturing sectors. Governmental control of economic affairs while still heavy has gradually lessened over the past decade with increasing privatization, simplification of the tax structure, and a prudent approach to debt. Progressive social policies also have helped raise living conditions in Tunisia relative to the region. Real growth, which averaged almost 5% over the past decade, reached 6.3% in 2007 because of development ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... colloquialism descriptive of the attitude of official conservatism. These departments being governed according to the latest bibliographical methods are of merely supplemental value as reference. The Simplification and National Unification of Federal and State statutes has, of course, added greatly to the facility of this branch of ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Simplification is the prophetic watchword in state government today. For cities, the City Manager and the Commission have offered salvation. A few officers only are elected and these are held strictly responsible, sometimes under ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... exception that I probably was very injudicious to call any attention to; and the trouble with you scholars, I find all the way thru, is that you permit those little exceptions to influence you too much. If a good simplification is ever effected, it will be by cutting Gordian knots, and you all of you seem absolutely incapable of anything of the kind. I don't expect anyhow to make much out of a man who will spell "peepl" "peopl". Imagine all this said with a grin, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... weight. To have the alternative forced upon us of admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with its environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with no environment and all relations packed within itself, would be too delicious a simplification. But the purely verbal character of the operation is undisguised. Because the names of finite things and their relations are disjoined, it doesn't follow that the realities named need a deus ex machina from on high to conjoin them. The same ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... their perquisitions in Bleeding Heart Yard that same forenoon. Little peculiarities were easily to be detected by experienced eyes in Mr Doyce's way of managing his affairs, but they almost always involved some ingenious simplification of a difficulty, and some plain road to the desired end. That his papers were in arrear, and that he stood in need of assistance to develop the capacity of his business, was clear enough; but all the results of his undertakings during many years were distinctly set forth, and ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... in a dull and mechanical way, raking together the straws and dust of the street; and he thought that a man might do a great work if he could put a philosophy of life into an accessible shape. The great need was the need of simplification; the world was full of palpitating interests, of beauty, of sweetness, of delight. But many people had no criterion of values; they filled their lives with petty engagements, and smilingly lamented that they had no time to think or read. For such people the sun rose over dewy fields, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... kind of merchandise is fixed at a third above what it bore in 1791: but as no distinction is made between the produce of the country, and articles imported—between the small retailer, who has purchased perhaps at double the rate he is allowed to sell at, and the wholesale speculator, this very simplification renders the whole absurd and inexecutable.—The result was such as might have been expected; previous to the day on which the decree was to take place, shopkeepers secreted as many of their goods as they could; and, when the day ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... improved remarkably, but this was a highly technical discussion. It was two days before Soames had the information he needed firmly in his mind. He made a working drawing of what had to be built. He realized that the drawing itself was a simplification of a much more sophisticated original device. It was adapted to be made out of locally available materials. It was what Fran had made and tried ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated to the one note they ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... doctrine, like that of Greek philosophy or of Spinoza, consists always in substituting for reality, by simplification, ideas or concepts which they think statically in their logical relations, regarding them at the same time as adequate representations and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... in reference to the general history of art. While it is characteristic of the Greek feeling—from which was derived the Italian—to idealise,—and to idealise, be it observed, not only the conceptions of the ideal world but even such material objects as portraits,—by the simplification of forms and the prominence given to the more important parts of a work of art, the early Netherlanders, on the other hand, conferred a portrait-like character upon the most ideal personifications of the Virgin, the Apostles, Prophets, and Martyrs, and in actual ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... OF RELATIONS BETWEEN RECORDS AND PROGRAMMES ON THE WORK.—The most noteworthy result of the closer relations between records and programmes which appear during the evolution of Scientific Management is the fact that they cause constant simplification. The more carefully records are standardized, the simpler becomes the drafting of the programme. As more and more records become standard, the drafting of programmes becomes constantly an ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... the over-simplification of the problem of Americanization by propagandist organizations. We are in constant danger from too simple analysis of problems and too simple as the epigrams that grow up about it. Panaceas usually touch only a part of a problem. It is interesting to watch various types of minds approach the problems ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... epoch—the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile "simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature, since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted, brilliant way of life, which had so much of ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... grandiose effect. They are not so much concerned with the art of words as with the creation of great images informed with magnificence of spirit. They are not lesser artists but greater, for there is a greater art in the simplification of form in the statue of Memnon than there is in the intricate detail of a bronze by Benvenuto Cellini. Standish O'Grady had in his best moments that epic wholeness and simplicity, and the figure ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... pious fancies of men who knew no science, and very little about evidence of any kind. What I want is just a simple and beautiful principle of living, such as I feel thrills through the words of Christ. The Prodigal Son—that's almost enough for me! It is simplification that I want, and independence. Of course I see that if that isn't what a man wants, if he requires that something or someone should be infallible, then he does require a good deal of argument and information and history. But though I don't object to people who want all that, it isn't what ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a magnified and a simplified view of life, we shall find that comedy is capable of furnishing us with more information than real life on this particular part of our subject. Perhaps we ought even to carry simplification still farther, and, going back to our earliest recollections, try to discover, in the games that amused us as children, the first faint traces of the combinations that make us laugh as grown-up persons. We ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... is more complex than any one of these truths taken singly—that only after many of these single truths have been acquired does the generalisation ease the memory and help the reason—and that to a mind not possessing these single truths it is necessarily a mystery. Thus confounding two kinds of simplification, teachers have constantly erred by setting out with "first principles": a proceeding essentially, though not apparently, at variance with the primary rule; which implies that the mind should be introduced to principles through the medium of examples, and so should be led from the particular ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... In the first five chapters there are numerous emendations, very few of which, however, affect the meaning to any appreciable extent, being mainly concerned with the excision of redundancies and the simplification of style. I imagine that by the time he had reached the end of the fifth chapter Butler realised that the corrections he had made were not of sufficient importance to warrant a new edition, and determined to let the book stand as it was. I believe, therefore, that I am ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... individual difficulty required a fresh treatment—one for the headache, one for the memory, one for the bad habit and so on—then the time needful to practise autosuggestion would form a considerable part of our waking life. Happily the researches of the Nancy School have revealed a further simplification. This is obtained by the use of a general formula which sets before the mind the idea of a daily improvement in every respect, mental, physical ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... exercise with dumbbells, the bar bell and the chest weight. The rings and horizontal and parallel bars are also used, but not nearly to the extent that they formerly were. The movement has been all in the direction of the simplification of apparatus; in fact, one well-known teacher of the Boston Gymnasium when asked his opinion said: "Four bare walls and a floor, with a well-posted instructor, is all that is ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... having to admit to herself that Mr. Mudge's removal to a higher sphere—to a more commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhood—would have been described still better as a luxury than as the mere simplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she contented herself with calling it. He had at any rate ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday. During the three months ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught up to an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification of human affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of their simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi. And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entire self-forgetfulness, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the barometer whereby to test the economy of the administration. It would furnish a simple measure by which every one could mete their merit, and by which every one could decide when taxes were deficient or superabundant. If to this can be added a simplification of the form of accounts in the treasury department, and in the organization of its officers, so as to bring every thing to a single centre, we might hope to see the finances of the Union as clear and intelligible as a merchant's books, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... law ought to take precedence of the rest? It was a fine academic question for church lawyers to discuss. Jesus passed by all ceremonial and ecclesiastical requirements, and put his hand on love as the central law of life, both in religion and ethics. It was a great simplification and spiritualization of religion. But love is the social instinct which binds man and man together and makes them indispensable to one another. Whoever demands love, demands solidarity. Whoever sets love ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... employment. The government is focusing on the problems of the high cost of labor and labor market inflexibility resulting from the 35-hour workweek and restrictions on lay-offs. The government is also pushing for pension reforms and simplification of administrative procedures. The tax burden remains one of the highest in Europe (43.8% of GDP in 2003). The current economic slowdown and inflexible budget items have pushed the 2003 deficit to 4% of GDP, above the EU's 3% debt limit. Business investment ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... perceive that, relatively to the animal kingdom, we should chiefly devote our attention to the invertebrate animals, because their enormous multiplicity in nature, the singular diversity of their systems of organization and of their means of multiplication, their increasing simplification, and the extreme fugacity of those which compose the lowest orders of these animals, show us, much better than the higher animals, the true course of nature, and the means which she has used and which she still unceasingly employs to give existence to all the living bodies of which ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... little as it questions the quality of the home product. Any careful reader of the various "Hints to Housewives" which have appeared, will note that the "simplifying of meals" recommended would require nearly double the time to prepare. The simplification takes into consideration only the question of food substitutions, price and waste. Mother is supposed to be wholly or largely unemployed and longing for unpaid toil. Should any housewife conscientiously follow the advice given her by state and municipal authorities ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... by the simple device of making Hilary Jesson a candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the dramatist's task.[3] The Second Mrs. Tanqueray requires an unusual amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of the second proposition, and they accordingly define a negative proposition to be one in which the predicate is a negative name. The point, though not of much practical moment, deserves notice as an example (not unfrequent in logic) where by means of an apparent simplification, but which is merely verbal, matters are made more complex than before. The notion of these writers was, that they could get rid of the distinction between affirming and denying, by treating every case of denying as the affirming of a negative name. But what is ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others RICHNESS is the supreme imaginative requirement.[303] When one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... is obvious that it is sometimes the beauty of form in natural objects which attracts the eye, and sometimes the beauty or strangeness of colours, either in their combination or from the unusual tint. And while the former quality fits the object for translation into ornament, by means of simplification and repetition, the latter is more likely to be the suggestive starting point for the production of something quite different than a factor in a directly-derived composition. Certain forms of flowers and leaves are also suitable for ornament ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... of the origin of roots has to be adopted, it need not altogether exclude the other view. In the process of simplification, certain final letters may have become typical, may have seemed invested with a certain function or determinative power, and may therefore have been added independently to other roots, by that powerful imitative tendency which asserts itself again ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... divination, silently achieved, was quick and happy: she should acquit herself by asking her father for the sum required and by just passing it on to Mr. Flack. The grandeur of his enterprise and the force of his reasoning appeared to overshadow her as they stood there. This was a delightful simplification and it didn't for the moment strike her as positively unnatural that her companion should have a delicacy about appealing to Mr. Dosson directly for financial aid, though indeed she would have been capable of thinking ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... so far as was possible, everything connected with the bridge that had not already been fully demonstrated in practice, he did not pretend that in his main outlines he was without some examples. It was in his development of known ideas and his expedients for simplification that his genius perhaps most strikingly showed itself. Again and again he contrived some device so simple that, like a great many strokes of genius, it seemed that anybody should have thought of it. The massive piers were sunk to the bed-rock by means of metal caissons. These were adapted ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... applied the powers of his clear and dispassionate mind to the simplification and improvement of our criminal code. On the 9th of March he introduced a bill to consolidate the various acts which related to offences against property. He explained the nature of these acts at great length; but the bill was not carried through the commons ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... He could not be otherwise than the constant friend of everything which made for the emancipation and elevation of the individual. His advocacy of an elective judiciary, the union of law and equity, and the simplification of pleadings and practice in the courts, showed that there were few stronger or clearer intellects in the constitutional convention. With good reason, therefore, the constituency that sent him there favoured him ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... know, among other things. They have amused me more than I thought they would. That venerable blunder: to think that in changing the form of government you change the heart of man. And in other respects, too, these dreamers are at sea. For surely we should aim at simplification of machinery. Conceive, now, the state of affairs where everybody is more or less employed by the community—the community, that comfortable word!—in some patriotic business or other. Everybody an official, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... as the Germans believe in Germany, there would be nothing for it but a duel to the death, the extinction of one people or the other, and darkness as the burier of the dead. Peace would be attained by a great simplification and impoverishment of the world. But the English do not believe in themselves in that mad-bull fashion. They come of mixed blood, and have been accustomed for many long centuries to settle their differences ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... be simple is all very well, but turn it into an active verb and you spoil the whole idea. To simplify seems forced, and I think Mrs. Gustus struck harder on the note of simplification than that of simplicity. I should not dare to criticise her, however, and Cousin Gustus was satisfied, so criticism in any case would be intrusive. It is just possible that he occasionally wished that she would ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... the Congress will give its immediate consideration to the problem of future taxation. Simplification of the income and profits taxes has become an immediate necessity. These taxes performed indispensable service during the war. They must, however, be simplified, not only to save the taxpayer inconvenience and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... is full and copious. Prof. Bush bears testimony to its merit, and observes that his design has been, by a greater simplification of the elements, to produce a work better adapted to the wants of those who are beginning a course of careful study of the language, while the grammar of Prof. Stuart, which leads at once into the deeper complexities of the language, ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... The subject of the reduction of observations, then, as we have already explained,[150] in a state of deplorable confusion, attracted his most earnest attention, and he was close on the track of Bessel when made acquainted with the method of simplification devised at Koenigsberg. Anticipated as an inventor, he could still be of eminent use as a promoter of these valuable improvements; and, carrying them out on a large scale in the star-catalogue of the Astronomical Society (published ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... them the kind of activity that they would like—such as their class enjoys in other countries where my system is in full flower, and where it is deemed so sacred that any proposal for its abolition or simplification by trusts is regarded with horror, especially by the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... consciousness of humanity, not only negatively by the demonstration of the impossibility of continuing in the pagan life, but also through its simplification, its increased clearness and freedom from the superstitions intermingled with it, and its diffusion through all ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... Linnaeus gave to this plant the name Poa bulbosa—a name that sufficed, according to the new system, to distinguish this from every other species of vegetable. It does not require any special knowledge to appreciate the advantage of such a simplification. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... serpenters," our ships offer flush and uniform decks, sheers free from hills, hollows, and excrescences, and complete, unbroken batteries of thirty-two or forty-two pounders. Thus has been realized an important desideratum—the greatest possible power to do execution coupled with the greatest simplification ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... however, the rod should be moved at a constant rate by some mechanical device, such as the pendulum and works of a Maelzel metronome removed from their case. The pendulum is fixed just in front of the color-disc. A further commendable simplification of the conditions consists in arranging the pendulum and disc to move concentrically, and attaching to the pendulum an isosceles-triangular shield, so cut that it forms a true radial sector of the disc ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... of distance I do not know: it is probably something like twenty miles. But a potential ell does not reconcile me to paying an exorbitant price for the actual inch which is all I have any use for. This method of simplification—fixing the minimum payment on the basis of the maximum bulk, weight, and distance—seems to me essentially irrational. In some cases, indeed, it cuts against the Express Company. When I first had occasion to move ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... becoming wholly God's, and God filling them. How can we say, then, that it is poverty to be filled with God! Rather is it rightly expressed as being a heart fixed in singleness upon God, through drastic simplification of interests: the which is no poverty, but the ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... form of another stretching machine which had been turned out in considerable numbers by Mr. Archibald Edmeston, engineer, of Salford, who makes a specialty of calico printers' and finishers' machinery. The improvements consist mainly of a simplification of the working parts and thoroughly substantial construction of the machine. The principle adopted is a well-known one. The selvages of the cloth, or more strictly the two edges of the cloth, of a width of about two inches, are caused to pass over and at the same time are held by the rims of two ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... is not only a simplification of scenic appliances that is needed. Other external incidents of production require revision. Spectacular methods of production entail the employment of armies of silent supernumeraries to whom are allotted functions wholly ornamental and mostly impertinent. Here, too, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... proportions, decoration of given geometrical areas; applications to practical uses; studies in form and color from still life; use of charcoal, brush, pastel, water color; simple exercises in pictorial composition; problems in simplification necessitated by technique; application of principles of design to room decoration. (This course would be prerequisite for all subsequent ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... and Number Two, leaving only Number Three for our consideration. It took, however, a good many years and a vast amount of study and writing for Kant to thus simplify. For years he toiled with algebraic formulas and syllogistic theorems before he concluded that the best wisdom of life lies in simplification, not complexity. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... old dream of the Christian community was ever coming back: one-third of the wealth accumulated for the purposes of worship, the adornment and glorification of the shrine, one-third for the priests, and one-third for the poor. Was not this a simplification of life, a means of rendering existence possible to the faithful who had no earthly desires, pending the marvellous contentment of heavenly life? Give us, then, the whole earth, and we will divide terrestrial wealth into three such parts, and you shall see what a golden age ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... human conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and publicists, here ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... a country where everyone consumed in proportion to his production, whether the fees were levied upon the consumers as such, or upon the same persons in their character as producers in the form of a minimal tax. What was saved by the simplification of the accounts remained as a pure gain. Further, an elaborate system of warranty was connected with these warehouses. Since the warehouse officials were at the same time the channel through which purchases were made, they were always accurately informed as to the condition of the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... adopted. He was the original founder of industrial schools for poor children, where they not only received a good education, but learned some useful trade, by which they might earn an honest living when they grew up to manhood. He advocated the revision and simplification of the whole code of laws—an idea afterwards carried out by the First Napoleon. He wrote against duelling, against luxury, against gambling, against monasticism, quoting the remark of Segrais, that "the mania for a monastic life is the smallpox of the mind." He ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... three, made the grand discovery of the applicability of algebra to geometry. While deeply engaged in mathematical studies and investigations, he came to the conclusion that mathematics were capable of a still further simplification, and of much more extended application. Impressed with the certainty of the conclusions arrived at by the aid of mathematical reasoning, he began to apply ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... would have all of the machinery now in use to sustain and protect natural existence, they would have concluded therefrom, first, an increase of independence, and in the second place, a great decrease in the competition for worldly possessions, They would have thought that the simplification of life would have been the result of such perfected means of action, that there would follow the realization of a higher standard of morality. Nothing of this sort has come to pass—not happiness, nor social peace, nor ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... invention was purchased by William Deering, one of McCormick's chief competitors, invented binders which used twine. By 1880 the self-binding harvester was complete. No distinctive improvement has been made since, except to add strength and simplification. The machine now needed the services of only two men, one to drive and the other to shock the bundles, and could reap twenty acres or more a day, tie the grain into bundles of uniform size, and dump them in piles of ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... a science must make its improvement along the same practical lines which develop system, simplification, classification of kindred activities, and better administrative direction in the evolution of business. A private or corporate enterprise is compelled to promote in the highest degree both efficiency ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... Second Period, 1100-1250.— The English of this period is called Early English. Even before the coming of the Normans, the inflexions of our language had— as we have seen— begun to drop off, and it was slowly on the way to becoming an analytic language. The same changes— the same simplification of grammar, has taken place in nearly every Low German language. But the coming of the Normans hastened these changes, for it made the inflexional endings of words of much less practical importance to the English themselves. —Great changes took place in the pronunciation also. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... were to be paid, but the number of judges was to be largely decreased, perhaps by two-thirds. This would be possible, because the simplification of procedure and the curtailment of their powers would enormously lessen the amount of work to be done. Dru called the Board's attention to the fact that England had about two hundred judges of all kinds, while there were some thirty-six hundred in the United States, and that the ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... in its presentment. There was a remarkable simplification of scenery. This was, perhaps, due to the new poverty of Berlin. But it comprised merely a wall, a hole in the wall called the Tower of London, a platform on top of the wall called Tower Hill, carpeted stairs against the wall called the Court at Westminster. Clarence mopes in the hole with one ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... that this has been said long ago and in just this way. Only those to whom moral truths are dear and important know how important and precious they are, and with what prolonged labor the elucidation, the simplification, of moral truths, their transit from the state of a misty, indefinitely recognized supposition, and desire, from indistinct, incoherent expressions, to a firm and definite expression, unavoidably demanding ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... ourselves to become discouraged. Indeed, the getting out of the keel was in itself a work of such difficulty that Chips more than once threw down his tools and pronounced the task impossible, demanding the revision and simplification of ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... bond, this underlying relation may be a physical law like the dependence of life on life; it may be a social law like the division of labor in modern industry. Any dramatic statement of these laws is a simplification as is a diagram or map. And like a diagram or map, it is in a way artificial since it gives weight to one element at the expense of the others. But again like the diagram or map, the thing it shows is a fact, a fact which is more readily grasped by this artificial device than by bald statement. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... idiom of France or Italy in the seventh and eighth centuries. For when we compare the earliest English of the thirteenth century with the Anglo-Saxon of the twelfth, it seems hard to pronounce why it should pass for a separate language, rather than a modification or simplification of the former. We must conform, however, to usage, and say that the Anglo-Saxon was converted into English:—1. By contracting and otherwise modifying the pronunciation and orthography of words. 2. By omitting many ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... that geometrical curves might be expressed by algebraical numbers, though highly important in the history of mathematics, only interests us here by leading us to trace his philosophical development. He was deeply engrossed in mathematics; he saw that mathematics were capable of a still further simplification and a far more extended application. Struck as he was with the certitude of mathematical reasoning, he began applying the principles of mathematical reasoning to the subject of metaphysics. His great object was, amid the scepticism and anarchy of his contemporaries, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... about as difficult a task as I could well set you. I have above noted the two ways in which it is done: the one, being merely rough cutting, may be passed over; the other, which is scientific alteration of design, falls, itself, into two great branches, Simplification ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... out (what will receive more ample attention later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... assumption that this somehow implies betterment, though it is left with the philosopher to justify such an assumption finally and fully. Whereas in most cases man would seem to have succeeded in the struggle for existence by growing more complex, though in some cases survival has been secured by way of simplification, anthropology concentrates its attention on the former set of cases as the more interesting and instructive even from a theoretical point of view. Let biology by all means dispense with the notion of progress, and consider man along with the other forms of life as subject to mere process. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... said afterwards, 'to have pointed out explicitly that a great disturbance and increase of our expenditure would baffle my reckonings.' Meanwhile, the fabric was planned on strong foundations and admirable lines. The simplification of the tariff of duties of customs, begun by Peel eleven years before, was carried forward almost to completion. Nearly one hundred and forty duties were extinguished, and nearly one hundred and fifty were lowered. The tea duty was to be reduced ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... material of my hat is worth two pairs of such stockings. And thus it turns out that an element of value (which Mr. Horner and thousands of others have supposed to be of a distinct nature, and to resist all further analysis) gives way before Mr. Ricardo's law, and is eliminated; an admirable simplification, which is equal in merit and use to any of the rules which have been devised, from time to time, for the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... with the Boss in conference, open the ground-glass door and say, "I think it is going to rain shortly." Carry your love of the beautiful into your office life. This will inevitably pave the way to simplification. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... selected the best men to aid him in his important undertaking. Numerous difficulties had, of course, to be surmounted. Plans were varied from time to time; new methods were tried, altered, and improved, simplification being aimed at throughout. Six long years passed in this pursuit of the possible. At length the clear light dawned. In 1868 Mr. Walter ventured to order the construction of three machines on the pattern of the first complete ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... junction of two lines. As time went on, the characters were more and more simplified, the number of wedges of which they consisted being reduced and only so many left as served to distinguish one sign from another. The simplification reached its extreme point in ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... drawing, harsh in its exterior limits and hollow within—the head a sort of convulsive abridgment, the hand void, and the fingers too, if we seek their articulations. An omission must not be mistaken for a simplification, and for all his omissions Manet strives to make amend by the tone. It would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful syntheses than that pale yellow, a beautiful golden sensation, and the black woman, the attendant of this light of love, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... and social life of men move, as by a fixed law, towards simplification. May we not hope that this same tendency may permeate the universal Church of Christ, dissolving the accretions of mistaken and conventional piety, combining the vital elements into a new synthesis, at once simple ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... himself the sport, between a vast number of agents, between crowds of genii upon whose mercies he thought himself dependent, and whom he did his best to propitiate by gifts and to compel by magic. Little by little, intelligence perfected that work of abstraction and simplification by which all races but those who have stuck fast in the conceptions of their infancy have arrived at a single conclusion. Without ceasing to believe in the existence of genii, they invented the gods, a race of beings far more powerful, not only ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... course, if accompanied by a simplification of the machinery of collection, which would then be easy of accomplishment, might reasonably be expected to result in diminishing the cost of such collection by at least $2,500,000 and in the retirement from office of from 1,500 ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... the Feeder.—The speed attained by the fastest sewing machines is due more to the reduction and simplification of the movements than to any other improvement. Heavy concessions and reactions have been replaced by direct motions, and cams have been excluded as much as possible. Mr. A.B. Wilson's famous invention of the four motion feeder depended upon both gravity and a reacting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... anxious for simplification asked, whether a predicate in any given case must not either apply to the whole of the subject or not? And whether, therefore, the third head of indefinite propositions were not as superfluous as the so-called 'common gender' of nouns ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... instruction. If stories come to one, it is well. Study of the detailed means of making them living for the reader will then be worth while. The student should be encouraged to invent plots of his own, but as a simplification of this difficulty, to the end that some exercise in the writing of a complete story may be had, plots of some successful published stories are here given with suggestions regarding methods ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... Slavonic group. In its groundwork it presents the nearest approach to the old ecclesiastical Slavonic, the liturgical language common to all the Orthodox Slavs, but it has undergone more important modifications than any of the sister dialects in the simplification of its grammatical forms; and the analytical character of its development may be compared with that of the neo-Latin and Germanic languages. The introduction of the definite article, which appears in the form of a suffix, and the almost total disappearance of the ancient declensions, for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... instance, though we may look at the eye of a molluscous animal or of an insect, as a proof how simple an organ will serve some of the ends of vision; and at the eye of a fish as a nearer guide of the manner of simplification; we must remember that it is a mere chance (assuming for a moment the truth of our theory) if any existing organic being has preserved any one organ, in exactly the same condition, as it existed in the ancient species at ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... quarter would have to be made, and what meditator worth his salt could fail to hold his breath while waiting on the event? The ingenuous mind might, it was true, be suppressed altogether, the general disconcertment averted either by some master-stroke of diplomacy or some rude simplification; yet these were ugly matters, and in the examples before one's eyes nothing ugly, nothing harsh or crude, had flourished. A girl might be married off the day after her irruption, or better still the day before it, to remove her from the sphere of the play of mind; but these were exactly not crudities, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... tendency to indistinctness and loss is not, however, wholly bad; for it has at the same time largely contributed, especially in English, to such a simplification of grammatical inflexions as certainly has the practical convenience of giving us less to learn. But in addition to this decay in the forms of words, we have also to reckon with a depreciation or weakening of the ideas they express. ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... affirmative, although their force is chiefly negative; for, as the last example shows, the difference between an infinite and a negative proposition may depend upon a hyphen. It has been proposed, indeed, with a view to superficial simplification, to turn all Negatives into Infinites, and thus render all propositions Affirmative in Quality. But although every proposition both affirms and denies something according to the aspect in which you regard it (as Snow is white denies that it is any ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... circumscribed, indeed, by the larger sphere of mankind's activities as by a concentric circle, but by no means merged into it. To atone for their sin, thinking Jews retraced their steps. They took in hand the transforming of Jewish inner life, the simplification of the extremely complicated Jewish ritual, the remodeling of pedagogic methods, and, above all, the cultivation of the extended fields of Jewish science, whose head and front is Jewish historical research in all its vastness and detail. Heine's friend, Zunz, laid the cornerstone of Jewish ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow |
